‘Mr. Crimble was unfortunate, my dear,’ said Mrs. Monnerie complacently, ‘because he cut his throat.’
‘Ach! how horrible. How can you say such things. Get down, you little silly! Please, Aunt Alice, there must be something pleasanter to talk about than that? Everybody knows about the hideous old Sir Jasper Goodge; so it doesn’t much matter what one says of him. But … ’ In spite of her command the little dog still gloated on her fingers.
‘There may be things pleasanter, my dear Susan,’ returned Mrs. Monnerie complacently, ‘but there are few so illuminating. In Greek tragedy, I used to be told, all such horrors have the effect of what is called a purgation. Did Mr. Crimble seem that kind of young man, my dear? And why was he so impetuous?’
‘I think, Mrs. Monnerie,’ said I, ‘he was in trouble.’
‘H’m,’ said she. ‘He had a very sallow look, I remember. So he discussed his troubles? But not with you, my fairy?’
‘Surely, Aunt Alice,’ exclaimed Susan hotly, ‘it isn’t quite fair or nice to bring back such ghastly memories. Why,’ she touched my hand with the tips of her light fingers, ‘she is quite cold already.’
‘Poppet’s hands are always cold,’ replied her aunt imperturbably. ‘And I suspect that she and I know more about this wicked world than has brought shadows to your young brow. We’ll return to Mr. Crimble, my dear, when Susan is butterflying elsewhere. She is so shockingly easily shocked.’
But it was Susan herself who returned to the subject. She came into my room where I sat reading – a collection of the tiniest little books in the most sumptuous gilt morocco had been yet another of Mrs. Monnerie’s kindnesses – and she stood for a moment musing out through my silk window blinds at the vast zinc tank on the roof.
‘Was that true?’ she said at last. ‘Did you really know someone who killed himself? Who was he? What was he like?’
‘He was a young man – in his twenty-ninth year,’ I replied automatically, ‘dark, short, with gold spectacles, a clergyman. He was the curate at St. Peter’s – Beechwood, you know.’ I was speaking in a low voice, as if I might be overheard.
It was extraordinary how swiftly Mr. Crimble had faded into a vanishing shadow. From the very instant of his death the world had begun to adjust itself to his absence. And now nothing but a memory – a black, sad memory.
But Susan’s voice interrupted these faint musings. ‘A clergyman!’ she was repeating. ‘But why – why did he – do that?’
‘They said melancholia. I suppose it was just impossible – or seemed impossible – for him to go on living.’
‘But what made him melancholy? How awful. And how can Aunt Alice have said it like that?’
‘But surely,’ I argued, in my old contradictory fashion, and spying about for a path of evasion, ‘it’s better to call things by their proper names. What is the body, after all? Not that I mean one has any right to – to not die in one’s own bed.’
‘And do you really think like that? – the body of no im-portance? You? Why, Miss M., Aunt Alice calls you her “pocket Venus”, and she means it, too, in her own sly way.’
‘It’s very kind of her,’ said I, breathing more freely. ‘Someone I know always calls me Midgetina, or Miss Midge, anything of that sort. I don’t mean, Miss Monnerie, that it doesn’t matter what we are called. Why, if that were so, there wouldn’t be any Society at all, would there? We should all be – well – anonymous.’ Deep inside I felt myself smile. ‘Not that that makes much difference to good poetry.’
Susan sighed. ‘How zigzaggedly you talk. What has poetry to do with Mr. Crimble? – that was his name, wasn’t it?’
‘Well, it hasn’t very much,’ I confessed. ‘He hadn’t the time for it.’
Susan seated herself on a cushion on the floor – and with how sharp a stab reminded me of Fanny and the old, carefree days of Wuthering Heights.
Surely – in spite of Fanny – life had definitely taken a tinge of Miss Brontë’s imagination since then. But it was only the languor of Susan’s movements, and that because she seemed a little tired, rather than merely indolent. And if from Fanny’s eyes had now stooped a serpent and now a blinded angel; from these clear blue ones looked only a human being like myself. Even as I write that ‘like myself’, I ponder. But let it stay.
‘So you really did know him?’ Susan persisted. ‘And it doesn’t seem a nightmare even to think of him? And who, I say, made it impossible for him to go on living?’ So intense was her absorption in these questions that when they ceased her hands tightened round her knees, and her small mouth remained ajar.
‘You said what just now,’ I prevaricated, looking up at her.
At this her blue eyes opened so wide I broke into a little laugh.
‘No, no, no, Miss Monnerie,’ I hastened to explain, ‘not me. It isn’t my story, though I was in it – and to blame. But please, if you would be so kind, don’t mention it again to Mrs. Monnerie, and don’t think about it any more.’
‘Not think about it! You must. Besides, thoughts sometimes think themselves. I always supposed that things like that only happened to quite – to different people, you know. Was he?’
‘Different?’ I couldn’t follow her. ‘He was the curate of St. Peter’s – a friend of the Pollackes.’
‘Oh, yes, the Pollackes,’ said she; and having glanced at me again, said no more.
The smallest confidence, I find, is a short cut to friendship. And after this little conversation there was no ice to break between Susan Monnerie and myself, and she often championed me in my little difficulties – even if only by her silence.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Miss Monnerie’s visits were less punctual though more frequent than Percy Maudlen’s. ‘And where is the toadlet?’ I heard him drawl one afternoon as I was being carried downstairs by the light-footed Fleming, on the padded tray which Mrs. Monnerie had had made for the purpose.
‘The toadlet, my dear Percy, is about to take a little gentle exercise with me in the garden, and you shall accompany us. If you were the kind of fairy-tale hero I used to read of in my nursery, you would discover the charm, and live happy ever after. But I see nothing of the heroic in you, and little of the hereafter. Miss M. is a feast of mercies.’
‘H’m. Providence packs his mercies into precious small quarters at times,’ he yawned.
‘Which suggests an uncivil speculation,’ replied his aunt, ‘on the size of your hat.’
‘But candidly, Aunt Alice,’ he retorted, ‘is your little attachée quite all there – I mean, all of her that there is? Personally I wouldn’t touch her, if I could help it, with a pair of tongs … A nasty trick!’
Then, ‘Hah!’ cried Mrs. Monnerie in a large, pleasant voice, ‘here is Miss M. Percy has been exposing a wounded heart, precious one. He is hurt because you look at him as if there were positively nothing more of him than what is there to see.’
‘Not at all, Aunt Alice,’ Percy drawled, with a jerk of his cane. ‘It was for precisely the opposite reason. Who knows you ain’t a witch, Miss M.? Distilled? Heavens, Aunt Alice! you are not bringing Cherry too?’
Yes, Cherry was coming too, with his globular eye and sneering nose. And so poor Percy, with a cold little smile on his fine pale features, had to accommodate himself to Mrs. Monnerie’s leisurely pace, and she to mine, while Cherry disdainfully shuffled in our rear. We were a singular quartette, though there were only two or three small children in the palisaded garden to enjoy the spectacle; and they, after a few polite and muffled giggles, returned to their dolls.
It was a stifling afternoon. As I trod the yellow gravel the quivering atmosphere all but blinded me with its reflected glare. The only sounds to be heard were the clang of a milkman’s handcart, and the pirouettes of a distant piano.
‘And what,’ Mrs. Monnerie suddenly inquired, looking down on me, with mauve-tinted cheek, from under her beribanded, long-handled parasol, ‘what is Miss M. thinking about?’
As a matter of fact I was walki
ng at that moment in imagination with Mrs. Bowater at Lyme Regis, but I seized the opportunity of hastening round from between aunt and nephew so that I could screen myself from the sun in Mrs. Monnerie’s ample shadow, and inquired why London gardeners were so much attached to geraniums, lobelias, calceolarias, and ice-plants? Mightn’t one just as well paint the border, Mrs. Monnerie, red, yellow, and blue? Then it would last – rain, snow, anything.
‘Now I’ll wager, Percy, you hadn’t noticed that,’ said Mrs. Monnerie in triumph.
‘I make it a practice’, he replied, ‘never to notice the obvious. It is merely a kind of least common denominator, as I believe you call ’em, and’, he wafted away a yawn with his glove, ‘I take no interest in vulgar fractions.’
I took a little look at him out of the corner of my eye, and wished that as a child I had paid more heed to my arithmetic lessons. ‘Look, Mrs. Monnerie,’ I cried piteously, ‘poor Cherry’s tongue is dangling right out of his head. He looks so hot and tired.’
She swept me a radiant, if contorted, gleam. ‘Percy, would you take pity on poor dear Cherry? Twice round, I think, will be as much as I can comfortably manage.’
So Percy had to take poor dear Cherry into his arms, just like a baby; and the quartette to all appearance became a trio.
But my existence at No. 2 was not always so monotonous as that. Mrs. Monnerie, in spite of her age, her ebony cane, and a tendency to breathlessness, was extremely active and alert. If life is a fountain, she preferred to be one of the larger bubbles as near as possible to its summit. She almost succeeded in making me a minute replica of herself. We shared the same manicurist, milliner, modiste, and coiffeur. And since it was not always practicable for Mahometta to be carried off to these delectable mountains, they were persuaded to attend upon her, and that as punctually as the fawn-faced man, Mr. Godde, who came to wind the clocks.
Whole mornings were spent in conclave in Mrs. Monnerie’s boudoir – Susan sometimes of our company. Julius Cæsar, so my little Roman history told me, had hesitated over the crossing of one Rubicon. Mrs. Monnerie and I confabulated over the fording of a dozen of its tributaries a day. A specialist – a singularly bald man in a long black coat – was called in. He eyed me this way, he eyed me that – with far more deference than I imagine Mr. Pellew can have paid me at my christening. He assured Mrs. Monnerie of his confirmed belief that the mode of the moment was not of the smallest consequence so far as I was concerned. ‘The hard, small hat,’ he smiled; ‘the tight-fitting sleeve!’ And yet, to judge by the clothes he did recommend, I must have been beginning to look a pretty dowd at Mrs. Bowater’s.
‘But even if Madam prefers to dress in a style of her own choice,’ he explained, ‘the difference, if she will understand, must still be in the fashion.’
But he himself – though Mrs. Monnerie, I discovered after he was gone, had not even noticed that he was bald – he himself interested me far more than his excellent advice; and not least when he drew some papers out of a pocket-book, and happened to let fall on the carpet the photograph of a fat little boy with an immense mop of curls. So men – quite elderly, practical men, can blush, I thought to myself; for Dr. Phelps had rather flushed than blushed; and my father used only to get red.
Since nothing, perhaps, could make me more exceptional in appearance than I had been made by Providence, I fell in with all Mrs. Monnerie’s fancies, and wore what she pleased – pushing out of mind as well as I could all thought of bills. I did more than that. I really began to enjoy dressing myself up as if I were my own doll, and when alone I would sit sometimes in a luxurious trance, like a lily in a pot. Yet I did not entirely abandon my old little Bowater habit of indoor exercise. When I was secure in my room I would sometimes skip. And on one of Fleming’s afternoons ‘out’ I even furbished up what I could remember of my four kinds of Kentish hop-scotch, with a slab of jade for dump. But in the very midst of such recreations I would surprise myself lost in a kind of vacancy. Apart from its humans and its furniture, No. 2 was an empty house.
I do not mean that Mrs. Monnerie was concerned only with externals. Sir William Forbes-Smith advised that a little white meat should enrich my usual diet of milk and fruit, and that I should have sea-salt baths. The latter were more enjoyable than the former, though both, no doubt, helped to bring back the strength sapped out of me by the West End.
My cheekbones gradually rounded their angles; a livelier colour came to lip and skin, and I began to be as self-conscious as a genuine beauty. One twilight, I remember, I had slipped across from out of my bath for a pinch of the ‘crystals’ which Mrs. Monnerie had presented me with that afternoon; for my nose, also, was accustoming itself to an artificial life. An immense cheval looking-glass stood there, and at one and the same instant I saw not only my own slim, naked, hastening figure reflected in its placid deeps, but, behind me, that of Fleming, shadowily engrossed. With a shock I came to a standstill, helplessly meeting her peculiar stare. Only seven yards or so of dusky air divided us. Caught back by this unexpected encounter, for one immeasurable moment I stood thus, as if she and I were mere shapes in a picture, and reality but a thought.
Then suddenly she recovered herself, and with a murmur of apology was gone. Huddled up in my towel, I sat motionless, shrunken for a while almost to nothing in the dense sense of shame that had swept over me. Then suddenly I flung myself on my knees, and prayed – though what about and to whom I cannot say. After which I went back and bathed myself again.
The extravagances of Youth! No doubt, the worst pang was that though vaguely I knew that my most secret solitude had been for a while destroyed, that long intercepted glance of half-derisive admiration had filled me with something sweeter than distress. If only I knew what common-sized people really feel like in similar circumstances. Biographies tell me little; and can one trust what is said in novels? The only practical result of this encounter was that I emptied all Mrs. Monnerie’s priceless crystals forthwith into my bath, and vowed never, never again to desert plain water. So, for one evening, my room smelt like a garden in Damascus.
As for Fleming, she never, of course, referred to this incident, but our small talk was even smaller than before. If, indeed, to Percy, ‘toadlet’ was the aptest tag for me; for Fleming, I fancy ‘stuck-up’ sufficed. Instinct told her that she was only by courtesy a lady’s-maid.
Less for her own sake than for mine, Mrs. Monnerie and I scoured London for amusement, even though she was irritated a little by my preference for the kind which may be called instructive. The truth is, that in all this smooth idleness and luxury a hunger for knowledge had seized on me; as if (cat to grass) my mind were in search of an antidote.
Mrs. Monnerie had little difficulty in securing ‘private views’. She must have known everybody that is anybody – as I once read of a Countess in a book. And I suppose there is not a very large number of this kind of person. Whenever our social engagements permitted, we visited the show places, galleries, and museums. Unlike the rest of London, I gazed at Amenhotep’s Mummy in the late dusk of a summer evening; and we had much to say to one another; though but one whiff of the huge round library gave me a violent headache. When the streets had to be faced, Fleming came with us in the carriage, and I was disguised to look as much like a child as possible – a process that made me feel at least twenty years older. The Tower of London, the Zoo, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s – each in turn fell an early prey to my hunger for learning and experience. As for the Thames, the very sight of it seemed to wash my small knowledge of English history clear as crystal.
Mrs. Monnerie yawned her way on – though my comments on these marvels of human enterprise occasionally amused her. I made amends, too, by accompanying her to less well-advertised show-places, and patiently sat with her while she fondled unset and antique gems in a jeweller’s, or inspected the china, miniatures, and embroideries in private collections. If the mere look of the books in the British Museum gave me a headache, it is curious that the Chamber of Horrors at Madam
e Tussaud’s Wax Works did not. And yet I don’t know; life itself had initiated me into this freemasonry. I surveyed the guillotine without a shudder, and eyed Mr. Hare and Charles Peace with far less discomposure than General Tom Thumb, or even Robert Burns in the respectable gallery above. My one misfortune was that I could look at no murderer without instantly recomposing the imaginary scene of his crime within my mind. And as after a while Mrs. Monnerie decided to rest on a chair set for her by the polite attendant under the scaffold, and we had the Chamber nearly to ourselves, I wandered on alone, and perhaps supped rather too full of horrors for one evening.
Mrs. Monnerie would often question me. ‘Well, what do you think of that, Mammetinka?’ or, ‘Now, then, my inexhaustible little Miss Aristotle, discourse on that.’
And like a bullfinch I piped up in response to the best of my ability. My answers, I fear, were usually evasive. For I had begun to see that she was making experiments on my mind and senses, as well as on my manners and body. She was a ‘fancier’. And one day I ogled up at her with the pert remark that she now possessed a pocket barometer which would do its very utmost to remain at 31 deg., if that was possible without being ‘Very Dry’.
She received this little joke with extraordinary good humour. ‘When I come down in the world, my dear,’ she said, ‘and these horrid anarchists are doing their best to send us all sky-high first, we’ll visit the Courts of Europe together, like Count Boruwlaski. Do you think you could bring yourself to support your old friend in her declining years in a declining age?’
I smiled and touched her glove. ‘Where thou goest, I will go,’ I replied; and then could have bitten off my tongue in remorse. ‘Pah,’ gasped a secret voice, ‘so that’s going the same way too, is it?’
Yet heaven knows I was not a Puritan – and never shall be. I just adored things bright and beautiful. Music, too, in moderation, was my delight; and Susan Monnerie with her small, sweet voice would sometimes sing to me in one room while – in an almost unbearable homesickness – I listened in another. Concerts in general, however, left every muscle of my body as stiff with rheumatism as it was after my visit to Mr. Moss’s farmhouse. The unexpected blare of a brass band simply froze my spine; and a really fine performance on the piano was sheer torture. Once, indeed, when Mrs. Monnerie’s carriage was one of a mellay clustered together while the Queen drove by, in the appalling clamour of the Lancers’ trombones and kettledrums, I fell prostrate in a kind of fit. So it was my silly nerves that cheated me of my one and only chance to huzza a Crowned Head not, if I may say so without disrespect, so very many sizes larger than my own.
Memoirs of a Midget Page 29