His eyes watched my lips. Everything seemed to have turned sour. To have waited and dreamed; to have actually changed my clothes and come scuttling out in a silly longing excitement – for this. Why, I felt more lonely and helpless under Wanderslore’s evening sky than ever I had been in my cedar-wood privacy in No. 2.
‘I mean it, I mean it,’ I broke out suddenly. ‘You domineer over me. You pamper me up with silly stories – “trailing clouds of glory”, I suppose. They are not true. It’s every one for himself in this world, I can tell you; and in future, please understand, I intend to be my own mistress. Simply because in a little private difficulty I asked you to help me –’
He turned irresolutely. ‘They have dipped you pretty deep in the dye-pot.’
‘And what, may I ask, do you mean by that?’
‘I mean’, and he faced me, ‘that I am precisely what your friend, Miss Bowater, called me. What more is there to say?’
‘And pray, am I responsible for everything my friends say? And to have dragged up that wretched fiasco after we had talked it out to the very dregs! Oh, how I have been longing and longing to come home. And this is what you make of it.’
He turned his face towards the west, and its vast light irradiated his sharp-boned features, the sloping forehead beneath the straight, black hair. Fume as I might, resentment fainted away in me.
‘You don’t seem to understand,’ I went on; ‘it’s the waste – the waste of it all. Why do you make it so that I can’t talk naturally to you, as friends talk? If I am alone in the world, so are you. Surely we can tell the truth to one another. I am utterly wretched.’
‘There is only one truth that matters; you do not love me. Why should you? But that’s the barrier. And the charm of it is that not only the Gods, but the miserable Humans, if only they knew it, would enjoy the sport.’
‘Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to me, I should like to know, in this – this cage?’
‘Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars,’ he sneered miserably. ‘Still we are sharing the same language now.’
The same language. Self-pitying tears pricked into my eyes; I turned my head away. And in the silence, stealthily, out of a dark woody hollow nearer the house, as if at an incantation, broke a low, sinister, protracted rattle, like the croaking of a toad. I knew that sound; it came straight out of Lyndsey – called me back.
‘S-sh!’ I whispered, caught up with delight. ‘A nightjar! Listen. Let’s go and look.’
I held out my hand. His sent a shiver down my spine. It was clammy cold, as if he had just come out of the sea. Thrusting our way between the denser clumps of weeds, we pushed on cautiously until we actually stood under the creature’s enormous oak. So elusive and deceitful was the throbbing croon of sound that it was impossible to detect on which naked branch in the black leafiness the bird sat churring. The wafted fragrances, the placid dusky air, and, far, far above, the delicate, shallowing deepening of the faint-starred blue – how I longed to sip but one drop of drowsy mandragora and forget this fretting, inconstant self.
We stood, listening; and an old story I had read somewhere floated back into memory. ‘Once, did you ever hear it?’ I whispered close to him, ‘there was a ghost came to a house near Cirencester. I read of it in a book. And when it was asked: “Are you a good spirit or a bad?”, it made no answer, but vanished, the book said – I remember the very words – “with a curious perfume and most melodious twang”. With a curious perfume’, I repeated, ‘and most melodious twang. There now, would you like me to go like that? Oh, if I were a moth, I would flit in there and ask that old Death-thing to catch me. Even if I cannot love you, you are part of all this. You feed my very self. Mayn’t that be enough?’
His grip tightened round my fingers; the entrancing, toneless dulcimer thrummed on.
I leaned nearer, as if to raise the shadowed lids above the brooding eyes. ‘What can I give you – only to be your peace? I do assure you it is yours. But I haven’t the secret of knowing what half the world means. Look at me. Is it not all a mystery? Oh, I know it, even though they jeer and laugh at me. I beseech you be merciful, and keep me what I am.’
So I pleaded and argued, scarcely heeding the words I said. Yet I realize now that it was only my mind that wrestled with him there. It was what came after that took the heart out of me. There came a clap of wings, and the bird swooped out of its secrecy into the air above us, a moment showed his white-splashed, cinder-coloured feathers in the dusk, seemed to tumble as if broken-winged upon the air, squawked, and was gone. The interruption only hastened me on.
‘Still, still listen,’ I implored: ‘if Time would but cease awhile and let me breathe.’
‘There, there,’ he muttered. ‘I was unkind. A filthy jealousy.’
‘But think. There may never come another hour like this. Know, know now, that you have made me happy. I can never be so alone again. I share my secretest thoughts – my imagination, with you; isn’t that a kind of love? I assure you that it is. Once I heard my mother talking, and sometimes I have wondered myself, if I am quite like – oh, you know what they say: a freak of Nature. Tell me; if by some enchantment I were really and indeed come from those snow mountains of yours, and that sea, would you recognize me? Would you? No, no; it’s only a story – why, even all this green and loveliness is only skin deep. If the Old World were just to shrug its shoulders, Mr. Anon, we should all, big and little, be clean gone.’
My words seemed merely to be like drops of water dripping upon a sponge. ‘Wake!’ I tugged at his hand. ‘Look!’ Kneeling down sidelong, I stooped my cheek up at him from a cool, green mat of grass, amid which a glow-worm burned: ‘Is this a – a Stranger’s face?’
He came no nearer; surveyed me with a long, quiet smile of infinitely sorrowful indulgence. ‘A Stranger’s? How else could it be, if I love you?’
Intoxicated in that earthy fragrance, washed about with the colours of the motionless flowers, it seemed I was merely talking to someone who could assure me that I was still in life, still myself. A strand of my hair had fallen loose, and smiling its gold pin between my lips, I looped it back. ‘Oh, but you see – haven’t I told you? – I can’t love you. Perhaps; I don’t know …What shall I do? What shall I say? Now suppose’, I went on, ‘I like myself that much,’ and I held my thumb and finger just ajar, ‘then I like you, think of you, hope for you, why, that!’ – and I swept my hand clean across the empty zenith. ‘Now do you understand?’
‘Oh, my dear, my dear,’ he said, and smiled into my eyes.
I laughed out in triumph at the success of my device. And he laughed too, as if in a conspiracy with me – and with Misery, I could see, sitting like an old hag at the door from which the sound came. And out of the distance the nightjar set again to its churring.
‘Then I have made you a little – a little less unhappy?’ I asked him, and hid my face in my hands, in a desolate peace and solitude.
He knelt beside me, held out his hand as if to touch me, withdrew it again. All presence of him distanced and vanished away in that small darkness. I prayed not to think any more, not to be exiled again into – how can I explain my meaning except by saying – Myself? Would some further world have withdrawn its veils and have let me in then and for ever if that lightless quiet could have continued a little longer? Is it the experience of every human being seemingly to trespass at times so close upon the confines of existence as that?
It was his own harsh voice that broke the spell.
‘Wake, wake!’ it called in my ear. ‘The woman is looking for you. We must go.’
My hands slipped from my face. A slow, sobbing breath drew itself into my body. And there beneath evening’s vacancy of twilight showed the transfigured scene of the garden, and, near me, the anxious, suffering face of this stranger, faintly greened by the light of the worm.
‘Wake!’ he bade me, rapping softly with his bony finger on my hand. I stared at him out of a dream.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Time and circumstance have strangely divided me from the Miss M. of those days. I look back on her, not with shame, but with a shrug of my shoulders, a sort of incredulous tolerance – almost as if she too were a stranger. Perhaps a few years hence I shall be looking back with an equal detachment on the Miss M. seated here at this moment with her books and her pen in the solitude of her thoughts, vainly endeavouring to fret out and spin together mere memories that nobody will ever have the patience to read. Shall I then be able to tell myself what I want now, give words to the vague desires that still haunt me? Shall I still be waiting on for some unconceived eventuality?
There is, too, another small riddle of a different kind, which I cannot answer. In memory and imagination, as I steadily gaze out of this familiar room recalling the past, I am that very self in that distant garden of Wanderslore. But even as I look, I am not only within myself there, but also outside of myself. I seem, I mean, actually to be contemplating, as if with my own eyes, those two queer, silent figures returning through the drowsying, moth-haunted flowers and grasses to the black, vigilant woman awaiting them beside the garden house. ‘Alas, you poor, blind thing,’ I seem, like a ghost, to warn the one small creature, ‘have a care; seize your happiness; it is vanishing!’
All that I write, then, is an attempt only to tell, not to explain. I realize that sometimes I was pretending things, yet did not know that I was pretending; that often I acted with no more conscience or consciousness, maybe, than has a carrion crow that picks out the eyes of a lamb, or a flower that draws in its petals at noon. Yet I know – know absolutely, that I was, and am, responsible not only for myself, but for everything. For my whole world. And I cannot explain this either. At times, as if to free myself, I had to stare at what appalled me. I am sure, for instance, that Mrs. Monnerie never dreamed that her mention of Mr. Crimble sent me off in fancy at the first opportunity to that woeful outhouse in his mother’s garden to look in on him there – again. But I did so look at him, and was a little more at peace with him after that. Why, then, cannot I be at peace with one who loved me?
Maybe if I could have foreseen how I was to come to Wanderslore again, I should have been a less selfish, showy, and capricious companion to him that June evening. But I was soon lapped back into my life in London; and thought only of Mr. Anon, as I am apt to think of God: namely, when I needed his presence and his help. As a matter of fact, I had small time to think. Even the doubts and misgivings that occasionally woke me in the night melted like dreams in the morning. Every morrow blotted out its yesterday – as faded flowers are flung away out of a vase.
In that vortex of visits and visitors, that endless vista of amusements and eating and drinking – some hidden spring of life in me began to fail. What a little self-conscious affected donkey I became, shrilly hee-hawing away; the centre of a simpering throng plying me with flattery. What airs I put on.
If this Life of mine had been a Biography, the author of it would have had the satisfaction of copying out from a pygmy blue morocco diary the names of all the celebrated and distinguished people I met at No. 2. A few of them underlined in red! The amusing thing is that, like my father, I was still a Radical at heart and preferred low life – flea-bane and chick-weed – to the fine flowers of culture; which only means, of course, that in this I am a snob inside out. Nevertheless, the attention I had shunned I now began to covet, and, like a famous artist or dancer, would go sulky to bed if I had been left to blush at being unseen. I forced myself to be more and more fastidious, and tried to admire as little as possible. I would even imitate and affect languid pretentiousnesses and effronteries; and learned to be downright rude to people in a cultivated way. As for small talk, I soon accumulated a repertory of that, and could use the fashionable slang and current ‘conversations’ like a native. All this intensely amused Mrs. Monnerie. For, of course, the more like the general run of these high livers I was, the more conspicuous I became.
The truth is, the Lioness’s head was in peril of being turned, and, like a blind kitten in a bucket of water, I came very near to being drowned in the social cream-bowl. For what little I gained in public by all this silly vanity I paid a heavy price when alone. I began to be fretful and utterly useless to myself – just lived on from excitement to excitement. And Fleming soon had better reasons for detesting me than merely because I was horribly undersized.
Perhaps I am exaggerating; but the truth is I find it extremely difficult to keep patience with Mrs. Monnerie’s pampered protégée. She was weak and stupid. Yet learning had not lost its charm. My mind persisted in being hungry, however much satiated were my senses and fine feelings. I even infected Susan with my enthusiasm for indigestible knowledge. For since Mrs. Monnerie had begun to find my passion for shells, fossils, flints, butterflies, and stuffed animals a little wearisome, it was her niece who now accompanied me to my many Meccas in her stead. By a happy chance we often met on these pilgrimages the dark, straight-nosed young man whom I had looked down upon at my first ballet, and who also apparently was a fanatic.
However deeply engrossed in mementoes of the Dark or Stone Ages he might be, he never failed to see us the moment we entered his echoing gallery. He would lift his eyebrows; his monocle would drop out; and he would come sauntering over to meet us, looking as fresh as apples cold with dew. I liked Captain Valentine. So much so that I sent an almost rapturous description of him to Mr. Anon.
He did not seem in the least to mind being seen in my company. We had our little private jokes together. We both enjoyed the company of Susan. He was so crisp and easy and quick-witted, and yet – to my unpractised eye – looked delightfully domesticatable. Even the crustiest old caretaker, at a word and a smile from Captain Valentine, would allow me to seat myself on the glass cases. So I could gloat on their contents at leisure. And certainly of the three of us I was by far the most diligent student.
Long hours, too, of the none too many which will make up my life would melt away like snow in Mrs. Monnerie’s library. A button specially fixed for me in the wainscot would summon a manservant. Having ranged round the lofty walls, I would point up at what books I wanted. They would be strewn around me on the floor – gilded and leathery volumes, some of them almost of my own height, and many times my weight. I would open the lid, turn the great pages, and carefully sprawling on my elbows between them, would pore for hours together on their coloured pictures of birds and flowers, gems and glass, ruins, palaces, mountains – hunting, cock-fighting, fashions, fine ladies, and foreign marvels. And I dipped into novels so like the unpleasanter parts of my own life that they might just as well have been autobiographies.
The secret charm of all this was that I was alone; and while I was reading I ceased to worry. I just drugged my mind with books. I would go rooting and rummaging in Mrs. Monnerie’s library, like a little pig after truffles. There was hardly a subject I left untasted – old plays, and street ballads; Johnson’s enormous dictionary, that extraordinary book on Melancholy with its borage and hellebore and the hatted young man in love; Bel and the Dragon, the Newgate Calendar. I even nibbled at Debrett – and clean through all its ‘M’s’. The more I read, the more ignorant I seemed to become; and quite apart from this smattering jumble of knowledge, I pushed my way through memoirs and romances at the very sight of which my poor godmother would have fainted dead off.
They may have been harmful; but I certainly can’t say that I regret having read them – which may be part of the harm. You could tell the really bad ones almost at a sniff. They had bad smells, like a beetle cupboard or a scented old man. I read on of witchcraft and devils, yet hated the cloud they cast over me – like some horrible treacle in the mind. But as for the authors who just reasoned about Time and God and Miracles, and so on, I poked about in them willingly enough; but my imagination went off the other way – with my heart in its pocket. Possibly without knowing it. But I do know this: that never to my dying day shall I learn what a common-sized person with a pen or a
pencil can not make shocking, or be shocked at. It seemed to me that to some of these authors the whole universe was nothing better than a Squid, and a very much scandalized young woman would attempt to replace their works on the shelves.
When in good faith I occasionally ventured to share (or possibly to show off) some curious scrap of information with Mrs. Monnerie, I thought her eyes would goggle out of her head. It was perhaps my old mole habit that prevented me from dividing things up into the mentionable and unmentionable. Possibly I carried this habit to excess; and yet, of course, remained the slave of my own small pruderies. Still, I don’t think it was either Mrs. Monnerie’s or Percy’s pruderies that I had to be careful about. To make him laugh was one of the most hateful of my experiences at No. 2.
I have read somewhere that the human instincts are ‘un-like Apollyon, since they always degrade themselves by their disguises. They dress themselves up as Apes and Mandrils; he as a ringed, supple, self-flattering, seductive Serpent’. Possibly that has something to do with it. Or is it that my instincts are also on a petty scale? I don’t know. I hate and fear pain even more than most people, and have fought pretty hard in the cause of self-preservation. On the other hand, I haven’t the faintest wish in the world to ‘perpetuate my species’. Not that I might not have been happy in a husband and in my children. I suppose that kind of thing comes on one just as naturally as breathing. Nevertheless, I suspect I was born to be an Old Maid. Calling up Spirits from the vasty deep has always seemed to me to be a far more dreadful mystery than Death. It is not, indeed, the ghosts of the dead and the past which I think should oppress the people I see around me, but those of the children to come. I thank God from the bottom of my heart for the happiness and misery of having been alive, but my small mind reels when I brood on what the gift of it implies.
Memoirs of a Midget Page 31