How oddly chance events knit themselves together. That very morning I had received a belated and re-addressed letter which smote like sunbeams on my hopes and plans. It was from Mrs. Bowater:
DEAR MISS M. – I send this line to say that I am still in the land of the living. I have buried my poor husband but have hopes some day of bringing him home. England is England when all’s said and done, and I can’t say I much approve of foreign parts. It’s a fine town and not what you might call foreign to look at the buildings, but moist and flat and the streets like a draughtboard. And the thought of the cattle upsets me. Everything topsy-turvy too with Spring coming along and breaking out and we here on the brink of September. It has been an afflicting time though considering all things he made a peaceful end, with a smile on his face as you would hardly consider possible.
The next fortnight will see me on board the steamer again, which I can scarcely support the thought of, though, please God, I shall see it through. I have spent many days alone here and the strangeness of it all and the foreign faces bring up memories which are happier forgotten. But I’m often thinking what fine things you must be doing in that fine place. Not as I think riches will buy everything in this world – and a mercy too – or that I’m not anxious at times you don’t come to harm with that delicate frame and all. Wrap up warm, miss, be watchful of your victuals and keep early hours. Such being so, I’m still hoping when I come home, if I’m spared, you may be of a mind to come to Beechwood Hill again and maybe settle down.
I may say that I had my suspicions for some time that that young Mr. Anon was consumptive in the lungs. But from what I gathered he isn’t, only suffering from a stomach cough – bad cooking and exposing himself in all weathers. I will say nothing nearer. I shall be easier off as money goes, but you and me needn’t think of that. Fanny doesn’t write much and which I didn’t much expect. She is of an age now which must reap as it has sown, though even allowing for the accident of birth, as they say, a mother’s a mother till the end of the chapter. I must now close. May the Lord bless you, miss, wherever you may be.
Yours truly,
E. BOWATER (Mrs.)
Surely this letter was a good omen. It cheered me, and yet it was disquieting, too. That afternoon I spent in the garden, wandering irresolutely up and down under the blue sky, and fretting at the impenetrable wall of time that separated me from the longed-for hour of freedom. On a sunny stone near a foresty bed of asparagus I sat down at last, tired, and a little dispirited. I was angry with myself for the last night’s failure, and for a kind of weakness that had come over me. Yet how different a creature was here today from that of only a week ago. From the darkened soil the stalks sprang up, stiffened and green with rain. A snail reared up her horns beneath my stone. An azure butterfly alighted on my knee, slowly fanning its turquoise wings, patterned with a delicate narrow black band on the one side, and spots of black and orange like a Paisley shawl beneath. Between silver-knobbed antennæ its furry perplexed face and shining eyes looked out at me, sharing my warmth. I watched it idly. How long we had been strangers. And surely the closer one looked at anything that was not of man’s making …My thoughts drifted away. I began day-dreaming again.
And it seemed that life was a thing that had neither any plan nor any purpose; that I was sunk, as if in a bog, in ignorance of why or where or who I truly was. The days melted on, to be lost or remembered, the Spring into Summer, and then Winter and death. What was the meaning of it all – this enormous ocean of time and space in which I was lost? Never else than a stranger. That couldn’t be true of the men and women who really keep the world’s ‘pot boiling’. All I could pray for was to sit like this for a while, undisturbed and at peace with my own heart. Peace – did I so much as know the meaning of the word? How dingy a patchwork I had made of everything. And how customary were becoming these little passing fits of repining and remorse. The one sole thing that comforted me – apart from my blue butterfly – was an echo in my head of those clapping hands, whoops and catcalls – and the white staring faces in the glare. And a few months ago this would have seemed an incredible degradation.
There stole into memory that last evening at Wanderslore. What would he think of me now? I had done worse than forget him, had learned in one single instant that for ever and ever, however dearly I liked and valued him and delighted in his company, I could not be ‘in love’ with him. I hid my face in my hands. Yet a curious quiet wish for his company sprang up in me. How stiff-necked and affected I had been. Love was nothing but cheating. Let me but confess, explain, ask forgiveness, unburden myself. Those hollow temples, that jutting jaw, the way he stooped on his hands and coughed. My great-aunt, Kitilda, had died in her youth of consumption. A sudden dread, like a skeleton out of the sky, stood up in my mind. There was no time to delay. To-morrow night, Adam or no Adam, I would set off to find him: all would be well.
As if in response to my thought, a shadow stole over the stones beside me. I looked up and – aghast – saw Fanny.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Her head was turned away from me, a striped parasol leaned over her shoulder. With a faintly defiant tilt of her beautiful head, as if exclaiming ‘See, Strangeness, I come!’ she stepped firmly on over the turf. A breath of some delicate indoor perfume was wafted across to my nostrils. I clung to my stone, watching her.
Simply because it seemed a meanness to play the spy on her in her solitude, I called her name. But her start of surprise was mere feigning. The silk of her parasol encircled her shoulders like an immense nimbus. Her eyes dwelt on me, as if gathering up the strands of an unpleasing memory.
‘Ah, Midgetina,’ she called softly, ‘it is you, is it, on your little stone? Are you better?’ The very voice seemed conscious of its own cadences. ‘What a delicious old garden. The contrast!’
The contrast. With a cold gathering apprehension at my heart I glanced around me. Why was it that of all people only Fanny could so shrink me up like this into my body? And there floated back to remembrance the vast, dazzling room, the flower-clotted table, and, in that hideous vertigo, a face frenzied with disgust and rage, a hand flung out to cast me off. But I entered her trap none the less.
‘Contrast, Fanny?’
‘No, no, now, my dear! Not quite so disingenuous as all that, please. You can’t have quite forgotten the last time we met.’
‘There was nothing in that, Fanny. Only that the midge was drunk. You should see the wasps over there in the nectarines.’
‘Only?’ she echoed lightly, raising her eyebrows. ‘I am not sure that everyone would put it quite like that. You couldn’t see yourself, you see. They call you little Miss Cassandra now. Woe! Woe! you know. Mrs. Monnerie asked me if I thought you were – you know – “all there”, as they say.’
‘I don’t care what they say.’
‘If I weren’t an old friend,’ she returned with crooked lip, ‘you might be made to care. I have brought the money you were kind enough to lend me; I’ll give it you when I have unpacked – tomorrow night.’
My body sank into a stillness that might well have betrayed its mind’s confusion to a close observer. Had she lingered satirically, meaningly, on those two last words? ‘I don’t want the money, Fanny: aren’t you generous enough to accept a gift?’
‘Well,’ said she, ‘it needs a good deal of generosity sometimes. Surely, a gift depends upon the spirit in which it is given. That last little message, now – was that, shall we say, an acceptable gift?’ Her tones lost their silkiness. ‘See here, Midgetina,’ she went on harshly, ‘you and I are going to talk all this out. But I’m thirsty. I hate this spawning sun. Where are the nectarines?’
Much against my will I turned my back on her, and led her off to the beehives.
‘One for you,’ she said, stooping forward, balancing the sheeny toe of her shoe on the brown mould, ‘and the rest for me. Catch!’ She dropped a wasp-bitten, pulpy fruit into my hands. ‘Now then. It’s shadier here. No eavesdroppers. Just you and
me and God. Please sit down?’
There was no choice. Down I sat; and she on a low wooden seat opposite me in the shade, her folded parasol beside her, the leaf-hung wall behind. She bit daintily into the juicy nectarine poised between finger and thumb, and watched me with a peculiar fixed smile, as if of admiration, on her pale face.
‘Tell me, pretty Binbin,’ she began again, ‘what is the name of that spiked red and blue and violet thing behind your back? It colours the edges of your delicate china cheeks. Most becoming!’
It was viper’s bugloss – a stray, I told her, shifting my head uneasily beneath her scrutiny.
‘Ah, yes, viper’s bugloss. Personally I prefer the common variety. Though no doubt that may stray, too. But fie, fie! You naughty thing,’ she sprang up and plucked another nectarine, ‘you have been blacking your eyebrows. I shouldn’t have dreamt it of you. What would mother say?’
‘Listen, Fanny,’ I said, pronouncing the words as best I could with a tongue that seemed to be sticking to the roof of my mouth; ‘I am tired of the garden. What do you really want to say to me? I don’t much care for your – your fun.’
‘And I just beginning to enjoy it! There’s contrariness! – To say? Well, now, a good deal, my dear. I thought of writing. But it’s better – safer to talk. The first thing is this. While you have been malingering down here I have had to face the whole Monnerie orchestra. It hasn’t been playing quite in tune; and you know why. That lovesick Susan, now, and her nice young man. But since you seem to be quite yourself again – more of yourself than ever, in fact – listen.’ I gazed, almost hypnotized, through the sunshine into her shady face.
‘What I am going to suggest’, she went on smoothly, ‘concerns only you and me. If you and I are to go on living in the same house – which heaven forbid – I give you fair warning that we shall have nothing more to do with one another than is absolutely inevitable. I am not so forgiving as I ought to be, Midgetina, and insults rankle. Treachery, still more.’ The low voice trembled.
‘Oh, yes, you may roll your innocent little eyes and look as harmless as a Chinese god, but answer me this: Am I a hypocrite? Am I? And while you are thinking it over, hadn’t you better tumble that absurd little pumpkin off your knee? It’s staining your charming frock.’
‘I never said you were a hypocrite,’ I choked.
‘No?’ The light gleamed on the whites of her eyes as they roved to and fro. ‘Then I say, you are. Fair to face, false to back. Who first trapped me out star-gazing in the small hours, then played informer? Who wheedled her way on with her mincing humbug – poof! naïveté! – and set my own mother against me? Who told someone – you know who – that I was not to be trusted, and far better cast-off? Who stuffed that lackadaisical idiot of a Sukie Monnerie with all those old horrors? Who warned that miserable little piece of deformity that I might come – borrowing? Who hoped to betray me by sending an envelope through the post packed with mousey bits of paper? Who made me a guy, a laughing-stock and poisoned – Oh, it’s a long score, Miss M. When I think of it all, what I’ve endured – well, honestly when a wasp crawls out of my jam, I remind myself that it’s stinged.’
The light smouldering eyes held me fast. ‘You mean, I suppose, Fanny, that you’d just kill it,’ I mumbled, looking up into her distorted face. ‘I don’t think I should much mind even that. But it’s no use. It would take hours to answer your questions. You have only put them your own way. They may sound true. But in your heart you know they are false. Why should you bother to hurt me? You know – you know how idiotically I loved you.’
‘Loved me, false, kill,’ echoed Fanny scornfully, with a leer which transformed her beauty into a mere vulgar grimace. ‘Is there any end to the deceits of the little gaby? Do you really suppose that to be loved is a new experience for me; that I’m not smeared with it wherever I go; that I care a snap of my fingers whether I’m loved or not; that I couldn’t win through without that? Is that what you suppose? Well, then, here’s one more secret. Open your ears. I am going to marry Percy Maudlen. Yes, that weed of a creature. You may remember my little prophecy when he brought his Aunt Alice’s manikin some lollipops. Well, the grace of God is too leisurely, and since you and I are both, I suppose, of the same sex, I tell you I care no more for him than that –’ She flung the nectarine stone at the beehive. ‘And I defy you, defy you to utter a word. I am glad I was born what I am. All your pretty little triumphs, first to last, what are they? – accidents and insults. Isn’t half the world kicking down the faces of those beneath them on the ladder? I have had to fight for a place. And I tell you this: I am going to teach these supercilious money-smelling ladies a lesson. I am going to climb till I can sneer down on them. And Mrs. Monnerie is going to help me. She doesn’t care a jot for God or man. But she enjoys intelligence, and loves a fighter. Is that candour? Is it now?’
‘I detest Percy Maudlen,’ I replied faintly. ‘And as for sneering, that only makes another wall. Oh, Fanny, do listen to yourself, to what you are. I swear I’m not the sneak you think me. I’d help you, if I could, to my last breath. Indeed, I would. Yes, and soon I can.’
‘Thank you; and I’d rather suffocate than accept your help – now. Listen to myself, indeed! That’s just the pious hypocrite all over. Well, declarations of love you know quite enough about for your – for your age. Now you shall hear one of a different kind. I tell you, Midgetina, I hate you: I can’t endure the sight or sound or creep or thought of you any longer. Why? Because of your unspeakable masquerade. You play the pygmy; pygmy you are: carried about, cosseted, smirked at, fattened on nightingale’s tongues – the last, though, you’ll ever eat. But where have you come from? What are you in your past – in your mind? I ask you that: a thing more everywhere, more thief-like, more detestable than a conscience. Look at me, as we sit here now. I am the monstrosity. You see it, you think it, you hate even to touch me. From first moment to last you have secretly despised me – me! I’m not accusing you. You weren’t your own maker. As often as not you don’t know what you are saying. You are just an automaton. But these last nights I have lain awake and thought of it all. It came on me as if my life had been nothing but a filthy, aimless nightmare; and chiefly because of you. I’ve worked, I’ve thought, I’ve contrived and forced my way. Oh, that house, the wranglings, the sermons. Did I make myself what I am, ask to be born? No, it’s all a devilish plot. And I say this, that while things are as they are, and this life is life, and this world my world, I refuse to be watched and taunted and goaded and defamed.’
Her face stooped closer, fascinating, chilling me like a cold cloud with its bright, hunted, malevolent stare. She stretched out a hand and wrung my shoulder. ‘Listen, I say. Come out of that trance! I loathe you, you holy imp. You haunt me!’
My eyes shut. I sat shivering, empty of self, listening, as if lost in a fog in a place desperately strange to me; and only a distant sea breaking and chafing on its stones far below. Then once more I became conscious of the steady and resolute droning of the bees: felt the breathing of actuality on my hair, on my cheek. My eyes opened on a garden sucked dry of colour and reality, and sought her out. She had left me, was standing a few paces distant now, looking back, as if dazed, her lips pale, her eyes dark-ringed.
‘Perhaps you didn’t quite hear all that, Midgetina. You led me on. You force things out of me till I am sick. But some day, when you are as desperate as I have been, it will come back to you. Then you’ll know what it is to be human. But there can’t be any misunderstanding left now, can there?’
I shook my head. ‘No, Fanny. I shall know you hate me.’
‘And I am free?’
What could she mean? I nodded.
She turned, pushed up her parasol. ‘What a talk! But better done with.’
‘Yes, Fanny,’ said I obediently. ‘Much better done with.’
She gave me an odd glance out of the corner of her eye. ‘The queer thing is,’ she went on, ‘what I wanted to say was something quite, quite differen
t. To give you a friendly word of warning, entirely on your own account … You have a rival, Midgetina.’
The words glided away into silence. The doves crooned on the housetop. The sky was empty above the distant hills. I did not stir, and am thankful I had the cowardice to ask no questions.
‘Her name is Angélique. She lives in a Castle in Spain’, sighed the calm, silky voice, with the odd break or rasp in it I knew so well. ‘Oh, I agree a circus-rider is nothing better than a mongrel, a pariah, worse probably. Yet this one has her little advantages. As Midgets go, she beats you by at least four inches, and rides, sings, dances, tells fortunes. Quite a little Woman of the World. The only really troublesome thing about it is that she makes you jiltable, my dear. They are so very seductive, these flounced-up, painted things. No principle! And, oh, my dear, all this just as dear Mrs. Monnerie has set her heart on finding her Queen Bee a nice little adequate drone for a husband!’
It was her last taunt. It was over. I had heard the worst. The arrow I had been waiting for had sprung true to its mark. Its barb was sticking there in my side. And yet, as I mutely looked up at her, I knew there was a word between us which neither could utter. The empty air had swallowed up the sound of our voices. Its enormous looking-glass remained placid and indifferent. It was as if all that we had said, or, for that matter, suffered, was of no account, simply because we were not alone. For the first instant in the intimacy of my love and hatred, Fanny seemed to be just any young woman standing there, spiteful, meaningless. The virtue had gone out of her. She made up her mouth, glanced uneasily over her shoulder and turned away.
We were never again to be alone together, except in remembrance.
I sat on in the garden till the last thin ray of sunlight was gone. Then, in dread that my enemy might be looking down from the windows of the house, I slipped and shuffled from bush to bush in the dusk, and so at last made my way into the house, and climbed the dark polished staircase. As, stealthily, I passed a bedroom door ajar, my look pierced through the crevice. It was a long, stretching, shallow room, and at the end of it, in the crystal quiet, stood Fanny, her arms laid on the chimney-piece, her shoulder blades sticking out of her muslin gown, her face hidden in her hands.
Memoirs of a Midget Page 40