Memoirs of a Midget

by de la Mare, Walter;

  But I need not have wasted myself. The puzzle was not quite inexplicable. For the moment Fanny’s miseries seemed to have vanished. Animation came into her face and voice and movements as she told me how, the night before, thinking that her mother and I might have returned from Lyme Regis, she had come tapping. And suddenly as she stood in the garden, her face close to the glass, an utterly strange one had thrust itself into view, and the figure of ‘a ghastly gloating little dwarfish creature’ had appeared in the porch.

  At first she had supposed – but only for an instant – that it was myself. ‘Of course, Mother had mentioned him in her letters, but’ – and Fanny opened her eyes at me – ‘I never guessed he was, well, like that.’

  Then in her folly, and without giving him the least opportunity to explain his presence there, she had begun railing at him, and had accused him of forcing his way in to rob the house! ‘And he stood there, hunched up, looking at me – out of my own house.’ The very picture of Fanny helplessly standing there at her own door, and of these two facing each other like that in the porch – this ridiculous end to my fine stratagem, filled me with a miserable amusement. I leaned back my head where I sat, shrilly and dismally laughing and laughing, until tears sprang pricklingly into my eyes. If any listener had been abroad in the woods that night, he would, I think, have hastened his departure.

  But Fanny seemed to be shocked at my levity. She peered anxiously into the clear night-glooms around us.

  ‘And what!’ I said, still striving to regain command over myself. ‘What happened then? Oh, Fanny, not a policeman?’

  But her memory of what had followed was confused, or perhaps she had no wish to be too exact. All that I could win from her for certain was that after an angry and bitter talk between herself and Mr. Anon, he had simply slammed my door behind him and dared her to do her worst.

  ‘That was pretty brave of him,’ I remarked.

  ‘Oh,’ said Fanny amiably, ‘I am not blaming your friend, Midgetina. He seemed to be perfectly competent.’

  Yet even now I remained unsatisfied. If Fanny had come secretly to Beechwood, as she had suggested, and had spent the night with a friend, solely to hear the last tidings of Mr. Crimble, what was this other trouble, so desperate that she had lost both her wits and her temper at finding Mr. Anon there? Supposing the house had been empty? My curiosity overcame me, and the none too ingenuous question slipped from my tongue! ‘Did you want some of the money for mourning, then, Fanny?’

  Her dark, pale face, above the black, enveloping cloak, met my look with astonishment.

  ‘Mourning!’ she cried, ‘why, that would be the very – No, not mourning, Midgetina. I owe a little to a friend – and not money only,’ she added with peculiar intensity. ‘Of course, if you have any doubts about lending it –’

  ‘Give, not lend,’ said I.

  ‘Yes, but how are we to get at it? I can’t lug that thing about, and you say he has the key. Shall we smash it open?’

  The question came so hurriedly that I had no time to consider what, besides money – and of course friendship – could be owed to a friend, and especially to a friend that made her clench her teeth on the word.

  ‘Yes, smash it open,’ I nodded. ‘It’s only a box.’

  ‘But such a pretty little box!’

  With knees drawn up, and shivering now after my outburst of merriment, I watched her labours. My beloved chest might keep out moth and rust, it was no match for Fanny. She wound up a large stone in her silk scarf. A few heavy and muffled blows, the lock surrendered, and the starlight dripped in like milk from heaven upon my hoard.

  ‘Why, Midgetina,’ whispered Fanny, delicately counting the notes over between her long, white fingers, ‘you are richer than I supposed – a female Crœsus. Wasn’t it a great risk? I mean’, she continued, receiving no answer, ‘no wonder he was so cautious. And how much may I take?’

  It seemed as if an empty space, not of yards but of miles, had suddenly separated us. ‘All you want,’ said I.

  ‘But I didn’t – I didn’t taunt you, now, did I?’ she smiled at me, with head inclined to her slim shoulder, as if in mimicry of my ivory Hypnos.

  ‘There was nothing to taunt me about. Mayn’t I have a friend?’

  ‘Why,’ she retorted lightly, mechanically recounting the bits of paper, ‘friend indeed! What about all those Pollackes and Monneries mother’s so full of? You will soon be flitting to quite another sphere. It’s the old friends that then will be left mourning. You won’t sit moon-gazing then, my dear.’

  ‘No, Fanny,’ I said stubbornly, ‘I’ve had enough of that, just for the present.’

  ‘Sst!’ she whispered swiftly, raising her head and clasping the notes to her breast beneath her cloak, ‘what was that?’

  We listened. I heard nothing – nothing but sigh of newborn leaf, or falling of dead twig cast off from the parent tree. It was early yet for the nightingale.

  ‘Only the wind,’ said she.

  ‘Only the wind,’ I echoed scornfully, ‘or perhaps a weasel.’

  She hurriedly divided my savings and thrust my share into my lap. I pushed it in under my arm.

  ‘Good heavens, Midgetina!’ she cried, aghast. ‘You are almost naked. How on earth was I to know?’

  I clutched close my dressing-gown and stumbled to my feet, trying in vain to restrain my silly teeth from chattering. ‘Never mind about me, Fanny,’ I muttered. ‘They don’t waste inquests on changelings.’

  ‘My God!’ was her vindictive comment, ‘how she harps on the word. As if I had nothing else to worry about.’ With a contemptuous foot she pushed my empty box under cover of a low-growing yew. Seemingly Wanderslore was fated to entomb one by one all my discarded possessions.

  Turning, she stifled a yawn with a sound very like a groan. ‘Then it’s au revoir, Midgetina. Give me five minutes’ start … You know I am grateful?’

  ‘Yes, Fanny,’ I said obediently, smiling up into her face.

  ‘Won’t you kiss me?’ she said. ‘Tout comprendre, you know, c’est tout pardonner.’

  ‘Why, Fanny,’ I replied; ‘no, thank you. I prefer plain English.’

  But scarcely a minute had separated us when I sprang up and pursued her a few paces into the shadows, into which she had disappeared. To forgive all – how piteously easy now that she was gone. She had tried to conceal it, brazen it out, but unutterable wretchedness had lurked in every fold of her cloak, in the accents of her voice, in every fatigued gesture. Her very eyes had shone the more lustrously in the starlight for the dark shadows around them. But understand her – I could not even guess what horrible secret trouble she had been concealing from me. And beyond that, too – a hideous, selfish dread – my guilty mind was haunted by the fear of what she might do in her extremity.

  ‘Fanny, Fanny,’ I called falsely into the silence. ‘Oh, come back! I love you; indeed I love you.’

  How little blessed it is at times even to give. No answer came. I threw myself on the ground. And I strove with myself in the darkness, crushing out every thought as it floated into my mind, and sinking on and on into the depths of unconsciousness.

  ‘Oh, my dear, my dear,’ came the whisper of a tender, guttural voice in my ear. ‘You are deathly cold. Why do you grieve so? She is gone. Listen, listen. They have neither love nor pity. And I – I cannot live without you.’

  I sat up, black with rage. My stranger’s face glimmered obscurely in the gloom.

  ‘Oh, if you spy on me again!’ I rasped at him. ‘Live without me, what do I care? – you can go and –’

  But, thank God, the die without me was never uttered. I haven’t that to haunt me. Some hidden strength that had been mine these few days melted away like water. ‘Not now, not now!’ I entreated him. I hastened away.

  London

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  And then – well, life plays strange tricks. In a week or two London had swallowed me up. How many times, I wonder, had I tried in
fancy to picture Mrs. Monnerie’s town house. How romantic an edifice fancy had made of it. Impressive in its own fashion, it fell far short of these ignorant dreams. It was No. 2 of about forty, set side by side, their pillared porticoes fronting a prodigious square. Its only ‘garden’, chiefly the resort of cats, children, nursemaids, an old whiskered gentleman in a bath chair, and sparrows, was visible to every passer-by through a spear-headed palisade of railings. Broad paving-stones skirted its areas, and over each descent of steps hung a bell-pull.

  On cloudless days the sun filled this square like a tank with a dry glare and heat in which even my salamanderish body sometimes gasped like a fish out of water. When rain fell out of the low, grey skies, and the scaling plane-trees hissed and the sparrows chirped, my spirits seemed to sink into my shoes. And fair or foul, London soot and dust were enemies alike to my eyes, my fingers, and my nose.

  Even my beloved cloud-burdened north-west wind was never quite free of smuts and grit; and when blew the east! But it must be remembered how ignorant and local I was. In my long carriage journey to Mrs. Monnerie’s through those miles and miles of grimed, huddling houses, those shops and hoardings and steeples, I had realized for the first time that its capital is not a part of England, only a sprawling human growth in it; and though I soon learned to respect it as that, I could never see without a sigh some skimpy weed struggling for life in its bricked-up crevices. It was nearly all dead, except for human beings, and that could not be said of Lyndsey, or even of Beechwood Hill.

  Maybe my imagination had already been prejudiced by a coloured drawing which Mr. Wagginhorne had sent me once for a Valentine when I was a child. It hangs up now in that child’s nursery for a memento that I have been nearly dead. In the midst of it on a hill, in gold and faded carmine, encircled with great five-pointed blue stars, and with green, grooved valleys radiating from its castellated towers, is a city – Hierusalem. A city surmounted by a narrow wreathing pennon on which inscribed in silver are the words: ‘Who heareth the Voice of My Spirit? And how shall they who deceive themselves resort unto Me?’

  Scattered far and near about this central piece, and connected with it by thin lines like wandering paths radiating from its gates across mountain, valley, and forest, lie, like round web-like smudges, if seen at a distance, the other chief cities of the world: Rome, Venice, Constantinople, Paris, and the rest. London sprawls low in the left-hand corner. The strongest glass cannot exhaust the skill and ingenuity of the maker of this drawing (an artist who, Mr. Wagginborne told me, was mad, poor thing – a man in a frenzy distemper – his very words). For when you peer close into this London, it takes the shape of a tusked, black, hairy boar, sprawling with hoofs outspread, fast asleep. And between them, and even actually diapering the carcass of the creature, is a perfect labyrinth of life – a high crowned king and queen, honey-hiving bees, an old man with a beard as if in a swoon, robbers with swords, travellers with beasts and torches, inns, a cluster of sharp-coloured butterflies (of the same proportion) fluttering over what looks like a clot of dung, a winding river, ships, trees, tombs, wasted unburied bodies, a child issuing from an egg, a phœnix taking flight; and so on. There is no end to this poor man’s devices. The longer you look, the more strange things you discover. Yet at distance of a pace or two, his pig appears to fade into nothing but a cloudy-coloured cobweb – one of the many around his bright-dyed Hierusalem.

  Now I cannot help wondering if this peculiar picture may not already have tinged a young mind with a curious horror of London; even though my aversion may have needed no artificial aid.

  Still I must not be ungrateful. These were vague impressions; and as an actual fact, Mrs. Monnerie had transported me into the very midst of the world of rank and fashion. Her No. 2 was now my home. The spaciousness, the unnatural solitude, the servants who never so much as glanced at me until after my back was turned, the hushed opulency, the formality! It was impossible to be just my everyday Miss M. My feet never found themselves twirling me round before their mistress was aware of it. I all but gave up gossiping with myself as I went about my little self-services.

  Parochial creature that I was – I missed Mrs. Bowater’s ‘homeliness’. To have things out of proportion to my body was an old story. To that, needless to say, I was perfectly accustomed. But here things were at first out of all proportion to my taste and habits, a very different thing. It is, in fact, extremely difficult in retrospect to get side by side again with those new experiences – with a self that was at one moment intoxicated and engrossed, and the next humiliated and desperately ill at ease, at the novelty of her surroundings.

  I had a maid, too, Fleming, with a pointed face and greenish eyes, who, unlike Mrs. Bowater, did not snort, but sniffed at things. Whether I retired for the night or rose in the morning, it was always to the accompaniment of a half-audible sniff. And I was never perfectly certain whether that sniff was one of the mind, or of the body, or of both. I found it hard to learn to do little enough for myself. Fleming despised me – at least so I felt – even for emptying my wash-basin, or folding my nightgown. Worse, I was never sure of being alone: she stole about so softly on her duties. And then the ‘company’.

  Not that the last black days at Beechwood were not even blacker for the change. At first I tried to think them quietly over, to ravel out my mistakes, and to get straight with my past. But I couldn’t in all that splendour. I had to spend much more time in bewaring of faux pas, and in growing accustomed to being a kind of tame, petted animal – tame even to itself, I mean. So Mrs. Bowater’s went floating off into the past like a dingy little house on the edge of a muddy river. Amid that old horror and anxiety, even my dear Pollie’s wedding day had slipped by unheeded. How often my thoughts went back to her now. If only she could have been my Fleming.

  I tried to make amends for my forgetfulness – even to the extent of pocketing my pride, and commissioning Fleming to purchase for me (out of the little stock of money left me by Fanny) a cradle, as a wedding present for Pollie, and a chest of tools for her husband. Oddly enough, she did not sniff at this request. Her green eyes almost sparkled. At the very word, wedding, she seemed to revive into a new woman. And Pollie completely forgave me:

  DEAR MISS M. – We was mother and all very sorry and grieved you couldn’t come though it passed off very satisfactory. As for forgetting please don’t mention the word, Lyndsey have never been the same since the old house was empty. It all passed off very satisfactory though with such torrents of rain there was a great pool in the churchyard which made everybody in high spirits. And William and I can’t thank you enough for those beautiful gifts you have sent us. Will have been a carpenter since he was a boy but there’s things there miss he says he never heard on in his born days but will be extreamly useful when he comes to know what for. And Mother says it was just like your good kind heart to think of what you sent me. You can’t think how handsome it looks in the new-papered room and I’m sure I hope if I may say so it may be quite as useful as Will’s tools, and its being pretty late to marry it isn’t as if I was a slip of a girl. And of course I have mother. Though if any does come you may be sure it will be a Sunday treat being too fine for ordinary.

  Please God miss I hope you are keeping well and happy in your new surroundings and that dream will come true. It was a dreadful moment that day by the shops but I’m thankful all came well. If you ever writes to Mrs. B. I trust you will mention me to her kindly not being much of a letter writer. If you could have heard the things she said of you your ears would burn miss you were such a treasure and to judge from her appearance she must have seen her troubles. And being a married woman helps to see into things though thank God I’m well and happy and William hopes to keep me so.

  Well, I must now close trusting that you are in the best of health. Your old Pollie.

  Miss Fenne have been very poorly of late so I’ve heard though not yet took to her bed – more peculiar than ever about Church and such like. Adam Waggett being W.’s oldest friend th
ough not my choice was to have been Best Man but he’s in service in London and couldn’t come.

  But if I pined for Pollie’s company, how can I express what the absence of Mrs. Bowater meant to me? Even when I had grown used to my new quarters, I would sometimes wake myself calling her name in a dream. She had been almost unendurably kind to me that last May morning in Wanderslore, when she had come to fetch me from yet another long adieu – to Mr. Anon. After he had gone, she and I had sat on for a while in that fresh spring beauty, a sober and miserable pair. Miserable on my side for miserable reasons. Then, if ever, had been the moment wherein to clear my breast and be in spirit as well as heart at one with her. Yet part for honesty and part for shame, I had remained silent. I could only comfort myself with remembering that we should soon meet again, and that the future might be kinder. Well, sometimes the future is kinder, but it is never the same thing as the past.

  ‘They may perhaps talk about that unfortunate – about that poor young Mr. Crimble, miss,’ was one of my landlady’s last remarks, as she sat staring rigidly at the great, empty house. ‘We all take good care to spread about each other’s horrors; and what else is a newspaper for? If so; well, I shouldn’t ask it, I suppose. But I’ve been thinking maybe my Fanny wasn’t everything to blame. We’ve had it out together, she and I, though only by letter. She was frightened of me as much as anything, though goodness knows I tried to bring her up a God-fearing child. She had no one, as she thought, to go to – and him a weak creature for all his obstinacy and, as you might say, penned in by his mother and his cloth. They say the Catholics don’t marry, and there’s nothing much to be wondered at in that. Poor young fellow, he won’t bear much thinking on, even when he’s gone out of mind. I’m fearing now that what’s come about may make her wilder and harder. Help her all you can, if only in your thoughts, miss; she sets more store by you than you might guess.’