Memoirs of a Midget

by de la Mare, Walter;

  He had seemed so peering a guest at Brunswick House. Mrs. Monnerie hadn’t so much as glanced at him when he had commented on Mrs. Browning’s poems. There seemed to be a shadow over whatever he did. It was as though there could be a sadness in the very coursing of one’s blood. How thankful I felt that mine hadn’t been a really flattering reply to Mrs. Monnerie’s question. She was extremely arrogant, even for a younger daughter of a lord. On the other hand, though, of course, the sheer novelty of me had had something to do with it, she had certainly singled me out afterwards to know what I thought, and in thoughts there is no particular size, only effusiveness – no, piercingness. I smiled to myself at the word, pitied my godmother for living so sequestered a life, and wondered how and why it was that my father and mother had so obstinately shut me away from the world. If only Fanny was coming home – what a difference she would find in her fretful Midge! And with that, I discovered that my feet were cold and that my headache had ached itself away.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  There had been no need to reserve the small hours for these ruminations. The next few days were wet and windy; every glance at the streaming panes cast my mind into a sort of vacancy. The wind trumpeted smoke into the room; I could fix my mind on nothing. Then the weather faired. There came ‘a red sky at night’, and Spica flashing secrets to me across the darkness; and that supper-time I referred as casually as possible to Mr. Anon.

  ‘I suppose one must keep one’s promises, Mrs. Bowater, even to a stranger. Would half-past six be too early to keep mine, do you think? Would it look too – forward? Of course he may have forgotten all about me by this time.’

  Mrs. Bowater eyed me like an owl as I bent my cheeks over my bowl of bread and milk, and proceeded to preach me yet another little sermon on the ways of the world. Nevertheless, the next morning saw us setting out together in the crisp, sparkling air to my tryst, with the tacit understanding that she accompanied me rather in the cause of propriety than romance.

  Owing, I fancy, to a bunion, she was so leisurely a walker that it was I who must set my pace to hers. But the day promised to be warm, and we could take our ease. As we wandered on among the early flowers and bright, green grass and under the beeches, a mildness lightened into her face. Over her long features lay a vacant yet happy smile, of which she seemed to be unaware. This set me off thinking in the old, old fashion; comparing my lot with that of ordinary human beings. How fortunate I was. If only she could have seen the lowlier plants as I could – scarcely looking down on any, and of the same stature as some among the taller of them so that the air around me was dyed and illumined with their clear colours, and burthened with their breath.

  The least and humblest of them – not merely crisp-edged lichen, speckle-seed whitlow-grass and hyssop in the wall – are so close to earth, the wonder, indeed, is that common-sized people ever see them at all. They must, at any rate, I thought, commit themselves to their stomachs, or go down on their knees to see them properly. So, on we went, Mrs. Bowater and I, she pursuing her private musings, and I mine.

  I smiled to myself at remembrance of Dr. Phelps and his blushes. After all, if humanity should ‘dwindle into a delicate littleness’, it would make a good deal more difference than he had supposed. What a destruction would ensue, among all the lesser creatures of the earth, the squirrels, moles, voles, hedgehogs, and the birds, not to mention the bees and hornets. They would be the enemies then – the traps and poisons and the nets! No more billowy cornfields a good yard high, no more fine nine-foot hedges flinging their blossoms into the air. And all the long-legged, ‘doubled’, bloated garden flowers, gone clean out of favour. It would be a little world, would it be a happier? The dwarfed Mrs. Bowaters, Dr. Phelpses, Miss Bullaces, Lady Pollackes.

  But there was little chance of such an eventuality – at least in my lifetime. It was far likelier that the Miss M.’s of the world would continue to be a by-play. Yet, as I glanced up at my companion, and called to mind other such ‘Lapland Giants’ of mine, I can truthfully avouch that I did not much envy their extra inches. So much more thin-skinned surface to be kept warm and unscratched. The cumbersome bones, the curious distance from foot and finger-tip to brain, too; and those quarts and quarts of blood. I shuddered. It was little short of a miracle that they escaped continual injury; and what an extended body in which to die.

  On the other hand, what real loss was mine – with so much to my advantage? These great spreading beech-trees were no less shady and companionable to me than to them. Nor, thought I, could moon or sun or star or ocean or mountain be any the less silvery, hot, lustrous, and remote, forlorn in beauty, or vast in strangeness, one way or the other, than they are to ordinary people. Could there be any doubt at all, too, that men had always coveted to make much finer and more delicate things than their clumsiness allowed?

  What fantastic creatures they were – with their vast mansions, pyramids, palaces, scores of sizes too large for either carcass or mind. Their Satan a monster on whose wrist the vulture of the Andes could perch like an aphis on my thumb; yet their Death but skeleton-high, and their Saviour of such a stature that well-nigh without stooping He could have laid His fingers on my head.

  Time’s sands had been trickling fast while I thought these small thoughts that bright spring daybreak. So, though we had loitered on our way, it seemed we had reached our destination on the wings of the morning. Alas, Mrs. Bowater’s smile can have been only skin-deep; for, when, lifting my eyes from the ground I stopped all of a sudden, spread out my hands, and cried in triumph, ‘There! Mrs. Bowater’; she hardly shared my rapture.

  She disapproved of the vast, blank ‘barn of a place’, with its blackshot windows and cold chimneys. The waste and ruination of the garden displeased her so much that I grew a little ashamed of my barbarism.

  ‘It’s all going to wrack and ruin,’ she exclaimed, snorting at my stone summer-house no less emphatically than she had snorted at Mrs. Monnerie. ‘Not a walkable walk, nor the trace of a border; and was there ever such a miggle-maggle of weeds! A fine house in its prime, miss, but now, money melting away like butter in the sun.’

  ‘But,’ said I, standing before her in the lovely light amid the dwelling dewdrops, ‘really and truly, Mrs. Bowater, it is only going back to its own again. What you call a miggle-maggle is what these things were made to be. They are growing up now by themselves; and if you could look as close as I can, you’d see they breathe only what each can spare. They are just racing along to live as wildly as they possibly can. It’s the tameness,’ I expostulated, flinging back my hood, ‘that would be shocking to me.’

  Mrs. Bowater looked down at me, listening to this high-piped recitative with an unusual inquisitiveness.

  ‘Well, that’s as it may be,’ she retorted, ‘but what I’m asking is, Where’s the young fellow? He don’t seem to be as punctual as they were when I was a girl.’

  My own eyes had long been busy, but as yet in vain.

  ‘I did not come particularly to see him,’ was my airy reply. ‘Besides, we said no time – any fine day. Shall we sit down?’

  With a secretive smile Mrs. Bowater spread a square of waterproof sheeting over a flat stone that had fallen out of the coping of the house, unfolded a newspaper over the grass, and we began our breakfast. Neither of us betrayed much appetite for it; she, I fancy, having already fortified herself out of her brown teapot before leaving the house, and I because of the odour of india-rubber and newspaper – an odour presently intensified by the moisture and the sun. Paying no heed to my fastidious nibblings, she munched on reflectively, while I grew more and more ill at ease, first because the ‘young fellow’ was almost visibly sinking in my old friend’s esteem, and next because her cloth-booted foot lay within a few inches of the stone beneath which was hidden Fanny’s letter.

  ‘It’ll do you good, the sea,’ she remarked presently, after sweeping yet one more comprehensive glance around her, ‘and we can only hope Mrs. Monnerie will be as good as her word. A spot
like this – trespassing or not – is good for neither man nor beast. And when you are young the more human company you get, with proper supervising, the better.’

  ‘Were you happy as a girl, Mrs. Bowater?’ I inquired after a pause.

  Our voices went up and up into the still, mild air. ‘Happy enough – for my own good,’ she said, neatly screwing up her remaining biscuits in their paper bag. ‘In my days children were brought up. Taught to make themselves useful. I would as soon have lifted a hand against my mother as answer her back.’

  ‘You mean, she – she whipped you?’

  ‘If need be,’ my landlady replied complacently, folding her thread-gloved hands on her lap and contemplating the shiny toecaps of her boots. ‘She had large hands, my mother; and plenty of temper kept well under control. What’s more, if life isn’t a continual punishment for the stupidities and wickedness of others, not to mention ourselves, then it must be even a darker story than was ever told me.’

  ‘And was, Mrs. Bowater, Mr. Bowater your – your first –’ I looked steadily at a flower at my foot in case she might be affected at so intimate a question, and not wish me to see her face.

  ‘If Mr. Bowater was not the first,’ was her easy response, ‘he may well live to boast of being the last. Which is neither here nor there, for we may be sure he’s enjoying attentive nursing. Broken bones are soon mended. It’s when things are disjointed from the root that the wrench comes.’

  The storm-felled bole lay there beside us, as if for picture to her parable. I began to think rather more earnestly than I had intended to that morning. In my present state of conscience, it was never an easy matter to decide whether Mrs. Bowater’s comments on life referred openly to things in general or covertly to me in particular. How fortunate that the scent of Fanny’s notepaper was not potent enough to escape from its tomb. And whether or not, speech seemed less dangerous than silence.

  ‘It seems to me, Mrs. Bowater,’ I began rather hastily, ‘at least to judge from my own father and mother, that a man depends very much on a woman. Men don’t seem to grow up in the same way, though I suppose they are practical enough as men.’

  ‘If it were one female,’ was the reply, ‘there’d be less to be found fault with. That poor young creature over there took her life for no better reason, even though the reason was turned inside out as you may say.’

  I met the frightful, louring stare of the house. ‘What was her name?’ I whispered – but into nothing, for, bolt upright as she was, Mrs. Bowater had shut her eyes, as if in preparation for a nap.

  A thread-like tangle of song netted the air. We were, indeed, trespassers. I darted my glance this way and that, in and out of the pale green whispering shadows in this wild haunt. Then, realizing by some faint stir in my mind that the stiff, still, shut-away figure beside me was only feigning to be asleep, I opened the rain-warped covers of my Sense and Sensibility, and began plotting how to be rid of her for a while, so that my solitude might summon my stranger, and I might recover Fanny’s letter.

  Then once more I knew. Raising my eyes, I looked straight across at him, scowling there beneath his stunted thorn in a drift of flowers like fool’s parsley. He was making signs, too, with his hands. I watched him pensively, in secret amusement. Then swifter than Daphne into her laurel, instantaneously he vanished, and I became aware that its black eyes were staring out from the long face of the motionless figure beside me, as might an owl’s into an aviary.

  ‘Did you hear a bird, Mrs. Bowater?’ I required innocently.

  ‘When I was a girl,’ said the mouth, ‘sparrowhawks were a common sight, but I never heard one sing.’

  ‘But isn’t a sparrowhawk quite a large bird?’

  ‘We must judge,’ said Mrs. Bowater, ‘not by the size, but the kind. Elseways, miss, your old friend might have been found sleeping, as they say, at her box.’ She pretended to yawn, gathered her legs under her, and rose up and up. ‘I’ll be taking a little walk round. And you shall tell your young acquaintance that I mean him no harm, but that I mean you the reverse; and if show himself he won’t, well, here I sit till the Day of Judgment.’

  An angry speech curled the tip of my tongue. But the simple-faced flowers were slowly making obeisance to Mrs. Bowater’s black, dragging skirts, and when she was nearly out of sight I sallied out to confront my stranger.

  His face was black with rage and contempt. ‘That contaminating scarecrow; who’s she?’ was his greeting. ‘The days I have waited!’

  The resentment that had simmered up in me on his behalf now boiled over against him. I looked at him in silence.

  ‘That contaminating scarecrow, as you are pleased to call her, is the best friend I have in the world. I need no other.’

  ‘And I’, he said harshly, ‘have no friend in this world, and need you.’

  ‘Then,’ said I, ‘you have lost your opportunity. Do you suppose I am a child – to be insulted and domineered over only because I am alone? Possibly,’ and my lips so trembled that I could hardly frame the words, ‘it is your face I shall see when I think of those windows.’

  I was speaking wiselier than I knew. He turned sharply, and by a play of light it seemed that at one of them there stood looking down on us out of the distance a shape that so had watched for ever, leering darkly out of the void. And there awoke in me the sense of this stranger’s extremity of solitude, of his unhappy disguise, of his animal-like patience.

  ‘Why,’ I said, ‘Mrs. Bowater! You might far rather be thanking her for – for –’

  ‘Curses on her,’ he choked, turning away. ‘There was everything to tell you.’

  ‘What everything?’

  ‘Call her back now,’ he muttered furiously.

  ‘That,’ I said smoothly, ‘is easily done. But, forgive me, I don’t know your name.’

  His eyes wandered over the turf beneath me, mounted slowly up, my foot to my head, and looked into mine. In their intense regard I seemed to be but a bubble floating away into the air. I shivered, and turned my back on him, without waiting for an answer. He followed me as quietly as a sheep.

  Mrs. Bowater had already come sauntering back to our breakfast table, and with gaze impassively fixed on the horizon, pretended not to be aware of our approach.

  I smiled back at my companion as we drew near. ‘This, Mrs. Bowater,’ said I, ‘is Mr. Anon. Would you please present him to Miss Thomasina of Bedlam?’

  For a moment or two they stood facing one another, just as I have seen two insects stand – motionless, regardful, exchanging each other’s presences. Then, after one lightning snap at him from her eye, she rose to my bait like a fish. ‘A pleasant morning, sir,’ she remarked affably, though in her Bible voice. ‘My young lady and I were enjoying the spring air.’

  Back to memory comes the darkness of a theatre, and Mrs. Monnerie breathing and sighing beside me, and there on the limelit green of the stage lolls ass-headed Bottom the Weaver cracking jokes with the Fairies.

  My Oberon addressed Mrs. Bowater as urbanely as St. George must have addressed the Dragon – or any other customary monster.

  He seemed to pass muster, none the less, for she rose, patted her sheet, pushed forward her bonnet on to her rounded temples, and bade him a composed good-morning. She would be awaiting me, she announced, in an hour’s time under my beech-tree.

  ‘I think, perhaps, two, Mrs. Bowater,’ I said firmly.

  She gave me a look – all our long slow evening firelit talks together seemed to be swimming in its smile; and withdrew.

  The air eddied into quiet again. The stretched-out blue of the sky was as bland and solitary as if a seraph sat dreaming on its eastern outskirts. Mr. Anon and I seated ourselves three or four feet apart, and I watched the sidelong face, so delicately carved against the green; yet sunken in so sullen a stare.

  Standing up on his feet against the background of Mrs. Bowater’s ink-black flounces, with his rather humped shoulders and straight hair, he had looked an eccentric, and, even to my view,
a stunted figure. Now the whole scene around us seemed to be sorting itself into a different proportion before my eyes. He it was who was become the unit of space, the yard-stick of the universe. The flowers, their roots glintily netted with spiderwebs, nodded serenely over his long hands. A peacock butterfly with folded colours sipped of the sunshine on a tuft nearly at evens with his cheek. The very birds sang to his size, and every rift between the woodlands awaited the cuckoo. Only his clothes were grotesque, but less so than in my parlour Mr. Crimble’s skirts, or even Lady Pollacke’s treacherous bonnet.

  I folded my white silk gloves into a ball. A wren began tweeting in a bush near by. ‘I am going away soon,’ I said, ‘to the sea.’

  The wren glided away out of sight amongst its thorns. I knew by his sudden stillness that this had been unwelcome news. ‘That will be very pleasant for me, won’t it?’ I said.

  ‘The sea?’ he returned coldly, with averted head. ‘Well, I am bound still further.’

  The reply fretted me. I wanted bare facts just then. ‘Why are you so angry? What is your name? And where do you live?’ It was my turn to ask questions, and I popped them out as if from a Little by Little.

  And then, with his queer, croaking, yet captivating voice, he broke into a long, low monologue. He gave me his name – and ‘Mr. Anon’ describes him no worse. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the house he lived in. But instead of apologizing for his ill-temper, he accused me of deceiving and humiliating him; of being, so I gathered, a toy of my landlady’s, of betraying and soiling myself.