Memoirs of a Midget

by de la Mare, Walter;

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she replied cautiously, piercing her eyes at me, ‘that is a riddle. You must tell me about your childhood. Not that I love children, or my own childhood either. I had enough of that to last me a lifetime. I shan’t pass it on; though I promise you, Midgetina, if ever I do have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles, bats, and dormice, and make it like you. Was your mother – ‘ she began again, after a pause of reflection. ‘Are you sorry, I mean, you aren’t – you aren’t – ?’

  Her look supplied the missing words. ‘Sorry that I am a midget, Fanny? People think I must be. But why? It is all I am, all I ever was. I am myself, inside; like everybody else; and yet, you know, not quite like everybody else. I sometimes think’ – I laughed at the memory – ‘I was asking Dr. Phelps about that. Besides, would you be – alone?’

  ‘Not when I was alone, perhaps. Still, it must be rather odd, Miss Needle-in-a-Haystack. As for being alone’ – once again our owl, if owl it was, much nearer now, screeched its screech in the wintry woods – ‘I hate it!’

  ‘But surely’, expostulated the wiseacre in me, ‘that’s what we cannot help being. We even die alone, Fanny.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m going to help it. I’m not dead yet. Do you ever think of the future?’

  For an instant its great black hole yawned close, but I shook my head.

  ‘Well, that’, replied she, ‘is what Fanny Bowater is doing all the time. There’s nothing’, she added satirically, ‘so important, so imperative for teachers as learning. And you must learn your lesson, my dear, before you are heard if – if you want to escape a slapping. Every little donkey knows that.’

  ‘I suppose the truth is’, said I, as if seized with a bright idea, ‘there are two kinds of ambitions, of wants, I mean. We are all like those Chinese boxes; and some of us want to live in the biggest, the outsidest we can possibly manage; and some in the inmost one of all. The one,’ I added a little drearily, ‘no one can share.’

  ‘Quite, quite true,’ said Fanny, mimicking my sententiousness, ‘the teeniest, tiniest, icklest one, which no mortal ingenuity has ever been able to open – and so discover the nothing inside. I know your Chinese boxes!’

  ‘Poor Fanny,’ I cried, rising up and kneeling beside the ice-cold hand that lay on the frosty leaves. ‘All that I have shall help you.’

  Infatuated thing; I stooped low as I knelt, and stroked softly with my own the outstretched fingers on which she was leaning.

  I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress. ‘Fanny,’ I whispered tragically, ‘will you please sing to me – if you are not frozenly cold? You remember – the Moon Song: I have never forgotten it; and only three notes, yet it sometimes wakes me at night. It’s queer, isn’t it, being you and me?’

  She laughed, tilting her chin; and her voice began at once to sing, as if at the scarcely opened door of her throat, and a tune so plain it seemed but the words speaking:

  ’Twas a Cuckoo, cried ‘cuck-oo’

  In the youth of the year;

  And the timid things nesting,

  Crouched, ruffled in fear;

  And the Cuckoo cried, ‘cuck-oo’,

  For the honest to hear.

  One – two notes: a bell sound

  In the blue and the green;

  ‘Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!’

  And a silence between.

  Ay, mistress, have a care, lest

  Harsh love, he hie by,

  And for kindness a monster

  To nourish you try –

  In your bosom to lie:

  ‘Cuck-oo’, and a ‘cuck-oo’,

  And ‘cuck-oo!’

  The sounds fell like beads into the quiet – as if a small child had come up out of her heart and gone down again; and she callous and unmoved. I cannot say why the clear, muted notes saddened and thrilled me so. Was she the monster?

  I had drawn back, and stayed eyeing her pale face, the high cheek, the delicate straight nose, the darkened lips, the slim black eyebrows, the light, clear, unfathomable eyes reflecting the solitude and the thin brilliance of the wood. Yet the secret of herself remained her own. She tried in vain not to be disturbed at my scrutiny.

  ‘Well,’ she inquired at last, with motionless glance fixed on the distance. ‘Do you think you could honestly give me a testimonial, Miss Midget?’

  It is strange. The Sphinx had spoken, yet without much enlightenment. ‘Now look at me,’ I commanded. ‘If I went away, you couldn’t follow. When you go away, you cannot escape from me. I can go back and – and be where I was.’ My own meaning was half-concealed from me; but a startled something that had not been there before peeped out of those eyes so close to mine.

  ‘If’, she said, ‘I could care like that too, yet wanted nothing, then I should be free too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said I, lifting my hand from the unanswering fingers.

  ‘I mean’, she exclaimed, leaping to her feet, ‘that I’m sick to death of the stars and am going home to bed. Hateful listening old woods!’

  I turned sharp round, as if in apprehension that some secret hearer might have caught her remark. But Fanny stretched out her arms, and, laughing a foolish tune, in affected abandonment began softly to dance in the crisp leaves, quite lost to me again. So twirling, she set off down the path by which she had come trespassing. A physical exhaustion came over me. I watched her no more, but stumbled along, with unheeding eyes, in her wake. What had I not given, I thought bitterly, and this my reward. Thus solitary, I had gone only a little distance, and had reached the outskirts of the woods, when a far from indifferent Fanny came hastening back to intercept me.

  And no wonder. She had remembered to attire herself becomingly for her moonlight tryst, but had forgotten the door key. We stood looking at one another aghast, as, from eternity, I suppose, have all fellow-conspirators in danger of discovery. It was I who first awoke to action. There was but one thing to be done, and, warning Fanny that I had never before attempted to unlatch the big front door of her mother’s house, I set off resolutely down the hill.

  ‘You walk so slowly!’ she said suddenly, turning back on me. ‘I will carry you.’

  Again we paused. I looked up at her with an inextricable medley of emotions struggling together in my mind, and shook my head.

  ‘But why, why?’ she repeated impatiently. ‘We could get there in half the time.’

  ‘If you could fly, Fanny, I’d walk,’ I replied stubbornly.

  ‘You mean – ‘ and her cold anger distorted her face. ‘Oh, pride! What childish nonsense! And you said we were to be friends. Do you suppose I care whether …?’ But the question remained unfinished.

  ‘I am your friend’, said I, ‘and that is why I will not, I will not give way to you.’ It was hardly friendship that gleamed out of the wide eyes then. But mine the victory – a victory in which only a tithe of the spoils, unrecognized by the vanquished, had fallen to the victor.

  Without another word she turned on her heel, and for the rest of our dejected journey, she might have been mistaken for a cross nurse trailing on pace for pace beside a rebellious child. My dignity was less ruffled than hers, however, and for a brief while I had earned my freedom.

  Arrived at the house, dumbly hostile in the luminous night, Fanny concealed herself as best she could behind the gatepost and kept watch on the windows. Far away in the stillness we heard a footfall echoing on the hill. ‘There is someone coming,’ she whispered, ‘you must hurry.’ She might, I think, have serpented her way in by my own little door. Where the head leads, the heart may follow. But she did not suggest it. Nor did I.

  I tugged and pushed as best I could, but the umbrella with which from a chair I at last managed to draw the upper bolt of the door was extremely cumbersome. The latch for a while resisted my efforts. And the knowledge that Fanny was fretting and fuming behind the gate-post hardly increased my skill. The house was sunken in quiet; Mrs. Bowater apparently was sleeping without her us
ual accompaniment; only Henry shared my labours, and he sat moodily at the foot of the stairs, refusing to draw near until at the same moment Fanny entered, and he leapt out.

  Once safely within, and the door closed and bolted again, Fanny stood for a few moments listening. Then with a sigh and a curious gesture she bent herself and kissed the black veil that concealed my fair hair.

  ‘I am sorry, Midgetina,’ she whispered into its folds, ‘I was impatient. Mother wouldn’t have liked the astronomy, you know. That was all. And I am truly sorry for – for – ‘

  ‘My dear,’ I replied in firm, elderly tones, whose echo is in my ear to this very day; ‘my dear, it was my mind you hurt, not my feelings.’ With that piece of sententiousness I scrambled blindly through my Bates’s doorway, shut the door behind me, and more disturbed at heart than I can tell, soon sank into the thronging slumber of the guilty and the obsessed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs. Bowater scattered out on the window-sill for my pleasure. And yet – their every virtue, every grace, Fanny Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled breast and song to a thrush, its sheen to a starling? It is a riddle that still baffles me. If we are all shut up in our bodies as the poets and the Scriptures say we are, then how is it that many of the loveliest seem to be all but uninhabited, or to harbour such dingy tenants; while quite plain faces may throng with animated ghosts?

  Fanny did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr. Crimble came to see her that afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he paused at the gate-post to push his spectacles more firmly on to his nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his face towards St. Peter’s. Next day, Holy Innocents’, he came again; but this time with more determination, for he asked to see me.

  To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs. Bowater boldly invited him to stay to tea. With a flurried glance of the eye in her direction he accepted my invitation.

  ‘A cold afternoon, Mrs. Bowater,’ he intoned. ‘The cup that cheers, the cup that cheers.’

  My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and presently he and I found ourselves positively tête-à-tête over her seed cake and thin bread and butter.

  But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his thoughts were not wholly with me.

  ‘Are you long with us?’ he inquired, stirring his tea.

  ‘I am quite, quite happy here,’ I replied, with a sigh.

  ‘Ah!’ he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, ‘how few of us have the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are miserable. It is this pessimism – of a mechanical, a scientific age – which we have chiefly to contend against. We don’t often see you at St. Peter’s, I think?’

  ‘You wouldn’t see very much of me, if I did come,’ I replied a little tartly. Possibly it was his ‘we’ that had fretted me. It seemed needlessly egotistical. ‘On the other hand,’ I added, ‘wouldn’t there be a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?’

  Mr. Crimble opened his mouth and laughed. ‘I wish’, he said, with a gallant little bow, ‘there were more like you.’

  ‘More like me, Mr. Crimble?’

  ‘I mean,’ he explained, darting a glance at the furniture of my bedroom, whose curtains, to my annoyance, hung withdrawn, ‘I mean that – that you – that so many of us refuse to see the facts of life. To look them in the face, Miss M. There is nothing to fear.’

  We were getting along famously, and I begged him to take some of Mrs. Bowater’s black currant jam.

  ‘But then, I have plenty of time,’ I said agreeably. ‘And the real difficulty is to get the facts to face me. Dear me, if only, now, I had some of Miss Bowater’s brains.’

  A veil seemed suddenly to lift from his face and as suddenly to descend again. So, too, he had for a moment stopped eating, then as suddenly begun eating again.

  ‘Ah, Miss Bowater! She is indeed clever; a – a brilliant young lady. The very life of a party, I assure you. And, yet, do you know, in parochial gatherings, try as I may, I occasionally find it very difficult to get people to mix. The little social formulas, the prejudices. Yet, surely, Miss M., religion should be the great solvent. At least, that is my view.’

  He munched away more vigorously, and gazed through his spectacles out through my window-blinds.

  ‘Mixing people must be very wearisome,’ I suggested examining his face.

  ‘“Wearisome”,’ he repeated blandly. ‘I am sometimes at my wits’ end. No. A curate’s life is not a happy one.’ Yet he confessed it almost with joy.

  ‘And the visiting!’ I said. And then, alas! my tongue began to run away with me. He was falling back again into what I may call his company voice, and I pined to talk to the real Mr. Crimble, little dreaming how soon that want was to be satiated.

  ‘I sometimes wonder, do you know, if religion is made difficult enough.’

  ‘But I assure you,’ he replied, politely but firmly, ‘a true religion is exceedingly difficult. “The eye of a needle” – we mustn’t forget that.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said I warmly; ‘that “eye” will be narrow enough even for a person with my little advantages. I remember my mother’s cook telling me, when I was a child, that in the old days, really wicked people if they wanted to return to the Church had to do so in a sheet, with ashes on their heads, you know, and carrying a long lighted candle. She said that if the door was shut against them, they died in torment, and went to Hell. But she was a Roman Catholic, like my grandmother.’

  Mr. Crimble peered at me as if over a wall.

  ‘I remember, too,’ I went on, ‘one summer’s day as a very little girl I was taken to the evening service. And the singing – bursting out like that, you know, with the panting and the yowling of the organ, made me faint and sick; and I jumped right out of the window.’

  ‘Jumped out of the window!’ cried my visitor in consternation.

  ‘Yes, we were at the back. Pollie, my nursemaid, had put me up in the niche, you see; and I dragged her hand away. But I didn’t hurt myself. The grass was thick in the churchyard: I fell light, and I had plenty of clothes on. I rather enjoyed it – the air and the tombstones. And though I had my gasps, the “eye” seemed big enough when I was a child. But afterwards – when I was confirmed – I thought of Hell a good deal. I can’t see it so plainly now. Wide, low, and black, with a few demons. That can’t be right.’

  ‘My dear young lady!’ cried Mr. Crimble, as if shocked, ‘is it wise to attempt it? It must be admitted, of course, that if we do not take advantage of the benefits bestowed upon us by Providence in a Christian community, we cannot escape His displeasure. The absence from His Love.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking at him in sudden intimacy, ‘I believe that.’ And I pondered awhile, following up my own thoughts. ‘Have you ever read Mr. Clodd’s Childhood of the World, Mr. Crimble?’

  By the momentary confusion of his face I gathered that he had not. ‘Mr. Clodd? … Ah, yes, the writer on Primitive Man.’

  ‘This was only
a little book, for the young, you know. But in it Mr. Clodd says, I remember, that even the most shocking old forms of religion were not invented by devils. They were “Man’s struggles from darkness to twilight”. What he meant was that no man loves darkness. At least,’ I added, with a sudden gush of remembrances, ‘not without the stars.’

  ‘That is exceedingly true,’ replied Mr. Crimble. ‘And talking of stars, what a wonderful sight it was the night before last, the whole heavens one spangle of diamonds. I was returning from visiting a sick parishioner, Mr. Hubbins.’ Then it was his foot that Fanny and I had heard reverberating on the hill! I hastily hid my face in my cup, but he appeared not to have noticed my confusion. He took another slice of bread and butter; folded it carefully in two, then peered up out of the corner of his round eye at me, and added solemnly: ‘Sick, I regret to say, no longer.’

  ‘Dead?’ I cried from the bottom of my heart, and again looked at him.

  Then my eyes strayed to the silent scene beyond the window, silent, it seemed, with the very presence of poor Mr. Hubbins. ‘I should not like to go to Hell in the snow,’ I said ruminatingly. Out of the past welled into memory an old ballad my mother had taught me:

  ‘This ae nighte, this ae nighte

  – Every nighte and alle,

  Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,

  And Christe receive thy saule!’

  ‘Beautiful, beautiful,’ murmured Mr. Crimble, yet not without a trace of alarm in his dark eyes. ‘But believe me, I am not suggesting that Mr. Hubbins – His was, I am told, a wonderfully peaceful end.’

  ‘Peaceful! Oh, but surely not in his mind, Mr. Crimble. Surely one must be more alive in that last hour than ever – just when one’s going away. At any rate,’ and I couldn’t refrain a sigh, almost of envy, ‘I hope I shall be. Was Mr. Hubbins a good man?’

  ‘He was a most regular church-goer,’ replied my visitor a little unsteadily; ‘a family-man, one of our Sidesmen, in fact. He will be greatly missed. You may remember what Mr. Ruskin wrote of his father: “Here lies an entirely honest merchant”. Mr. Ruskin, senior, was, as a matter of fact, in the wine trade. Mr. Hubbins, I believe, was in linen, though, of course, it amounts to the same thing. But haven’t we,’ and he cleared his throat, ‘haven’t we – er – strayed into a rather lugubrious subject?’