But the question was neither sharp, tart, tradesman-like nor grown-up-ish. It merely asked for valuable information.
‘Nothing at all, thank you,’ said her visitor, ‘I was only looking.’
‘And so was I,’ said Miss Miller. ‘What’s the harm in that?’
The bobbed head under the blue bonnet stooped a little forward. ‘My name,’ she all but whispered, as though she didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, ‘is not Rosie; it’s Nella.’
‘And that’s an odd thing too,’ cried Miss Miller from in under her high hat, ‘for mine is Miller – Miss Miller. At least that’s what they call me:
Though only one had an umberella,
There sat Miss Miller and there stood Nella.’
‘Can you make up much?’ asked the little girl.
‘It depends on who for, on the vocabulary, and the rhymes,’ said Miss Miller. ‘Some come, some won’t. But the next and the next and the next thing to inquire is why, Rosie, you have run away? And who from? Or should we say, whom-m-m?
In life, so I’m told, there is no need to stammer,
So long as we keep a sharp eye on our grammar.
And be sure not to answer if you’ve no wish to say.’
The little girl looked stealthily over her shoulder, gazed carefully once more at Miss Miller, turned, and breathed out her secret.
‘It’s my new nurse,’ she said. ‘She’s not my real nannie; my nannie’s ill. She’s a beast, and I hate her.’
‘Ah, now,’ cried Miss Miller, clutching more firmly than ever her beaked umbrella; ‘“a beast”! With four legs no doubt, but not, oh no, a tell-tale at the end of it! What did I say! Isn’t that just, Rosie, what we have to expect? And I’ll be bound she can’t help it. That’s my opinion. It’s what’s called ingrained. So you ran away. And what more likely? Though not, we must admit, allowed?
And there, maybe to mock the eye,
Goes fluttering by a butterfly.
But mark, dear Pilgrim, mark with me,
How rational is the honey bee!
Hey now, what about that? Nurses! It’s years and years and years… but then you see after all it’s only Time, Rosie, that divides us. By us meaning just you and me. And what is Time? Nothing I promise you but merely “wear and tear”. Merely.’
Yet another prolonged shuddering sob shook the little girl from head to foot, but it was meaning little more now than that solemn foamless swell upon the Pacific which succeeds a storm.
‘She won’t let me do a single thing I want, and some day I’ll run right away. Then even my daddy won’t be able to find me.’
‘I expect not,’ said Miss Miller, ‘and especially even if he shouldn’t happen to look. You see, my poppet, even if we have the legs and the brrroth to run with, it’s very very seldom really “right away”. It can’t be done. And there’s the rub. I have frequently noticed it.’
She was still steadily surveying her visitor, her perched-up hat trembling a little in the process. The fair face looked far too young to have had so many troubles begin to show their markings in it. At which sad notion Miss Miller openly smiled at the little girl, though her smile rather more closely resembled a grimace.
‘Now when I was about your size and for a good long time after,’ she said, ‘I didn’t myself usually run away. I was run away from.’
‘Didn’t you have a nurse?’
‘Three,’ said Miss Miller. ‘Black, yellow and brown. Turn and turn about. So it wasn’t much good.’
‘I don’t think I quite understand that,’ said her visitor.
‘No? In such cases I am told it is better to explain. You will understand then, Pollie, that when I was young – which is exactly a hundred and forty-eight years ago now, not counting Sundays – I lived in a big, a great big house – a whacking great enormous house.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ said Miss Miller, ‘it was there it had pleased God to call me. A house, Pollie, not parked as they say in a huge prairie like this one,’ and she swept her umbrella across the ample view, ‘not with a bit of a pond in it like that one,’ and she jabbed its point at the lake, ‘but a river, my love, a wide r-r-rolling r-r-river, with cr-r-reeks in its cr-r-rumplings, and simply carpeted with water-lilies. Carpeted. A hop and a skip and a jump and there you were on the other side. And fish – plop-plip-plopp, and ducks – quack-quack – quarkk! And besides the woolly sheep, my love, deer! Herds of them, dappled and waggle-tailed and some of them horned, and ears like windmills. But believe me, Pollie, one flick of a finger and every single one of them clean out of sight! On the other hand, it was not the deer we were referring to, but the house. It had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of windows. Specially up above, of course, where the corridors were – one after another and all the way round.’ And Miss Miller spread out the black-gloved fingers of one lank left hand as if that would show exactly how. ‘And to every window – or two – or three, as the case might be, a room or chamber: chiefly, as I say, bed. Not that I’d attempt to tell you exactly how many. Mistakes cannot always be put right. But imagine me there, if you please, looking out of the windows; and the OTHERS, you know, feasting in the HALL.’
‘I have my dinner,’ said her visitor, ‘in the nursery; except on Sundays. Then it’s with my daddy.’
‘Halls and dining-rooms – much the same,’ said Miss Miller. ‘All depends on the entourage. Well,’ she planted her foot a little more firmly on the little patch of gravel that surrounded the seat, ‘it was at one of those windows that I first saw it running away.’
‘Saw what running away?’
‘That, my love, is what I could never positively descry,’ said Miss Miller, stooping her long nose and the brim of her hat in the direction of the little girl as if she were a cockatoo on a perch. ‘There’s some that run, and there’s some who are run from, and it’s distance lends enchantment to the view. What I can say is that it seemed to be something or somebody I didn’t exactly want, you know, to go. And such a swimming moon! Every bit as the poem says,’ and Miss Miller once more broke into rhyme:
‘There were leaves on the branches like silver,
And dew thick as frost on the grass,
And nought but the moon in the shimmery-shammery,
And me staring out through the glass.
I say staring, Pollie, though we agree it’s not polite. But politesse apart, as the barber said, it wasn’t to be seen from that window. And why? Simply, my dear, because it had gone out of sight. So that’s where we are.’
‘Where?’ said the little girl.
‘Why, there,’ said Miss Miller.
‘What did you do?’ asked the little girl.
‘That’s just it,’ said Miss Miller. ‘What would you have done? And the answer to that is, I did just the same as that. I ran as fast as my trotters would carry me to the next – and then to the next, and then to all the nexteses. Little windows, every one of them, with round tops and small – er – panes. But no. No – and I repeat it on purpose – not a glimpse. I won’t say, mind you,’ she continued with due solemnity and with a longer face than ever, ‘that all the little bedrooms had beds in them, or wash-handstands or even chests of drawerseses. You’ll pardon me, but I didn’t really look. But I will say I went in and out, and out and in, and so of course out again of every single one there was, until after twice round the house and back, counting the corridors once and once only, I found myself in the very place I had started from. And by and large, my dear Miss Sheepshanks, that’s what we all do. In time.’
Miss Miller thereupon burst out laughing, and even Miss Sheepshanks opened her mouth – not to laugh, but only because she was so intent on her new acquaintance that she couldn’t help imitating her.
‘What did you do then?’ she said.
‘Well, then,’ said Miss Miller, drawing her cotton-gloved forefinger slowly down her nose as if in deep reflection, and the faded greying tip of it made a right-angle with the rest, ‘then – I gave it up;
and it gave me up. It was what’s called mutual, my poppet. Then too about that time we were compelled to move – the Family, you know. Ups and downs, then downs again. So we dismissed the, the – well – the entourage. That is the best thing, don’t you think?’
Nella nodded.
‘Too-whit, or too-whoo,
Come now, or come soon,
You won’t miss the sun
If you look at the moon.
That,’ said Miss Miller, ‘is how it goes in the pome. But oh, Pollie, if only you could have seen the shadows on the cobblestones and the silvering of the snails!’
‘I don’t think,’ said Nella, ‘I quite like snails.’
Miss Miller merely beamed on her as though, if she had not entirely disagreed with her visitor, she could not have so easily comprehended a very natural aversion. ‘There are such people; I admit it,’ she cried cordially:
‘“And whether one travels due East or due West,
I’m inclined,” said the Sailor, “to think truth is best.”
But as I was saying,’ she went rapidly on, ‘there might have been dew and there were snails, but there was positively nothing else. It had come, my dear; and it had gone, my dove. And if you should ask me what I mean by it, I should say it is called being young – like you and me, Miss Cosy. And as for that, and with all due respect for nursemaids and such, the first part of it is apt to be much nicer than the last.’
The little girl stared at this fantastic Miss Miller sitting so stiff and vertical on her scroll-shaped seat with its iron legs bent under her on the patch of gravel. It was deliciously cool under the fan-like fronds of the great spiky-fruited chestnut tree overhead. The leaves shed a dry fragrance, and the sun-burned grass, too; and there came floating on the air from afar the hypnotic whiff of an early autumn bonfire.
Miss Miller appeared for the moment to have forgotten she was not alone, while the round blue eyes of her visitor went on busily examining her from top to toe.
‘Do you live in a great big enormous house now?’ Nella presently inquired.
‘By no means. Not at all,’ Miss Miller replied, her black eyes fixed on the far-away. ‘Still, for shelter from what are called the Ellimans, my child, only four walls are required, excluding floor and ceiling. What is space?’
‘But you see,’ said Nella, ‘I didn’t quite understand what you meant it was when what you couldn’t see ran away, out of all those little windows, I mean.’
Miss Miller penetrated the slight ambiguity of this sentence as if with a needle.
‘And what more likely?’ she agreed. ‘No more did I. But you see, me never having noticed much that it was there, it wasn’t scarcely right or proper to go laveering and lamenting up and down when it was gone. Which is what is called reasoning, Rosie. Besides, as I say, we moved. What is 17 from, say, 55?’
‘I think,’ said Nella, after a long pause, ‘sit must be thirty something.’
‘Well, then, it is about thirty something whatever-you-like-to-call-them ago since I climbed up the Tower for the last time.’ Miss Miller suddenly stooped and pressed the ringers of her right hand on the toe of her left shoe. Her face had gone a little stiff and surprised-looking.
‘Does that bump on your toe hurt you?’ inquired her visitor courteously.
‘Now and then,’ replied Miss Miller in her richest tones. ‘It does its best. It’s what is called a bunion. Not John, of course, though it may come, they say, from walking about. And that, my dear, I am pretty well used to. Now the Tower, you must understand, please, was in our park. In what is called the centre, Rosie. Where we went to next, I mean. Two parks in all. But not, as I have said before, a public prairie like this!’ And yet again Miss Miller swept the panorama with the point of her umbrella. ‘This Tower I mention faced to the east, you will please imagine, and was of the fairest choicest marble. It might almost be ivory; something like a roly-poly jam-pudding, but pinker and more, as they say, diffused. And its top was like a pepper-pot, marble too, with heads and wings and faces, and cut out with holes like flowers for peeping places, and all, all of stone. Quite quite solid too. And’ – Miss Miller paused and looked at her toe – ‘perhaps I ought to mention that it was also in the middle of a box-wood. And, as dear Alfred Lord Tennyson says: “With here and there a cypress pricking
Black against the blue,
And here and there a dark but older
Tree they call a yew.”
In the middle of a box-wood, Rosie; and you could see for miles – if, that is, and you’ll forgive the reminder, you troubled to look. Well, I climbed that tower one morning, birds chimchamping, grasshoppers whirring, larks in the sky, sun burning, and as I peered up the spiral staircase – you know what a corkscrew is, my child – a twist, a wheeze and a pop?’
Nella, with a small dumpy forefinger pointing upward, pushed that finger round and round and up and up under the tree.
‘Exactly. And just at the topmost bend of it, bless your heart, what if I didn’t go and see it yet again! Or something: at any rate so much like it, you could scarcely tell them apart; not at first.’
‘What was it doing then?’
‘Just the same as usual,’ said Miss Miller airily. ‘Running away. And all as the old song goes.’ She actually sang it too, but not loud enough to get beyond the circuit of her chestnut since she had her respectability to consider, and at times her voice, even to her own ear, seemed almost too powerful:
‘It’s joys and cares and stri-i-ife
I’m singing to you of,
And some they call it li-i-ife,
And some they call it lov.
So up I went, of course. Round and round and up and up until at last I reached the top, and never a sign of it nowhere.’
Miss Miller inhaled a deep breath of the thin autumnal air, as if to restore her after that long climb in memory. But Nella still stood her ground.
‘Not but what I might not say,’ said her new acquaintance a little craftily, ‘there was no vestige of a sign of where it might have been. On the other hand it wasn’t there then. And everything so calm and still and trarnquil you could have dined off thistledown. Why, it might have been carried off in its sleep the very moment I got to the top step and came out into the gallery. So, you see, once more, or, in other words, yet again’ – and the lengthy angular face turned slowly about towards the little girl rather like the ominous top of an oast house – ‘I had been cheated of everything.
No, no, papa, I cannot, since
He whom I wed must be a Prince.
Though how you can call it cheating when every single card from the Queen of Hearts to the Ace of Spades was on the table, I’ll be dashed, Rosie, if I can see. And you will, I hope, excuse the vigour of the remark.
‘Now when you say “It”, my dear Miss Sheepshanks,’ Miss Miller continued reflectively, ‘I suppose we neither of us know exactly what we are talking about. What, I mean, we mean; even though it’s something we might, given a good supper and a feather bed, dream of, say, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for years and years. And on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, including the Sabbath, be trusted to forget. But there is no need for high horses. None whatever.
Come what come may; go what go will,
There is such a thing as must.
Then why be philo-so-sophical
So long as one tries to be just?
You follow me?’
The round clear eyes under the compact little brow beneath the fair straight fringe of hair and the rim of bonnet gazed steadily back. Then Nella nodded.
‘Precisely,’ said Miss Miller with a smile like that of the Conqueror at Hastings, as with a sharp little gesture she planted the point of her umbrella emphatically between the pebbles. ‘Precisely. And so between you and me and the gate-post it has been ever since. This prairie, you understand, these here people, and all these trees; you sit, you scarcely need to look, but you know it just comes and goes. And the complete entourage dispersed! In fact, who would beli
eve, Rosie, that looking out of one’s own indefatigably poky little top-floor window, square this time, of course, or rather obbolongy, with a jar of geranium or mignonette on the sill – and I must say some of those young men who look after the gardens are very civil – and millions of chimney pots over the roofs of every shape and smell and size, and the wires simply humming in the breezes, not to speak of the noise and – er – odours from down below and only twopence-halfpenny to pay for it, and a landlady who never has change – who, I say, who would believe, my dear, there could be anything left at all?’
‘In the chimney pots?’
‘In the chimney pots.’
‘Are there many smuts?’
‘In winter, hosts,’ said Miss Miller, ‘and in summer, fewer.’
‘Do you mean you can’t see anything, of what you were saying, there, either? Not even now?’ And Miss Miller’s square-headed little visitor looked quite anxious about it.
‘For certain; never: but of signs of it exactly a thousand and one. Now look at this,’ Miss Miller with some little fumbling managed at last to unfasten an old leather vanity bag that hung on her arm, ‘look at this.’
Nella with a deep sigh drew a step or two nearer, but not too close, while her odd friend held up between cotton-gloved finger and thumb an acorn with a long stalk. ‘That,’ said Miss Miller almost ingratiatingly as she rapidly twirled it, ‘that is an acorn. No doubt of it. And did you ever in your life see anything that fitted better – John Bunyan apart, you know? As if the cup and the seed, or the “a” and the “corn” had been waiting for one another for ages on ages until at last there was no keeping them back. Now that, Rosie, dropped on to my hat as I was walking under its parent tree – this very hat, and not an hour ago. And what did I say to myself when I looked at it, come clean out of the blue sky, so to speak? I said: Observe, Miss Miller; it fits!
Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 41