Memoirs of a Midget

by de la Mare, Walter;

  ‘My dear, dear young lady,’ he cried, beaming down on me from between his peaked collar-tips, over his little black bow, the gold rim of his large eyeglasses pressed to his lip, ‘a far – far more refreshing sight! Would you believe it, it was the pleasing little hobby of that oiled and curled monstrosity up there – Heliogabalus – to smother his guests in roses – literally, smother them? Now,’ and he looked at me quizzically as if through a microscope, ‘the one question is how have you survived what I imagine must have been a similar ordeal? Not quite at the last gasp, I hope? Comparatively happy? It’s all we can hope for, my dear, in this world.’

  I nodded, hungrily viewing him, meeting as best I could the bright blue eyes, and realizing all in a moment the dark inward of my mind.

  Those other eyes began thinking as well as looking. ‘Well, well, that’s right. And now we must have a little quiet talk before his Eminence reappears. So our old friend Mrs. Bowater has gone husband-hunting? Gallant soul! she came to see me.’

  Squatted up on a crimson leather stool, I must have looked the picture of astonishment.

  ‘Yes,’ he assured me, ‘there are divinities that shape our ends; and Mrs. Bowater is one of them. If anything can hasten her husband’s recovery – but never mind that. She has left me in charge. And here I am. The question is, can we have too many trustees, guardians? Perhaps not. Look at the Koh-i-Noor, now.’

  I much preferred to continue to look at Sir Walter, even though, from the moment I had entered the room, at least five or six voices had begun arguing in my mind. And here, as if positively in answer to them, was his very word – trustee. I pounced on it like a wasp on a plum. It was a piece of temerity that saved me from – well, as I sit thinking things over in quiet and leisure in my old Stonecote, the house of my childhood, I don’t know what it hasn’t saved me from.

  ‘Too many trustees, Sir Walter?’ I breathed. ‘I suppose, not – if they are honest.’

  ‘But bless me, my dear young lady,’ his face seemed to be shining like the sun’s in mist; ‘whose heresies are these? Have they given you a French maid?’

  ‘Fleming; oh, no,’ I replied, laughing out, ‘she’s a Woman of Kent, all but. What I was really thinking is, that I would, if I may – and please forgive me – very much like to show you a letter. I simply can’t make head or tail of it. But it’s dreadfully – suggestive.’

  ‘My dear, I came in certain hope of being shown nothing less vital than your heart,’ he retorted gallantly.

  So off I went – with my visitor all encouraging smiles as he opened the door for me – to fetch my lawyer’s bombshell.

  Glasses on tip of his small, hawklike nose, Sir Walter’s glittering eyes seemed to master this obscure document at one swoop.

  ‘H’m,’ he said cautiously, and once more communed with the bust of Heliogabalus. ‘Now what did you think of it all? Was it worth six and eightpence, do you think?’

  ‘I couldn’t think. It frightened me. ‘The Shares’, you know. Whose Shares? Of What? I’m terribly, terribly ignorant.’

  ‘Ah,’ he echoed, ‘the Shares – as the blackbird said to the Cherry Tree. And there was nobody, you thought, to discuss the letter with? You didn’t answer it?’

  ‘Nobody,’ said I, with a shake of my head, and smoothing my silk skirts over my knees.

  ‘Why, of course not,’ he sparkled. ‘You see how admirably things work out. Miss Fenne, Mr. Pellew, Mrs. Bowater, my wife, Tom o’ Bedlam, Hypnos, Mrs. Monnerie, Mr. Bowater, Mrs. Bowater, the Harrises, Me. ’Pon my word, you’d think it was a plot. Now, supposing I keep this letter – could you trust it with me for a while? – and supposing I see these gentlemen, and make a few inquiries; and that in the meantime – we – we bottle the Cherries? But first, I must have a little more information. Your father, my dear. Let’s just unbosom ourselves of all this horrible old money-grubbing, and see exactly how we stand.’

  I needed no second invitation, and poured out helter-skelter all (how very little, in my girlish folly) that I knew about my father’s affairs, and of how I had been ‘left’.

  ‘And Miss Fenne, now?’ he peered out, as if at my godmother herself. ‘Why didn’t she send word to France? Where is this providential step-grandfather, Monsieur Pierre de Ronvel, all this time? Not dead too?’

  Shamefully I had to confess that I did not know; had not even inquired. ‘It is my miserable ingratitude. I just blow hot and cold; that is my nature.’

  ‘Well, well, it may be so.’ He smiled at me, as if out of the distance, with the serenest kindliness. ‘But you and I are going to share the temperate zone – a cool, steady Trade Wind.’

  ‘If only,’ I smiled, taking him up on this familiar ground, ‘if only I could keep clear of the Tropics – and that Sargasso Sea!’

  At this little sally he gleamed at me as goldenly as the spade guinea that dangled on his waistcoat. Then he rose and surveyed one by one a row of silent, sumptuous tomes in their glazed retreat: ‘The Sargasso Sea; h’m, h’m, h’m; and one might suppose,’ he cast a comprehensive glance at the taciturn shelves around and above us, ‘one might suppose the tuppenny box would afford some of these a more sociable haven.’

  But this was Greek to me. ‘Mrs. Monnerie is generous?’ he went on, ‘indulgent? Groundsel, seed, sugar, and a Fleming. Yet perhaps the door might be pushed just an inch or two farther open, eh? What I’m meaning, my dear, is, will you perhaps wait in patience a little? And if anything should go amiss, will you make me a promise to send just a wisp of a word and a penny stamp to an old friend who will be doing his best? The first lawyer, you know, was a waif that was adopted by a tortoise and a fox. Now I’m going to be a mole – with its fur on the bias, as Miss Rossetti happened to notice – and burrow. So you see, all will come well!’

  I must have been sitting very straight and awkward on my stool, and not heeding what my face was telling.

  ‘Is there anything else distressing you, my dear?’ he asked anxiously, almost timidly.

  ‘Only myself,’ I muttered. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any end to it all. I grope on and on, and – the kindness only makes it worse. Can there be a riddle, Sir Walter, that hasn’t any answer? I remember reading in a book that was given me that Man “comes into the world like morning mushrooms”. Don’t you think that’s true; even, I mean, of – everybody?’

  But his views on this subject were not to be shared with me for many a long day. Our half-hour was over; and there stood Mrs. Monnerie, mushroom-shaped, it is true, but suggesting nothing of the evanescent, as she looked in on us from the mahogany doorway.

  ‘How d’ye do, Sir Walter,’ she greeted him. ‘If it hadn’t been for an exceedingly interesting young creature disguised, I understand, as a Miss Bowater, I should have had the happiness of seeing you earlier. And how is our Peri looking, do you think?’

  ‘How is our Peri looking?’ he repeated musingly, poising himself, and eyeing me, on his flat, gleaming boots; ‘why, Mrs. Monnerie, as I suppose a Peri should be looking – into Paradise.’

  ‘Then, my Peri,’ said Mrs. Monnerie blandly, ‘ask Sir Walter to be a complete angel, and stay to luncheon.’

  Mrs. Monnerie, I remember, was in an unusually vivacious humour at that meal; and devoured immense quantities of salmon mayonnaise. One might have supposed that Fanny’s influence had added a slim crescent of silvery light to her habitual earthshine. None the less, when our guest was gone, she seemed to subside into a shallow dejection; and I into a much deeper. We sat on together in an uneasy silence, she pushing out her lips, restlessly prodding Cherry with her foot, and occasionally uttering some inarticulate sound that was certainly not intended as conversation.

  I think Mrs. Monnerie was in secret a more remarkable woman than she affected to be. However thronged a room might be, you could never be unaware that she was in it. And in the gentle syllabub of polite conversation her silence was like that of an ancient rock with the whispering of the wavelets on the sands at its base. I remember once seeing a
comic picture of an old lady with a large feather in her bonnet placidly sitting on a camp-stool beneath a pollard willow on one side of a stream, while a furious, frothing bull stood snorting and rampaging on the other. I think the old lady in the picture was meant to be Britannia; but, whoever or whatever the bull might represent, Mrs. Monnerie reminded me of her. She sat more heavily, more passively, in her chair than anyone I have ever seen.

  Of course – quite apart from intelligence – there must be many, many layers in society, and I cannot say at all how far Mrs. Monnerie was from the topmost. But I am sure she was able to look down on a good many of them; while I was born always to be ‘looking up’. I was looking up at Mrs. Monnerie now from my stool. Widespread in her chair, she had closed her eyes, and to judge from her face, she was dreaming. It looked more faded than usual. The puckers gave it a prunish look. Queer, contorting expressions were floating across her features. Her soul seemed gently to rock in them, like an empty boat at night on a dark river. In the pride of my youth – and a little uneasy over my confidences with Sir Walter – I examined my patroness with a slight stirring of dismay.

  ‘Oh, no, no! never to grow old, not me,’ a voice was saying in me. Yet, after all, I reminded myself, I was looking only at Mrs. Monnerie’s outer case. But then, after all, was it only that? ‘The Resurrection of the body.’ One may see day at a little hole, says an old proverb – I hope a Kentish proverb. And from Mrs. Monnerie, my thoughts drifted away to Fanny. She would grow old too. Should we know one another then? Should we understand, and remember what it was to be young? We had had our secrets.

  I came out of these reflections to find Mrs. Monnerie’s sleepy eyes fixed full upon me; and herself marvellously cheered up by her nap. She had thought very well of Miss Bowater, she told me. So well that she not only very soon found her a charming engagement as a morning-governess to the two little girls of a rich fashionable widow – just Fanny’s ‘sinecure’ – but invited her to stay at No. 2 as a ‘companion’ to herself, until a more permanent post offered itself.

  ‘You and I want more company,’ she assured me; ‘otherwise the flint will use up all the tinder, or vice versa, my dear. A pretty creature and no fool. She sings a little, too, she tells me. So we shall have music wherever she goes.’

  That afternoon both flint and tinder – whichever of us was which – were kept very busy. Mrs. Monnerie fell into one of her long monologues, broken only by Chakka’s griding on his bars, and Cherry’s whimpering in his dreams. It was another kind of ‘white meat’ for me; and though, no doubt, I was incapable of digesting all Mrs. Monnerie’s views on life, society, and the world at large, I realized that if in the course of time it might be my fate to wither and wizen away, I should still have my own company and plenty of internal entertainment. I actually saw myself a little bent-up, old, midget woman, creeping down some stone steps out of a porch, with a fanlight, under a street lamp. It curdled my blood, that picture. And yet, I thought, what must be, must be. I will endure to be a little, bent-up, old, midget woman, creeping down stone steps out of a porch with a fanlight. And I even nodded up at the street lamp.

  In response to a high-spirited scrawl from Fanny, I sent her all that was left of my savings to purchase ‘those horrible little etceteras that just feather down the scales, Midgetina. It would be saintlike of you, and you won’t miss it there’. It was a desperate wrench to me to see the last of my money disappear. I knew no more than the Man in the Moon where the next was to come from.

  I counted the days to Fanny’s coming; and dressed myself for the occasion in the most expensive gold and blue afternoon gown I possessed. It must have been with a queer, mixed motive in my head. I sat waiting for her, while beyond the gloom-hung window raged a London thunderstorm, with dense torrents of rain. My little silver clock struck three, and she entered my room like a black swan, tossing from her small, velveted head, as she did so, a few beads of rain. From top to toe in deadest black. She must have noticed my glance of wonderment.

  ‘When you want to make a favourable impression on your social superiors, Midgetina, the meeker you look the better,’ she said.

  But this was not the only reason for her black. Only a day or two before, she told me, a letter had come from her mother … ‘My father is dead.’ The words dropped out as if they were quite accustomed to one another’s company. But those which followed – ‘blood-poisoning’, ‘mortification’, hung up in my mind – in that interminable gallery – a hideous picture. I could only sit and stare at the motionless figure outlined against the sepulchral window.

  ‘It is awful, awful, Fanny!’ I managed to whisper at last. ‘It never stops. One after another they all go. Think how he must have longed to be home. And now to be buried – out there – nothing but strangers.’

  A vacancy came over my mind in which I seemed to see the dead Mr. Bowater of my photograph rising like Lazarus in his grave-cloths out of his foreign tomb, and looking incredulously around him.

  ‘And your mother, Fanny! Out there, too – those miles and miles of sea away!’

  Fanny made no movement, though I fancied that her eyes wandered uneasily towards the door. ‘I quite agree, Midgetina; it’s awful!’ she said. ‘But really and truly, it’s worse for me. I think I am like my father in some ways. Mother never really understood him. You can’t talk a man different; and for that matter holding your tongue at him is not much good either. You must just lie in wait for him with – well, with your charms, I suppose.’

  The word sounded like a sneer. ‘Still, I don’t mean to say that it was all pure filial bliss for me when he was at home, until, at least, I grew up. Then he and I quarrelled too; but that’s pleasure itself by comparison with listening to other people at it. He did his best to spoil me, I suppose. He wanted to make a lady of me.’ She turned and smiled out of the window, her under-lip quivering and casting a faint shadow on the smooth skin beneath. ‘So here I am; though I fear you can’t make ladies of quite the correct consistency out of dressmaker’s clothes and a smatter of Latin. The salt will out. But there,’ she flung a little gesture with her glove, ‘as I say, here I am.’

  And as if for welcome, a gleam of lightning danced at the window, illumining us there, and a crackling peal of thunder rolled hollowly off over the roof-tops of the square. We listened until the sound had emptied itself into quiet; and only the rain in the gutters gurgled and babbled.

  ‘Do you know,’ she went on, with a faraway challenging thrill in her low, mournful voice, ‘I don’t think I have a solitary relation left in the world now – except Mother. “They are all gone into a world of light” – though I’ve now and then suspected that a few of the disreputable ones have been buried alive. There’s nothing very dreadful in that. Life consists, of course, in shedding various kinds of skin – and tanning the remainder.’

  Fanny, then, was unaware that Mrs. Bowater was not her real mother. And I think she never guessed it.

  ‘Nor have I,’ I said, ‘not one.’ As I looked at it there, it seemed a fact more curious than tragic. Besides, in the brooding darkness of that room it was Fanny and I who were strange, external beings, not the memoried phantoms of my mother and father. We had still to go on, to live things out. ‘So you see, Fanny,’ I continued, after a pause, ‘I do know what it means – a little; and we must try more than ever to be really one another’s friend, mustn’t we? I mean, if you think I can be.’

  ‘Why, I owe you pounds and pounds,’ cried Fanny gaily, pushing back her handkerchief into her bodice. ‘Here we are – not quite in the same box, perhaps; still strangers and pilgrims. Of course we must help one another …Just think of this house! The servants! The folly of it, and all for Madame Monnerie – though I wouldn’t mind being in her shoes, even for one season. Socialism, my dear, is all a question of shoes. And this is Poppetkin’s little boudoir? A pygmy palace, my dear, and if only the lightning would last a little longer I might get a real glimpse of that elfin little exquisite over there in her beautiful blue bro
cade. But then; it will be roses all the way with you, Miss M. You are independent, and valued for yourself alone.’

  ‘How different people are, Fanny. You always think first of the use of a thing, and I, stupidly, just of it – itself.’

  ‘Do we?’ she said indifferently, and rose from her chair.

  ‘Anyhow I’m here to be of use. And who,’ she remarked, with a little yawn, as she came to a pause again beside the streaming window. ‘Who was that prim, colourless girl with the pale blue eyes? Engaged to be married.’

  ‘But Fanny, she had her gloves on that morning, I remember it as clearly as – as I always remember everything where you are! how could you possibly tell that Susan Monnerie was engaged?’

  It was quite a simple problem, Fanny tranquilly assured me! ‘The ring bulged under the suède.’

  Her scornfulness piqued me a little. ‘Anyhow,’ I retorted, ‘Susan’s eyes are not pale blue. They are almost cornflower – chicory colour; like the root of a candle-flame.’

  ‘Please, Midgetina,’ Fanny begged me, ‘don’t let me canker your new adoration. Perhaps you preened your pretty feathers in them when they were fixed on the demigod. “Susan!” I thought all the Susans perished in the ’sixties, or had fled down the area. And who is he?’ But she did not follow up her question. All things come to him who waits, she had rambled on inconsequently, if he waits long enough; and no doubt God would temper the wind to the shorn orphan even if she did look a perfect frump in mourning.

  ‘You know you could never look a frump,’ I replied indignantly, ‘even if you hadn’t a rag on.’