Why all this wild stuff only seemed to flatter me, I cannot say. I listened and laughed, pressing flat with both hands the sorry covers of my book, and laughed also low in my heart.
‘Oh, contempt!’ he cried. ‘I am used to that.’
The words curdled on his tongue as he expressed his loathing of poor Mrs. Bowater and her kind – mere Humanity – that ate and drank in musty houses stuck up out of the happy earth like warts on the skin, that battened on meat, stalked its puddled streets and vile, stifling towns, spread its rank odours on the air, increased and multiplied. Monstrous in shape, automatic, blinded by habit, abandoned by instinct, monkey-like, degraded!
What an unjust tirade! He barked it all out at me as if the blame were mine; as if I had nibbled the Apple. I turned my face away, smiling, but listening. Did I realize, he asked me, what a divine fortune it was to be so little, and in this to be All. On and on he raved: I breathed air ‘a dewdrop could chill’; I was as near lovely naught made visible as the passing of a flower; the mere mattering of a dream. And when I died my body would be but a perishing flake of manna, and my bones …
‘Yes, a wren’s picking,’ I rudely interrupted. ‘And what of my soul, please? Why, you talk like – like a poet. Besides, you tell me nothing new. I was thinking all that and more on my way here with my landlady. What has size to do with it? Why, when I thought of my mother after she was dead, and peered down in the place of my imagination into her grave, I saw her spirit – young, younger than I, and bodiless, and infinitely more beautiful even than she had been in my dreams, floating up out of it, free, sweet, and happy, like a flame – though shadowy. Besides, I don’t see how you can help pitying men and women. They seem to fly to one another for company; and half their comfort is in their numbers.’
Never in all my life had I put my thoughts into words like this; and he – a stranger.
There fell a silence between us. The natural quietude of the garden was softly settling down and down like infinitesimal grains of sand in a pool of water. It had forgotten that humans were harbouring in its solitude. And still he maintained that his words were not untrue, that he knew mankind better than I, that to fall into their ways and follow their opinions and strivings was to deafen my ears, and seal up my eyes, and lose my very self. ‘The Self everywhere,’ he said.
And he told me, whether in time or space I know not, of a country whose people were of my stature and slenderness. This was a land, he said, walled in by enormous, ice-capped mountains couching the furnace of the rising sun, and yet set at the ocean’s edge. Its sand-dunes ring like dulcimers in the heat. Its valleys of swift rivers were of a green so pale and vivid and so flower-encrusted that an English – even a Kentish – spring is but a coarse and rustic prettiness by comparison. Vine and orange and trees of outlandish names gave their fruits there; yet there also willows swept the winds, and palms spiked the blue with their fans, and the cactus flourished with the tamarisk. Geese, of dark green and snow, were on its inland waters, and a bird clocked the hours of the night, and the conformation of its stars would be strange to my eyes. And such were the lowliness and simplicity of this people’s habitations that the most powerful sea-glass, turned upon and searching their secret haunts from a ship becalmed on the ocean, would spy out nothing – nothing there, only world wilderness of snow-dazzling mountain top and green valley, ravine, and condor, and what might just be Nature’s small ingenuities – mounds and traceries. Yet within all was quiet loveliness, feet light as goldfinch’s, silks fine as gossamer, voices as of a watery beading of silence. And their life being all happiness they have no name for their God. And it seems – according to Mr. Anon’s account of it – that such was the ancient history of the world, that Man was so once, but had swollen to his present shape, of which he had lost the true spring and mastery, and had sunk deeper and deeper into a kind of oblivion of the mind, suffocating his past, and now all but insane with pride in his own monstrosities.
All this my new friend (and yet not so very new, it seemed) – all this he poured out to me in the garden, though I can only faintly recall his actual words, as if, like Moses, I had smitten the rock. And I listened weariedly, with little hope of understanding him, and with the suspicion that it was nothing but a Tom o’ Bedlam’s dream he was recounting. Yet, as if in disproof of my own incredulity, there sat I; and over the trees yonder stood Mrs. Bowater’s ugly little brick house; and beyond that, the stony, tapering spire of St. Peter’s, the High Street. And I looked at him without any affection in my thoughts, and wished fretfully to be gone. What use to be lulled with fantastic pictures of Paradise when I might have died of fear and hatred on Mrs. Stocks’s doorstep; when everything I said was ‘touching, touching’?
‘Well,’ I mockingly interposed at last, ‘the farthing dip’s guttering. And what if it’s all true, and there is such a place, what then? How am I going to get there, pray? Would you like to mummy me and shut me up in a box and carry me there, as they used to in Basman? Years and years ago my father told me of the pygmy men and horses – the same size as yours, I suppose – who lived in caves on the banks of the Nile. But I doubt if I believed in them much, even then. I am not so ignorant as all that.’
The life died out of his face, just as, because of a cloud carried up into the sky, the sunlight at that moment fled from Wanderslore. He coughed, leaning on his hands, and looked in a scared, empty, hunted fashion to right and left. ‘Only that you might stay,’ he scarcely whispered. ‘… I love you.’
Instinctively I drew away, lips dry, and heart numbly, heavily beating. An influence more secret than the shadow of a cloud had suddenly chilled and darkened the garden and robbed it of its beauty. I shrank into myself, cold and awkward, and did not dare even to glance at my companion.
‘A fine thing’, was all I found to reply, ‘for a toy, as you call me. I don’t know what you mean.’
Miserable enough that memory is when I think of what came after, for now my only dread was that he might really be out of his wits, and might make my beloved, solitary garden for ever hateful to me. I drew close my cape, and lifted my book.
‘There is a private letter of mine hidden under that stone,’ I said coldly. ‘Will you please be so good as to fetch it out for me? And you are never, never to say that again.’
The poor thing looked so desperately ill and forsaken with his humped shoulders – and that fine, fantastic story still ringing in my ears! – that a kind of sadness came over me, and I hid my face in my hands.
‘The letter is not there,’ said his voice.
I drew my fingers from my face, and glared at him from between them; then scrambled to my feet. Out swam the sun again, drenching all around us with its light and heat.
‘Next time I come’, I shrilled at him, ‘the letter will be there. The thief will have put it back again! Oh, how unhappy you have made me!’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I stumbled off, feeling smaller and smaller as I went, more and more ridiculous and insignificant, as indeed I must have appeared; for distance can hardly lend enchantment to any view of me. Not one single look did I cast behind; but now that my feelings began to quiet down, I began also to think. And a pretty muddle of mind it was. What had enraged and embittered me so? If only I had remained calm. Was it that my pride, my vanity, had in some vague fashion been a punishment of him for Fanny’s unkindness to me?
‘But he stole, he stole my letter,’ I said aloud, stamping my foot on a budding violet; and – there was Mrs. Bowater. Evidently she had been watching my approach, and now smiled benignly.
‘Why, you are quite out of breath, miss; and your cheeks! … I hope you haven’t been having words. A better spoken young fellow than I had fancied; and I’m sure I ask his pardon for the “gentleman”.’
‘Ach,’ I swept up at my beech tree, now cautiously unsheathing its first green buds in the lower branches, ‘I think he must be light in his head.’
‘And that often comes’, replied Mrs. Bowater, wit
h undisguised bonhomie, ‘from being heavy at the heart. Why, miss, he may be a young nobleman in disguise. There’s unlikelier things even than that, to judge from that trash of Fanny’s. While, as for fish in the sea – it’s sometimes wise to be contented with what we can catch.’
Who had been talking to me about fish in the sea – quite lately? I thought contemptuously of Pollie and the Dream Book. ‘I am sorry,’ I replied, nose in air, ‘but I cannot follow the allusion.’
The charge of vulgarity was the very last, I think, which Mrs. Bowater would have lifted a finger to refute. My cheeks flamed hotter to know that she was quietly smiling up there. We walked on in silence.
That night I could not sleep. I was afraid. Life was blackening my mind like the mould of a graveyard. I could think of nothing but one face, one voice – that scorn and longing, thought and fantasy. What if he did love me a little? I might at least have been kind to him. Had I so many friends that I could afford to be harsh and ungrateful? How dreadfully ill he had looked when I scoffed at him. And now what might not have happened to him? I seemed lost to myself. No wonder Fanny … My body grew cold at a thought; the palms of my hands began to ache.
Half-stifled, I leapt out of bed, and without the least notion of what I was doing, hastily dressed myself, and fled out into the night. I must find him, talk to him, plead with him, before it was too late. And in the trickling starlight, pressed against my own gatepost – there he was.
‘Oh,’ I whispered at him in a fever of relief and shame and apprehensiveness, ‘what are you doing here? You must go away at once, at once. I forgive you. Yes, yes; I forgive you. But – at once. Keep the letter for me till I come again.’ His hand was wet with the dew. ‘Oh, and never say it again. Please, please, if you care for me the least bit in the world, never, never say what you did again.’ I poured out the heedless words in the sweet-scented quiet of midnight. ‘Now – now go,’ I entreated. ‘And indeed, indeed I am your friend.’
The dark eyes shone quietly close to mine. He sighed. He lifted my fingers, and put them to my breast again. He whispered unintelligible words between us, and was gone. No more stars for me that night. I slept sound until long after dawn …
Softly as thistledown the days floated into eternity; yet they were days of expectation and action. April was her fickle self; not so Mrs. Monnerie. Her letter to Mrs. Bowater must have been a marvel of tact. Apartments had been engaged for us at a little watering-place in Dorsetshire, called Lyme Regis. Mrs. Bowater and I were to spend at least a fortnight there alone together, and after our return Mrs. Monnerie herself was to pay me a visit, and see with her own eyes if her prescription had been successful. After that, perhaps, if I were so inclined, and my landlady agreed with Mr. Pellew that it would be good for me, I might spend a week or two with her in London. What a twist of the kaleidoscope. I had sown never a pinch of seed, yet here was everything laughing and blossoming around me, like the wilderness in Isaiah.
Indeed my own looking-glass told me how wan and languishing a Miss M. was pining for change of scene and air. She rejoiced that Fanny was enjoying herself, rejoiced that she was going to enjoy herself too. I searched Mrs. Bowater’s library for views of the sea, but without much reward. So I read over Mr. Bowater’s Captain Maury – on the winds and monsoons and tide-rips and hurricanes, freshened up my Robinson Crusoe, and dreamed of the Angels with the Vials. In the midst of my packing (and I spread it out for sheer amusement’s sake) Mr. Crimble called again. He looked nervous, gloomy, and hollow-eyed.
I was fast becoming a mistress in affairs of the sensibilities. Yet, when, kneeling over my open trunk, I heard him in the porch, I mimicked Fanny’s ‘Dash!’ and wished to goodness he had postponed his visit until only echo could have answered his knock. It fretted me to be bothered with him. And now? What would I not give to be able to say I had done my best and utmost to help him when he wanted it? Here is a riddle I can find no answer to, however long I live: How is it that our eyes cannot foresee, our very hearts cannot forefeel, the future? And how should we act if that future were plain before us? Yet, even then, what could I have said to him to comfort him? Really and truly I had no candle with which to see into that dark mind.
In actual fact my task was difficult and delicate enough. In spite of her vow not to write again, yet another letter had meanwhile come from Fanny. If Mr. Crimble’s had afforded ‘a ray of hope’, this had shut it clean away. It was full of temporizings, wheedlings, evasions – and brimming over with Fanny.
It suggested, too, that Mrs. Bowater must have misread the name of her holiday place. The half-legible printing of the postmark on the envelope – fortunately I had intercepted the postman – did not even begin with an M. And no address was given within. I was to tell Mr. Crimble that Fanny was overtired and depressed by the term’s work, that she simply couldn’t set her ‘weary mind’ to anything, and as for decisions:
He seems to think only of himself. You couldn’t believe, Midgetina, what nonsense the man talks. He can’t see that all poor Fanny’s future is at stake, body and soul. Tell him if he wants her to smile, he must sit in patience on a pedestal, and smile too. One simply can’t trust the poor creature with cold, sober facts. His mother, now – why, I could read it in your own polite little description of her at your Grand Reception – she smiles and smiles. So did the Cheshire Cat.
‘But oh, dear Fanny, time and your own true self, God helping, would win her over.’ So writes H. C. That’s candid enough, if you look into it; but it isn’t sense. Once hostile, old ladies are not won over. They don’t care much for mind in the young. Anyhow, one look at me was enough for her – and it was followed by a sharp little peer at poor Harold! She guessed. So you see, my dear, even for youthful things, like you and me, time gathers roses a jolly sight faster than we can, and it would have to be the fait accompli, before a word is breathed to her. That is, if I could take a deep breath and say yes.
But I can’t. I ask you: can you see Fanny Bowater a Right Reverendissima? No, nor can I. And not even gaiters or an apron here and now would settle the question offhand. Why I confide all this in you (why, for that matter, it has all been confided in me), I know not. You want nothing, and if you did, you wouldn’t want it long. Now, would you? Perhaps that is the secret. But Fanny wants a good deal. She cannot even guess how much. So, while Miss Stebbings and Beechwood Hill for ever and ever would be hell before purgatory, H. C. and St. Peter’s would be merely the same thing, with the fires out. And I am quite sure that, given a chance, heaven is our home.
Oh, Midgetina, I listen to all this; mumbling my heart like a dog a bone. What the devil has it got to do with me, I ask myself? Who set the infernal trap? If only I could stop thinking and mocking and find someone – not ‘to love me’ (between ourselves, there are far too many of them already), but capable of making me love him. They say a woman can’t be driven. I disagree. She can be driven – mad. And apart from that, though twenty men only succeed in giving me hydrophobia, one could persuade me to drink, if only his name was Mr. Right, as Mother succinctly puts it.
But first and last, I am having a real, if not a particularly sagacious, holiday, and can take care of myself. And next and last, play, I beseech you, the tiny good Samaritan between me and poor, plodding blinded H. C. – even if he does eventually have to go on to Jericho.
And I shall ever remain, your most affec. – F.
How all this baffled me. I tried, but dismally failed, to pour a trickle of wine and oil into Mr. Crimble’s wounded heart, for his sake and for mine, not for Fanny’s, for I knew in myself that his ‘Jericho’ was already within view.
‘I don’t understand her; I don’t understand her,’ he kept repeating, crushing his soft hat in his small, square hands. ‘I cannot reach her; I am not in touch with her.’
Out of the fount of my womanly wisdom I reminded him how young she was, how clever, and how much flattered.
‘You know, then, there are – others?’ he gulped, darkly meeting me.
He gazed at me, his eyes like an immense, empty shop window. ‘That thought puts … I can’t’; and he twisted his head on his shoulders as if shadows were around him; ‘I can’t bear to think of her and – with – others. It unbalances me. But how can you underrstand? … A sealed book. Last night I sat at my window. It was raining. I know not the hour! and Spring!’ He clutched at his knees, stooping forward. ‘I repudiated myself, thrust myself out. Oh, believe me, we are not alone. And there and then I resolved to lay the whole matter before’ – his glance groped towards the door – ‘before, in fact, her mother. She is a woman of sagacity, of proper feeling in her station, though how she came to be the mother of … but that’s neither here nor there. We mustn’t probe. Probably she thinks … but what use to consider it? One word to her – and Fanny would be lost to me for ever.’ For a moment it seemed his eyes closed on me. ‘How can I bring myself to speak of it?’ a remote voice murmured from beneath them.
I looked at the figure seated there in its long black coat; and far away in my mind whistled an ecstatic bird – ‘The sea! the sea! You are going away – out, out of all this.’
So, too was Mr. Crimble, if only I had known it. It was my weak and cowardly acquiescence in Fanny’s deceits that was speeding him on his dreadful journey. None the less, a wretched heartless impatience fretted me at being thus helplessly hemmed in by my fellow creatures. How clumsily they groped on. Why couldn’t they be happy in just living free from the clouds and trammels of each other and of themselves? The selfish helplessness of it all. It was, indeed, as though the strange fires which Fanny had burnt me in – which any sudden thought of her could still fan into a flickering blaze – had utterly died down. Whether or not, I was hardened; a poor little earthenware pot fresh from the furnace. And with what elixir was it brimmed.
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