Memoirs of a Midget

by de la Mare, Walter;

  It is all very well to accuse Percy Maudlen of goldfishiness. What kind of fish was I? During the few months of my life at Mrs. Monnerie’s – until, that is, Fanny’s arrival – she had transported her ‘Queen Bee’, as she sometimes called me, to every conceivable social function and ceremony, except a deathbed and a funeral. Why had I not played my cards a little more skilfully? Had not Messrs. de la Rue designed a pack as if expressly for me, and for my own particular little game of Patience? If perhaps I had shown more sense and less sensibility; and had not been, as I suppose, in spite of all my airs and flauntings, such an inward young woman, what altitudes I might have scaled. Mrs. Monnerie, indeed, had once made me a promise to present me at Court in the coming May. It is true that this was a distinction that had been enjoyed by many of my predecessors in my own particular ‘line’ – but I don’t think my patroness would have dished me up in a Pie.

  That being so, my proud bosom might at this very moment be heaving beneath a locket adorned with the royal monogram in seed pearls, and inscribed: ‘To the Least of her Subjects from the Greatest of Queens.’ Why, I might have been the most talked-of and photographed débutante of the season. But I must beware of sour grapes. ‘There was once a Diogenes whom the gods shut up in a tub’ – poor Mr. Wagginhorne, he had been, after all, comparatively frugal with his azaleas.

  In all seriousness I profited far too little by Mrs. Monnerie’s generosities, by my ‘chances’, while I was with her. I just grew hostile, and so half-blind. Many of her friends, of course, were merely wealthy or fashionable, but others were just natural human beings. As Fanny had discovered, she not only delighted in people that were pleasant to look at. She enjoyed also what I suppose is almost as rare – intelligence.

  The society ‘Beauties’, now? To be quite candid, and I hope without the least tinge of jealousy, I think they liked the look of me – well, no better than I liked the look of excessively handsome men. These exotics of either sex reminded me of petunias – the headachy kind, that are neither red nor blue, but a mixture. I always felt when I looked at them that they knew they were making me dizzy. Yet, as a matter of fact, I could hardly see their beauty for their clothes. It must, of course, be extremely difficult to endure pure admiration. True, I never remember even the most tactful person examining me for the first time without showing some little symptom of discomposure. But that’s a very different thing.

  There was, however, another kind of beauty which I loved with all my heart. It is difficult to express what I mean, but to see a woman whose face seemed to be the picture of a dream of herself, or a man whose face was absolutely the showing of his own mind – I never wearied of that. Or, at any rate, I do not now; in looking back.

  So much for outsides. Humanity, our old cook Mrs. Ballard used to say, is very like a veal and ham pie: its least digestible part is usually the crust. I am only an amateur veal and ham Pieist; and the fact remains that I experienced just as much difficulty with what are called ‘clever’ people. They were like Adam Waggett in his Sunday clothes – a little too much of something to be quite all there. I firmly believe that what one means is the best thing to say, and the very last thing, however unaffected, most of these clever people said was seemingly what they meant. Their conversation rarely had more than an intellectual interest. You asked for a penny, and they gave you what only looked like a threepenny-bit.

  Perhaps this is nothing but prejudice, but I have certainly always got on very much better with stupid people. Chiefly, perhaps, because I could share experiences with them; and the latest thoughts did not matter so much. Clever men’s – and women’s – experiences all seem to be in their heads; and when I have seen a rich man clamber through the eye of a needle, as poor Mr. Crimble used to say, I shall keep my eyes open for a clever one attempting the same feat. It had been one of my absurd little amusements at Mrs. Bowater’s to imagine myself in strange places – keeping company with a dishevelled Comet in the cold wilds of space, or walking about in the furnaces of the Sun, like Shadrach and Abednego. Not so now. Yet if I had had the patience, and the far better sense, to fix my attention on anyone I disliked at Mrs. Monnerie’s so as to enter in, no doubt I should so much have enlarged my inward self as to make it a match at last even for poor Mr. Daniel Lambert.

  On the other hand, I sometimes met people at No. 2, or when I was taken out by Mrs. Monnerie, whose faces looked as if they had been on an almost unbelievably long journey – and one not merely through this world, though that helps. I did try to explore those eyes, and mouths, and wrinkles; and solitudes, stranger than any comet’s, I would find myself in at times. Alas, they paid me extremely little attention; though I wonder they did not see in my eyes how hungry I was for it. They were as mysterious as what is called genius. And what would I not give to have set eyes on Sir Isaac Newton, or Nelson, or John Keats – all three of them comparatively little men.

  However absurdly pranked up with conceit I might be, I knew in my heart that outwardly, at any rate, I was nothing much better than a curio. To care for me was therefore a really difficult feat. And apart from there being very little time for anything at Mrs. Monnerie’s, I never caught anyone making the attempt. When the novelty of me had worn off, I used to amuse myself by listening to Mrs. Monnerie’s friends talking to one another – discussing plays and pictures and music and so on – anything that was new, and, of course, each other. Often on these occasions I hardly knew whether I was on my head or my heels.

  Books had always been to me just a part of my life; and music very nearly my death. However much I forgot of it, I wove what I could remember of my small reading round myself, so to speak; and I am sure it made the cocoon more comfortable. As often as not these talkers argued about books as if their authors had made them – certainly not ‘out of their power and love’ – but merely for their readers to pick to pieces; and about ‘beauty’, too, as if it were something you could eat with a spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it meant no more than – well, its ‘meaning’. As if a butterfly were a chrysalis. I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother’s way.

  But there, what presumption this all is. I had never been to school, never been out of Kent, had never ‘done’ anything, nor ‘been’ anything, except – and that half-heartedly – myself. No wonder I was censorious.

  If I could have foreseen how interminably difficult a task it would prove to tack these memoirs together, I am sure I should have profited a little more by the roarings of my fellow lions. As a matter of fact I used merely to watch them sipping their tea, and devouring their cake amid a languishing circle of admirers, and to wonder if they found the cage as tedious as I did. If they noticed me at all, they were usually polite enough; but – like the Beauties – inclined to be absent and restless in my company. So the odds were against me. I had one advantage over them, however, for when I was no longer a novelty, I could occasionally slip in, unperceived, behind an immense marquetry bureau. There in the dust I could sit at peace, comparing its back with its front, and could enjoy at leisure the conversation beyond.

  Nevertheless, there was one old gentleman, with whom I really made friends. He was a bachelor, and was not only the author of numbers of books, but when he was a little boy had been presented by Charles Dickens himself with a copy of David Copperfield, and had actually sat on the young novelist’s knee. No matter who it was he might be talking to, he used to snap his fingers at me in the most exciting fashion whenever we saw each other in the distance, and we often shared a quiet little talk together (I standing on a highish chair, perhaps, and he squatting beside me, his hands on his knees) in some corner of Mrs. Monnerie’s enormous drawing-room, well out of the mob.

  I once ventured to ask him how to write.

  His face grew very solemn. ‘Lord have mercy upon me,’ he said, ‘to write, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of: take a quart or mo
re of life-blood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots.’ Then he laughed at me, and polished his eyeglasses with his silk pocket handkerchief.

  I surveyed this grisly mixture without flinching, and laughed too, and said, tapping his arm with my fan: ‘But, dear Mr. –, would you have me die of anæmia?’

  And he said I was a dear, valuable creature, and, when next ‘Black Pudding Day’ tempted us, we would collaborate.

  Having heard his views, I was tempted to push on, and inquired as flatteringly as possible of a young portrait painter how he mixed his paints: ‘So as to get exactly the colours you want, you know?’

  He gently rubbed one long-fingered hand over the other until there fell a lull in the conversation around us. ‘What I mix my paints with, Miss M.? Why – merely with brains,’ he replied. My old novelist had forgotten the brains. But I discovered in some book or other long afterwards that a still more celebrated artist had said that too; so I suppose the mot is traditional.

  And last, how to ‘act’; for some mysterious reason I never asked any theatrical celebrity, male or female, how to do that.

  More or less intelligent questions, I am afraid, are not the only short-cut to good, or even to polite, conversation. And I was such a dunce that I never really learned what topics are respectable, and what not. In consequence, I often amused Mrs. Monnerie’s friends without knowing why. They would exchange a kind of little ogling glance, or with a silvery peal of laughter like bells, cry: ‘How naïve!’

  How I detested the word. Naïve – it was simply my ill-bred earnestness. Still, I made one valuable discovery: that you could safely laugh or even titter at things which it was extremely bad manners to be serious about. What you could be serious about, without letting skeletons out of the cupboard – that was the riddle. I had been brought up too privately ever to be able to answer it.

  How engrossing it all would have been if only the Harrises could have trebled my income, and if Fanny had not known me so well. There was even a joy in the ladies who shook their lorgnettes at me as if I were deaf, or looked at me with their noses, as one might say, as if I were a bad or unsavoury joke. On my part, I could never succeed in forgetting that, in spite of appearances, they must be of flesh and blood, and therefore the prey of them, and of the World, and the Devil. So I used to amuse myself by imagining how they would look in their bones, or in rags, or in heaven, or as when they were children. Or again, by an effort of fancy I would reduce thïem, clothes and all, to my proportions; or even a little less. And though these little inward exercises made me absent-minded, it made them ever so much more interesting and entertaining.

  How I managed not to expire in what, for a country mouse, was extremely like living in a bottle of champagne, I don’t know. And if my silly little preferences suggest cynicism – well, I may be smug enough, but I don’t, and won’t, believe I am a cynic. Remember I was young. Besides I love human beings, especially when they are very human, and I have even tried to forgive Miss M. her Miss M-ishness. How can I be a cynic if I have tried to do that? It is a far more difficult task than to make allowances for the poor, wretched, immortal waxwork creatures in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, or even for the gentleman naturalist who shot and stuffed Kent’s last golden oriole.

  Nor have I ever, for more than a moment, shared with Lemuel Gulliver his none too nice disgust at the people of Brobdingnag, even at kind-hearted Glumdalclitch. Am I not myself – not one of the quarrelsome ‘Fair Folks of the Woods’ – but a Yahoo? Gulliver, of course, was purposely made unaccustomed to the gigantic; while I was born and bred, though not to such an extreme, in its midst. And habit is second nature, or, as an old Lyndsey proverb goes: ‘There’s nowt like eels for eeliness.’

  I am, none the less, ever so thankful that neither my ears, nose, nor eyes, positively magnify, so to speak. I may be a little more sensitive to noises and smells than some people are, but that again is probably only because I was brought up so fresh and quiet and privately. I am far more backward than can be excused, and in some things abominably slow-witted. Whether or not my feelings are pretty much of the usual size, I cannot say. What is more to the point is that in some of my happiest moments my inward self seems to be as remote from my body as the Moon is from Greenland; and, at others – even though that body weighs me down to the earth like a stone – it is as if memory and consciousness stretched away into the ages, far, far beyond my green and dwindling Barrow on Chizzel Hill, and had shaken to the solitary night-cry of Creation: ‘Let there be Light.’

  But enough and to spare of all this egotism. I must get back to my story.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The fact is, Miss M.’s connection with good society was rapidly drawing to a close. My smoky little candle had long since begun to gutter and sputter and enwreathe itself in a winding sheet. It went out at last in a blaze of light. For once in his life Percy had conceived a notion of which his aunt cordially approved – my Birthday Banquet. Heart and soul, all my follies and misdemeanours forgotten, she entered into this new device to give her Snippety, her Moppet, her Pusskinetta, her little Binbin, her Fairy, her Petite Sereine, an exquisite setting.

  Invitations were sent out to the elect on inch-square cards embossed with my family crest and motto – a giant, head and shoulders, brandishing a club, and Non Omnis Moriar.1 She not only postponed her annual departure from town, but, as did the great man in the parable, compelled her friends to come in. She exhausted her ingenuity on the menu. The great, on this occasion, were to feast on the tiny. A copy of it lies beside me now, though, unfortunately, I did not examine it when I sat down to dinner. Last, but not least, Percy’s pastrycooks, Messrs. Buszard, designed a seven-tiered birthday cake, surrounded on its lowermost plateau by one-and-twenty sugar-figures, about a quarter life-size, and each of them bearing on high a silver torch.

  Their names were inscribed on their sugar pediments: Lady Morgan (the Windsor Fairy); Queen Elizabeth’s Mrs. Tomysen; the Empress Julia’s Andromeda; the great little, little great Miss Billing of Tilbury; Anne Rouse and poor Ann Colling; the Sicilian Mlle. Caroline Crachami (who went to the anatomists); Nannette Stocker (33 inches, 33 lbs. avoirdupois at 33); the blessed and tender Anastasia Boruwlaski; Gaganini; the gentle Miss Selby of Bath; Alethea (the Guernsey Nymph); Madame Teresa (the Corsican Fairy); Mrs. Jekyll Skinner; the appalling Nono; Mrs. Anne Gibson (née Shepherd); and the rest.

  It was a joke, none the worse, maybe, for being old; and Peter the Great must have turned in his grave in envy of Mrs. Monnerie’s ingenuity.

  It may scarcely be believed, but I had become so hardened to such little waggeries that under the genial eye of Mrs. Monnerie I made the circuit of this cake with a smile; and even scolded her for omitting the redoubtable Mrs. Bellamy with her life-size family of nine. I criticised the images too, as not to be compared even as sugar, with the alabaster William of Windsor and Blanche, in the Tower.

  The truth is, when real revulsions of body and soul come, they come, in a gush, all at once. Fleming, on the Night, was actually putting the last touches to my coiffure when suddenly, with a wicked curse, I turned from the great glass and announced my decision. Tiny tortoiseshell comb uplifted, she stood in the clear lustrousness looking in at my reflection, queer thoughts darting about in her eyes. At first she supposed it was but another fit of petulance. Then her hatred and disgust of me all but overcame her.

  She quietly argued. I insisted. But she was mortally afraid of Mrs. Monnerie, and rather than deliver my message to her, sought out Susan. Poor Susan. She, too, was afraid: and it was her face rather than her love that won me over at last. Then she had to rush away to make what excuse she could for my unpunctuality. It thus came about that Mrs. Monnerie’s guests had already sat down to table, and were one and all being extremely amused by some story she was entertaining them with, when Marvell threw open the great mahogany doors for me, and I made my solitary entry.

  In primrose silk,
à la Pompadour, a wreath of tight-shut pimpernels in my hair – it is just possible that Mrs. Monnerie suspected I had chosen to come in late like this merely for effect. But that would have been an even feebler exhibition of vanity than I was capable of. All her guests were known to me, even though only one of them was of my choosing; for Mrs. Bowater was in the Argentine, Sir Walter in France, Miss Fenne on her deathbed, Mr. Pellew in retreat, and Mr. Crimble in his grave. Fanny was my all.

  She was sitting four or five chairs away from me on my left, between Percy (who had on his right hand a beautiful long-faced girl in turquoise green) and Captain Valentine. Further down, and on the other side of the table, sat Lady Maudlen – a seal-like lady, who, according to Fanny, disapproved of me on religious grounds – while I was on Mrs. Monnerie’s left, and next to Lord Chiltern. Alas, even my old friend the ‘Black Pudding’ was too far distant to do more than twinkle ‘Courage!’ at me, when our eyes met.

  Recollections of that disastrous evening are clouded. So evil with dreams my nights had been that I hardly knew whether I was awake or asleep. But I recall the long perspective of the table, the beards, the busts, the pearls, the camellias and gardenias, the cornucopias, and that glistening Folly Castle, my Birthday Cake. Marvell is behind me, and Adam Waggett is ducketing in the luminous distance. The clatter of many tongues beats on my ear. Mrs. Monnerie murmurs and gently rocks. The great silver dishes dip and withdraw. Corks pop, and the fumes of meat and wine cloud into the air. In memory it is as if I myself were far away, as if I had read of the scene in a book.