Memoirs of a Midget

by de la Mare, Walter;

  To leap from stair to stair was far too formidable a means of progression. I should certainly have dashed out my brains. So I must sit, and jump sitting, manipulating my candle as best I could. In this sidling, undignified fashion, my eyes fixed only on the stair beneath me, I mastered the first flight, and paused to rest. What a medley of furtive sounds ascended to my ear from the desolate rooms below: the heavy plash of raindrop from the eaves, scurry and squeak of mouse, rustle of straw, a stirring – light as the settling of dust, crack of timber, an infinitely faint whisper; and from without, the whistle of bat, the stony murmur of the garden stream, the hunting screech of some predatory night-fowl over the soaked and tranquil harvest fields. And who, Who? – that shape? … I turned sharply, and the melted tallow of the guttering candle welled over and smartly burned the hand that held it. The pain gave me confidence. But better than that, a voice from below suddenly broke out, not Pollie’s but Adam Waggett’s, hollaing in the porch. Adam – the wren-slaughterer – prove me a coward? No, indeed. All misgiving gone, I girded my dressing-gown tighter around me, and continued the descent.

  It was a jolting and arduous business, and as I paused on the next landing, I now looked into the moon-bathed vacancy of my father’s bedroom. Dismantled, littered with paper and the fragments of wood and glass of a picture my mother had given him, a great hole in the plaster, a broken chair straddling in the midst – a hideous spectacle it was. An immense moth with greenly glowing eyes, lured out of its roosting place, came fluttering round my candle, fanning my cheek with its plumy wings. I shaded the flame and smiled up at the creature which, not being of a kind that is bent on self-slaughter, presently wafted away. The lower I descended the filthier grew my journey. My stub of candle was fast wasting; and what use should I be to Pollie’s messenger? When indeed in the muck and refuse left by the Sale, I reached the door, it was too late. He was now beating with his fists at the rear of the house; and I must needs climb down the last flight of the back wooden staircase used by the servants. When at last the great stagnant kitchen came into view, it was my whole inward self that cried out in me. Its stone flags were swarming with cockroaches.

  These shelled, nocturnal, sour-smelling creatures are among the few insects that fill me with horror. By comparison the devil’s coachman may be worse-tempered, but he is a gentleman. The very thought of one of them rearing itself against my slippered foot filled me with disgust; and the males were winged. They went scurrying away into hiding, infants seemingly to their mothers, whisper, whisper – I felt sick at the sight. There came a noise at the window. Peering from round my candle flame I perceived Adam’s dusky face, with its long nose, staring in at me through the glass. At sight of the plight I was in, he burst into a prolonged guffaw of laughter. This enraged me beyond measure. I stamped my foot, and at last he sobered down enough to yell through the glass that Pollie’s mother had sent him to see that I was safe and had forgotten to give him the house-key. Pollie herself would be with me next morning.

  I waved my candle at him in token that I understood. At this the melted grease once more trickled over and ran scalding up my arm. The candle fell to the floor, went out; the pale moonshine spread through the air. I could see Adam’s conical head outlined against the soft light of the sky; though he could no longer see me. Horror of the cockroaches returned on me. Instantly I turned tail, leaving the lump of tallow for their spoil.

  How, in that dark, high house, I managed to remount those stairs, I cannot conceive. Youth and persistency, I suppose. I doubt if I could do it now. Utterly exhausted and bedraggled I regained my bedroom at last without further misadventure. I sponged the smoke and grime from face and hands in my wash-bowl, hung my dressing-gown where the morning air might refresh it, and was soon in a dead sleep, from which I think even the Angel Gabriel would have failed to arouse me.

  Chapter Seven

  When I awoke, the morning sky was gay with sunshine, there was a lisping and gurgling of starlings on the roof, the roar of the little river in flood after the rains shook the air at my window, and there sat Pollie, in her outdoor clothes, the rest of the packing done and she awaiting breakfast. Unstirringly from my pillow I scrutinized the plump, red-cheeked face with its pale-blue prominent eyes dreaming out of the window; and sorrow welled up in me at the thought of the past and of how near drew our separation. She heard me move, and kneeling and stooping low over my bed, with her work-roughened finger she stroked the hand that lay on my coverlet. A pretty sight I must have looked – after my night’s experiences. We whispered a little together. She was now a sedate, young woman, but still my Pollie of the apples and novelettes. And whether or not it is because early custom is second nature, she is still the only person whom my skin does not a little creep against when necessity calls for a beast of burden.

  Her desertion of me the night before had been caused by the untimely death of one of her father’s three Alderney cows – a mild, horned creature, which I had myself often seen in the meadows cropping among the buttercups, and whose rich-breathed nose I had once had the courage to ask to stroke with my hand. This ill-fated beast at first threat of the storm had taken shelter with her companions under an oak. Scarcely had the lightnings begun to play when she was struck down by a ‘thunderbolt’. It was a tragedy after Pollie’s heart. She had (she said) fainted dead off at news of it – and we bemoaned the event in concert. In return I told her my dream of the garden. Nothing would then content her but she must fetch from under her mattress Napoleon’s Book of Fate, a legacy from Mrs. Ballard.

  ‘But, Pollie,’ I demured; ‘a dream is only a dream.’

  ‘Honest, miss,’ she replied, thumbing over the pages, ‘there’s some of ’em means what happens and comes true, and they’ll tell secrets too if they be searched about. More’n a month before Mrs. Ballard fell out with master she dreamed that one of the speckled hens had laid an egg in the kitchen dresser. There it was clucking among the crockery. And to dream of eggs, the book says, is to be certain sure of getting the place you are after, and which she wrote off to a friend in London and is there now!’

  What more was there to say? So presently Pollie succeeded in turning to ‘Pears’ in the grease-grimed book, and spelled out slowly:

  PEARS. – To dream of pears is in-di-ca-tive of great wealth (which means riches, miss), and that you will rise to a much higher spear than the one you at present occupy. To a woman they denote that she will marry a person far above her in rank (lords and such-like, miss, if you please), and that she will live in great state. To persons in trade they denote success and future prosperity and eleviation. They also indi- indicate constancy in love and happiness in the marriage state.

  Her red cheeks grew redder with this exertion of scholarship, and I burst out laughing. ‘Ah, miss,’ she cried in confusion, ‘laugh you may, and that’s what Sarah said to the angel. But mark my words if something of it don’t hap out like what the book says.’

  ‘Then, Pollie,’ said I, ‘there’s nothing for it but to open a butcher’s shop. For live in great state I can’t and won’t, not if the Prince of Wales himself was to ask me in marriage.’

  ‘Lor, miss,’ retorted Pollie in shocked accents, ‘and him a married man with grown-up sons and all.’ But she forgave me my mockery. As for the Dream Book, doubtless young Bonaparte must often have dreamed of pears in Corsica; and no less indubitably have I lived in ‘great state’ – though without much alleviation.

  But the day was hasting on. My toilet must be made, and the preparations for our journey completed. Now that the dawn of my new fortunes was risen, expectancy filled my mind, and the rain-freshened skies and leaves of the morning renewed my spirits. Our train – the first in my experience – was timed to leave our country railway station at 3.30 pm. By one o’clock, all the personal luggage that I was to take with me had been sewn up in a square of canvas, and corded. The rest of my belongings – my four-poster, etc. – were to be stowed in a large packing-case and sent after me. First impressions en
dure. No great store of sagacity was needed to tell me that. So I had chosen my clothes carefully, determined to show my landlady that I meant to have my own way and not be trifled with. My dear Mrs. Bowater! – she would be amused to hear that.

  Pollie bustled downstairs. I stood in the midst of the sunlit, dismantled room, light and shadow at play upon ceiling and walls, and sun-pierced air a silvery haze of dust. A host of memories and thoughts, like a procession in a dream, traversed my mind. A strangeness, too – as if even this novel experience of farewell was a vague recollection beyond defined recall. Pollie returned with the new hat in the paper bag in which she had brought it from home: and I was her looking-glass when she had put it on. Then from top to basement she carried me through every room in the house, and there on the kitchen floor, mute witness of the past, lay the beetle-gnawn remnant of my candle-stub. We wandered through the garden, glinting green in the cool flocking sunbeams after the rain; and already vaunting its escape from Man. Pollie was returning to Lyndsey – I not! My heart was too full to let me linger by the water. I gazed at the stones and the wild flowers in a sorrowful hunger of farewell. Trifles, soon to be dying, how lovely they were. The thought of it swallowed me up. What was the future but an emptiness? Would that I might vanish away and be but a portion of the sweetness of the morning. Even Pollie’s imperturbable face wore the appearance of make-belief; for an instant I surprised the whole image of me reflected in her round blue eye.

  The Waggett’s wagonette was at the door, but not – and I was thankful – not my Adam, but the old Adam, his father. My luggage was pushed under the seat. I was set up, to be screened as far as possible from the wind, beside Pollie and behind Mr. Waggett – no stranger to me with his neat, dark whiskers, for in the old days, at dinner parties, he would wait at table. I see him now – as gentlemanlike as a Devil’s Coach-horse – entering the kitchen with his little black bag. Only once I swiftly turned my head over my shoulder toward the house. Then we were outside the iron gates, and bumping along through the puddles between the bowery hedges towards the station.

  I thought of my father and mother lying side by side, beyond the sullen drift of nettles, under the churchyard wall. Miss Fenne had taken me there many weeks before in her faded barouche with the gaunt white mare. Not a word had I breathed to her of my anguish at sight of the churchyard. The whole afternoon was a nightmare. She regaled the journey with sentiments on death and the grave. Throughout it, I was in danger of slipping out of her sight; for the buttons on the sage-green leather seat were not only discomfort but had failed to aid me to sit upright; and nothing would have induced me to catch at the trimmings of her dolman to save myself from actually falling off into the pit of her carriage. There sat her ancient coachman; clutter-clutter plodded the hoofs; what a monstrous, monstrous world – and she cackling on and on – like a hen over its egg.

  But now the novelty of this present experience, the flowery cottages, Mr. Waggett’s square, sorrel nag, the ballooning northwesterly clouds, the aromatic rusty hedgrows, the rooks in the cornfields – all these sights and sounds called joy into my mind, and far too soon the bright-painted railway station at the hill-bottom hove into sight, and our drive was over. I was lifted down into Pollie’s arms again. Then followed a foolish chaffering over the tickets, which Mr. Waggett had volunteered to purchase for us at the rounded window. The looming face beyond had caught sight of me, and the last words I heard bawled through for any to hear were: ‘Lor, Mr. Waggett, I’d make it a quarter for ’ee if it was within regulations. But ’tain’t so, the young lady’s full natural size in the eye of the law, and I couldn’t give in to ’ee not even if ’twas a honeymooning you was after.’ No doubt it was wholesome to learn as quickly as possible how easy a butt I was to be for the jests of the good-humoured. On that occasion it was a bitter pill. I felt even Pollie choke down a laugh into her bosom. My cheek whitened, but I said nothing.

  An enormous din at the moment shattered around me, ten thousand times harsher to my nerves than any mere witticism could be. My first ‘steam-monster’ was entering the station. All but stunned by its clatter, I barely had the presence of mind to thank Mr. Waggett for the little straw basket of three greengages, and the nosegay of cherry-pie which he had thrust into my arms. My canvas-wrapped package was pushed in under the seat, the door was slammed to, the guard waved his green flag, Mr. Waggett touched his hat: and our journey was begun.

  Fortunately Pollie and I found ourselves in an empty carriage. The scream of the whistle, the grinding jar of the wheels, the oppressive odour of Mr. Waggett’s bouquet – I leaned back on her to recover my wits. But the cool air blowing in on my face and a far-away sniff from a little glass bottle with which her mother had fortified her for the journey, quickly revived me, and I was free to enjoy the novelties of steam-travel. My eyes dizzied at the wide revolving scene that was now spread out beneath the feathery vapours. How strange it was to see the green country world – meadow and stream and wooded hill – thus wheel softly by. If Pollie and I could have shared it alone, it would have been among my pleasantest memories.

  But at the next stopping places other passengers climbed into the carriage; and five complete strangers soon shared the grained wood box in which we were enclosed. There was a lady in black, with her hair smoothed up under her bonnet, and a long pale nose; and up against her sat her little boy, a fine fair, staring child of about five years of age. A black-clothed, fat little man with a rusty leather bag, over the lock of which he kept clasped his finger and thumb, quietly seated himself. He cast but one dark glance about him and immediately shut his eyes. In the corner was an older man with a beard under his chin, gaiters, and a hard, wide brimmed hat. Besides these, there was a fat country woman on the same side as Pollie and I, whom I could hear breathing and could not see, and a dried-up, bird-eyed woman opposite in a check shawl, with heavy metal ear-rings dangling at her ears. She sat staring blankly and bleakly at things close as if they were at a distance.

  My spirit drank in this company. So rapt was I that I might have been a stock of wood. Gathered together in this small space they had the appearance of animals, and, if they had not been human, what very alarming ones. As long as I merely sat and watched their habits I remained unnoticed. But the afternoon sun streamed hot on roof and windows: and the confined air was soon so dense with a variety of odours, that once more my brain dizzied, and I must clutch at Pollie’s arm for support. At this movement the little boy who had more than once furtively glanced at me, crouched wriggling back against his mother, and, edging his face aside, piped up into her ear, ‘Mamma, is that alive?’

  The train now stood motionless, a fine array of hollyhocks and sunflowers flared beyond the window, and his voice rang out shrill as a bird in the quiet of afternoon. Tiny points of heat broke out all over me, as one by one my fellow passengers turned their astonished faces in my direction. Even the man with the leather bag heard the question. The small bead-brown eyes wheeled from under their white lids and fixed me with a stare.

  ‘Hush, my dear,’ said the lady, no less intent but less open in her survey; ‘hush, look at the pretty cows!’

  ‘But she is, mamma. It moved. I saw that move,’ he asseverated, looking along cornerwise at me out of his uptilted face.

  Those blue eyes! a mingling of delight, horror, incredulity, even greed swam in their shallow deeps. I stood leaning close to Pollie’s bosom, breathless and helpless, a fascinating object, no doubt. Never before had I been transfixed like this in one congregated stare. I felt myself gasp like a fish. It was the old farmer in the corner who at last came to my rescue. ‘Alive! I warrant. Eh, ma’am?’ he appealed to poor Pollie. ‘And an uncommon neat-fashioned young lady, too. Off to Whipham Fair, I’ll be bound.’

  The bag-man turned with a creeping grin on his tallowy features and muttered some inaudible jest out of the corner of his mouth to the gipsy. She eyed him fiercely, drawing her lips from her bright teeth in a grimace more of contempt than laughter. Once more the
engine hooted and we glided on our way.

  ‘I want that, mamma,’ whispered the child. ‘I want that dear little lady. Give that teeny tiny lady a biscuit.’

  At this new sally universal merriment filled the carriage. We were jogging along in fine style. This, then, was Miss Fenne’s ‘network’. A helpless misery and bitterness swept through me, the heavy air swirled; and then – whence, from whom, I know not – self-possession returned to me. Why, I had chosen my fate: I must hold my own.

  My young admirer, much against his mother’s inclination, had managed to fetch out a biscuit from her reticule – a star-shaped thing, graced with a cone of rose-tinted sugar. Still crouching back like a chick under her wing, he stretched his bribe out at arm’s length towards me, in a pink, sweat-sparked hand. All this while Pollie had sat like a lump beside me, clutching her basket, a vacant, flushed smile on her round face. I drew myself up, and supporting myself by her wicker basket, advanced with all the dignity at my command to the peak of her knees, and, stretching out my hand in return, accepted the gift. I even managed to make him an indulgent little bow, feigned a nibble at the lump of food, then planted it on the dusty ledge beneath the carriage window.

  A peculiar silence followed. With a long sigh the child hid his face in his mother’s sleeve. She drew him closer and smiled carefully into nothingness. ‘There,’ she murmured, ‘now mother’s treasure must sit still and be a good boy. I can’t think why papa didn’t take – second-class tickets.’

  ‘But nor did that kind little lady’s papa,’ returned the child stoutly.

  The kindly old farmer continued to gloat on me, gnarled hands on knees. But I could not bear it. I quietly surveyed him until he was compelled to rub his face with his fingers, and so cover its retreat to his own window. The gipsy woman kept her ferocious, birdlike stare on me, with an occasional stealthy glance at Pollie. The bag-man’s lids closed down. For the rest of the journey – though passengers came and went – I kept well back, and was left in peace. It was my first real taste of the world’s curiosity, mockery, aversion, and flattery. One practical lesson it taught me. From that day forward I never set out on any such journey unless thickly veiled. For then, though the inquisitive may see me, they cannot tell whether or not I see them, or what my feelings may be. It is a real comfort; though, from what I have read, it appears to be the condition rather of a ghost than of a normal young lady.