Memoirs of a Midget

by de la Mare, Walter;

  ‘We have strayed into a rather lugubrious world,’ said I.

  ‘Of course, of course; but, believe me, we mustn’t always think too closely. “Days and moments quickly flying”, true enough, though hardly appropriate, as a matter of fact, at this particular season in the Christian year. But, on the other hand, “we may make our lives sublime”. Does not yet another poet tell us that? Although, perhaps, Mr. Hub –’

  ‘Yes,’ I interposed eagerly, the lover of books in me at once rising to the bait, ‘but what do you think Longfellow absolutely meant by his “sailor on the main” of life being comforted, you remember, by somebody else having been shipwrecked and just leaving footprints in the sand? I used to wonder and wonder. Does the poem imply, Mr. Crimble, that merely to be born is to be shipwrecked? I don’t think that can be so, because Longfellow was quite a cheerful man, wasn’t he? – at least for a poet. For my part’, I ran on, now thoroughly at home with my visitor, and on familiar ground, ‘I am sure I prefer poor Friday. Do you remember how Robinson Crusoe described him soon after the rescue from the savages as “without Passions, Sullenness, or Designs”, even though he did, poor thing, “have a hankering stomach after some of the Flesh”? Not that I mean to suggest’, I added hastily, ‘that Mr. Hubbins was in any sense a cannibal.’

  ‘By no means,’ said Mr. Crimble helplessly. ‘But there,’ and he brushed his knees with his handkerchief, ‘I fear you are too much of a reader for me, and – and critic. For that very reason I do hope, Miss M., you will sometimes contrive to pay a visit to St. Peter’s. Mother Church has room for all, you know, in her – about her footstool.’ He smiled at me very kindly. ‘And our organist, Mr. Temple, has been treating us to some charmingly quaint old carols – at least the words seem a little quaint to a modern ear. But I cannot boast of being a student of poetry. Parochial work leaves little time even for the classics:

  Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo.

  Favete linguis …

  He almost chirped the delightful words in a high, pleasant voice, but except for the first three of them, they were too many for my small Latin, and I afterwards forgot to test the aptness of his quotation. I was just about to ask him (with some little unwillingness) to translate the whole ode for me, when I heard Fanny’s step at the door. I desisted.

  At her entry the whole of our conversation, as it hung about in Mrs. Bowater’s firelit little parlour, seemed to have become threadbare and meaningless. My visitor and I turned away from each other almost with relief – like Longfellow’s shipwrecked sailors, perhaps, at sight of a ship.

  Fanny’s pale cheeks beneath her round beaver hat and veil were bright with the cold – for frost had followed the snow. She eyed us slowly, with less even than a smile in her eyes, facing my candles softly, as if she had come out of a dream. Whatever class of the community Mr. Crimble may have meant to include in his Odi, the celerity with which he rose to greet her made it perfectly clear that it was not Miss Bowater’s. She smiled at the black sleeve, cuff, and signet ring outstretched towards her, but made no further advance. She brought him, too, a sad disappointment, simply that she would be unable to sing at his concert on the last night of the year. At this blow Mr. Crimble instinctively folded his hands. He looked helpless and distressed.

  ‘But, Miss Bowater,’ he pleaded, ‘the printer has been waiting nearly two days for the names of your songs. The time is very short now.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fanny, seating herself on a stool by the fire and slowly removing her gloves, ‘it is annoying. I hadn’t a vestige of a cold last night.’

  ‘But, indeed, indeed,’ he began, ‘is it wise in this severe weather –?’

  ‘Oh, it isn’t the weather I mind,’ was the serene retort, ‘it’s the croaking like a frog in public.’

  ‘“A frog!”’ cried Mr. Crimble beguilingly, ‘oh, no!’

  But all his protestations and cajoleries were unavailing. Even to a long, silent glance so private in appearance that it seemed more courteous to turn away from it, Fanny made no discernible response. His shoulders humped. He caught up his soft hat, made his adieu – a little formal, and hasty – and hurried off through the door to the printer.

  When his muffled footsteps had passed away, I looked at Fanny.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed, shrugging her shoulders, ‘it was a lie. I said it like a lie, so that it shouldn’t deceive him. I detest all that wheedling. To come here two days running, after – And why, may I ask, if it is beneath your dignity to dance to the parish, is it not beneath mine to sing? Let the silly sheep amuse themselves with their bleating. I have done with it all.’

  She rose, folded her gloves into a ball and her veil over her hat, and once more faced her reflection in her mother’s looking-glass. I had not the courage to tell her that the expression she wore on other occasions suited her best.

  ‘But surely,’ I argued uneasily, ‘things are different. If I were to dance, stuck up there on a platform, you know very well it would not be the dancing that would amuse them, but – just me. Would you care for that if you were – well, what I am?’

  ‘Ah, but you don’t know,’ a low voice replied bitterly, ‘you don’t know. The snobs they are! I have soaked in it for years, like a pig in brine. Boxed up here in your pretty little doll’s house, you suppose that all that matters is what you think of other people. But to be perfectly frank, you are out of the running, my dear. I have to get my own living, and all that matters is not what I think of other people but what other people think of me. Do you suppose I don’t know what he, in his heart, thinks of me – and all the rest of them? Well, I say, wait!’

  And she left me to my doll’s house – a more helpless slave than ever.

  Not only one ‘star’ the fewer, then, dazzled St. Peter’s parish that New Year’s Eve, but Fanny and I never again shared an hour’s practical astronomy. Still, she would often sit and talk to me, and the chain of my devotion grew heavy. Perhaps she, on her side, merely basked in the flattery of my imagination. It was for her a new variety of a familiar experience. Perhaps a curious and condescending fondness for me for a while sprang up in her – as far as that was possible, for, apart from her instinctive heartlessness, she never really accustomed herself to my physical shortcomings. I believe they attracted yet repelled her. To my lonely spirit she was a dream that remained a dream in spite of its intensifying resemblance to a nightmare.

  I realize now that she was desperately capricious, of a catlike cruelty by nature, and so evasive and elusive that frequently I could not distinguish her soft, furry pads from her claws. But whatever her mood, or her treatment of me, or her lapses into a kind of commonness to which I deliberately shut my eyes, her beauty remained. Whomsoever we love becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what we give as well as for what we accept. The very memory of her beauty, when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often, it was only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would have incensed her to know it. When she came to me in my sleep, she was both paradise and seraph, and never fiddle entranced a Paganini as did her liquid lapsing voice my small fastidious ear. Yet, however much she loved to watch herself in looking-glass or in her mind, and to observe her effects on others, she was not vain.

  But the constant, unbanishable thought of anything wearies the mind and weakens the body. In my infatuation, I, too, was scarcely more than a ghost – a very childish ghost perhaps. I think if I could call him for witness, my small pasha in the train from Lyndsey would bear me out in this. As for what is called passion, the only burning of it I ever felt was for an outcast with whom I never shared so much as glance or word. Alas, Fanny, I suppose, was merely a brazen image.

  Long before the dark day of her departure – a day which stood in my thoughts like a barrier at the world’s end – I had very foolishly poured out most of my memories for her profit and amusement, though so immobile was she when seated i
n a chair beside my table, or standing foot on fender at the chimney-piece, that it was difficult at times to decide whether she was listening to me or not. What is more important, she told me in return, in her curious tortuous and contradictory fashion, a good deal about herself, and of her childhood, which – because of the endless violent roarings of her nautical father, and the taciturn discipline of poor Mrs. Bowater – filled me with compassion and heaped fuel on my love. And not least of these bonds was the secret which, in spite of endless temptation, I managed to withhold from her in a last instinctive loyalty to Mrs. Bowater – the discovery that her own mother was long since dead and gone.

  She possessed more brains than she cared to exhibit to visitors like Dr. Phelps and Mr. Crimble. Even to this day I cannot believe that Mr. Crimble even so much as guessed how clever she was. It was just part of herself, like the bloom on a plum. Hers was not one of those gesticulating minds. Her efforts only intensified her Fannyishness. Oh dear, how simple things are if only you leave them unexplained. Her very knowledge, too (which for the most part she kept to herself) was to me like finding chain armour when one is in search of a beating heart. She could shed it all, and her cleverness too, as easily as a swan water-drops. What could she not shed, and yet remain Fanny? And with all her confidences, she was extremely reticent. A lift of the light shoulders, or of the clear arched eyebrows, a sarcasm, a far-away smile, at the same time illuminated and obscured her talk. These are feminine gifts, and yet past my mastery. Perhaps for this reason I admired them the more in Fanny – just as, in reading my childhood’s beloved volume, The Observing Eye, I had admired the crab’s cuirass and the scorpion’s horny rings – because, being, after all, myself a woman, I faintly understood their purpose.

  Thus, when Fanny told me of the school she taught in; and of the smooth-haired drawing-master who attended it with his skill, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and of the vivacious and saturnine ‘Monsieur Crapaud’, who, poked up in a room under the gables, lived in the house; or of that other parish curate who was a nephew of the headmistress’s, the implacable Miss Stebbings, and who, apparently, preached Sunday after Sunday, with peculiar pertinacity on such texts as ‘God is love’ – when Fanny recounted to me these afflictions, graces, and mockeries of her daily routine as ‘literature’ mistress, I could as easily bestow on her the vivifying particulars she left out, as a painter can send his portraits to be framed.

  Once and again – just as I have seen a blackbird drop plumb from the upper boughs of a tree on a worm disporting itself in the dewy mould – once I did ask a question which produced in her one of those curious reactions which made her, rather than immaterial, an exceedingly vigilant image of her very self. ‘What will you do, Fanny, when you can’t mock at him?’

  ‘Him?’ she inquired in a breath.

  ‘The him,’ I said.

  ‘What him?’ she replied.

  ‘Well,’ I said, stumbling along down what was a rather black and unfamiliar alley to me, ‘my father was not, I suppose, particularly wise in anything, but my mother loved him very much.’

  ‘And my father,’ she retorted, in words so carefully pronounced that I knew they must be dangerous, ‘my father was a first mate in the mercantile marine when he married your landlady.’

  ‘Well,’ I repeated, ‘what would you do, if – if you fell in love?’

  Fanny sat quite still, all the light at the window gently beating on her face, with its half-closed eyes. Her foot stirred, and with an almost imperceptible movement of her shoulder, she replied, ‘I shall go blind.’

  I looked at her, dumbfounded. All the days of her company were shrivelled up in that small sentence. ‘Oh, Fanny,’ I whispered hopelessly, ‘then you know?’

  ‘“Know?”’ echoed the smooth lips.

  ‘Why, I mean,’ I expostulated, rushing for shelter fully as rapidly as my old friend the lobster must have done when it was time to change his shell, ‘I mean that’s what that absurd little Frenchman is – “Monsieur Crapaud.”’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Fanny calmly, ‘he is not blind, he only has his eyes shut. Mine,’ she added, as if the whole light of the wintry sky she faced were the mirror of her prediction, ‘mine will be wide open.’

  How did I know that for once the serene, theatrical creature was being mortally serious?

  Chapter Fifteen

  I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my first talk with Mr. Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house. The last day of the year the wind was still in the north. It perplexed me that the pride which from my seed had sprung up in Fanny, and had prevented her from taking part in the parish concert, yet allowed her to attend it. She set off thickly veiled. Not even Mr. Crimble’s spectacles were likly to pierce her disguise. I had written a little letter the afternoon before and had myself handed it to Mrs. Bowater with a large fork of mistletoe from my Christmas bunch. It was an invitation to herself and Fanny to sit with me and ‘see in’ the New Year. She smiled at me over it – still her tranquil, though neglected self – and I was half-satisfied.

  Her best black dress was donned for the occasion. She had purchased a bottle of ginger wine, which she brought in with some glasses and placed in the middle of the red and black tablecloth. Its white-lettered, dark-green label ‘haunts me still’. The hours drew on. Fanny returned from the concert – entering the room like a cloud of beauty. She beguiled the dwindling minutes of the year with mocking echoes of it.

  In a rich falsetto she repeated Mr. Crimble’s ‘few words’ of sympathetic apology for her absence. ‘I must ask your indulgence, ladies and gentlemen, for a lamentable hiatus in our programme’. She gave us Miss Willett’s and Mr. Bangor’s spirited rendering of Oh, that we two; and of the recitation which rather easily, it appeared, Mrs. Bullace had been prevailed upon to give as an encore after her Abt Vogler: The Lady’s Yes, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And what a glance of light and fire she cast me when she came to stanza six of the poem:

  Lead her from the festive boards,

  Point her to the starry skies! …

  And she imitated Lady Pollacke’s niece’s – Miss Oran’s – cello obbligato to The Lost Chord, with a plangency that stirred even the soul of Henry as he lay curled up in my landlady’s lap. The black head split like a pomegranate as he yawned his disgust.

  At this Mrs. Bowater turned her bony face on me, her hands on her knees, and with a lift of her eyes disclosed the fact that she was amused, and that she hoped her amusement would remain a confidence between us. She got up and put the cat out: and on her return had regained her solemnity.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said stiffly, staring into the sparkling fire that was our only illumination. ‘I suppose, poor creatures, they did their best: and it isn’t so many years ago, Fanny, since you were as put-about to be allowed to sing at one of the church concerts as a bird is to hop out of its cage.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fanny, ‘but in this world birds merely hop out of one cage into another; though I suppose the larger are the more comfortable.’ This retort set Mrs. Bowater’s countenance in an impassive mask – so impassive that every fitfully-lit photograph in the room seemed to have imitated her stare. ‘And, mother,’ added Fanny seductively, ‘who taught me to sing?’

  ‘The Lord knows,’ cried Mrs. Bowater, with conviction, ‘I never did.’

  ‘Yes,’ muttered Fanny in a low voice, for my information, ‘but does He care?’ I hastily asked Mrs. Bowater if she was glad of tomorrow’s New Year. As if in reply the kitchen clock, always ten minutes fast, began to chime twelve, half-choking at every stroke. And once more the soul of poor Mr. Hubbins sorrowfully took shape in a gaze at me out of vacancy.

  ‘To them going downhill, miss,’ my landlady was replying to my question, ‘it is not the milestones are the pleasantest company – nor that the journey’s then of much account until it is over. By which I don’t mean to suggest there need be gloom. But to you and Fanny here – well, I expect the little that’s
the present for you is mostly wasted on the future.’ With that, she rose, and poured out the syrupy brown wine from the green bottle, reserving a remarkably little glass which she had rummaged out of her years’ hoardings for me.

  Fanny herself, with musing head – her mockings over – was sitting drawn-up on a stool by the fire. I doubt if she was thinking. Whether or not, to my enchanted eyes some phantom within her seemed content merely to be her beauty. And in rest, there was a grace in her body – the smooth shoulder, the poised head that, because, perhaps, it was so transitory, seemed to resemble the never-changing – that mimicry of the unknown which may be seen in a flower, in a green hill, even in an animal. It is as though, I do think, what we love most in this life must of necessity share two worlds.

  Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a look into space. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil. So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible lord and master. But no moon was risen yet.

  I turned towards the shape by the fire, and without her perceiving it, wafted kiss and prayer in her direction. Cold, careless Fanny – further than Uranus. We were alone, for at first stroke of St. Peter’s Mrs. Bowater had left the room and had opened the front door. She was smiling; but was she smiling, or was that vague bewitchingness in her face merely an unmeaning guile of which she was unaware? It might have been a mermaid sitting there in the firelight.