Memoirs of a Midget
Page 45
Its bitter juices jetted out upon cheek, mouth, and tongue, for ever staining me with their dye. Their very rancour shocked my body wideawake. Struck suddenly through with frightful cold and terror, I flung the vile thing down, and scoured my mouth with the draggled hem of my skirt. ‘Oh God; oh God!’ I cried; then turned, ran a few steps, tripped, turned back and cast myself down, crushing my eyes with my hands; and in helpless confusion began to pray.
Minutes, hours, passed – I know not. But at last, with throat parched and swollen, and hands and cheeks and scalp throbbing with an unnatural heat, I raised my eyes. Two moons were in the sky, hideously revolving amid interwoven arcs of coloured light, and running backward and forward. I called out in the silence. A gigantic nightjar swirled on me, plucking at my hair. A maddening vertigo seized me. I went stumbling and staggering down to my stone and drenched head and breast in the flashing black and silver water.
It was a momentary refreshment, and in its influence memory began droning of the past. Confused abhorrent images mocked my helpless dreamings. There was a place – beyond – out of these shadows, unattainable. A piercing, vindictive voice was calling me. No hope now. I was damned. In senseless hallucination I began systematically, laboriously, a frenzied search. Leaf, pebble, crawling night-creature – with slow, animal-like care, I turned them over one by one, seeking and seeking.
Lyndsey
* * *
Chapter Fify-Five And Last
And yet again I pause – long after these last words were written – to look back across the intervening years at that young woman. What, indeed, was her insane mind seeking: what assurance; reconciliation? I know not, but there she herself was found, nails worn to the quick, feet shoeless, a hunted anatomy. Her fret and fever were to pass away; but what has all this experience done for me? – that wildest, happiest, cruellest, dearest, blackest twelvemonth of my life? One more unanswerable question. But, thank God, I live on; have even finished the task I set myself; and in spite of fits and moods of depression, distaste, and weariness, have been happy in it. Even when most contemptuous and ashamed of myself, I have still found comfort in the belief that truth is a wholesome medicine, though in essence it be humanly unattainable. And my work has taught me this too – not to fret so foolishly as once I did, at being small and insignificant in body; to fear a great deal more remaining pygmy-minded, and pygmy-spirited. I used to try to set myself against the World – but no need to enter further into that. We cannot see ourselves as others see us, but that is no excuse for not wearing spectacles; and even up here, in my peaceful lonely old Stonecote, I must beware of a mind swept and garnished. Moreover my hour must come again: and his.
That being so, of this I am certain; that it will be impossible to free myself, to escape from this world, unless in peace and amity I can take every shred of it, every friend and every enemy, all that these eyes have seen, these senses discovered with me. I know that. And perhaps for that very reason, in spite of the loving gratitude that overcomes me at the thought of what my existence might have been, I sometimes dread the ease and quiet and seclusion in which I live. And this tale itself? As Mrs. Monnerie had said, what is it but once more to have drifted into being on show again – in a book? That is so; and so I must leave it, hoping against hope that one friend at any rate will consent in his love and wisdom to take me seriously, and to remember me, not with scorn or even with pity, but as if, life for life, we had shared the world on equal terms.
M.
First published by Collins Sons & Co Ltd in 1921
First paperback edition published by Oxford University Press in 1982
This edition published by Telegram in 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84659-066-5
eISBN: 978-1-84659-176-1
Copyright © The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare, 1921 and 2009
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