But now the sun had begun to descend and the rays of evening to stain the fields. We loitered on from station to station. To my relief Pollie had at last munched her way through the pasties and sweetmeats stowed in her basket. My nosegay of cherry-pie was fainting for want of water. In heavy sleep the bagman and gipsy sat woodenly nodding and jerking side by side. The lady had delicately composed her face and shut her eyes. The little boy slumbered serenely with his small red mouth wide open. Languid and heavy, I dared not relax my vigilance. But in the desolation that gathered over me I almost forgot my human company, and returned to the empty house which seemingly I had left for ever – the shadows of yet another nightfall already lengthening over its flowers and sward.
Could I not hear the silken rustle of the evening primrose unfolding her petals? Soon the cool dews would be falling on the stones where I was wont to sit in reverie beside the flowing water. It seemed indeed that my self had slipped from my body, and hovered entranced amid the thousand jargonings of its tangled lullaby. Was there, in truth, a wraith in me that could so steal out; and were the invisible inhabitants in their fortresses beside my stream conscious of its presence among them, and as happy in my spectral company as I in theirs?
I floated up out of these ruminations to find that my young pasha had softly awakened and was gazing at me in utter incredulity from sleep-gilded eyes. We exchanged a still, protracted, dwelling smile, and for the only time in my life I actually saw a fellow creature fall in love!
‘Oh, but mamma, mamma, I do beseech you,’ he called up at her from the platform where he was taking his last look at me through the dingy oblong window, ‘please, please, I want her for mine! I want her for mine!’
I held up his biscuit in my hand, laughing and nodding. The whistle knelled, out narrow box drew slowly out of the station. As if heartbroken, he took his last look at me, petulantly flinging aside his mother’s hand. He had lost me for ever, and Pollie and I were alone again.
Beechwood
* * *
Chapter Eight
Still the slow train bumped on, loath to drag itself away from the happy harvest fields. Darkness was near when we ourselves alighted at our destination, mounted into a four-wheeled cab, and once more were in motion in the rain-laid dust. On and on rolled Pollie and I and our luggage together, in such ease and concealment after the hard wooden seats and garish light that our journey began to seem – as indeed I wished for the moment it might prove – interminable. One after another the high street lamps approached, flung their radiance into our musty velvet cabin, and went gliding by. Ever and again the luminous square of a window beyond the outspread branches of a tree would float on. Then suddenly our narrow solitude was invaded by the bright continuous flare flung into it from a row of shops.
Never before had I been out after nightfall. I gazed enthralled at the splendours of fruit and cakes, silks and sweet-meats packed high behind the glass fronts. Wasn’t I myself the heiress of £110 a year? Indeed I was drinking in Romance, and never traveller surveyed golden Moscow or the steeps of Tibet with keener relish than I the liquid amber, ruby, and emerald that summoned its customers to a wayside chemist’s shop. Twenty – what a child I was! I smile now at these recollections with an indulgence not unmixed with envy. It is Moscow survives, not the artless traveller.
After climbing a long hill – the wayside houses steadily thinning out as we ascended – the cab came to a standstill. The immense, shapeless old man who had so miraculously found our way for us, and who on this mild August evening was muffled up to his eyes in a thick ulster, climbed down backwards from his box and opened the door. At the same moment, as if by clockwork, opened another door – that of the last house on the hill. I was peering out of the cab, then, at my home; and framed in that lighted oblong stood Mrs. Bowater. All utterly different from what I had foreseen: this much smaller house, this much taller landlady, and – dear me, how fondly I had trusted that she would not for the first time set eyes on her lodger being carried into her house. I had in fancy pictured myself bowing a composed and impressive greeting to her from her own hearthrug. But it was not to be.
Pollie lifted me out, settled me on her arm, and my feet did not touch terra firma again until she had ascended the five stone steps and we were within the passage.
‘Lor, miss; then here we are,’ she sighed breathlessly, then returned to the cabman to pay him his fare. Even dwarfed a little perhaps by my mourning, there I stood, breathed upon by the warm air of the house, in the midst of a prickly doormat, on the edge of the shiny pattern oilcloth that glossed away into the obscurity from under the gaslight in front of me; and there stood my future landlady. For the first time, with head thrown back, I scanned a countenance that was soon to become so familiar and so endeared. Mrs. Bowater’s was a stiff and angular figure. She, too, was in black, with a long, springside boot. The bony hands hung down in their peculiar fashion from her elbows. A large cameo brooch adorned the flat chest. A scanty velvet patch of cap failed to conceal the thin hair sleekly parted in the middle over the high narrow temples. The long dark face with its black, set eyes, was almost without expression, except that of a placid severity. She gazed down at me, as I up at her, steadily, silently.
‘So this is the young lady,’ she mused at last, as if addressing a hidden and distant listener. ‘I hope you are not over-fatigued by your journey, miss. Please to step in.’
To my ear, Mrs. Bowater’s was what I should describe as a low, roaring voice, like falling water out of a black cloven rock in a hillside; but what a balm was its sound in my ear, and how solacing this dignified address to jaded nerves still smarting a little after my victory on the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway. Making my way around a grandfather’s clock that ticked hollowly beside the door, I followed her into a room on the left of the passage, from either wall of which a pair of enormous antlers threatened each other under the discoloured ceiling. For a moment the glare within and the vista of furniture legs confused my eyes. But Mrs. Bowater came to my rescue.
‘Food was never mentioned,’ she remarked reflectively, ‘being as I see nothing to be considered except as food so-called. But you will find everything clean and comfortable; and I am sure, miss, what with your sad bereavements and all, as I have heard from Mr. Pellew, I hope it will be a home to you. There being nothing else as I suppose that we may expect.’
My mind ran about in a hasty attempt to explore these sentiments. They soothed away many misgivings, though it was clear that Mrs. Bowater’s lodger was even less in dimensions than Mrs. Bowater had supposed. ‘Clean’: after so many months of Mrs. Sheppey’s habits, it was this word that sang in my head. Wood, glass, metal flattered the light of gas and coal, and for the first time I heard my own voice float up into my new ‘apartment’: ‘It looks very comfortable, thank you, Mrs. Bowater; and I am quite sure I shall be happy in my new abode.’ There was nothing intentionally affected in this formal little speech.
‘Which being so,’ replied Mrs. Bowater, ‘there seems to be trouble with the cabman, and the day’s drawing in, perhaps you will take a seat by the fire.’
A stool nicely to my height stood by the steel fender, the flames played in the chimney; and for a moment I was left alone. ‘Thank God,’ said I, and took off my hat, and pushed back my hair … Alone. Only for a moment, though. Its mistress gone, as fine a black cat as ever I have seen appeared in the doorway and stood, green-eyed, regarding me. To judge from its countenance, this must have been a remarkable experience.
I cried seductively, ‘Puss.’
But with a blink of one eye and a shake of its forepaw, as if inadvertently it had trodden in water, it turned itself about again and disappeared. In spite of all my cajoleries, Henry and I never were to be friends.
Whatever Pollie’s trouble with the cabman may have been, Mrs. Bowater made short work of it. Pollie was shown to the room in which she was to sleep that night. I took off my bodice and bathed face, hands, and arms to the elbow in the shallow bowl
Mrs. Bowater had provided for me. And soon, wonderfully refreshed and talkative, Pollie and I were seated over the last meal we were to share together for many a long day.
There were snippets of bread and butter for me, a little omelette, two sizes too large, a sugared cherry or two sprinkled with ‘hundreds and thousands’, and a gay little bumper of milk gilded with the enwreathed letters, ‘A Present from Dover’. Alack-a-day for that omelette! I must have kept a whole family of bantams steadily engaged for weeks together. But I was often at my wits’ end to dispose of their produce. Fortunately Mrs. Bowater kept merry fires burning in the evening – ‘Ladies of some sizes can’t warm the air as much as most,’ as she put it. So at some little risk to myself among the steel fire-irons, the boiled became the roast. At last I made a clean breast of my horror of eggs, and since by that time my landlady and I were the best of friends, no harm came of it. She merely bestowed on me a grim smile of unadulterated amusement, and the bantams patronized some less fastidious stomach.
My landlady was a heavy thinker, and not a copious – though a leisurely – talker. Minutes would pass, while with dish or duster in hand she pondered a speech; then perhaps her long thin lips would only shut a little tighter, or a slow, convulsive rub of her lean forefinger along the side of her nose would indicate the upshot. But I soon learned to interpret these mute signs. She was a woman who disapproved of most things, for excellent, if nebulous, reasons; and her silences were due not to the fact that she had nothing to say, but too much.
Pollie and I talked long and earnestly that first evening at Beechwood. She promised to write to me, to send me all the gossip of the village, and to come and see me when she could. The next morning, after a sorrowful breakfast, we parted. Standing on the table in the parlour window, with eyes a little wilder than usual, I watched her pass out of sight. A last wave of her handkerchief, and the plump-cheeked, fair-skinned face was gone. The strangeness and solitude of my situation flooded over me.
For a few days, strive as she might, Mrs. Bowater’s lodger moped. It was not merely that she had become more helpless, but of far less importance. This may, in part, be accounted for by the fact that, having been accustomed at Lyndsey to live at the top of a high house and to look down on the world, when I found myself foot to foot with it, so to speak, on Beechwood Hill, it alarmingly intensified the sense of my small stature. Use and habit however. The relative merits of myself and of the passing scene gradually readjusted themselves with a proper respect for the former. Soon, too, as if from heaven, the packing-case containing my furniture arrived. Mrs. Bowater shared a whole morning over its unpacking, ever and again standing in engrossed consideration of some of my minute treasures, and, quite unaware of it, heaving a great sigh. But how to arrange them in a room already over-occupied.
Chapter Nine
A carpenter of the name of Bates was called in, so distant a relative of Mrs. Bowater’s apparently that she never by nod, word, or look acknowledged the bond. Mr. Bates held my landlady in almost speechless respect. ‘A woman in a thousand,’ he repeatedly assured me, when we were grown a little accustomed to one another; ‘a woman in ten thousand. And if things hadn’t been what they was, you may understand, they might have turned out different. Ah, miss, there’s one looking down on us could tell a tale.’ I looked up past his oblong head at the ceiling, but only a few flies were angling round the chandelier.
Mrs. Bowater’s compliments were less indirect. ‘That Bates,’ she would say, surveying his day’s handiwork after he was gone, ‘is all thumbs.’
He was certainly rather snail-like in his movements, and spent most of his time slowly rubbing his hands on the stiff apron that encased him. But I minded his thumbs far less than his gluepot.
Many years have passed, yet at the very whisper of his name, that inexpressible odour clouds up into my nose. It now occurs to me for the first time that he never sent in his bill. Either his memory failed him, or he carpentered for love. Level with the wide table in the window recess, strewn over with my small Persian mats, whereon I sat, sewed, read, and took my meals, Mr. Bates constructed a broad shelf, curtained off on three sides from the rest of the room. On this wooden stage stood my four-poster, wardrobe, and other belongings. It was my bedchamber. From table to floor he made a staircase, so that I could easily descend and roam the room at large. The latter would have been more commodious if I could have persuaded Mrs. Bowater to empty it a little. If I had kept on looking at the things in it I am sure I should have gone mad. Even tact was unavailing. If only there had been the merest tinge of a Cromwell in my character, the baubles that would have been removed!
There were two simpering plaster figures – a Shepherd and Shepherdess – nearly half my height on the chimney-piece, whom I particularly detested; also an enlarged photograph in a discoloured frame on the wall – that of a thick-necked, formidable man, with a bush of whisker on either cheek, and a high, quarrelsome stare. He made me feel intensely self-conscious. It was like a wolf looking all day into a sheep-fold. So when I had my meals, I invariably turned my back on his portrait.
I went early to bed. But now that the autumnal dusks were shortening, an hour or two of artificial light was necessary. The flare of the gas dazzled and stupefied me, and gave me a kind of hunted feeling; so Mrs. Bowater procured for me a couple of fine little glass candlesticks. In bed I sometimes burned a wax-light in a saucer, a companionable thing for night-thoughts in a strange place. Often enough I sat through the evening with no other illumination than that of the smouldering coals, so that I could see out of the window. It was an endless source of amusement to withdraw the muslin curtains, gaze out over the darkened fields beyond the roadway, and let my day-dreams wander at will.
At nine o’clock Mrs. Bowater would bring me my supper – some fragments of rusk, or of bread, and milk. My food was her constant anxiety. The difficulty, as she explained, was to supply me with little enough to eat – at least of cooked food: ‘It dries up in the winking of an eye.’ So her cat, Henry, fared more sumptuously than ever, though the jealous creature continued to reject all my advances, and as far as possible ignored my existence. ‘Simple victuals, by all means, miss,’ Mrs. Bowater would admit. ‘But if it don’t enjoy, the inside languishes; and you are not yet of an age that can fall back on skin and bone.’
The question of food presently introduced that of money. She insisted on reducing her charges to twenty shillings a week. ‘There’s the lodging, and there’s the board, the last being as you might say all but unmentionable; and honesty the best policy though I have never tried the reverse.’ So, in spite of all my protestations, it was agreed. And thus I found myself mistress of a round fifty-eight pounds a year over and above what I paid to Mrs. Bowater. Messrs. Harris, Harris, and Harris were punctual as quarter-day: and so was I. I ‘at once’ paid over to my landlady £13 and whatever other sum was needful. The ‘charity’ my godmother had recommended began, and, alas, remained at home. I stowed the rest under lock and key in one of my grandfather’s boxes which I kept under my bed. This was an imprudent habit, perhaps. Mrs. Bowater advocated the Penny Bank. But the thought of my money being so handy and palpable reassured me. I would count it over in my mind, as if it were a means to salvation; and became, in consequence, near and parsimonious.
Occasionally when she had ‘business’ to transact, Mrs. Bowater would be off to London. There she would purchase for me any little trifle required for the replenishment of my wardrobe. Needing so little, I could afford the finest materials; my sovereign was worth at least sixty shillings. Rather than ‘fine’, Mrs. Bowater preferred things ‘good’; and for this ‘goodness,’ I must confess, she sometimes made rather alarming sacrifices of appearance. Still, I was already possessed of a serviceable stock of clothes, and by aid of one of my dear mother’s last presents to me, a shiny Swiss miniature workbox with an inlaid picture of the Lake of Geneva on the lid, I soon became a passable needlewoman.
I love bright, pure colours, and, my sweeping and d
usting and bedmaking over, and my external mourning for my father at an end, a remarkably festive figure would confront me in my cheval glass of an afternoon. The hours I spent in dressing my hair and matching this bit of colour with that. I would talk to myself in the glass, too, for company’s sake, and make believe I was a dozen different characters. I was young. I pined for life and companionship, and having only my own – for Mrs. Bowater was rather a faithful feature of the landscape than a fellow being – I made as much, and as many, of myself as possible.
Another question that deeply engaged my landlady was my health. She mistrusted open windows, but strongly recommended ‘air’. What insidious maladies she spied around me! Indeed that September was unusually hot. I sat on my table in the window like a cricket in an oven, sorely missing my high open balcony, the garden, and the stream. Once and again Mrs. Bowater would take me for a little walk after sunset. Discretion to her was much the better part of valour; nor had I quite recovered from my experiences in the train. But such walks – though solitary enough at that hour of the day – were straggly and irksome. Pollie’s arm had been a kind of second nature to me; but Mrs. Bowater, I think, had almost as fastidious a disinclination to carrying me as I have to being carried. I languished for liberty. Being a light sleeper, I would often awake at daybreak and the first call of the birds. Then the hill – which led to Tyddlesdon End and Love (or Loose) Lane – was deserted. Thought of the beyond haunted me like a passion. At a convenient moment I intimated to Mrs. Bowater how secure was the street at this early hour, how fresh the meadows, and how thirsty for independent outings her lodger. ‘Besides, Mrs. Bowater, I am not a child, and who could see me?’
Memoirs of a Midget Page 7