Memoirs of a Midget

by de la Mare, Walter;

  Mrs. Monnerie’s eyelids, on the other hand, with a faintly fluttering motion, remained closed from the first bar to the last – a method of appreciation I experimented with for a moment but quickly abandoned; while at the first clash of the keys, Sir Walter had dexterously contrived to slide himself out of the room by the door at which he had unexpectedly entered it on my first visit. Such was the social situation when, after murmurs of gratitude and applause, Miss Templemaine took up her gloves and rose from the piano, and Mrs. Monnerie reopened herself to the outer world with the ejaculation, ‘That’s right. Now, my dear!’

  The summons was to me. My moment had come, but I was prepared for it. In my last ordeal I had broken down because I had chosen a poem that was a kind of secret thing in my mind. So, after receiving Lady Pollacke’s letter, I had hunted about for a recitation as short, but less personal: one, I mean, whose sentiments I didn’t mind. And since Mrs. Bullace had chosen two of Mrs. Browning’s pieces for her triumph on New Year’s Eve, I argued that she knew the parish taste, and that I could do no better. Of course, too, composure over what I was going to do was more important than the composition.

  ‘Prepared for it,’ I said just now, but I meant it only in the sense that one prepares for a cold bath. There was still the plunge. I clasped my hands, stood up. Ceiling and floor gently rocked a little. There seemed to be faces – faces everywhere, and every eye in them was fixed on me. Thus completely encompassed, I could find no refuge from them, for unfortunately my Hypnos was completely obliterated from view by the lady with the lorgnette. So I fixed my attention, instead, on the window, where showed a blank break of clear, fair, blue sky between the rain-clouds of afternoon. A nervous cough from Lady Pollacke plunged me over, and I announced my title: The Weakest Thing, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

  Which is the weakest thing of all

  Mine heart can ponder?

  The sun, a little cloud can pall

  With darkness yonder!

  The cloud, a little wind can move

  Where’er it listeth;

  The wind, a little leaf above,

  Though sere, resisteth!

  What time that yellow leaf was green,

  My days were gladder:

  Now on its branch each summer-sheen

  May find me sadder!

  Ah, me! a leaf with sighs can wring

  My lips asunder –

  Then is my heart the weakest thing

  Itself can ponder.

  Yet, Heart, when sun and cloud are pined

  And drop together;

  And at a blast which is not wind,

  The forests wither,

  Thou, from the darkening, deathly curse

  To glory breakest –

  The Strongest of the Universe

  Guarding the weakest.

  The applause, in which Miss Templemaine generously joined, was this time quite unconcealed, and Lady Pollacke’s sister’s last ‘Touching’ had hardly died away when Mrs. Monnerie added her approbation.

  ‘Charming, perfectly charming,’ she murmured, eyeing me like a turtle-dove. ‘But tell me, my dear, why that particular poem? It seemed to have even less sense than usual.’

  ‘No-o; ye-es,’ breathed Lady Pollacke, and many heads nodded in discreet accord.

  ‘Doesn’t – er – perhaps, Mrs. Browning dwell rather assiduously on the tragic side of life?’ Mr. Crimble ventured to inquire.

  Lady Pollacke jerked her head, either in the affirmative or in the negative, and looked inquiringly at Mrs. Monnerie, who merely drooped her eyes a little closer towards me and smiled, almost as if she and I were in a little plot together.

  ‘What do you say, Miss M.?’

  ‘Well, Mrs. Monnerie,’ I replied a little nervously, for all eyes were turned on me, ‘I don’t think I know myself what exactly the poem means – the who’s and what’s – and what the blast was which was not wind. But I thought it was a poem which every one would understand as much as possible of.’

  To judge from the way she quivered in her chair, though quite inaudibly, Mrs. Monnerie was extremely amused at this criticism.

  ‘And that is why you chose it?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said I; ‘you see, when one is listening to poetry, not reading it to oneself, I mean, one hasn’t time to pry about for all its bits of meaning, but only just to get the general – general –’

  ‘Aroma?’ suggested Mrs. Monnerie.

  ‘Yes – aroma.’

  ‘And the moral?’

  The silence that hung over this little exchange was growing more and more dense. Luckless Miss M.! She only plunged herself deeper into it by her reply that, ‘Oh, there’s nothing very much in the moral, Mrs. Monnerie. That’s quite ordinary. At least I read about that in prose, why, before I was seven!’

  ‘Touch – ‘ began that further voice, but was silenced by a testy lift of Mrs. Monnerie’s eyelid. ‘Indeed!’ she said, ‘and couldn’t you, wouldn’t you, now, give me the prose version? That’s more my mark.’

  ‘It was in a little nursery lesson-book of mine, called The Observing Eye; letters about snails and coral insects and spiders and things – ‘ I paused. ‘A book, rather, you know, for Sundays. But my – my family and I – ‘

  ‘Oh, but do,’ cried Lady Pollacke in a voice I should hardly have recognized, ‘I adore snails.’

  Once more I was cornered. So I steeled myself anew, and stumbled through the brief passage in the squat, blue book. It tells how:

  The history of each one of the animals we have now considered, teaches us that our kind God watches over the wants and the pleasures of the meanest of His creatures. We see that He gives to them, not only the sagacity and the instruments which they need for catching their food, but that He also provides them with some means of defending themselves. We learn by their history that the gracious Eye watches under the mighty waters, as well as over the earth, and that no creature can stop doing His will without His eye seeing it.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Once more I sat down, but this time in the midst of what seemed to me a rather unpleasant silence, as if the room had grown colder! a silence which was broken only by the distant whistlings of a thrush. At one and the same moment both Mr. Pellew and Mr. Crimble returned to teacups which I should have supposed must have, by this time, been empty, and Lady Pollacke’s widowed sister folded up her lorgnette.

  ‘My dear Miss M.,’ said Mrs. Monnerie dryly, with an almost wicked ray of amusement in her deep-set eyes, ‘wherever the top of Beechwood Hill may be, and whatever supplies of food may be caught on its crest, there is no doubt that you have been provided with the means of defending yourself. But tell me now, what do you think, perhaps, Mr. Pellew’s little “instruments” are? Or, better still – mine? Am I a mollusc with a hard shell, or a scorpion with a sting?’

  Lady Pollacke rose to her feet and stood looking down on me like a hen, though not exactly a motherly one. But this was a serious question over which I must not be flustered, so I took my time. I folded my hands, and fixed a long, long look on Mrs. Monnerie. Even after all these years, I confess it moves me to recall it.

  ‘Of course, really and truly,’ I said at last, as deferentially as I could, ‘I haven’t known you long enough to say. But I should think, Mrs. Monnerie, you always knew the truth.’

  I was glad I had not been too impetuous. My reply evidently pleased her. She chuckled all over.

  ‘Ah,’ she said reposefully, ‘the truth. And that is why, I suppose, like Sleeping Beauty, I am so thickly hedged in with the thorns and briers of affection. Well, well, there’s one little truth we’ll share alone, you and I.’ She raised herself in her chair and stooped her great face close to my ear: ‘We must know more of one another, my dear,’ she whispered. ‘I have taken a great fancy to you. We must meet again.’

  She hoisted herself up. Sir Walter Pollacke had hastened in and stood smiling, with arm hooked, and genial, beaming countenance in front of her. Mr. Crimble had already vanished.
Mr. Pellew was talking earnestly with Lady Pollacke. Conversation broke out like a storm-shower, on every side. For a while I was extraordinarily alone.

  Into this derelict moment a fair-cheeked, breathless lady descended, and surreptitiously thrusting a crimson padded birthday book and a miniature pencil into my lap, entreated my autograph – ‘Just your signature, you know – for my small daughter. How she would have loved to be here!’

  This lady cannot have been many years older than I, and one of those instantaneous, fleeting affections sprang up in me as I looked up at her for the first and only time, and seemed to see that small daughter smiling at me out of her face.

  Alas, such is vanity. I turned over the leaves to August 30th and found printed there, for motto, a passage from Shakespeare:

  He that has had a little tiny wit –

  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain –

  Must make content with his fortunes fit,

  For the rain it raineth every day.

  The 29th was little less depressing, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

  He prayeth best who loveth best

  All creatures great and small.

  This would never do. I bent double over the volume, turned back hastily three or four leaves, and scrawled in my name under August 25th on a leaf that bore the quotation:

  Fie on’t! ah, fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,

  That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

  Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

  and beneath the quotation, the signature of Josephine Mildred Spratte.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, she will be overjoyed,’ blushed the fair-haired lady. A sudden hunger for solitude seized upon me. I rose hastily, conscious for the first time of a headache, caused, no doubt, by the expensive and fumey perfumes in the air. Threading my way between the trains and flounces and trouser-legs around me, at last my adieux were over. I was in the porch – in the carriage. The breezes of heaven were on my cheek. My blessed parlour-maid was once more installed beside me. Yet even now the Pollacke faces were still flocking in my mind. The outside world was very sluggishly welling in. Looking up so long had stiffened my neck. I fixed my eyes on the crested back buttons of Lady Pollacke’s stiff-looking coachman, and committed myself to my thoughts.

  It was to a Miss M., with one of her own handkerchiefs laid over her brows, and sprinkled with vinegar and lavender water, that Mrs. Bowater brought in supper that evening. We had one of our broken talks together, none the less. But she persisted in desultory accounts of Fanny’s ailments in her infancy; and I had to drag in Brunswick House by myself. At which she poked the fire and was mum. It was unamiable of her. I longed to share my little difficulties and triumphs. Surely she was showing rather too much of that discrimination which Lady Pollacke had recommended.

  She snorted at Mr. Pellew, she snorted at my friendly parlourmaid and even at Mrs. Monnerie. Even when I repeated for her ear alone my nursery passage from The Observing Eye, her only comment was that to judge from some fine folk she knew of, there was no doubt at all that God watched closely over the pleasures of the meanest of His creatures, but as for their doing His will, she hadn’t much noticed it.

  To my sigh of regret that Fanny had not been at home to accompany me, she retorted with yet another onslaught on the fire, and the apophthegm, that the world would be a far better place if people kept themselves to themselves.

  ‘But, Mrs. Bowater,’ I argued fretfully, ‘if I did that, I should just – distil, as you might say, quite away. Besides, Fanny would have been far, far the – the gracefullest person there. Mrs. Monnerie would have taken a fancy to her, now, if you like.’

  Mrs. Bowater drew in her lips and rubbed her nose. ‘God forbid,’ she said.

  But it was her indifference to the impression that I myself had made on Mrs. Monnerie that nettled me the most. ‘Why, then, who is Lord B.?’ I inquired impatiently at last, pushing back the bandage that had fallen over my eyes.

  ‘From what I’ve heard of Lord B.,’ said Mrs. Bowater shortly, ‘he was a gentleman of whom the less heard of ’s the better.’

  ‘But surely,’ I protested, ‘that isn’t Mrs. Monnerie’s fault any more than Fanny’s being so lovely – I mean, than I being a midget was my father’s fault? Anyhow,’ I hurried on, ‘Mrs. Monnerie says I look pale, and must go to the sea.’

  Mrs. Bowater was still kneeling by the fire, just as Fanny used to kneel. And, like Fanny, when one most expected an answer, she remained silent; though, unlike Fanny, it seemed to be not because she was dreaming of something else. How shall I express it? – there fell a kind of loneliness between us. The severe face made no sign.

  ‘Would you – would you miss me?’ some silly self within piped out pathetically.

  ‘Why, for the matter of that,’ was her sardonic reply, ‘there’s not very much of you to miss.’

  I rose from my bed, flung down the bandage, and ran down my little staircase. ‘Oh, Mrs. Bowater,’ I said, burying my face in her camphory skirts, ‘be kind to me; be kind to me! I’ve nobody but you.’

  The magnanimous creature stroked my vinegar-sodden hair with the tips of her horny fingers. ‘Why there, miss. I meant no harm. Isn’t all the gentry and nobility just gaping to snatch you up? You won’t want your old Mrs. Bowater very long. What’s more, you mustn’t get carried away by yourself. You never know where that journey ends. If sea it is, sea it must be. Though, Lord preserve us, the word’s no favourite of mine.’

  ‘But suppose, suppose, Mrs. Bowater,’ I cried, starting up and smiling enrapturedly into her face, ‘suppose we could go together!’

  ‘That’, she said, with a look of astonishing benignity, ‘would be just what I was being led to suppose was the height of the impossible.’

  At which, of course, we at once began discussing ways and means. But, delicious though this prospect seemed, I determined that nothing should persuade me to go unless all hope of Fanny’s coming home proved vain. Naturally, from Fanny memory darted to Wanderslore. I laughed up at my landlady, holding her finger, and suggested demurely that we should go off together on the morrow to see if my stranger were true to his word.

  ‘We have kept him a very long time, and if, as you seem to think, Mrs. Monnerie isn’t such a wonderful lady, you may decide that after all he is a gentleman.’

  She enjoyed my little joke, was pleased that I had been won over, but refused to accept my reasoning, though the topic itself was after her heart.

  ‘The point is, miss, not whether your last conquest is a wonderful lady, or a grand lady, or even a perfect lady for the matter of that, but, well, a lady. It’s that’s the kind in my experience that comes nearest to being as uncommon a sort as any sort of a good woman.’

  This was a wholly unexpected vista for me, and I peered down its smooth, green, aristocratic sward with some little awe.

  ‘As for the young fellow who made himself so free in his manners,’ she went on placidly, so that I had to scamper back to pick her up again, ‘I have no doubt seeing will be believing.’

  ‘But what is the story of Wanderslore?’ I pressed her none too honestly.

  The story – and this time Mrs. Bowater poured it out quite freely – was precisely what I had been told already, but with the addition that the young woman who had hanged herself in one of its attics had done so for jealousy.

  ‘Jealousy! But of whom?’ I inquired.

  ‘Her husband’s, not her own: driven wild by his.’

  ‘You really mean’, I persisted, ‘that she couldn’t endure to live any longer because her husband loved her so much that he couldn’t bear anybody else to love her too?’

  ‘In some such measure,’ replied Mrs. Bowater, ‘though I don’t say he didn’t help the other way round. But she was a wild, scattering creature. It was just her way. The less she cared, the more they flocked. She couldn’t collect herself, and say, “Here I am; who are you?” so to speak. Ah, miss, it’s a sickly and dangerous thing to be too much a
dmired.’

  ‘But you said “scattering”: was she mad a little?’

  ‘No. Peculiar, perhaps, with her sidelong, startled look. A lovelier I’ve never seen.’

  ‘You’ve seen her!’

  ‘Thirty years ago, perhaps. Alive and dead.’

  ‘Oh, Mrs. Bowater, poor thing, poor thing.’

  ‘That you may well say, for lovely in the latter finding she was not.’

  My eyes were fixed on the fire, but the picture conjured up was dark even amidst the red-hot coals. ‘And he? did he die too? At least his jealousy was broken away.’

  ‘And I’m not so sure of that,’ said Mrs. Bowater. ‘It’s like the men to go on wanting, even when it comes to scrabbing at a grave. And there’s a trashy sort of creature, though well-set-up enough from the outside, that a spark will put in a blaze. I’ve no doubt he was that kind.’

  I thought of my own sparks, but questioned on: ‘Then there’s nothing else but – but her ghost there now?’

  ‘Lor, ghosts, miss, it’s an hour, I see, when bed’s the proper place for you and me. I look to be scared by that kind of gentry when they come true.’

  ‘You don’t believe, then, in Destroyers, Mrs. Bowater?’

  ‘Miss, it’s those queer books you are reading,’ was the evasive reply. ‘“Destroyers!” Why, wasn’t it cruel enough to drive that poor feather-brained creature into a noose!’

  Candle and I and drowsing cinders kept company until St. Peter’s bell had told only the sleepless that midnight was over the world. It seemed to my young mind that there was not a day, scarcely an hour, I lived, but that Life was unfolding itself in ever new and ravishing disguises. I had not begun to be in the least tired or afraid of it. Smallest of bubbles I might be, tossing on the great waters, but I reflected the universe. What need of courage when no danger was apparent? Surely one need not mind being different if that difference added to one’s share in the wonderful banquet. Even Wanderslore’s story was only of what happened when the tangle was so harshly knotted that no mortal fingers could unravel it. And though my own private existence now had Mrs. Monnerie – and all that she might do and mean and be – to cope with, as well as my stranger who was yet another queer story and as yet mine alone, these complications were enticing. One must just keep control of them; that was all. At which I thought a little unsteadily of Fanny’s ‘pin’, and remembered that that pin was helping to keep her and Mr. Crimble from being torn apart.