But no: there was a difference, he stubbornly maintained. What was done, was done. He was not speaking of the past. I knew nothing about the world. It was my very innocence that had kept me safe; ‘and – well, the courage’. My innocence! and the ‘courage’ thrown in! But couldn’t I, wouldn’t I see? he argued. The need was over now; he was with me; there was nothing to be afraid of; he would protect me. ‘Surely – oh, you know in your heart you couldn’t have enjoyed all that!’
‘Oh,’ said I poisonously, ‘so you don’t think that to cheat the blackguard, as you call him, at the last moment – and please don’t suppose I have forgotten what you have called other friends of mine – you don’t think that to break every promise I have made wouldn’t be wallowing worse than – Oh, thank you for the wallowing, I shall remember that.’
‘But, my dear, my dear,’ he began, ‘I never –’
‘I say I am not your dear,’ I broke in furiously. ‘One moment you dictate to me as if I were a child, and the next – As if I hadn’t been used to that pretence, that wheedling all my life long. As if I had ever been treated like an ordinary human being – coddled up, smuggled about, whispered at! Why, a scullery maid’s is Paradise compared with the life I’ve led. And as for the vile mob and the rest of it, I tell you I’ve enjoyed every minute of them. I make them clap their great ugly hands; I make them ashamed of themselves; they can’t help themselves; they just – And I’ve comforted some of them, too. What’s more, I tell you I love them. They are my own people; and I’d die for them if they would only forget what’s between us and – and share it all. You be careful; maybe I shall stay here for good. They don’t wince at my company; they don’t come creeping and crawling. Why! aren’t we all on show? Who set the world spinning? I tell you I hate that – that hypocrisy. What does it amount to, pray, but that you’d like the pretty, simpering doll all to yourself?’
A hooting screech broke the quiet that followed. The merry-go-round had set to its evening’s labours. Faster and faster jangled the pipes and chiming:
I dreamt that I dwe-elt in mar-ar-ble halls,
With vassals and serfs by my si-i-ide …
And at the sound, anger and pride died down in me. I lifted my face from the ground.
‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘But you don’t know what I have gone through these last weeks. And even if I were a hundred times as ashamed of myself as you think I ought to be, I couldn’t – I can’t go back. I have promised. It’s written down. Only once more – this one night, and I swear it shall be the last.’ My mouth crooked itself into a smile. ‘You shall pray for me on the hill,’ I said, ‘then lead me off to a Nunnery yourself.’
And still I could not whisper – Money. The word stuck in my throat.
He seemed not to have heard the miserable things I had been saying. Without a syllable of retaliation, he came a little nearer, and stood over me. We were all but in darkness now, though lights were beating on the canvas of our tent. It was quite, quite simple, he said. The showman was no fool. He couldn’t compel me to exhibit myself against my will. A contract was a contract, of course, but what if both parties to it agreed to break it? And supposing the showman refused to agree – what then? There was a far better plan, if only I would listen. As soon as he had been made to realize that nothing on earth could persuade me to show myself again, he would accept any alternative: ‘I’ll take your place,’ smiled Mr. Anon.
Take my place!
So this was the plan he had been brooding over on our journey. No wonder he had been absent-minded. Cold with dread I gazed at him in the obscurity of the tent. A glimpse of Adam’s rabbit face as he had stood brazening out his fears of the showman on that first night of adventure had darted through my mind. And this man – dwarfed, shrunken, emaciated.
A terrifying compassion gushed up into my heart, breaking down barriers that I never knew were there. It was the instant in my life, I think, when I came nearest to being a mother.
‘S-sh,’ I implored him. ‘You don’t understand. You can have no notion of what you are saying. I am a woman. They daren’t harm me. But you! They – and besides,’ the craftier argument floated into my mind, ‘besides, Mrs. Monnerie …’
But the sentence remained unfinished. The flap of the tent had lifted. The figure of the showman loomed up in the entry against the lights and the darkening sky. He was in excellent humour. He rattled the money in his pocket and breathed the smell of whisky into the tent, peering into it as if he were uncertain whether it was occupied or not.
‘That’s right, then,’ he began huskily, ‘that’s as it should be. Ten minutes, your ladyship! And maybe the young gentleman would give a hand with the drum outside, while you get through with the titivating.’
His shape was only vaguely discernible as he stood gently rocking there. It was Mr. Anon who answered him. For a little while the showman seemed to be too much astounded to reply. Then he lost control of himself. A torrent of imprecations spouted out of his mouth. He threatened to call in the police, the mob. He shook his brass-ringed whip in our faces. I had never seen a man of his kind really angry before. He looked like a beast, like the Apollyon straddling the path in my Pilgrim’s Progress. His roaring all but stunned me, swept over me, as if I were nothing – a leaf in the wind. I think I could have listened to him all but in mere curiosity – as to an equinoctial gale when one is safe in bed – if he had not been so near, and the tent so small and gloomy, and if Mr. Anon had not been standing in silence within reach of his hands. But his fury spent itself at last. Slowly his head turned on his heavy shoulders. He seemed suddenly to have forgotten his rage and became coaxing and conciliatory. He had a sounding, calf-like voice, and it rose up and down. An eavesdropper outside the tent would have supposed he was on the verge of tears.
He was sure the young lady had no intention of cheating him, of ‘doing the dirty’. Why, he’d as lief send off there and then to the great house for the flunkey and the cage. What had I to complain of? Wasn’t it private enough? Should he make it a level bob-a-nob, and no thrupennies? There was nothing to be afraid of. ‘God bless you, sir, she wouldn’t cheat an honest man, not she.’
People were swarming into the Fair from miles around, and real gentry in their carriages amongst them, like as had never been seen before. Did we want to ruin him? What should we think, now, if we had paid down good money to come and see the neatest little piece of female shape as ever God Almighty smuggled out of heaven; and in we went, and stuck up there was a gent – ‘a nice-spoken, respectable gent’, he agreed, with a contemptuous heave of his massive shoulders, ‘but a gent no less, and him gowked up on the table, there, why, half as big again, and mouthing, mouthing like a …?’ The hideous words poured on.
His great body gently rocked above me; his thumbs hooked-in under his armpits, his whip dangling. Till that moment I had scarcely realized that the scene in which I sat was real, I had been so harassed and stupefied by his noise. But now he had begun to think of what he was saying. In those last words an unnameable insult lurked. He was looking at us, seeing us, approaching us as if in a dream.
A horror of the spirit came over me, and, as if rapt away from myself, I stared sheer up at him.
‘Beware, my friend,’ I cried up at him. ‘Have a care. I see a rope round your neck.’
It was the truth. In the gloom, actually with my own eyes, I saw a noose loosely dangling there over his round, heavy shoulders.
So to this day I see my showman. His circus, I believe, continues to roam the English countryside, and by the mercy of heaven he will die in his bed, or, better still, in the bracken. But I suppose, like most of us, he was a slave to his own superstitions, or perhaps it was my very littleness, combined with the memory of some old story he had heard as a boy, that intimidated him. His mouth opened; his whip shook; the grin of a wild beast swept over his face. But he said no more.
Yet his, none the less, was half the victory. Nothing on earth could now have dissuaded me from keeping my bar
gain. His words had bitterly frightened me. No one else should be ‘gowked’ up there. I turned my back on him. He could go; I was ready.
But if I could be obstinate, so too could Mr. Anon. And when at last our argument was over, in sheer weariness I had agreed to a compromise. It was that I should show myself, and he take my place in the circus. The showman’s money was safe; that was all he cared about. If ‘Humpty’ liked to petticoat himself up like a doxy and take my ‘turn’ in the ring – why, it was a rank smelling robbery, but let him – let him. He bawled for the woman, flung a last curse at us, and withdrew.
We were alone – only the vacancy of the tent between us. Beyond the narrow slit I could see the merry jostling crowds, hoydens and hobbledehoys, with their penny squirts and pasteboard noses and tin trumpets. A strange luminousness bathed their faces and clothes, beautifying them with light and shadow, carpeting with its soft radiance the rough grey-green grass. The harvest moon was brightening. I went near to him and touched his sleeve. His lips contracted, his shoulder drew in from my touch.
‘Listen,’ I pleaded. ‘One hour – that is all. That evening in Wanderslore – do you remember? All my troubles over. Yes, I know. I have brought you to this. But then we can talk. Then you shall forgive me.’
He stretched out his hand. A shuffling step, a light were approaching. I fled back, snatched up my bundle, and climbed up into the darkness behind my canvas curtain. The next moment gigantic shadows rushed furiously into hiding, the tent was swamped with the flaring of the naphtha-lamp which the gipsy woman had come to hang to the tent-pole to light my last séance.
A few hasty minutes, and, stealing out, I bade Mr. Anon look. All Angélique’s fair hair had been tied into a bob and draped mantilla-fashion with a thick black veil. A black, coarse fringe torn from the head of a doll which I had found in the bottom of my trunk, dangled over her forehead. Her eyebrows were angled up like a Chinaman’s. Her cheeks were chalk-white, except for a dab of red on the bone, and she was dressed in a flounced gown, jet black and yellow, which I had cobbled up overnight and had padded out, bust, hips, and shoulders to nearly double my natural size. A spreading topaz brooch was on her breast, chains of beads and coral dangled to her waist, and a silk fan lay on her arm.
I swept him a curtsey. ‘I dreamt that I dwe-elt in mar-ar-ble halls,’ I piped out in a quavering falsetto. The folly of taking things so solemnly. What was humanity but a dressed-up ape? Had not my fair saint, Isobel de Flores, painted her cheeks, and garlanded her hair? And all his answer was to clench his teeth. He turned away with a shudder.
The drum reverberated, the panpipes squealed. I signed to him to hide himself in the recess among my discarded clothes, out of sight of peeping eyes, and arranged my person on the satin and rabbit-skins.
The tent flap lifted and the mob pressed in. Stretching out in a queue like a serpent, I caught a glimpse in the pale saffron moonlight of the crowd beyond. The sixpences danced in the tray. Once more the flap descended; my audience stilled. I looked from one to the other, smiling, defiant.
‘Why, Bob said she was a pale, pinched-up snippet of a thing with golden hair,’ whispered a slip of a girl to a smooth little woman at her side.
‘Ay, my Goff! And a waist like a wedding-ring,’ responded a wide mouth in a large red face, peering over.
‘Ah, lady,’ warbled the Signorina, ‘fair today and foul tomorrow. “Believe what you are told,” clanked the bell in the churchyard. Stuffing, my pretty; ask the goose!’
So went the Signorina’s last little orgy. It would be a lie to profess that she, or rather some black hidden ghost in her, did not enjoy it. My monstrous disguise, that ferment of humanity, those owlish faces, the lurking shame, the danger, the poisonous excitement swept me clean out of myself. Anything to be free for a while from ‘pernickety’ Miss M. But that, I suppose, is the experience of every gambler and wastrel and jezebel in the world, every one of his kind. One must not open the door too wide.
But this was not all. On other nights I had been alone. Now I was fervidly conscious of unseen, hungering eyes, watching every turn, and glance, and gesture. My dingy daïs was no longer in actuality. I lived in that one watcher’s mind – in his imagination. And deep beneath this insane excitement lay a gentle, longing happiness. Oh, when this vile tinsel show was over, and these swarming faces had melted into thin air, and the moonlit empty night was ours, what would I not pour out for his peace and comfort. What gratitude and tenderness for all that he had been to me, and done, and said. Why, we seemed never even to have spoken to each other – not self to self, and there was all the world to tell.
Hotter, ranker grew the fetid atmosphere. I could scarcely breathe in my monstrous mummery. But clearly, the showman was making a rich bargain of me, and rumour of a Midget that was golden as Aphrodite one night, and black as pitch the next, only thickened the swarm. At length – long expected – there came a pause. Yet another country urchin flat on his stomach in the grass, with head goggling up at me from the hem of the canvas, was dragged out, screeching and laughing, by his breeches. But I had caught the accents of a well-known voice, and, crouching, with head wrenched aside to listen, I heard the gipsy’s whining reply.
My moment had come. A pulse began its tattoo in my head. To remain helplessly lying there was impossible. I thrust myself on to my feet and, drawing back a pace or two, stood hunched up on the crimson spread of satin beside my wooden bolster. The canvas lifted, and one by one, the little party of ‘gentry’ stooped and filed in.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Mrs. Monnerie had paid for elbow room. It was the last ‘Private View’ in this world we were to share together. The sight of her capacious figure with its great bonnet and the broad, dark face beneath, now suddenly become strange and hostile, filled me with a vague sense of desolation. Yet I know she has forgiven me. Had I not pocketed my ‘pretty little fastidiousness’?
What Fanny had planned to do if Miss M., plain and simple, had occupied the Signorina’s table, I cannot even guess. For the spectacle of the squat, black, gloating guy she actually found there, she was utterly unprepared. It seemed, as I looked at her, that myself had fainted – had withdrawn out of my body – like the spirit in sleep. Or, maybe, not to be too nice about it, I merely ‘became’ my disguise. With mind emptied of every thought, I sank into an almost lifeless stagnancy, and with a heavy settled stare out of my black and yellow, from under the coarse fringe that brushed my brows, I met her eyes. Out of time and place, in a lightless, vacant solitude, we wrestled for mastery. At length the sneering, incredulous smile slowly faded from the pale, lovely face, leaving it twisted up as if after a nauseous draught of physic. Her gaze faltered, and fell. Her bosom rose; she coughed and turned away.
‘Hideous! monstrous!’ murmured Mrs. Monnerie to the tall, expressionless figure that stood beside her. ‘The abject evil of the creature!’
Her dark, appraising glance travelled over me – feet, hands, body, lace-draped head. It swept across my eyes as if they were less significant than bits of china stuck in a cocoanut.
‘No, Miss Bowater,’ she turned massively round on her, ‘you were perfectly right, it seems. As usual – but a dangerous habit, my dear. My little ransoming scheme must wait a bit. Just as well, perhaps, that our patient’s dainty nerves should have been spared this particular little initiation – Could one have imagined it?’
Mr. Padgwick-Steggall merely raised his eyebrows. ‘I shouldn’t have cared to try,’ he drawled. And the lady beside him made a little mouth and laid her gloved hand on his arm. ‘But, Madame is forgetting,’ whined the Signorina in a broken nosy English over her outspread fan, ‘Madame is forgetting. It’s alive! Oh, truly!’ and I clasped my arms even tighter across my padded chest, my body involuntarily rocking to and fro, though not with amusement.
‘Madame is forgetting nothing of the kind,’ retorted Mrs. Monnerie heartily. ‘The princess is an angel – Angélique – adorable.’ She turned to the gipsy woman and slipped a coin int
o the clawlike fingers. ‘Well, good-night,’ she nodded at me. ‘We are perfectly satisfied.’
‘La, la, Madame,’ my stuttering voice called after her, the words leaping out from some old hiding-place in my mind. ‘Je vous remercie, madame. Rien ne va plus …Noir gagne!’
Her ebony stick shook beneath her hand. ‘Unspeakable,’ she angrily ejaculated, stumping her way out. ‘A positive outrage against humanity.’
I shut my eyes, but the silent laughter that had once overtaken me in my bedroom at Mrs. Bowater’s scarcely sounded in my head. And Mrs. Monnerie could more easily survive the little exchange than I. My body was dull and aching as if after a severe fall. The booth was filling for the last time.
Little life was left in the inert figure that faced this new assortment of her fellow-creatures: how strangely dissimilar one from another; how horrifyingly alike. A faint premonition bade me be on my guard. Under the wavering flame of the lamp, my glance moved slowly on from face to face, eye on to eye; and behind every one a watcher whom now I dared not wait to challenge. Empty or cynical, disgusted, malevolent, or blankly curious, they met me: none pitiful; none saddened or afflicted. On former nights – Why had they grown so hostile? This, then, was to smother in the bog.
But one face there was known to me, and that known well. Hoping, perhaps, to take me unaware, or may it have been to snatch a secret word with me; Fanny had slipped back into the tent again, and was now steadily regarding me from behind the throng. A throng so densely packed together that the canvas walls bulged behind them, and the tent-pole bent beneath the strain. Yet so much alone were she and I in that last infinite moment that we might have been whispering together after death. And this time, suddenly overwhelmed with self-loathing, it was I who turned away.
Memoirs of a Midget Page 43