Memoirs of a Midget

by de la Mare, Walter;

  Alas, Mrs. Monnerie was an enthusiast for all the pleasures of the senses. I verily believe that it was only my vanity which prevented me from becoming as inordinately fat as Sir William Forbes-Smith’s white meat threatened to make me.

  Brightest novelty of all was my first visit to a theatre – the London night, the glare and clamour of the streets, the packed white rows of faces, the sea-like noise of talk, the glitter, shimmer, dazzle – it filled my veins with quicksilver; my heart seemed to be throbbing in my breast as fast as Mrs. Monnerie’s watch. Fortunately she had remembered to take our seats on the farther side from the brass and drums of the orchestra. I restrained my shivers; the lights went out; and in the congregated gloom softly stole up the curtain on the ballet.

  Perched up there in the velvet obscurity of our box, I surveyed a woodland scene, ruins, distant mountains, a rocky stream on which an enormous moon shone, and actually moved in the theatrical heavens. And when an exquisite figure floated, pale, gauzy, and a-tiptoe, into those artificial solitudes, drenched with filmy light, with a far cry of ‘Fanny!’ my heart suddenly stood still; and all the old stubborn infatuation flooded heavily back upon me once more.

  Susan sat ghostlike, serenely smiling. Percy’s narrow jaws were working on their hinges like those of a rabbit I had seen through my grandfather’s spyglass nibbling a root of dandelion. Mrs. Monnerie reclined in her chair, hands on lap, with pursed-up mouth and weary eyes. There was nobody to confide in, then. But when from either side of the brightening stage flocked in winged creatures with lackadaisical arms and waxlike smilings, whose paint and powder caught back my mind rather than my feelings, my first light-of-foot was hovering beneath us close to the flaring footlights; and she was now no more Fanny than the circle of illuminated parchment over her head was the enchanting moon. What a complicated world it was with all these layers! The experience filled me with a hundred disquieting desires, and yet again, chiefest of them was that which made sensitive the stumps where, if I turned into a bird, my wings would grow, and which bade me ‘escape’.

  ‘She’s getting devilish old and creaky on her pins,’ yawned Percy, when the curtain had descended, and I had sighingly shrunk back into my own tasselled nook from the noise and emptiness of actuality.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs. Monnerie, ‘it is you, Percy, who are getting old. You were born blasé. You’ll be positively yawning your head off at the Last Trump.’

  ‘Dear Aunt Alice,’ said Percy, squinting through his opera glasses, ‘nothing of the kind. I shall be helping you to find the mislaid knucklebones. Besides, it’s better to be born – ‘

  But the rest of his sentence – and I listened to him only because I hated him – passed unheeded, for all my attention had been drawn to Susan. The hand beside me had suddenly clutched at her silk skirt, and a flush, gay as the Queen’s Union Jacks in Bond Street, had mounted into her clear, pale cheek, as with averted chin she sat looking down upon someone in the stalls. At sight of her blushing, a richer fondness for her lightened my mind. I followed her eye to its goal, and gazed enthralled, now up, now down, stringing all kinds of little beads of thoughts together; until, perhaps conscious that she was being watched, she turned and caught me. Flamed up her cheeks yet hotter; and now mine too; for my spirits had suddenly sunk into my shoes at the remembrance of Wanderslore and my ‘ghostly, gloating, little dwarfish creature’. Then once more darkness stole over the vast, quieting house, and the curtain reascended upon Romance.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Instead of its being a month as had been arranged, it was over six weeks before I was deposited again with my elegant dressing-case – a mere flying visitor – on Mrs. Bowater’s doorstep. A waft of cooked air floated out into the June sunshine through the letterbox. Then, in the open door, just as of old, flushed and hot in her black clothes, there stood my old friend, indescribably the same, indescribably different. She knelt down on her own doormat, and we exchanged loving greetings. Once more I trod beneath the wreathing, guardian horns, circumnavigated the age-stained eight-day clock, and so into my parlour.

  Nothing was changed. There stood the shepherdess ogling the shepherd; there hung Mr. Bowater; there dangled the chandelier; there angled the same half-dozen flies. Not a leg, caster, or antimacassar was out of place. Yet how steadfastly I had to keep my back turned on my landlady lest she should witness my discomfiture. Faded, dingy, crowded, shrunken – it seemed unbelievable, as I glanced around me, that here I could have lived and breathed so many months, and been so ridiculously miserable, so tragically happy. All that bygone happiness and wretchedness seemed, for the moment, mere waste and folly. And not only that – ‘common’. I climbed Mr. Bates’s clumsy staircase, put down my dressing-case, and slowly removing my gloves, faced dimly the curtained window. Beyond it lay the distant hills, misty in the morning sunbeams, the familiar meadows all but chin-high with buttercups.

  ‘Oh, Mrs. Bowater,’ I turned at last, ‘here I am. You and the quiet sky – I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one’s self, if one is always changing?’

  ‘There comes a time, miss, when we don’t change; only the outer walls crumble away morsel by morsel, so to speak. But that’s not for you yet. Still, that’s the reason. Me and the old sticks are just what we were, at least to the eye; and you – well, there! – the house has been like a cage with the bird gone.’

  She stood looking at me with one long finger stretching bonily out on the black and crimson tablecloth, a shining sea of loving kindness in her eyes. ‘I can see they have taken good care of you and all, preened the pretty feathers. Why, you are a bit plumper in figure, miss; only the voice a little different, perhaps.’ The last words were uttered almost beneath her breath.

  ‘My voice, Mrs. Bowater; oh, they cannot have altered that.’

  ‘Indeed they have, miss; neater-twisted, as you might say; but not scarcely to be noticed by any but a very old friend. Maybe you are a little tired with your long drive and those two solemnities on the box. I remember the same thing – the change of voice – when Fanny came back from her first term at Miss Stebbings’s.’

  ‘How is she?’ I inquired, in even tones. ‘She has never written to me. Not a word.’

  But, strange to say, as Mrs. Bowater explained, and not without a symptom of triumph, that’s just what Fanny had done. Her letter was awaiting me on the mantelpiece, tucked in behind a plush-framed photograph.

  ‘Now, let me see,’ she went on, ‘there’s hot water in your basin, miss – I heard the carriage on the hill; a pair of slippers to ease your feet, in case in the hurry of packing they’d been forgot; and your strawberries and cream are out there icing themselves on the tray. So we shan’t be no time, though disturbing news has come from Mr. Bowater, his leg not mending as it might have been foreseen – but that can wait.’

  An unfamiliar Miss M. brushed her hair in front of me in the familiar looking-glass. It was not that her Monnerie raiment was particularly flattering, or she, indeed, pleasanter to look at – rather the contrary; and I gazed long and earnestly into the glass. But art has furtive and bewitching fingers. While in my homemade clothes I had looked just myself, in these I looked like one or other of my guardian angels, or perhaps, as an unprejudiced Fleming would have expressed it – the perfect lady. How gradual must have been the change in me to have passed thus unnoticed. But I didn’t want to think. I felt dulled and dispirited. Even Mrs. Bowater had not been so entranced to see me as I had anticipated. It was tiresome to be disappointed. I rummaged in a bottom drawer, got out an old gown, made a grimace at myself in my mind, and sat down to Fanny’s letter. But then again, what are externals? Who was this cool-tempered Miss M. who was now scanning the once heartrending handwriting?

  DEAR MIDGETINA – When this will reach you, I don’t know. But somehow I cannot, or rather I can, imagine you the cynosure of the complete peerage, and prefer that my poor little letter should not uprear its modest head in the midst of all that Granjer. You may not agree – but
if a few weeks of a High Life that may possibly continue into infinity has made no difference to you, then Fanny is not among the prophets.

  We have not met since – we parted. But did you ever know a yesterday entomb itself with such ingratiating rapidity? Have you in your sublime passion for Nature ever watched a Sexton Beetle? But, mind you, I have helped. The further all that slips away, the less I can see I was to blame for it. What’s in your blood needs little help from outside. Cynical it may sound; but imagine the situation if I had married him! What could existence have been but a Nightmare-Life-in-Death? (Vide S. T. Coleridge.) Now the Dream continues – for us both.

  Oh, yes, I can see your little face needling up at this. But you must remember, dear Midgetina, that you will never, never be able to see things in a truly human perspective. Few people, of course, try to. You do. But though your view may be delicate as gossamer and clear as a glass marble, it can’t be full-size. Boil a thing down, it isn’t the same. What remains has the virtues of an essence, but not the volume of its origin. This sounds horribly school-booky; but I am quite convinced you are too concentrated. And I, being what I am, only the full volume can be my salvation. Enough. The text is as good as the sermon – far better, in fact.

  Now I am going to be still more callous. My own little private worries have come right – been made to. I’m tit for tat, that is, and wiser for it beyond words. Some day, when Society has taught you all its lessons, I will explain further. Anyhow, first I send you back £3 of what I owe you. And thank you. Next I want you to find out from Mrs. Mummery (as Mother calls her – or did), if among her distinguished acquaintance she knows anyone with one or two, or at most three, small and adorable children who need an excellent governess. Things have made it undesirable for me to stay on here much longer. It shall be I who give notice, or, shall we say, terminate the engagement.

  Be an angel, then. First, wake up. Candidly, to think me better than I am is more grossly unfair than if I thought you taller than you are. Next, sweet cynosure, find me a sinecure. Don’t trouble about salary. (You wouldn’t, you positive acorn of quixoticism, not if I owed you half a million.) But remember! Wanted by the end of August at latest, a Lady, wealthy, amiable, with two Cherubic Doves in family, boys preferred. The simple, naked fact being that after this last bout of life’s fitful fever, I pine for a nap.

  Of course Mother can see this letter if she wishes to, and you don’t mind. But personally I should prefer to have the bird actually fluttering in my hand before she contemplates it in the bush.

  I said pine just now. Do you ever find a word suddenly so crammed with meaning that at any moment it threatens to explode? Well, Midgetina, them’s my sentiments. Penitent I shall never be, until I take the veil. But I have once or twice lately awoke in a kind of glassy darkness – beyond all moonshine – alone. Then, if I hadn’t been born just thick-ribbed, unmeltable ice – well … Vulgar, vulgar Fanny!

  Fare thee well, Midgetina. ‘One cried “God bless us”, and “Amen” the other.’ Prostituted though he may have been for scholastic purposes, w. s. knew something of Life.

  Yours – F.

  What was the alluring and horrifying charm for me of Fanny’s letters? This one set my mind, as always, wandering off into a maze. There was a sour taste in it, and yet – it was all really and truly Fanny. I could see her unhappy eyes glittering through the mask. She saw herself – perhaps more plainly than one should. ‘Vulgar Fanny’. As for its effect on me, it was as if I had fallen into a bed of nettles, and she herself, picking me up, had scoffed: ‘Poor little Midgekin’, and supplied the dock. Her cynicism was its own antidote, I suppose. The selfishness, the vanity, and impenetrable hardness – even love had never been so blind as to ignore all that, and now what love remained for her had the sharpest of sharp eyes.

  And yet, though my little Bowater parlour looked cheap and dingy after the splendours of No. 2, Fanny somehow survived every odious comparison. She was very intelligent, I whispered to myself. Mrs. Monnerie would certainly approve of that. And I prickled at the thought. And I – I was too ‘concentrated’. In spite of my plumping ‘figure’, I could never, never be full-size. If only Fanny had meant that as a compliment, or even as a kind of explanation to go on with. No, she had meant it for the truth. And it must be far easier for a leopard to change his spots than his inside. The accusation set all the machinery of my mind emptily whirring.

  My glance fell on my Paris frock, left in a shimmering slovenly ring on the floor. It wandered off to Fanny’s postal order, spread over my lap like an expensive antimacassar. She had worked for that money; while I had never been anything more useful than ‘an angel’. In fancy I saw her blooming in a house as sumptuous as Mrs. Monnerie’s. Bloom indeed! I hated the thought, yet realized, too, that it was safer – even if for the time being not so profitable – to be life-size. And, as if out of the listening air, a cold dart pierced me through. Suppose my Messrs. Harris and Harris and Harris might not be such honest trustees as Miss Fenne had vouched for. Suppose they decamped with my £110 per annum! – I caught a horrifying glimpse of the wolf that was always sniffing at Fanny’s door.

  Mrs. Bowater brought in my luncheon, and – as I insisted – her own, too. The ice from Mr. Tidy, the fishmonger’s, had given a slightly marine flavour to the cream, and I had to keep my face averted as much as possible from the scorched red chop sprawling and oozing on her plate. How could she bring herself to eat it? We are such stuff as dreams are made on, said Hamlet. So then was Mrs. Bowater. What a mystery then was this mutton fat! But chop or no chop, it was a happy meal.

  Having waved my extremely ‘Fannyish’ letter at her, I rapidly dammed that current of her thoughts by explaining that I had changed my clothes not (as a gleam from her eye had seemed to suspect) because I was afraid of spoiling my London finery, but in order to be really at home. For the first time I surprised her muttering a grace over the bone on her plate. Then she removed the tray, accepted a strawberry, folded her hands in her lap, and we began to talk. She asked a hundred and one questions concerning my health and happiness, but never once mentioned Mrs. Monnerie; and at last, after a small pause, filled by us both with the same thought, she remarked that ‘that young Mr. Anon was nothing if not persistent’.

  Since I had gone, not a week had passed, she told me, but he had come rapping at the door after dusk to inquire after me. ‘Though why he should scowl like a pitchpot to hear that you are enjoying the lap of luxury –’ The angular shoulders achieved a shrug at least as Parisian as my discarded gown.

  ‘Why doesn’t he write to me, then? Twice, in ten weeks!’

  ‘Well, it’s six, miss, I’ve counted, though seemingly sixty. But that being the question, he is there to answer it, at any time this evening, or at six to-morrow morning, if London ways haven’t cured you of early rising.’

  So we went off together, Mrs. Bowater and I, in the cool of the evening about half an hour after sunset – she, alas, a little ruffled because I had refused to change back again into my Monnerie finery. ‘But Mrs. Bowater, imagine such a thing in a real wild garden!’ I protested, but without mollifying her, and without further explaining – how could I do that? – that the gown which Miss Sentimentality (or Miss Coquette) was actually wearing was that in which she had first met Mr. Anon.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I trod close in Mrs. Bowater’s track as she convoyed me through a sea of greenery breaking here and there to my waist and even above my hat. Summer had been busy in Wanderslore. Honeysuckle and acid-sweet brier were in bloom; sleeping bindweed and pimpernel. The air was liquidly sweet with uncountable odours. And the fading skies dyed bright the frowning front of the house, about which the new-come swifts shrieked in their play over my wilderness. Mr. Anon looked peculiar, standing alone there.

  Having bidden him a gracious good-evening, Mrs. Bowater after a long, ruminating glance at us, decided that she would ‘take a stroll through the grounds’. We watched her black figure trail slowly away up t
he overgrown terraces towards the house. Then he turned. His clear, dwelling eyes, with that darker line encircling the grey-black iris, fixed themselves on me, his mouth tight-shut.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, almost wearily. ‘It has been a long waiting.’

  I was unprepared for this sighing. ‘It has indeed,’ I replied. ‘But it is exceedingly pleasant to see Beechwood Hill again. I wrote; but you did not answer my letter, at least not the last.’

  My voice dropped away; every one of the fine little speeches I had thought to make forgotten.

  ‘And now you are here.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said quickly, a little timid of any silence between us, ‘and that’s pleasant too. You can have no notion what a stiff, glaring garden it is up there – geraniums and gravel, you know, and windows, windows, windows. They are wonderfully kind to me – but I don’t much love it.’

  ‘Then why stay?’ he smiled. ‘Still, you are, at least, safely out of her clutches.’

  ‘Clutches!’ I hated the way we were talking. ‘Thank you very much. You forget you are speaking of one of my friends. Besides, I can take care of myself.’ He made no answer.

  ‘You are so gloomy,’ I continued. ‘So – oh, I don’t know – about everything. It’s because you are always cooped up in one place, I suppose. One must take the world – a little – as it is, you know. Why don’t you go away; travel; see things? Oh, if I were a man.’