Memoirs of a Midget

by de la Mare, Walter;

What was it Lord Chiltern was saying? I paused on the threshold: ‘An exquisite little performance. But isn’t it a little selfish to hide her light under your admirable bushel, Mrs. Monnerie? The stage, now?’

  ‘The stage!’ exclaimed Mrs. Monnerie in consternation. ‘The child’s as proud as Lucifer. She would faint at the very suggestion. You have heard her deliciously sharp little tongue; but her tantrums! Still, she’s a friendly and docile little creature, and I am very well satisfied with her.’

  ‘And not merely that,’ paced on the rather official voice. ‘I was noticing that something in the eyes. Almost disconcertingly absent yet penetrating. She thinks. She comes and goes in them. I noticed the same peculiarity in poor Willie Arbuthnot’s. And this little creature is scarcely more than a child.’

  ‘I think it is perfectly sad, Lord Chiltern,’ broke in a reedy, vibrating voice. ‘In some circumstances it would be tragic. It’s a mercy she does not realize … habit, you know …’

  Listeners seldom hear such good things of themselves. Why, then, was it so furious an eavesdropper that hastened away with a face and gesture worthy of a Sarah Siddons!

  No: my box remained locked. Yet, thought I, as I examined its contents, any dexterous finger could have opened that tiny lock – with a hairpin. And how else could my secret have been discovered? Fleming or Fanny – or both of them: it maddened me to think of them in collusion. I would take no more risks. I tore Mr. Anon’s letter into fragments, and these again into bits yet smaller, until they were almost like chaff. These I collected together and put into an envelope, which I addressed in sprawling capitals to Miss Fanny Bowater, at No. 2.

  Then for a sombre half hour I communed intensely at the window with my Tank. It was hot and taciturn company – not a breath of air stirred my silk window-blind – yet it managed to convey a few home truths, and even to increase the light a little in which I could look at the ‘bushel’. There were ‘mercies’, I suppose. Out of the distance rolled the vague reverberation of the enormous city. I watched the sparrows, and they me. When the time came for my afternoon walk, I put on my hat, with eyes fixed on my letter, and, finally – left it behind me.

  Was it for discretion’s sake, or in shame? I cannot say, but I remember that during my slow descent to the empty hall I kept my eyes fixed with peculiar malignity on the milk-white figure of a Venus (not life-size, thank Heaven), who had been surprised apparently in the very act of entering the water for a bathe. Why I singled her out for contempt I cannot say; for she certainly looked a good deal more natural and modest than many of the fine ladies who heedlessly passed her by. It was merely my old problem of the Social Layers over again. And my mind was in such a state of humiliation and discomfort that I hadn’t the energy even to smile at a marble goddess.

  Fanny was awaiting me on my return. A strand of hair was looped demurely and old-fashionedly round each small ear; her clear, unpowdered skin had the faint sheen of a rose. She stood, still and shimmering, in the height of pleasant spirits, yet, I thought, watchful and furtive through it all. She had come, she said, to congratulate me on my ‘latest conquest’.

  Mrs. Monnerie, she told me, had been pleased with my entertainment of the late First Commissioner of – was it Good Works? But I must beware. ‘Once a coquette, Midgetina, soon quite heartless,’ she twitted me.

  To which I called sourly, as I stood drying my hands, that pretty compliments must be judged by where they come from.

  ‘Come from, indeed,’ laughed Fanny. ‘He’s a positive Peer of the Realm, and bathes, my dear, every morning in the Fount of Honours. You wouldn’t be so flippant if … hallo! what’s this? A letter – addressed to Me! Where on earth did this come from?’

  Heels to head, a sudden heat swept over me. ‘Oh,’ said I hollowly, ‘that’s nothing, Fanny. Only a little joke. And now you are here – but surely,’ I hurried on, ‘you don’t really like that starched-up creature?’

  But Fanny was holding up my envelope between both her thumbs and forefingers, and steadily smiling at me, over its margin. ‘A joke, Midgetina; and one of your very own. How exciting. And how bulgy. May I open it? I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

  ‘Please, Fanny, I have changed my mind. Let me have it. I don’t feel like jokes now.’

  ‘But honestly, I do. Some jokes have such a deliciously serious side. Besides, as you have just come in, why didn’t this go out with you?’ To which I replied stubbornly that it was not her letter; that I had thought better of it; and that she had no right to question me if I didn’t want to answer.

  ‘I see.’ Her voice had glided steadily up the scale of suavity. ‘It’s a bit more of the dead past, is it? And you don’t like the – the fragrance. But surely, if we are really talking about rights – and, according to my experience, there are none too many of them knocking about in this world – surely I have the right to ask what pulpy mysteries are enclosed in an envelope addressed to me in what appears to be a feigned ca – calligraphy? Look. I am putting the thing on the floor so that we shall be on – well – fairly equal terms. Even your sensitive Sukie could not be more considerate than that, could she? All I want to know is, what’s inside that envelope? If you refuse to say, well and good. I shall retire to my maidenly couch and feed on the blackest suppositions.’

  It was a cul-de-sac; and the only thing to do was to turn back boldly and get out of it.

  ‘Well, Fanny; I have told you that I thought better of sending it. But I am not ashamed. Even if I am wrong, I suppose you are at liberty to have your little jokes too, and so is Percy Maudlen. It’s a letter, torn up; that’s all.’

  ‘A letter – so I guessed. Who from?’

  I gazed at her silently.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s hateful of you, Fanny … From the hunchback.’

  Her astonishment, surely, could not have been pretence. ‘And what the devil, you dear, stammering little midgelet, has your miserable little hunchback to do with me? Why send his scrawls to me – and in bits?’

  ‘Because,’ said I, ‘I thought you had been making fun of him and me to – the others.’

  The light hands lifted themselves; the dark head tilted a little back and askew. ‘What a roundabout route,’ she sighed. But her face was false to the smooth, scornful accents. ‘So you suspected me of spying on you? I see. And gentle Susan Monnerie was kind enough to smear a little poison on the fangs. Well, Midgetina love, I tell you this. It’s safer sometimes to lose your reputation than your temper. But there’s a limit –’

  ‘Hush,’ I whispered, for I had sharper ears than Fanny even when rage had not deafened her own. I pounced on the envelope – but only just in time.

  ‘It’s Mr. Percy, miss,’ announced Fleming, ‘and may he come in?’

  ‘Hallo!’ said that young man, lounging greyly into view, ‘a bad penny, Miss M. I happened to be passing Buszard’s just now, and there was the very thing! Miss Bowater says you have a sweet tooth, and they really are rather neat.’ He had brought me the daintiest little box of French doll bonbons. I glared at it; I glared at him – hardly in the mood for any more of his little jokes – not even one tied up with pale-blue ribbon.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ he went on. ‘Susan told us that your birthday was coming along – August 25th, isn’t it? And I have proposed a Grand Birthday Party, sort of general rag. Miss M. in the Chair. Don’t you think it’s a ripping idea of mine, Miss Bowater?’

  ‘Most ripping,’ said Fanny, meeting his long, slow, sneaking glance with a slight and seeming involuntary lift of her narrow shoulder. A long look I could not share passed between them; I might have been a toy on the floor.

  ‘But you don’t look positively in the pink,’ he turned to me. ‘Now, does she? Late hours, eh? You look crumpled, doesn’t she? Cherry, too: we must have in another vet.’ The laugh died on his long lips. His eyes roved stealthily from point to point of the basking afternoon room, then once more sluggishly refastened on Fanny. I sat motionless, watching his every turn
and twist, and repeating rapidly to myself: ‘Go away, my friend; go away, go away.’ Some nerve in him must have taken the message at last, or he found Fanny’s silence uneasy. He squinnied a glinting, curious look at me, and as jauntily as self-consciousness permitted, took his departure.

  The door shut. His presence fainted out into a phantasm, and that into nothing at all. And for sole evidence of him basked on my table, beneath a thread of sunlight, his blue-ribboned box.

  ‘Isn’t he a ninny?’ sighed Fanny. ‘And yet, my dear: there – but for the grace of God – goes Mr. Fanny Bowater.’

  Her anger had evaporated. There stood my familiar Fanny again, slim as a mast, her light eyes coldly shining, her bearing, even the set of her foot showing already a faint gilding of Mrs. Monnerie. She laughed – looking straight across at me, as if with a challenge.

  ‘Yes, my dear, it’s quite true. I’m not a bit cross now. Milk and Honey. So you see even a fool may be a lightning conductor. I forgive,’ she pouted a kiss from the tips of her fingers, ‘I forget.’

  And then she was gone too, and I alone. What an easy, consoling thing – not to care. But though Fanny might forgive, she must have found it unamusing to forget. The next evening’s post brought me an exquisitely written little fable, signed ‘F. B.’ and entitled Asteroida and the Yellow Dwarf. I couldn’t enjoy it very much; though no doubt it must have been exceedingly entertaining when read aloud.

  Still Fanny did not care. While I myself was like those railway lines under the green bank I had seen on my journey to Lyme Regis. A day’s neglect, a night’s dews, and I was stained thick with rust. A dull and heedless wretchedness took possession of me. The one thought that kept recurring in every instant of solitude, and most sharply in those instants which pounced on me in the midst of strangers, was, how to escape.

  I put away the envelope and its contents into my box again. And late that night, when I was secure from interruption, I wrote to Wanderslore. Nibbling a pen is no novelty to me, but never in all my life have I spent so blank and hideous an hour merely in the effort to say no to one simple question so that it should sound almost as pleasant as yes, and far more unselfish. ‘Throw the stone’, indeed; when my only desire was to heal the wound it might make.

  Thank goodness my letter was kinder than I felt. My candelabra burned stilly on. Cold, in the blues, I stood in my dressing-gown and spectacling my eyes with my hands, looked out of the chill glass into the London night. Only one high garret window shone out in the dark face of the houses … Who and where was Willie Arbuthnot with the peculiar eyes? Had Lord Chiltern a tank on his roof – his back yard? What a fool I had been to abandon myself and come here. If they only knew how I despised them. And the whole house asleep.

  So much I despised them that not until I was dressing the following morning did I stoop into my Indian mirror to see if I could discover what Lord Chiltern had meant.

  During the next few weeks Mrs. Monnerie – with ample provocation – almost yawned at sight of me. In a bitter instant of rebellion our eyes met. She detected the ‘ill-wish’ in mine, and was so much taken aback by it that I should hardly have recognized the set face that glared at me as hers at all. Well, the fancier had wearied of her fancy – that was all. If I had been just an ordinary visitor, she would soon have washed her hands of me. But I was notorious, and not so easily exchanged as bronchitic Cherry had been for her new Pekinese, Plum.

  Possibly, too, the kind of aversion she now felt against me was a closer bond than even virtuosity or affection. She would sit with a sullen stare under her heavy eyelids watching me grow more and more heated and clumsy over my scrap of embroidery or my game of Patience. Meanwhile Chakka would crack his nut, and with stagnant eye sidle thievishly up and down the bars of his cage; while Plum gobbled up dainties or snored on his crimson cushion. We three.

  Usually I was left pretty much alone; and what plans Mrs. Monnerie was turning over to dispose of me were known only to herself. What to do; where to hide; how to ‘make myself small’ during those torpid August days, I hardly knew. My one desire was to keep out of sight. One afternoon, I remember, after brooding for some hours under a dusty lilac bush in the Square garden, I strayed off – my eyes idly glancing from straw to hairpin to dead match in the dust – down a narrow deserted side street that led to a Mews. A string of washing hung in the sunlight from the windows. Skirting a small public house, from which the smell of beer and spirits vapoured into the sunshine, I presently found myself in a black-green churchyard among tombstones.

  A clear shadow slanted across the porch, the door of the church stood open, and after pausing for a moment on its flagstones, I went in. It was empty. Stone faces gazed sightlessly from its walls. Two red sanctuary lamps hung like faint rubies in the distant chancel. I dragged out a cushion and sat down under the font. The thin, cloudy fragrance that hung in the gloom of the coloured windows stole in through my nostrils, drugged my senses. Propping my chin on my hands, I looked up through the air into the dark roof. A pendulum ticked slowly from on high. Quiet began to steal over me – long centuries of solitude had filled this vacancy as with a dream.

  It was as if some self within me were listening to the unknown – but to whom? I could not answer; I might as well have been born a pagan. Was this church merely the house of a God? There were gods and temples all over the world. Was it a house of the God? Or only of ‘their’ God? In a sense I knew it was also my God’s, but how much more happily confident of His secret presence I had been in wild-grown Wanderslore. Did this mean that I was actually so much alone in my world as to be different from all other human beings?

  A fluttering panic swept through my mind at the muffled thumping of the invisible pendulum. I had forgotten that time never ceased to be wasting. And the past stretched its panorama before my eyes: No. 2; the public house with the solitary thinking man I had seen, pot in hand, staring into the sawdust; and this empty, cavernous silence. Then back and back – Lyme Regis, Mrs. Bowater’s – and Fanny, Lyndsey, my mother and father, the garden. No sylphs of the air, no trancing music out of the waters now! It was as if the past were surrounded with a great wall; and the future clear and hard as glass. You might explore the past in memory: you couldn’t scale its invisible walls.

  And there was Mr. Crimble – an immeasurable distance away; yet he had still the strange power to arrest me, to look out on me in my path. Must the future be all of its piece? I stopped thinking again, and my eyes wandered over my silk skirt and shoes.

  My ghost! there was no doubt I was an exceedingly small human being. It may sound absurd, but I had never vividly realized it before. And how solemnly sitting there – like a spider in wait for flies. ‘For goodness sake, Miss M.,’ I said to myself, ‘cheer up. You are being deadly dull company – always half afraid. They daren’t really do anything to you, you know. Face it out.’ And even while I was muttering, I was reading the words cut into a worn tombstone at my feet: ‘Jenetta Parker’ – only two-and-twenty, a year older than I. Yet she had lain here for two whole centuries and more. And beneath her name I spelled out her epitaph:

  Ah, Stranger, breathe a sigh:

  For, where I lie,

  Is but a handful of bright Beauty cast:

  It was; and now is past.

  I repeated the words mechanically again and again; and, as if in obedience to her whisper, a much more niggardly handful of none too bright a beauty did breathe a sigh and a prayer – part pity, part melancholy, and all happiness and relief. I kissed my hand to Jenetta; crossed myself and bowed to the altar – dulled gems of light the glass – and emerged into the graveyard. A lamp had been lit. An old man was shuffling along behind me; he had come to lock up the church. For an instant I debated whether or not to scuttle off down the green-bladed cobbles of the Mews and – trust my luck. No: the sight of a Punch and Judy man gobbling some food out of a newspaper at the further corner, scared me out of that little enterprise. Dusk was settling; and I edged back as fast as I could to No. 2.
r />   But it did me good, that visit. It was as if I had been looking up at my own small skull on a high shelf in some tranquil and dingy old laboratory – a few bottles, a spider’s web, and an occasional glint of moonlight. How very brief the animation for so protracted a peace.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Susan’s visits to her aunt were now less frequent. Percy’s multiplied. Duty seemed to have become a pleasure to him. Mrs. Monnerie’s gaze would rest on him with a drowsy vigilance which it was almost impossible to distinguish from mere vacancy of mind. He was fortunate in being her only nephew; unfortunate in being himself, and the son of a sister to whom Mrs. Monnerie seemed very little attached. Still, he appeared to be doing his best to cultivate his aunt’s graces, would meander ‘in attendance’ round and round the Square’s square garden, while Fanny’s arm had now almost supplanted Mrs. Monnerie’s ebony cane. When Mrs. Monnerie was too much fatigued for this mild exercise, or otherwise engaged, there was still my health to consider. At least Fanny seemed to think so. But since Percy’s conversation had small attractions for me, it was far rather he who enjoyed the experience; while I sat and stared at nothing under a tree.

  At less than nothing – for I was staring, as usual, chiefly at myself. I seemed to have lost the secret of day-dreaming. And if the quantity of aversion that looked out of my eyes had matched its quality, those piebald plane-trees and poisonous laburnums would have been scorched as if with fire. I shall never forget those interminable August days, besieged by the roar and glare and soot and splendour and stare of London. All but friendless, absolutely penniless, I had nothing but bits of clothes for bribes to keep Fleming from mutiny. I shrank from making her an open enemy; though I knew, as time went on, that she disrelished me more and more. She would even keep her nose averted from my clothes.

  As for Fanny, to judge from her animation when Susan and Captain Valentine broke in upon us, I doubt if anybody less complacent than Percy would not have realized that she was often bored. She would look at him with head on one side, as if she had been painted like that for ever and ever in a picture. She could idly hide behind her beauty, and Percy might as well have gone hunting Echo or a rainbow. She could make corrosive remarks in so seducing a voice that the poor creature hardly knew where the smart came from. He would exclaim: ‘Oh, I say, Miss Bowater!’ and gape like a goldfish. Solely, perhaps, to have someone to discuss herself with, Fanny so far forgave and forgot my shortcomings as to pay me an occasional visit, and had yawned how hideously expensive she found it to live with the rich. But the only promise of help I could make was beyond any possibility of performance. I promised, none the less, for my one dread was that she should guess what straits I was in for money.