For Fanny no words would come – nothing but a mere bare promise that I would help her as soon as I could – an idiot’s message. The next three days were an almost insupportable solitude. From Mr. Anon no answer could be expected, since in my haste I had forgotten to give him Mrs. Petrie’s address. I brooded in horror of what the failure of my letter to reach him might entail. I shared Fanny’s damnation. Wherever I went, a silent Mr. Crimble dogged my footsteps. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bowater’s newspaper, I discovered, lay concealed beneath her pillow.
At length I could bear myself no longer, and standing beside her bed, asked if I might read it. Until that moment we had neither of us even referred to the subject. Propped up on her pillows, her long face looking a strange colour against their whiteness, she considered my request.
‘Well, miss,’ she said at last, ‘you know too much to know no more.’
I spread out the creased sheets on the worn carpet, and read slowly the smudged, matter-of-fact account from beginning to end. There were passages in it that imprinted themselves on my memory like a photograph. Mr. Crimble had taken the evening service that last day looking ‘ill and worn, though never in what may be described as robust health, owing to his indefatigable devotion to his ecclesiastical and parochial duties’. The service over, and the scanty congregation dispersed, he had sat alone in the vestry for so unusual a time that the verger of St. Peter’s, a Mr. Soames, anxious to get home to his supper, had at length looked in on him at the door, to ask if his services were required any further. Mr. Crimble had ‘raised his head as if startled’, and ‘had smiled in the negative’, and then, ‘closing the eastern door behind him’, had ‘hastened’ out of the church. No other human eye had encountered him until he was found at 11.27 pm. in an outhouse at the foot of his mother’s garden. ‘The head of the unfortunate gentleman was wellnigh severed from the body.’ ‘He was an only son, and was in his twenty-ninth year. Universal sympathy will be extended by all to the aged lady who is prostrated by this tragic occurrence.’
Propped on my hands and knees, fearful that Mrs. Bowater might interrupt me before I was prepared, I stared fixedly at the newspaper. I understood all that it said, yet it was as strange to me as if it had been written in Hebrew. I had seen, I had known, Mr. Crimble. Who, then, was this? My throat drew together as I turned my head a little and managed to inquire: ‘What is an inquest, Mrs. Bowater?’
‘Fretting out the why’s and wherefores,’ came the response, muffled by a handkerchief pressed close to her mouth.
‘And – this “why”?’ I whispered, stooping low.
‘That’s between him and his Maker,’ said the voice. ‘The poor young man had set his heart on we know where. As we make our bed so we must lie on it, miss. It’s for nobody to judge; though it may be a lesson.’
‘Oh, Mrs. Bowater, then you knew I knew.’
‘No, no. Not your lesson, miss. I didn’t mean that. It’s not for you to fret yourself, though I must say – I have always made it a habit, though without prying, please God, to be aware of more than interference could set right. Fanny and I have talked the affair over till we couldn’t look in each other’s faces for fear of what we might say. But she’s Mr. Bowater’s child, through and through, and my firm hand was not firm enough, maybe. You did what you could. It’s not in human conscience to ask more than the natural frame can bear.’
Did what I could … I cowered, staring at my knuckles, and it seemed that a little concourse of strangers, heads close together, were talking in my mind. My eyes were dry; I think the spectre of a smile had dragged up my lips. Mrs. Bowater raised herself in her bed, and peered over at me.
‘It’s the letters,’ she whispered at me. ‘If he hasn’t destroyed them, they’ll be read to the whole parish.’
I crouched lower. ‘You’ll be thankful to be rid of me. I shall be thankful to be rid of myself, Mrs. Bowater.’
She thrust a long, skinny arm clean out of the bed. ‘Come away, there; come away,’ she cried.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘take me away, take me away. I can’t bear it, Mrs. Bowater. I don’t want to be alive.’
‘There, miss, rest now, and think no more.’ She smoothed my hair, clucked a little low, whistling tune, as if for lullaby. ‘Why, there now,’ she muttered sardonically, ‘you might almost suppose I had been a mother myself!’
There was silence between us for a while, then, quietly raising herself, she looked down at me on the pillow, and, finding me to be still awake, a long smile spread over her face! ‘Why, we don’t seem neither of us to be much good at day-time sleeping.’
Chapter Thirty-One
A morning or two afterwards we set out on our homeward journey – the sea curdling softly into foam on its stones, a solitary ship in the distance on its dim, blue horizon. We were a dejected pair of travellers, keeping each a solemn face turned aside at the window, thinking our thoughts and avoiding, as far as we could, any interchange of looks that might betray them one to the other. For the first time in our friendship Mrs. Bowater was a little short and impatient with me over difficulties and inconveniences which I could not avoid, owing to my size.
Her key in the lock of the door, she looked down on me in the porch, a thin smile between nose and cheek. ‘No place like home there mayn’t be, miss,’ she began, ‘but –’ The dark passage was certainly uninviting; the clock had stopped. ‘I think I’ll be calling round for Henry,’ she added abruptly.
I entered the stagnant room, ran up my stairs, my heart with me – and paused. Not merely my own ghost was there to meet me; but a past that seemed to mutter ‘Never again, never again’, from every object on shelf and wall. Yet a faint, sweet, unfamiliar odour lay on the chilly air. I drew aside the curtain and looked in. Fading on the coverlet of my bed lay a few limp violets, ivory white and faintly rosy.
I was alone in the house, concealed now even from Mr. Bowater’s frigid stare. Yet at sight of these flowers a slight vertigo came over me, and I had to sit on my bed for a moment to recover myself.
Then I knelt down, my heart knocking against my side, and dragged from out its hiding-place the box in which I kept my money. Gritty with the undisturbed dust of our absence, it was locked. I drew back, my hand on my mouth. What could be the meaning of this? My stranger had come and gone. Had he been so stupidly punctilious that, having taken out the twenty pounds, he had relocked an almost empty box?
Or had he, at the last moment? … This riddle distressed me so much that instantly I was seized with a violent headache. But nothing could be done for the present. I laid by the violets in a drawer, pushed back the box, and, making as good a pretence at eating my supper as I could, prepared for the night.
One by one the clocks in hall and kitchen struck out the hours, and, the wind being in the east, borne on it came the chimes of St. Peter’s. Automatically I counted the strokes, turning this way and that, as if my life depended on this foolish arithmetic, yet ready, like Job, to curse the day I was born. What had my existence been but a blind futility, my thought for others but a mask of egotism and selfishness? Yet, in all this turmoil of mind, I must have slept, for suddenly I found myself stiff, drawn-up, and wide awake – listening to a cautious, reiterated tapping against my window-pane. A tallow night-light burned beside me in a saucer of water. For the first time in my life – at least since childhood – I had been afraid to face the dark. Why, I know not; but I at once leapt out of bed and blew out that light. The night was moonless, but high and starry. I peered through the curtains, and a shrouded figure became visible in the garden – Fanny’s.
Curtain withdrawn, we looked each at each through the cold, dividing glass in the gloom – her eyes, in the night-spread pallor of her skin, as if congealed. The dark lips, with an exaggerated attempt at articulation, murmured words, but I could catch no meaning. The face looked almost idiotic in these contortions. I shuddered, shook my head violently. She drew back.
Terrified that she would be gone – in my dressing-gown and slippers I grope
d my way across the room and was soon, with my door open, in the night air. She had heard me, and with a beckon of her finger, turned as if to lead me on.
‘No, no,’ I signalled, ‘I have no key.’ With a gesture she drew close, stooped, and we talked there together, muttering in the porch.
‘Midgetina,’ she whispered, smiling bleakly, ‘it’s this wretched money. I must explain. I’m at my wits’ end – in awful trouble – without it.’
Huddled close, I wasted no time in asking questions. She must come in. But this she flatly refused to do. Yet money, money was her one cry: and that she must have before she saw her mother again. Not daring to tell her that I was in doubt whether or not my savings were still in my possession, I pushed her hand away as she knelt before me on the upper-most step. ‘I must fetch it,’ I said.
By good fortune my money-box was not the weightiest of my grandfather’s French trunks – not the brass-bound friend-in-need of my younger days, and it contained little but paper. I hoisted it on to my bed, and, as I had lately seen the porters do at the railway station, contrived to push under it and raise it on to my shoulder. Its edge drove in on my collar-bone till I thought it must snap. Thus laden, I staggered cautiously down the staircase, pushed slowly across the room, and, so, out into the passage and towards the rounded and dusky oblong of the open door.
On the threshold Fanny met me, gasping under this burden, and at sight of me some blessed spirit within her seemed to give her pause. ‘No, no,’ she muttered, and drew back as if suddenly ashamed of her errand. On I came, however, and prudence prevailed. With a sound that might have been sigh or sob she snatched the load from me and gathered it in, as best she could, under her cloak.
‘Oh, Midgetina!’ she whispered meaninglessly. ‘Now we must talk.’ And having wedged back the catch of my door, we moved quickly and cautiously in the direction of Wanderslore.
We climbed on up the quiet hill. The cool, fragrant night seemed to be luring us on and on, to swallow us up. Yet, there shone the customary stars; there, indeed, to my amazement, as if the heavenly clock of the universe had set back its hands on my behalf, straddled the constellation of Orion.
Come to our beech tree, now a vast indistinguishable tent of whispering, silky leaves, Fanny seated herself upon a jutting root, and I stood panting before her.
‘Well?’ she said, with a light, desolate laugh.
‘Oh, Fanny, “well”!’ I cried.
‘Can’t you trust me?’
‘Trust you?’
‘Oh, oh, mocking-bird! – with all these riches?’
I cast a glance up into the leafy branches, and seated myself opposite to her.
‘Fanny, Fanny. Have you heard?’
‘“Heard,”’ she says! It was her turn to play the parrot. ‘What am I here for, but to hear more? But never mind; that’s all over. Has mother –’
‘“All over,” Fanny!’ I interrupted her. ‘All over? But, the letters?’
‘What letters?’ She stared at me, and added, looking away. ‘Oh, mine?’ She gave out the word with a long, inexhaustible sigh. ‘That was all right. He did not hide, he burned. Neither to nor from; not even to his mother. Every paper destroyed. I envy her feelings! He just gave up, went out, Exit. I envy that, too.’
‘Not even to you, Fanny? Not a word even to you?’
The figure before me crouched a little closer together. ‘They said’, was her evasive reply, ‘that there is melancholia in the family.’
I think the word frightened me even more than its meaning. ‘Melancholia,’ I repeated the melodious syllables. ‘Oh, Fanny!’
‘Listen, Midgetina,’ her voice broke out coldly. ‘I can guess easily enough what’s saving up for me when I come home – which won’t be yet awhile, I can assure you. I can guess, too, what your friends, Lady Pollacke and Co., are saying about me. Let them rave. That can’t be helped. I shall bear it, and try to grin. Maybe there would be worse still, if worse were known. But your worse I won’t have, not even from you. I was not his keeper. I did not play him false. I deny it. Could I prevent him – caring for me? Was he man enough to come openly? Did he say to his mother “Take her or leave her, I mean to have her” – as I would have done? No, he blew hot and cold. He temporized; he – he was a coward. Oh, this everlasting dog-fight between body and mind! Ages before you ever crept upon the scene he pestered and pestered me – until I have almost retched at the sound of church bells. What was it, I ask you, but sheer dread of what the man might go and do that kept me shilly-shallying? And what’s more, Miss Wren, who told me to throw the stone? Pff, it sickens me, this paltering world. I can’t and won’t see things but with my reason. My reason, I tell you. What else is a schoolma’am for? Did he want me for my sake? Who begged and begged that his beautiful love should be kept secret? There was once a philosopher called Plato, my dear. He poisoned Man’s soul.’
Flesh and spirit, Fanny must have been very tired. Her voice fluttered on like a ragged flag.
‘But listen, listen!’ I entreated her. ‘I haven’t blamed you for that, Fanny. I swear it. I mean, you can’t help not loving. I know that. But perhaps if only we had – It’s a dreadful thing to think of him sitting there alone – the vestry – and then looking up “with a smile”. Oh, Fanny, with a smile! I dare hardly go into his mind – and the verger looking in. I think of him all day.’
‘And I all night,’ came the reply, barked out in the gloom. ‘Wasn’t the man a Christian, then?’
‘Fanny,’ I covered my eyes. ‘Don’t say that. We shall both of us just suffocate in the bog if you won’t even let yourself listen to what you are saying.’
‘Well,’ she said doggedly, ‘be sure you shall suffocate last, Miss Midge. There’s ample perch-room for you on Fanny’s shoulder.’ I felt, rather than saw, the glance almost of hatred that she cast at me from under her brows.
‘Mock as you like at me,’ was my miserable answer, ‘I have kept my word to you – all but; and it was I who helped – oh, yes, I know that.’
‘Ah, “all but”!’ her agile tongue caught up the words. ‘And what else, may I ask?’
I took a deep breath, with almost sightless eyes fixed on the beautiful, mysterious glades stretching beneath us. ‘He came again. Why, it was not very many days ago. And we talked and talked, and I grew tired, yes, and angry at last. I told him you were only making use of me. You were. I said that all we could do was just to go on loving you – and keep away. I know, Fanny, I cannot be of any account; I don’t understand very much. But that is true.’
She leaned nearer, as if incredulous, her face as tranquil in its absorption as the planet that hung in the russet-black sky in a rift of the leaves.
‘Candid, and candid,’ she scoffed brokenly, and all in a gasp.
The voice trailed off. Her mouth relaxed. And suddenly my old love for her seemed to gush back into my heart. A burning, inarticulate pity rose up in me.
‘Listen, Midgetina,’ she went on. ‘That was honest. And I can be honest, too. I don’t care what you said. If you had called me the vilest word they can set their tongue to, I’d still have forgiven you. But would you have me give in? Go under? Have you ever seen Mother Grundy? I tell you, he haunts me – the blackness, the deadness. That outhouse! Do you suppose I can’t see inside that? He sits by my bed. I eat his shadow with my food. At every corner in the street his black felt hat bobs and disappears. If even he hadn’t been so solemn, so insignificant! …’ Her low, torturing laugh shook under the beechen hollow.
‘And I say this’ – she went on slowly, as if I sat at a distance, ‘if he’s not very careful I shall go the same way. I can’t bear that – that kind of spying on me. Don’t you suppose you can sin after death? If only he had given me away – betrayed me! We should at least have been square. But that,’ she jerked back her head. ‘That’s only one thing. I had not meant to humble myself like this. You seem not to care what humiliations I have to endure. You sit there, oh, how absurd for me, watching and watching
me, null and void and meaningless. Yet you are human: you feel. You said you loved me – oh, yes. But touch me, come here’ – she laid her hand almost fondly on her breast – ‘and be humanly generous, no. That’s no more your nature than – than a changeling’s. Contamination, perhaps!’
Her eyes fretted round her, as if she had lost her sense of direction.
‘And now there’s this tongueless, staring ghost.’ She shuddered, hiding her face in her hands. ‘The misery of it all.’
‘Fanny, Fanny,’ I besought her. ‘You know I love you.’ But the words sounded cold and distant, and some deadly disinclination held me where I was, though I longed to comfort her. ‘And at times, I confess it, I have hated you too. You haven’t always been very kind to me. I was trying to cure myself. You were curing me. But still I go on – a little.’
‘It’s useless, useless,’ she replied, dropping her hands into her lap and gazing vacantly on the ground. ‘I can’t care; I can’t even cry. And all you say is only pity. I don’t want that. Would you still pity me, I wonder, if you knew that even though I had come to take this wretched money from you, I meant to taunt you, to accuse you of lying to me?’
‘Taunt,’ ‘lying.’ My cheek grew hot. I drew back my head with a jerk and stared at her. ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘There. What did I say! She doesn’t understand me,’ she cried with a sob, as if calling on the angels to bear witness to her amazement. ‘Well, then, let Fanny tell you, Miss M., whoever and whatever you may be, that she, yes, even she, can understand that unearthliness, too. Oh, these last days! I have had my fill of them. Take all: give nothing. There’s no other means of grace in a world like this.’
‘But you said “taunt” me,’ I insisted, with eyes fixed on the box that lay between the blunt-headed fronds of the springing bracken. ‘What did you mean by that? I did my best. Your mother was ill. She fainted, Fanny, when the newspaper came. I couldn’t come back a single hour earlier. So I wrote to – to a friend, sending him my keys, and asking him to find the money for you. I know my letter reached him. Perhaps’ – I hesitated, in dread of what might be hanging over our heads, ‘perhaps the box is empty.’
Memoirs of a Midget Page 26