After anxious and arduous discussion, Mr. Bates was once more consulted. He wrapped himself in a veritable blanket of reflection, and all but became unconscious before he proposed a most ingenious device. With Mrs. Bowater’s consent, she being her own landlady and amused at the idea, he cut out of one of the lower panels of her parlour door a round-headed opening just of an easy size to suit me. In this aperture he hung a delicious little door that precisely fitted it. So also with the door into the street – to which he added a Bramah lock. By cementing a small square stone into the corner of each of the steps down from the porch, he eased that little difficulty. May Heaven bless Mr. Bates! With his key round my neck, stoop once, stoop twice, a scamper down his steps, and I was free – as completely mistress of my goings-out and of my comings-in as every self-respecting person should be.
‘That’s what my father would have called a good job, Mr. Bates,’ said I cordially.
He looked yearningly at me, as if about to impart a profound secret; but thought better of it. ‘Well, miss, what I say is, a job’s a job; and if it is a job, it’s a job that should be made a job of.’
As I dot the i’s and cross the t’s of this manuscript, I often think – a little ruefully – of Mr. Bates.
As soon as daybreak was piercing into my region of the sky, and before Mrs. Bowater or the rest of the world was stirring, I would rise, make my candlelit toilet, and hasten out into the forsaken sweet of the morning. If it broke wet or windy, I could turn over and go to sleep again. A few hundred yards up the hill, the road turned off, as I have said, towards Tyddlesdon End and Loose Lane – very stony and steep. On the left, and before the fork, a wicket gate led into the woods and the park of empty ‘Wanderslore’. To the verge of these deserted woods made a comfortable walk for me.
If, as might happen, any other wayfarer was early abroad, I could conceal myself in the tussocks of grass and bushes that bordered the path. In my thick veil, with my stout green parasol and inconspicuous shawl, I made a queer and surprising figure no doubt. Indeed, from what I have heard, the ill fame of Wanderslore, acquired a still more piquant flavour in the town by reports that elf-folk had been descried on its outskirts. But if I sometimes skipped and capered in these early outings, it was for exercise as well as suppressed high spirits. To be prepared, too, for the want of such facilities in the future, I had the foresight to accustom myself to Mrs. Bowater’s steep steps as well as to my cemented-in ‘Bateses’, as I called them. My only difficulty was to decide whether to practise on them when I was fresh at the outset of my walk, or fatigued at the end of it. Naturally people grow ‘peculiar’ when much alone: self plays with self, and the mimicry fades.
These little expeditions, of course, had their spice of danger, and it made them the more agreeable. A strange dog might give me a fright. There was an old vixen which once or twice exchanged glances with me at a distance. But with my parasol I was a match for most of the creatures which humanity has left unslaughtered. My sudden appearance might startle or perplex them. But if few were curious, fewer far were unfriendly. Boys I feared most. A hulking booby once stoned me through the grass, but fortunately he was both a coward and a poor marksman. Until winter came, I doubt if a single sunshine morning was wasted. Many a rainy one, too, found me splashing along, though then I must be a careful walker to avoid a sousing.
The birds renewed their autumn song, the last flowers were blossoming. Concealed by scattered tufts of bracken where an enormous beech forked its roots and cast a golden light from its withering leaves, I would spend many a solitary hour. Above the eastern treetops my Kent stretched into the distance beneath the early skies. Far to my left and a little behind me rose the chimneys of gloomy Wanderslore. Breathing in the gentle air, the dreamer within would stray at will. There I kept the anniversary of my mother’s birthday; twined a wreath for her of ivy-flowers and winter green; and hid it secretly in a forsaken blackbird’s nest in the woods.
Still I longed for my old home again. Mrs. Bowater’s was a stuffy and meagre little house, and when meals were in preparation, none too sweet to the nose. Especially low I felt, when a scrawling letter was now and then delivered by the postman from Pollie. Her spelling and grammar intensified my homesickness. Miss Fenne, too, had not forgotten me. I pored over her spidery epistles till my head ached. Why, if I had been so rash and undutiful, was she so uneasy? Even the texts she chose had a parched look. The thought of her spectacling my minute handwriting and examining the proof that I was still a child of wrath, gave my pride a silly qualm. So Mrs. Bowater came to my rescue, and between us we concocted replies to her which, I am afraid, were not more intelligible for a tendency on my landlady’s part to express my sentiments in the third person.
This little service set her thinking of Sunday and church. She was not, she told me, ‘what you might call a religious woman’, having been compelled ‘to keep her head up in the world, and all not being gold that glitters’. She was none the less a regular attendant at St. Peter’s – a church a mile or so away in the valley, whose five bells of a Sabbath evening never failed to recall my thoughts to Lyndsey and to dip me into the waters of melancholy. I loved their mellow clanging in the lap of the wind, yet it was rather doleful to be left alone with my candles, and only Henry sullenly squatting in the passage awaiting his mistress’s return.
‘Not that you need making any better, miss,’ Mrs. Bowater assured me. ‘Even a buttercup – or a retriever dog, for that matter – being no fuller than it can hold of what it is, in a manner of speaking. But there’s the next world to be accounted for, and hopes of reunion on another shore, where, so I understand, mere size, body or station, will not be noticeable in the sight of the Lamb. Not that I hold with the notion that only the good so-called will be there.’
This speech, I must confess, made me exceedingly uncomfortable.
‘Wherever I go, Mrs. Bowater,’ I replied hastily, ‘I shall not be happy unless you are there.’
‘D.V.,’ said Mrs. Bowater grimly, ‘I will.’
Still, I remained unconverted to St. Peter’s. Why, I hardly know: perhaps it was her reference to its pew rents, or her description of the vicar’s daughters (who were now nursing their father at Tunbridge Wells), or maybe even it was a stare from her husband which I happened at that precise moment to intercept from the wall. Possibly if I myself had taken a ‘sitting’, this aura of formality would have faded away. Mrs. Bowater was a little reassured, however, to hear that my father and mother, in spite of Miss Fenne, had seldom taken me to church. They had concluded that my absence was best both for me and for the congregation. And I told her of our little evening services in the drawing-room, with Mrs. Ballard, the parlourmaid, Pollie, and the Boy on the sofa, just as it happened to be their respective ‘Sundays in’.
This set her mind at rest. Turn and turn about, on one Sunday evening she went to St. Peter’s and brought back with her the text and crucial fragments of Mr. Crimble’s sermon, and on the next we read the lessons together and sang a hymn. Once, indeed, I embarked upon a solo, ‘As pants the hart’, one of my mother’s favourite airs. But I got a little shaky at ‘O for the wings’, and there was no rambling, rumbling chorus from my father. But Sunday was not my favourite day on Beechwood Hill. Mrs. Bowater looked a little formal with stiff white ‘frilling’ round her neck. She reminded me of a leg of mutton. To judge from the gloom and absentmindedness into which they sometimes plunged her, quotations from Mr. Crimble could be double-edged. My real joy was to hear her views on the fashions and manners of her fellow-worshippers.
Well, so the months went by. Winter came with its mists and rains and frosts, and a fire in the polished grate was no longer an evening luxury but a daily need. As often as possible I went out walking. When the weather was too inclement, I danced for an hour or so, for joy and exercise, and went swimming on a chair. I would entertain myself also in watching through the muslin curtains the few passers-by; sorting out their gaits, and noses, and clothes, and acquaintances, and g
uessing their characters, occupations, and circumstances. Certain little looks and movements led me to suppose that, even though I was perfectly concealed, the more sensitive among them were vaguely uneasy under this secret scrutiny. In such cases (though very reluctantly) I always drew my eyes away: first because I did not like the thought of encroaching on their privacy, and next, because I was afraid their uneasiness might prevent them coming again. But this microscopic examination of mankind must cease with dusk, and the candle-hours passed rather heavily at times. The few books I had brought away from Lyndsey were mine now nearly by heart. So my eye would often wander up to a small bookcase that hung out of reach on the other side of the chimney-piece.
Chapter Ten
One supper-time I ventured to ask Mrs. Bowater if she would hand me down a tall, thin, dark-green volume, whose appearance had particularly taken my fancy. A simple enough request, but surprisingly received. She stiffened all over and eyed the bookcase with a singular intensity. ‘The books there’, she said, ‘are what they call the dead past burying its dead.’
Spoon in hand, I paused, looking now at Mrs. Bowater and now at the coveted book. ‘Mr. Bowater’, she added from deep down in herself, ‘followed the sea.’ This was, in fact, Mr. Bowater’s début in our conversation, and her remark, uttered in so hollow yet poignant a tone, produced a romantic expectancy in my mind.
‘Is – ‘ I managed to whisper at last: ‘I hope Mr. Bowater isn’t dead?’
Mrs. Bowater’s eyes were like lead in her long, dark-skinned face. She opened her mouth, her gaze travelled slowly until, as I realized, it had fixed itself on the large yellowing photograph behind my back.
‘Dead, no’; she echoed sepulchrally. ‘Worse than.’
By which I understood that, far from being dead, Mr. Bowater was still actively alive. And yet, apparently, not much the happier for that. Instantaneously I caught sight of a rocky, storm-strewn shore, such as I had seen in my Robinson Crusoe, and there Mr. Bowater, still ‘following the sea’.
‘Never, never,’ continued Mrs. Bowater in her Bible voice, ‘never to darken these doors again!’ I stole an anxious glance over my shoulder. There was such a brassy boldness in the responsive stare that I was compelled to shut my eyes.
But Mrs. Bowater had caught my expression. ‘He was, as some would say,’ she explained with gloomy pride, ‘a handsome man. Do handsome he did never. But there, miss, things being as they must be, and you in the green of your youth – though hearing the worst may be a wholesome physic if taken with care, as I have told Fanny many a time …’ She paused to breathe. ‘What I was saying is, there can be no harm in your looking at the book if that’s all there’s to it.’ With that she withdrew the dry-looking volume from the shelf and laid it on the table beside my chair.
I got down, opened it in the middle (as my father had taught me, in order to spare the binding), opened it on a page inkly black as night all over, but starred with a design as familiar to me as the lines on the palm of my hand.
‘But, oh! Mrs. Bowater!’ I cried, all in a breath, running across, dragging back the curtain and pointing out into the night; ‘look, look, it’s there! It’s Orion!’
There, indeed, in the heavens beyond my window, straddling the dark, star for star the same as those in the book, stood the Giant, shaking his wondrous fires upon the air. Even Mrs. Bowater was moved by my enthusiasm. She came to the table, compared at my direction chart with sky, and was compelled rather grudgingly to admit that her husband’s book was at least true to the facts. Stooping low, I read out a brief passage. She listened. And it seemed a look of girlhood came into the shadowy face uplifted towards the window. So the stars came into my life, and faithful friends they have remained to this day.
Mrs. Bowater’s little house being towards the crest of the hill, with sunrise a little to the left across the meadows, my window commanded about three-fifths of the southern and eastern skies. By day I would kneel down and study for hours the charts, and thus be prepared for the dark. Night after night, when the weather was fair, or the windy clouds made mock of man’s celestial patternings, I would sit in the glow of the firelight and summon these magic shiners each by name – Bellatrix, huge Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and the rest. I would look at one, and, while so doing, watch another. This not only isolated the smaller stars, but gradually I became aware that they were one and all furtively signalling to me! About a fortnight later my old Lyndsey friend, the Dogstar, topped the horizon fringe of woodland. I heard myself shout at him across the world. His sudden molten bursts of crimson betwixt his emeralds and sapphires filled me with an almost ridiculous delight.
By the middle of December I had mastered all the greater stars in my region, and with my spyglass a few even of the Gammas and Deltas. But much of the zenith and all the north was closed to me, and – such is human greed – I began to pine beyond measure for a sight of Deneb, Vega, and the Chair. This desire grew unendurable, and led me into a piece of genuine foolhardiness. I determined to await the first clear still night and then to sally out and make my way, by hook or crook, up to my beech-roots, from which I should be able to command a fair stretch of the northern heavens. A quiet spell favoured me.
I waited until Mrs. Bowater had gone to her bedroom, then muffled myself up in my thickest clothes and stole out into the porch. At my first attempt, one glance into the stooping dark was enough. At the second, a furtive sighing breath of wind, as I breasted the hill, suddenly flapped my mantle and called in my ear. I turned tail and fled. But never faint heart won fair constellation. At the third I pressed on.
The road was deserted. No earthly light showed anywhere except from a lamp-post this side of the curve of the hill. I frisked along, listening and peering, and brimming over with painful delight. The dark waned; and my eyes grew accustomed to the thin starlight. I gained the woods unharmed. Rich was my reward. There and then I begged the glimmering Polestar to be true to Mr. Bowater. Fear, indeed, if in a friendly humour, is enlivening company. Instead of my parasol I had brought out a carved foreign knife (in a sheath at least five inches long) which I had discovered on my parlour what-not.
The whisperings of space, the calls of indetectable birds in the wastes of the sky, the sudden appearance of menacing or sinister shapes which vanished or melted themselves into mere stocks or stones as I drew near – my heart gave many an anguished jump. But quiet, and the magnificence of night, vanquished all folly at last. It seemed to me that a Being whom one may call Silence was brooding in solitude where living and human visitants are rare, and that in his company a harmless spirit may be at peace. Oblivious of my ungainly knife, yet keeping a firm arm on it, self seemed to be the whole scene there, and my body being so small I was perhaps less a disturber than were most intruders of that solemn repose.
Why I kept these night-walks secret, I cannot say. It was not apprehension of Mrs. Bowater. She would have questioned my discretion, but would not, I think, have attempted to dissuade me from them against my will. No. It may be that every true astronomer is a miser at heart, and keeps some Lambda or Mu or lost nebula his eternal friend, named with his name, but unrecorded on any chart. For my part I hoarded the complete north for a while.
A fright I got one night, however, kept me indoors for the better part of a week. In my going out the little house door had been carelessly left unlatched. Algol and the red planet Mars had been my quarry among the floating woolpack clouds. The wind was lightly blowing from the north-west after the calm. I drew down my veil and set off briskly and light-heartedly for home.
The sight of the dark-looking hole in the door quickly sobered me down. All was quiet, however, but on entering my room, there was a strangeness in the air, and that not due to my landlady’s forlorn trumpetings from above. Through the floating vaporous light I trod across to my staircase and was soon in bed. Hardly had my eyes closed when there broke out of the gloom around me a dismal, appalling cry. I soon realized that the creeping horror this caused in me was as nothing compared wit
h that of the poor beast, lured, no doubt, into the house by Henry, at finding itself beneath a strange roof.
‘Puss, puss,’ I pleaded shakenly; and again broke out that heartsick cry.
Knife in hand, I descended my staircase and edging as far as possible from the baleful globes greenly burning beneath a mahogany chair, I threw open both doors and besought my unwelcome visitor to take his departure. The night wind came fluttering; there was the blur of a scuttering, shapeless form, and in the flash of an eye I was sprawling on the floor. A good deal shaken, with a nasty scratch on my thigh, but otherwise unharmed, I waved my hand after the fugitive and returned to bed.
The blood soon ceased to flow. Not daring to send my bloodstained nightgown to the wash, I concealed it behind my dresses in the wardrobe, and the next fine morning carried it off with me and buried it as deeply as I could in a deserted rabbit-burrow in the woods. Such is an evil conscience that, first, I had the fancy that during my digging a twig had inexplicably snapped in the undergrowth; and next, for ‘burnt offering’, I made Mrs. Bowater the present of an oval hand-glass set in garnets (one of my grandfather’s gifts). This she took down to a local jeweller’s to be mounted with a pin, and wore it on Sundays in place of her usual cameo depicting the Three Graces disporting themselves under a Palm-tree beside a Fountain.
Meanwhile I had heard a little more about the ‘Fanny’ whom Mrs. Bowater had mentioned. My landlady was indeed a slow confider. Fanny, I gathered, had a post as mistress at a school some forty miles away. She taught the little boys ‘English’. The fleeting Miss Perry returned to mind, and with a faint dismay I heard that Fanny would soon be returning home for the Christmas holidays. Mrs. Bowater’s allusions to her were the more formidable for being veiled. I dreaded the invasion. Would she not come ‘between us’?
Memoirs of a Midget Page 8