Possibly if Lady Pollacke had not at this so composedly turned her full face on me – with its exceedingly handsome nose – her bonnet might have remained only vaguely familiar. Now as I looked at her, it was as if the full moon had risen. She was, without the least doubt in the world, the lady who had bowed to Mr. Crimble from her carriage that fateful afternoon. A little countenance is not, perhaps, so tell-tale as a large one. (I remember, at any rate, the horrid shock I once experienced when my father set me up on his hand one day to show me my own face, many times magnified, in his dressing-room shaving-glass.) But my eyes must have narrowed a little, for Lady Pollacke’s at once seemed to set a little harder. And she was still awaiting an answer to her question.
‘“Go out!”’ I repeated meditatively, ‘not very much, Lady Pollacke; at least not in crowded places. The boys, you know.’
‘Ah, yes, the boys.’ It was Mr. Crimble’s little dilemma all over again: Lady Pollacke was evidently wondering whether I knew she knew I knew.
‘But still’, I continued cheerfully, ‘it is the looker-on that sees most of the game, isn’t it?’
Her eyelids descended, though her face was still lifted up. ‘Well, so the proverb says,’ she agreed, with the utmost cordiality. It was at this moment – as I have said – that she invited me to tea.
She would come for me herself, she promised. ‘Now wouldn’t that be very nice for us both – quite a little adventure?’
I was not perfectly certain of the niceness, but might not Mr. Crimble be a fellow-guest; and hadn’t I an urgent and anxious mission with him? I smiled and murmured; and, as if her life had been a series of such little social triumphs, my visitor immediately rose; and, I must confess, in so doing seemed rather a waste of space.
‘Then that’s settled: Thursday afternoon. We must wrap up,’ she called gaily through her descending veil. ‘This treacherous month! It has come in like a lamb, but’ – and she tugged at her gloves, still scrutinizing me fixedly beneath her eyelids, ‘but it will probably go out like a lion.’ As if to illustrate this prediction, she swept away to the door, leaving Mrs. Bowater’s little parlour and myself to gather our scattered wits together as best we could, while her carriage rolled away.
Alas, though I love talking and watching and exploring, how could I be, even at that age a really social creature? Though Lady Pollacke had been politeness itself, the remembrance of her bonnet in less favourable surroundings was still in my mind’s eye. If anything, then, her invitation slightly depressed me. Besides, Thursday never was a favourite day of mine. It is said to have only one lucky hour – the last before dawn. But this is not tea-time. Worse still, the coming Thursday seemed to have sucked all the virtue out of the Wednesday in between. I prefer to see the future stretching out boundless and empty in front of me – like the savannas of Robinson Crusoe’s island. Visitors, and I am quite sure he would have agreed with me, are hardly at times to be distinguished from visitations.
All this merely means that I was a rather green and backward young woman, and, far worse, unashamed of being so. Here was one of the greatest ladies of Beechwood lavishing attentions upon me, and all I was thinking was how splendid an appearance she would have made a few days before if she had borrowed his whip from her coachman and dispersed my little mob with it, as had Mrs. Stocks with her duster. But noblesse oblige; Mr. Crimble had been compelled to consider my feelings, and no doubt Lady Pollacke had been compelled to consider his.
The next day was fine, but I overslept myself and was robbed of my morning walk. For many hours I was alone.
Mrs. Bowater had departed on one of her shopping bouts. So, whoever knocked, knocked in vain; and I listened to such efforts in secret and unmannerly amusement. I wonder if ever ghosts come knocking like that on the doors of the mind; and it isn’t that one won’t hear, but can’t. My afternoon was spent in an anxious examination of my wardrobe. Four o’clock punctually arrived, and, almost as punctually, Lady Pollacke. Soon, under Mrs. Bowater’s contemplative gaze, I was mounted up on a pile of cushions, and we were bowling along in most inspiriting fashion through the fresh March air. Strangely enough, when during our progress, eyes were now bent in my direction, Lady Pollacke seemed copiously to enjoy their interest. This was especially the case when she was acquainted with their owners; and bowed her bow in return.
‘Quite a little reception for you,’ she beamed at me, after a particularly respectable carriage had cast its occupants’ scarcely modulated glances in my direction. How strange is human character! To an intelligent onlooker, my other little reception must have been infinitely more inspiring; and yet she had almost wantonly refused to take any part in it. Now, supposing I had been Royalty or a corpse run over in the street … But we were come to our journey’s end.
Brunswick House was a fine, square, stone-edged edifice, dominating its own ‘grounds’. Regiments of crocuses stood with mouths wide open in its rich loam. Its gate-posts were surmounted by white balls of stone; and the gravel was of so lively a colour that it must have been new laid. Wherever I looked, my eyes were impressed by the best things in the best order. This was as true of Lady Pollacke’s clothes, as of her features, of her gate-posts, and her drawing-room. And the next most important thing in the last was its light.
Light simply poured in upon its gilt and brass and pale maroon from two high wide windows staring each other down from between their rich silk damask curtains. It was like entering an enormous bath, and it made me timid. In the midst of a large animal’s skin, beneath a fine white marble chimney-piece, and under an ormolu clock, the parlour-maid was directed to place a cherry-coloured stool for me. Here I seated myself. With a fine, encouraging smile my hostess left me for a few minutes to myself. Maybe because an embroidered fire-screen that stood near reminded me of Miss Fenne, I pulled myself together. ‘Don’t be a ninny,’ I heard myself murmur. My one hope and desire in this luxurious solitude was for the opportunity to deliver my message to Mr. Crimble. This was not only a visit, it was an adventure. I looked about the flashing room; and it rather stared back at me.
The first visitor to appear was none but Miss Bullace, whose recitation of The Lady’s ‘Yes’ had so peculiarly inspirited Fanny. She sat square and dark with her broad lap in front of her, and scrutinized me as if no emergency ever daunted her. And Lady Pollacke recounted the complexity of ties that had brought us together. Miss Bullace, alas, knew neither Mr. Ambrose Pellew, nor my godmother, nor even my godmother’s sister, Augusta Fenne. Indeed I seemed to have no claim at all on her recognition until she inquired whether it was not Augusta Fenne’s cousin, Dr. Julius Fenne, who had died suddenly while on a visit to the Bermudas. Apparently it was. We all at once fell into better spirits, which were still more refreshed when Lady Pollacke remarked that Augusta had also ‘gone off like that’, and that the Fennes were a doomed family.
But merely to smile and smile is not to partake; so I ventured to suggest that to judge from my last letter from my godmother she, at any rate, was in her usual health; and I added, rather more cheerfully perhaps than the fact warranted, that my family seemed to be doomed too, since, so far as I was aware, I myself was the last of it left alive.
At this a sudden gush of shame welled up in me at the thought that through all my troubles I had never once remembered the kindnesses of my step-grandfather; that he too, might be dead. I was so rapt away by the thought that I caught only the last three words of Miss Bullace’s murmured aside to Lady Pollacke, viz., ‘not blush unseen’.
Lady Pollacke raised her eyebrows and nodded vigorously; and then to my joy Mr. Crimble and a venerable old lady with silver curls clustering out of her bonnet were shown into the room. He looked pale and absent as he bent himself down to take my hand. It was almost as if in secret collusion we had breathed the word Fanny together. Mrs. Crimble was supplied with a teacup, and her front teeth were soon unusually busy with a slice of thin bread and butter. Eating or drinking, her intense old eyes dwelt distantly but assiduously on my smal
l shape; and she at last entered into a long story of how, as a girl, she had been taken to a circus – a circus: and there had seen … But what she had seen Mr. Crimble refused to let her divulge. He jerked forward so hastily that his fragment of toasted scone rolled off his plate into the wild beast’s skin, and while, with some little difficulty, he was retrieving it, he assured us that his mother’s memory was little short of miraculous, and particularly in relation to the past.
‘I have noticed,’ he remarked, in what I thought a rather hollow voice, ‘that the more advanced in years we – er – happily become, the more closely we return to childhood.’
‘Senile …’ I began timidly, remembering Dr. Phelps’s phrase.
But Mr. Crimble hastened on. ‘Why, mother,’ he appealed to her, with an indulgent laugh, ‘I suppose to you I am still nothing but a small boy about that height?’ He stretched out a ringless left hand about twenty-four inches above the rose-patterned carpet.
The old lady was not to be so easily smoothed over. ‘You interrupted me, Harold,’ she retorted, with some little show of indignation, ‘in what I was telling Lady Pollacke. Even a child of that size would have been a perfect monstrosity.’
A lightning grimace swept over Miss Bullace’s square features.
‘Ah, ah, ah!’ laughed Mr. Crimble, ‘I am rebuked, I am in the corner! Another scone, Lady Pollacke?’ Mrs. Crimble was a beautiful old lady; but it was with a rather unfriendly and feline eye that she continued to regard me; and I wondered earnestly if Fanny had ever noticed this characteristic.
‘The fact of the matter is,’ said Lady Pollacke, with conviction, ‘our memories rust for want of exercise. Where, physically speaking, would you be, Mr. Crimble, if you hadn’t the parish to tramp over? Precisely the same with the mind. Every day I make a personal effort to commit some salient fact to memory – such a fact, for a trivial example, as the date of the Norman Conquest. The consequence is, my husband tells me, I am a veritable encyclopædia. My father took after me. Alexander the Great, I have read somewhere, could address by name – though one may assume not Christian name – every soldier in his army. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a great genius, poor man, knew by heart every book he had ever read. A veritable mine of memory. On the other hand, I once had a parlour-maid, Sarah Jakes, who couldn’t remember even the simplest of her duties, and if it hadn’t been for my constant supervision would have given us port with the soup.’
‘Perfectly, perfectly true,’ assented Miss Bullace. ‘Now mine is a verbal memory. My mind is a positive magnet for words. Method, of course, is everything. I weld. Let us say that a line of a poem terminates with the word bower, and the next line commences with she, I commit these to memory as one word – Bowershee – and so master the sequence. My old friend, Lady Bovill Porter – we were schoolfellows – recommended this method. It was Edmund Kean’s, I fancy, or some other well-known actor’s. How else indeed, could a great actor realize what he was doing? Word-perfect, you see, he is free.’
‘Exactly, exactly,’ sagely nodded Mr. Crimble, but with a countenance so colourless and sad that it called back to my remembrance the picture of a martyr – of St. Sebastian, I think – that used to hang up in my mother’s room.
‘And you?’ – I discovered Lady Pollacke was rather shrilly inquiring of me. ‘Is yours a verbal memory like Miss Bullace’s; or are you in my camp?’
‘Ah, there,’ cried Mr. Crimble, tilting back his chair in sudden enthusiasm. ‘Miss M. positively puts me to shame. And poetry, Miss Bullace; even your wonderful repertory!’
‘You mean Miss M. recites?’ inquired Miss Bullace, leaning forward over her lap. ‘But how entrancing! It is we, then, who are birds of a feather. And how I should adore to hear a fellow-enthusiast. Now, won’t you, Lady Pollacke, join your entreaties to mine? Just a stanza or two!’
A chill crept through my bones. I had accepted Lady Pollacke’s invitation, thinking my mere presence would be entertainment enough, and because I knew it was important to see life, and immensely important to see Mr. Crimble. In actual fact it seemed I had hopped for a moment not out of my cage, but merely, as Fanny had said, into another compartment of it.
‘But Mr. Crimble and I were only talking,’ I managed to utter.
‘Oh, now, but do! Delicious!’ pleaded a trio of voices.
Their faces had suddenly become a little strained and unnatural. The threat of further persuasion lifted me almost automatically to my feet. With hunted eyes fixed at last on a small marble bust with stooping head and winged brow that stood on a narrow table under the window, I recited the first thing that sprang to remembrance – an old poem my mother had taught me, Tom o’ Bedlam:
The moon’s my constant mistress,
And the lovely owl my marrow;
The flaming drake,
And the night-crow, make
Me music to my sorrow.
I know more than Apollo;
For oft when he lies sleeping,
I behold the stars
At mortal wars,
And the rounded welkin weeping.
The moon embraces her shepherd,
And the Queen of Love her warrior;
While the first does horn
The stars of the morn,
And the next the heavenly farrier …
Throughout these first three stanzas all went well. So rapt was my audience that I seemed to be breaking the silence of the seas beyond their furthest Hebrides. But at the first line of the fourth – at ‘With a heart’ – my glance unfortunately wandered off from the unheeding face of the image and swam through the air, to be caught, as it were like fly by spider, by Miss Bullace’s dark, fixed gaze, that lay on me from under her flat hat.
‘“With a heart”’, I began; and failed. Some ghost within had risen in rebellion, sealed my tongue. It seemed to my irrational heart that I had – how shall I say it? – betrayed my ‘stars’, betrayed Fanny, that she and they and I could never be of the same far, quiet company again. So the ‘furious fancies’ were never shared. The blood ran out of my cheek; I stuck fast; and shook my head.
At which quite a little tempest of applause spent itself against the walls of Lady Pollacke’s drawing-room, an applause reinforced by that of a little round old gentleman, who, unnoticed, had entered the room by a farther door, and was now advancing to greet his guest. He was promptly presented to me on the beast-skin, and with the gentlest courtesy begged me to continue.
'“With a heart”, now; “with a heart …”’ he prompted me, ‘a most important organ, though less in use nowadays than when I was a boy.’
But it was in vain. Even if he had asked me only to whisper the rest of the poem into his long, pink ear, for his sake alone, I could not have done so. Moreover, Mr. Crimble was still nodding his head at his mother in confirmation of his applause; and Miss Bullace was assuring me that mine was a poem entirely unknown to her, that, ‘with a few little excisions’, it should be instantly enshrined in her repertory – ‘though perhaps a little bizarre!’ and that if I made trial of Lady Bovill Porter’s Bowershee method, my memory would never again play me false.
‘The enunciation – am I not right, Sir Walter? – as distinct from the elocution – was flawless. And really, quite remarkable vocal power!’
Amidst these smiles and delights, and what with the brassy heat of the fire and the scent of the skin, I thought I should presently faint, and caught, as if at a straw, at the bust in the window.
‘How lovely!’ I cried, with pointing finger …
At that, silence fell, but only for a moment. Lady Pollacke managed to follow the unexpected allusion, and led me off for a closer inspection. In the hushed course of our progress thither I caught out of the distance two quavering words uttered as if in expostulation, ‘apparent intelligence’. It was Mrs. Crimble addressing Sir Walter Pollacke.
‘Classical, you know,’ Lady Pollacke was sonorously informing me, as we stood together before the marble head. ‘Charming pose, don’t you think?
Though, as we see, only a fragment – one of Sir Walter’s little hobbies.’
I looked up at the serene, winged, sightless face, and a whisper sounded on and on in my mind in its mute presence, ‘I know more than Apollo; I know more than Apollo.’ How strange that this mere deaf-and-dumbness should seem more real, more human even, than anything or anyone else in Lady Pollacke’s elegant drawing-room. But self-possession was creeping back. ‘Who’, I asked, ‘is he? And who sculped him?’
‘Scalped him?’ cried Lady Pollacke, poring down on me in dismay.
‘Cut him out?’
‘Ah, my dear young lady,’ said a quiet voice, ‘that I cannot tell you. It is the head of Hypnos, Sleep, you know, the son of Night and brother of Death. One wing, as you see, has been broken away in preparation for this more active age, and yet … only a replica, of course’; the voice trembled into richness, ‘but an exceedingly pleasant example. It gives me rare pleasure, rare pleasure,’ he stood softly rocking, hands under coat-tails, eyes drinking me in, ‘to – to have your companionship.’
What pleasure his words gave me, I could not – can never – express. Then and there I was his slave for ever.
‘Walter,’ murmured Lady Pollacke, as if fondly, smiling down on the rotund old gentleman, ‘you are a positive peacock over your little toys; is he not, Mr. Crimble? Did you ever hear of a woman wasting her affections on the inanimate. Even a doll, I am told, is an infant in disguise.’
But Mr. Crimble had approached us not to discuss infants or woman, but to tell Lady Pollacke that her carriage was awaiting me.
‘Then pity ’tis, ’tis true,’ cried she, as if in Miss Bullace’s words. ‘But please, Miss M., it must be the briefest of adieus. There are so many of my friends who would enjoy your company – and those delightful recitations. Walter, will you see that everything’s quite – er – convenient?’
I am sure Lady Pollacke’s was a flawless savoir faire, yet, when I held out my hand in farewell, her cheek crimsoned, it seemed, from some other cause than stooping. The crucial moment had arrived. If one private word was to be mine with Mr. Crimble, it must be now or never. To my relief both gentlemen accompanied me out of the room, addressing their steps to mine. Urgency gave me initiative. I came to a standstill in the tessellated marble of the hall, and this time proffered my hand to Sir Walter. He stooped himself double over it; and I tried in vain to dismiss from remembrance a favourite reference of Pollie’s to the guinea-pig held up by its tail.
Memoirs of a Midget Page 17