I sat down for a breathing space on the sunset side of a haystack. In the shade of the hazels, on the verge of the green descending field, rabbits were feeding and playing. And I began to think. Supposing I did reach the new pitch in time: the wreck I should be. Then Mrs. Monnerie – and Fanny; my thoughts skimmed hastily on. What then? As soon as my showman had paid me I must creep away by myself out of sight at once; that was certain. I must tell him that Adam was waiting for me. And then? Well, after a few hours’ rest in some shed or under a haystack, somehow or other I should have to find out the way, and press on to Wanderslore. There’d be a full moon. That would be a comfort. I knew the night. Once safely there, with money in my pocket, I could with a perfectly free conscience ask Mr. Anon to find me a lodging, perhaps not very far from his own. A laughable situation. But we would be the best of friends; now that all that – that nonsense was over. A deep sigh, drawn, as it were, from the depths of my bowels, rose up and subsided. What a strange thing that one must fall in love, couldn’t jump into it. And then? Well, Mrs. Bowater would soon be home, and perhaps Sir Walter had circumvented the Harrises. Suppose not. Well, even at the very worst, at say ten, say even fifteen shillings a week, my thirteen pounds would last me for months and months …Say four.
And as I said ‘four’, a gate clacked-to not many yards distant and a slow footfall sounded. Fortunately for me, the path I had been following skirted the other side of my haystack. Gathering myself close under the hay, I peeped out. A tall, spare man, in a low, peaked cap and leather leggings, came cautiously swinging along. His face was long, lean, severe. His eyes were fixed in a steady gaze, as if he were a human automaton stalking on. And the black barrel of a gun sloped down from under his arm. I drew in closer. His footsteps passed, died away; the evening breeze blew chill. A few moments afterwards a shattering report came echoing on from wood to wood, seeming to knock on my very breastbone. This was no place for me. With one scared glance at the huddling wood, I took to my heels, nor paused until the path through the spinney became so rutted that I was compelled to pick my way.
A cold gloom had closed in on my mind. I cursed clod-hopping shoes and bundle; envied the dead rabbit that had danced its airy dance and was done. As likely as not, I had already lost my way. And I plodded on along the stony paths, pausing only to quench my thirst with the rough juice of the blackberries that straggled at the wayside. I wonder if the ‘Knight of Furious Fancies’ was as volatile!
But yet another shock was awaiting me. The footpath dipped, there came a hedge and another stile, and I scuffled down the bank into the very lane which I had left more than an hour ago. I knew that white house on the hill; had seen it with Adam under the moon. It stood not much more than a mile from the lodge gates. My short cut had been a detour; and now the sun was down.
I drew back and examined my scribble of map. There was no help for it. Henceforward I must keep to the road. My thick shoes beat up the dust, one of my heels had blistered, my bundle grew heavier with every step. But fear had left me. Some other master cracked his whip at me as I shambled on, as doggedly and devil-may-care as a tramp.
I was stooping in the wayside ditch in one more attempt to ease my foot, when once again I heard hoofs approaching. With head pushed between the dusty tussocks, I stared along the flat, white road. A small and seemingly empty cart was bowling along in the dust. As it drew near, my ears began to sing, my heart stood still. I knew that battered cart, that rough-haired, thick-legged pony. Suddenly I craned up in horror, for it seemed that the face peering low over the splashboard in my direction was that of a death’s-head, grinning at me out of its gloom. Then with a cry of joy I was up and out into the road. ‘Hi, hi!’ I screamed up at him.
It was Mr. Anon. The pony was reined back on to its haunches; the cart stood still. And my stranger and I were incredulously gazing at one another as if across eternity, as if all the world beside were a dream that asked no awakening.
Half dragged and half lifted into the cart, by what signs I could, for speech was impossible, I bade him turn back. It unmanned me to see the quiet and love in his face. Without a word he wheeled the rearing pony round under the elmboughs, and for many minutes we swung on together at an ungainly gallop, swaying from this side to that, the astonishment of every wayfarer we met or overtook on our way. At length he turned into a grass-track under a rusting hedge festooned with woodbine and feathery travellers’ joy; and we smiled at one another as if in all history there had never been anything quite so strange as this.
‘You are ill,’ he said. ‘Oh, my dear, what have they done to you?’
I denied it emphatically, wiping my cheeks and forehead with the hem of my skirt – for my handkerchief was stuffed into my shoe. ‘Look at me!’ I smiled up at him, confident and happy. Was my face lying about me? Oh, I knew what a dreadful object I must be, but then: ‘I’ve been tramping for hours and hours in the dust; and why! – haven’t you come to meet me; to give me a lift?’
What foolish speeches makes a happy heart. Indeed, Mr. Anon had come to meet me, but not exactly there and then. He fetched out of his pocket the minute note that had summoned him. Here it is, still faintly scented:
Mrs. Monnerie sends her compliments, and would Miss M.’s friend very kindly call at Monk’s House, Croomham, at three o’clock on Friday afternoon. Mrs. Monnerie is anxious about Miss M.’s health.
Oh, Fanny, Fanny! Precisely how far she had taken Mrs. Monnerie’s name in vain in this letter I have never inquired. And now, I suppose, Mrs. Percy Maudlen would not trouble to tell me. But I can vow that in spite of the grime on my face the happiest smile shone through as I stuffed it into my bodice. So this was all that her harrowing ‘husband’ had come to – a summoning of friend to friend. If every little malicious plot ended like this, what a paradise the world would be. All tiredness passed away, though perhaps it continued to effervesce in my head a little. It seemed that I had been climbing on and on; and now suddenly the mist had vanished, and mountain and snow lay spread out around me in eternal peace and solitude. If Susan Monnerie’s was my first stranger’s kiss, Mr. Anon’s were my quietest tears.
His crazy cart seemed more magical than all the carpets of Arabia. I poured out my story – though not quite to its dregs. ‘This very afternoon,’ I told him, ‘I was writing to you – in my mind. And you see, you have come.’ The shaggy pony tugged at the coarse grass. I could hear the trickling sands in the great hourglass, and chattered on in vain hope to hold them back.
‘You are not listening, only watching,’ I blamed him.
His lips moved; he glanced away. Yet I had already foreseen the conflict awaiting me. And all his arguments and entreaties that I should throw over the showman, and drive straight on with him into the gathering evening towards Wanderslore, were in vain.
‘Look,’ he said, as if for straw to break the camel’s back, and drew out by its ribbon my Bowater latchkey.
‘No,’ said I, ‘not even that. I sleep out to-night.’ And surely, surely I kept repeating, he must understand. How could I possibly be at rest with a broken promise? What cared I now for what was past and gone? Think what a joy, what sheer fun it would be to face Mrs. Monnerie for the last time, and she unaware of it! Nothing, nothing could amuse her more when she hears of it. He should come and see; hear the crowd yell. He mustn’t be so solemn about things. ‘Do try and see the humour of it,’ I besought him.
But the money – that little incentive – I kept to myself.
He stared heavily into the silvery copse that bordered the track. Motionless in their bright, withering leaves, its trees hung down their tasselled branches beneath the darkening sky. Then, much against his will, he turned his pony towards the high road. The wheel gridded on a stone, he raised his whip.
‘Hst!’ I whispered, clutching at the arm that held the rein. Crouching low, we watched the great Monnerie carriage, with its stiff-necked, blinkered, stepping greys and gleaming lamps sweep by.
‘There,’ I laughed up at him,
lifting myself, one hand upon his knee, ‘there but for the Grace of God goes Miss M.’
The queer creature frowned into my smiling face and flicked the pony with his whip. ‘And here,’ he muttered moodily, ‘who knows but by the Grace of God go I?’
Anxiety gone now, and responsibility but a light thing, my tongue rattled on quite as noisily as the cart. Kent’s rich cornfields were around us, their stubble a pale washed-out gold in the last light of evening. Here and there on the hills a row or two of ungarnered stooks stood solemnly carved out against the sky. Most of the hop-gardens, too, had been dismantled, though a few we passed, with their slow-twirling dusky vistas and labyrinths, were still wreathed with bines. Their scent drifted headily on the stillness. And as with eyes peeping over the edge of the cart I watched these beloved, homelike hills and fields and orchards glide by, I shrilled joyfully at my companion every thought and fancy that came into my head, many of them, no doubt, recent deposits from the library at No. 2.
I told him, I remember, how tired I was of the pernicketiness of my life; and amused him with a description of my Tank. ‘You would hardly believe it, but I have never once heard the least faint whisper of water in it, and if I had been a nice, simple savage, I dare say I should have prayed to it. Instead of which, when one night I saw a star over the housetop I merely shrugged my shoulders. My mind was so rancid I hated it. I was so shut in; that’s what it was.’
He stroked the little, thick-coated horse with the lash of his whip, and smiled round at me.
On I went. Shouldn’t life be a High Road, didn’t he think; surely not a hot, silly zigzag of short cuts leading back to the place you started from, and you too old or stupid, perhaps, to begin again? Didn’t he hunger, too, to see the great things of the world, the ruins of Babylon, the Wall of China, the Himalayas, and the Pyramids – at night – black; and sand?
‘My ghost!’ said I, had he ever thought of the enormous solitudes of the Sahara, or those remote places where gigantic images stare blindly through the centuries at the stars – their builders just a pinch of dust? Some day, I promised him out of the abandonment of my heart, we would sail away, he and I, to his Pygmy Land. Surf and snow and singing sand-dunes, and fruits on the trees and birds in the air: we would live – ‘Oh, happy as all this!’ (and I swept my hands across hill and dale), ‘ever, ever afterwards. As they do, Mr. Anon, in those absurd, incredible fairy-tales, you know.’
He smiled again, cast a look into the distance, touched my hand.
Perhaps he was wishing the while that that piercing, pining voice of mine would keep silence, so that my presence might not disturb his own brooding thoughts. I could only guess at pleasing him. Yet I felt, still feel, that he was glad of my company and never for a moment sorry we had met.
Chapter Fifty-One
But our brief hour was drawing to an end. We were now passing little groups of country people and children in the quiet evening. We ourselves talked no more. The old pony plodded up yet another hill; we went clattering down its deep descent; and there, in the green bowl of a meadow sloping down from its woody fringes above, lay scattered the bellying booths, the gaudy wagons and cages of the circus. All but hidden in the trees above them, a crooked, tarnished weathercock glinted in the sunset afterglow. Lights twinkled against the dying daylight. The bright-painted merry-go-round with its staring, motionless, galloping horses was bathed in the shine of its flares, a thin plume of steam softly ascending from its brass-rimmed funnel.
A knot of country boys, gabbling at one another like starlings, shrilled a cheer as we came rattling over a stone bridge beneath which a stream shallowly washed its bank of osiers. I laughed at them, waved my hand. At this they yelled, danced in the road, threw dust into the air. Not, perhaps, a very friendly return; but how happy I was, all anxiety and responsibility gone now.
The faint, rank smell of the wild beasts mingling with the evening air was instilling its intoxication in my brain. I longed for darkness, the din and glare; longed for my tent and the gaping faces, for the smoky wind to fan my cheek as I bobbed cantering round the ring. It must have been a ridiculously childish face that ever and again scrutinized my companion’s. Nothing for me in that looking-glass! How slow a face his was; he was refusing to look at me. It dismayed and fretted me to find him so sombre and dour.
His glance shifted to and fro under a frown that expressed a restless anxiety. His silence seemed to reproach me. Oh, well, when the day was over, and Mademoiselle’s finery packed up in its bundle again, and the paint washed off, and the last echo of applause from the crowded benches had died away, and my pay was safe in my pocket, then he would know that the stake I had played for had been my freedom, my very self. Then surely his heart would lighten, and he would praise me, and we could go in peace. Would he not realize, too, that even my small body had its value, and was admired in a dismal world that cared not a jot for the spirit that inhabited it?
The showman stood by the tent, a gaudy silk scarf knotted round his neck. My lean-breasted gipsy woman spangled there beside him, with her black hair looped round her narrow bony head, and her loose, dusty, puckered boots showing beneath her skirts. There was a clear lustre in the lamp-starred air; and the spectacle of man and woman, of resting wheel and cropping horse, meadow and hill, poured a livelong blessing into my heart. Even the cowed, enfeebled lion with the mange of age and captivity in his skin, seemed to drowse content, and the satin-skinned leopards – almost within pat of paw of the flaxen-haired girl in the white stockings who leaned idly against the wheel – paced their den as if in pride. It was the same old story: my heart could not contain it all. Yet to whom tell its secrets?
A roomier tent had been prepared for me. We were ushered into it by the showman with a mock obeisance that swelled the veins on his forehead almost to bursting. The gipsy’s birdlike eyes pierced and darted from one to the other of us, her skinny hand concealing her mouth. I felt as light as a feather, and thankful that my mud-caked shoes and petticoats were hardly discernible as none too elegantly I scrambled down from the cart.
The showman watched me with that sly, covetous grin about his mouth that I knew so well, though the stare with which he had greeted Mr. Anon had been more insolent than friendly. I had cut the time rather close, he told me, but better late than never! As for that long-nosed rat with the cage, he hadn’t been much smitten with the looks of him; and he was not the man to ask questions of a lady, not he. Here I was, and he hoped I had come for good. A rough life but a merry. Up with the lark until down under the daisies; and every man jack of them ready to kiss the ground I walked on. And the Fat Woman – just pining good money away she was, with longing to mother the little stranger!
I nodded my head at him with a smile as worldly-wise as I could make it. ‘It’s the last taste that counts, Mr. Showman,’ I said politely. ‘Everyone has been exceedingly kind to me; and my love, please, to the Fat Woman. This is my friend, Mr. Anon. He has come to take care of me. We shall go back – go on together.’
The showman broke into a laugh, but his face hardened again, as, grinding one jaw slowly on the other, he turned to Mr. Anon. Maybe ‘the young gentleman’ was anxious to enjoy a taste of the life on his own account, he asked me. Could he ride? A bit of steeple-chasing? There was plenty of horseflesh – a double turn: Beauty and the Beast, now? Or perhaps another Spotted Boy? Love or money; just name the figure. Treat him fair and square, and he wouldn’t refuse a genuine offer; though, naturally, every inch made a difference, and a foot twelve times as much. And looks were looks.
There was little enough to enjoy in the sound of all this. Apparently the mere sight of Mr. Anon had soured the showman. Many of his words were Greek to me, and to judge from the woman’s yelps of laughter their meaning was none of the daintiest. I shrugged my shoulders, smiled, spread out my hands, and with a word or two fenced him off, pretending to be flattered. He looked at the woman as if to say ‘There’s manners for you!’ She made a sudden, ferocious grimace. We were a sin
gular four in the tent.
But it would be false to profess that I hadn’t a sneaking admiration for the man; and I kept glancing uneasily at the ‘young gentleman’ who was so blackly ignoring his advances. To say the least of it, it was a little unintelligent of Mr. Anon not to take things as they came, if only for my sake.
‘But you must please try and help me a little,’ I pleaded, when the showman and the gipsy had left us to ourselves for a moment. ‘It’s only his fun. He’s really not a bad sort of man underneath. You can’t say there’s a Spirit of Evil in that great hulking creature, now can you? I am not the least bit afraid of him.’
He glanced at me without turning his head. Involuntarily I sighed. Things never were so easy as one supposed or hoped they would be.
Already my fingers were busy at the knots of my bundle, and for a while, simply because what Mr. Anon was saying was so monstrous and incredible, I continued to fumble at them without attempting to answer him. He was forbidding me to keep my word; forbidding me to show myself; just ordering me to come away. No, no; he must be crazy; I had never understood him. There must be some old worm in his mind. He was telling me in so many words that to lie a prey to the mob’s curiosity had been a disgrace – soiling me for ever.
The cruel stupidity of it! With head bent low and burning cheek I heard his harsh voice knell on and on – not persuading or conciliating, or pleading with me – I could have forgiven him that easily enough; but flatly commanding me to listen and obey.
‘For mercy’s sake,’ I broke in hurriedly at last, ‘that’s enough of that. If just sitting here and talking to one’s fellow-creatures has smeared me over, as you say it has, why, I must wait till Jordan to be clean. You should have seen that great wallowing sow this evening. She wasn’t ashamed of herself. Can’t you understand that I simply had to get free? You’d see it was for your sake, too, perhaps, if you had had the patience to listen. But there; never mind. I understand. You can’t endure my company any longer. That’s what it means. Well, then, if that is so, there’s no help for it. You must just go. And I must be alone again.’
Memoirs of a Midget Page 42