Memoirs of a Midget, page 30
part #3 of James Tait Black Memorial Fiction Prize Winners Series
As a matter of fact I was walking at that moment in imagination with Mrs. Bowater at Lyme Regis, but I seized the opportunity of hastening round from between aunt and nephew so that I could screen myself from the sun in Mrs. Monnerie’s ample shadow, and inquired why London gardeners were so much attached to geraniums, lobelias, calceolarias, and ice-plants? Mightn’t one just as well paint the border, Mrs. Monnerie, red, yellow, and blue? Then it would last—rain, snow, anything.
“Now I’ll wager, Percy, you hadn’t noticed that,” said Mrs. Monnerie in triumph.
“I make it a practice,” he replied, “never to notice the obvious. It is merely a kind of least common denominator, as I believe you call ’em, and,” he wafted away a yawn with his glove, “I take no interest in vulgar fractions.”
I took a little look at him out of the corner of my eye, and wished that as a child I had paid more heed to my arithmetic lessons. “Look, Mrs. Monnerie,” I cried piteously, “poor Cherry’s tongue is dangling right out of his head. He looks so hot and tired.”
She swept me a radiant, if contorted, gleam. “Percy, would you take pity on poor dear Cherry? Twice round, I think, will be as much as I can comfortably manage.”
So Percy had to take poor dear Cherry into his arms, just like a baby; and the quartette to all appearance became a trio.
But my existence at No. 2 was not always so monotonous as that. Mrs. Monnerie, in spite of her age, her ebony cane, and a tendency to breathlessness, was extremely active and alert. If life is a fountain, she preferred to be one of the larger bubbles as near as possible to its summit. She almost succeeded in making me a minute replica of herself. We shared the same manicurist, milliner, modiste, and coiffeur. And since it was not always practicable for Mahometta to be carried off to these delectable mountains, they were persuaded to attend upon her, and that as punctually as the fawn-faced man, Mr. Godde, who came to wind the clocks.
Whole mornings were spent in conclave in Mrs. Monnerie’s boudoir—Susan sometimes of our company. Julius Caesar, so my little Roman history told me, had hesitated over the crossing of one Rubicon. Mrs. Monnerie and I confabulated over the fording of a dozen of its tributaries a day. A specialist—a singularly bald man in a long black coat—was called in. He eyed me this way, he eyed me that—with far more deference than I imagine Mr. Pellew can have paid me at my christening. He assured Mrs. Monnerie of his confirmed belief that the mode of the moment was not of the smallest consequence so far as I was concerned. “The hard, small hat,” he smiled; “the tight-fitting sleeve!” And yet, to judge by the clothes he did recommend, I must have been beginning to look a pretty dowd at Mrs. Bowater’s.
“But even if Madam prefers to dress in a style of her own choice,” he explained, “the difference, if she will understand, must still be in the fashion.”
But he himself—though Mrs. Monnerie, I discovered after he was gone, had not even noticed that he was bald—he himself interested me far more than his excellent advice; and not least when he drew some papers out of a pocketbook, and happened to let fall on the carpet the photograph of a fat little boy with an immense mop of curls. So men—quite elderly, practical men, can blush, I thought to myself; for Dr. Phelps had rather flushed than blushed; and my father used only to get red.
Since nothing, perhaps, could make me more exceptional in appearance than I had been made by Providence, I fell in with all Mrs. Monnerie’s fancies, and wore what she pleased—pushing out of mind as well as I could all thought of bills. I did more than that. I really began to enjoy dressing myself up as if I were my own doll, and when alone I would sit sometimes in a luxurious trance, like a lily in a pot. Yet I did not entirely abandon my old little Bowater habit of indoor exercise. When I was alone in my room I would sometimes skip. And on one of Fleming’s afternoons “out” I even furbished up what I could remember of my four kinds of Kentish hopscotch, with a slab of jade for dump. But in the very midst of such recreations I would surprise myself lost in a kind of vacancy. Apart from its humans and its furniture, No. 2 was an empty house.
I do not mean that Mrs. Monnerie was concerned only with externals. Sir William Forbes-Smith advised that a little white meat should enrich my usual diet of milk and fruit, and that I should have sea-salt baths. The latter were more enjoyable than the former, though both, no doubt, helped to bring back the strength sapped out of me by the West End.
My cheekbones gradually rounded their angles; a livelier colour came to lip and skin, and I began to be as self-conscious as a genuine beauty. One twilight, I remember, I had slipped across from out of my bath for a pinch of the “crystals” which Mrs. Monnerie had presented me with that afternoon; for my nose, also, was accustoming itself to an artificial life. An immense cheval looking-glass stood there, and at one and the same instant I saw not only my own slim, naked, hastening figure reflected in its placid deeps, but, behind me, that of Fleming, shadowily engrossed. With a shock I came to a standstill, helplessly meeting her peculiar stare. Only seven yards or so of dusky air divided us. Caught back by this unexpected encounter, for one immeasurable moment I stood thus, as if she and I were mere shapes in a picture, and reality but a thought.
Then suddenly she recovered herself, and with a murmur of apology was gone. Huddled up in my towel, I sat motionless, shrunken for a while almost to nothing in the dense sense of shame that had swept over me. Then suddenly I flung myself on my knees, and prayed—though what about and to whom I cannot say. After which I went back and bathed myself again.
The extravagances of Youth! No doubt, the worst pang was that though vaguely I knew that my most secret solitude had been for a while destroyed, that long intercepted glance of half-derisive admiration had filled me with something sweeter than distress. If only I knew what common-sized people really feel like in similar circumstances. Biographies tell me little; and can one trust what is said in novels? The only practical result of this encounter was that I emptied all Mrs. Monnerie’s priceless crystals forthwith into my bath, and vowed never, never again to desert plain water. So, for one evening, my room smelt like a garden in Damascus.
As for Fleming, she never, of course, referred to this incident, but our small talk was even smaller than before. If, indeed, to Percy, “toadlet” was the aptest tag for me; for Fleming, I fancy, “stuck-up” sufficed. Instinct told her that she was only by courtesy a lady’s-maid.
* * *
Less for her own sake than for mine, Mrs. Monnerie and I scoured London for amusement, even though she was irritated a little by my preference for the kind which may be called instructive. The truth is, that in all this smooth idleness and luxury a hunger for knowledge had seized on me; as if (cat to grass) my mind were in search of an antidote.
Mrs. Monnerie had little difficulty in securing “private views.” She must have known everybody that is anybody—as I once read of a Countess in a book. And I suppose there is not a very large number of this kind of person. Whenever our social engagements permitted, we visited the show places, galleries, and museums. Unlike the rest of London, I gazed at Amenhotep’s Mummy in the late dusk of a summer evening; and we had much to say to one another; though but one whiff of the huge round library gave me a violent headache. When the streets had to be faced, Fleming came with us in the carriage, and I was disguised to look as much like a child as possible—a process that made me feel at least twenty years older. The Tower of London, the Zoo, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s—each in turn fell an early prey to my hunger for learning and experience. As for the Thames; the very sight of it seemed to wash my small knowledge of English history clear as crystal.
Mrs. Monnerie yawned her way on—though my comments on these marvels of human enterprise occasionally amused her. I made amends, too, by accompanying her to less well-advertised showplaces, and patiently sat with her while she fondled unset and antique gems in a jeweller’s, or inspected the china, miniatures, and embroideries in private collections. If the mere look of the books in the British Museum gave me a headache, it is curious that the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Works did not. And yet I don’t know; life itself had initiated me into this freemasonry. I surveyed the guillotine without a shudder, and eyed Mr. Hare and Charles Peace with far less discomposure than General Tom Thumb, or even Robert Burns in the respectable gallery above. My one misfortune was that I could look at no murderer without instantly recomposing the imaginary scene of his crime within my mind. And as after a while Mrs. Monnerie decided to rest on a chair set for her by the polite attendant under the scaffold, and we had the Chamber nearly to ourselves, I wandered on alone, and perhaps supped rather too full of horrors for one evening.
Mrs. Monnerie would often question me. “Well, what do you think of that, Mammetinka?” or, “Now, then, my inexhaustible little Miss Aristotle, discourse on that.”
And like a bullfinch I piped up in response to the best of my ability. My answers, I fear, were usually evasive. For I had begun to see that she was making experiments on my mind and senses, as well as on my manners and body. She was a “fancier.” And one day I ogled up at her with the pert remark that she now possessed a pocket barometer which would do its very utmost to remain at 31°, if that was possible without being “Very Dry.”
She received this little joke with extraordinary good humour. “When I come down in the world, my dear,” she said, “and these horrid anarchists are doing their best to send us all sky-high first, we’ll visit the Courts of Europe together, like Count Boruwlaski. Do you think you could bring yourself to support your old friend in her declining years in a declining age?”
I smiled and touched her glove. “Where thou goest, I will go,” I replied; and then could have bitten off my tongue in remorse. “Pah,” gasped a secret voice, “so that’s going the same way too, is it?”
Yet heaven knows I was not a Puritan—and never shall be. I just adored things bright and beautiful. Music, too, in moderation, was my delight; and Susan Monnerie with her small, sweet voice would sometimes sing to me in one room while—in an almost unbearable homesickness—I listened in another. Concerts in general, however, left every muscle of my body as stiff with rheumatism as it was after my visit to Mr. Moss’s farmhouse. The unexpected blare of a brass band simply froze my spine; and a really fine performance on the piano was sheer torture. Once, indeed, when Mrs. Monnerie’s carriage was one of a mellay clustered together while the Queen drove by, in the appalling clamour of the Lancers’ trombones and kettledrums, I fell prostrate in a kind of fit. So it was my silly nerves that cheated me of my one and only chance to huzza a Crowned Head not, if I may say so without disrespect, so very many sizes larger than my own.
Alas, Mrs. Monnerie was an enthusiast for all the pleasures of the senses. I verily believe that it was only my vanity which prevented me from becoming as inordinately fat as Sir William Forbes-Smith’s white meat threatened to make me.
Brightest novelty of all was my first visit to a theatre—the London night, the glare and clamour of the streets, the packed white rows of faces, the sea-like noise of talk, the glitter, shimmer, dazzle—it filled my veins with quicksilver; my heart seemed to be throbbing in my breast as fast as Mrs. Monnerie’s watch. Fortunately she had remembered to take our seats on the farther side from the brass and drums of the orchestra. I restrained my shivers; the lights went out; and in the congregated gloom softly stole up the curtain on the ballet.
Perched up there in the velvet obscurity of our box, I surveyed a woodland scene, ruins, distant mountains, a rocky stream on which an enormous moon shone, and actually moved in the theatrical heavens. And when an exquisite figure floated, pale, gauzy, and a-tiptoe, into those artificial solitudes, drenched with filmy light; with a far cry of “Fanny!” my heart suddenly stood still; and all the old stubborn infatuation flooded heavily back upon me once more.
Susan sat ghostlike, serenely smiling. Percy’s narrow jaws were working on their hinges like those of a rabbit I had seen through my grandfather’s spyglass nibbling a root of dandelion. Mrs. Monnerie reclined in her chair, hands on lap, with pursed-up mouth and weary eyes. There was nobody to confide in, then. But when from either side of the brightening stage flocked in winged creatures with lackadaisical arms and waxlike smilings, whose paint and powder caught back my mind rather than my feelings, my first light-of-foot was hovering beneath us close to the flaring footlights; and she was now no more Fanny than the circle of illuminated parchment over her head was the enchanting moon. What a complicated world it was with all these layers! The experience filled me with a hundred disquieting desires, and yet again, chiefest of them was that which made sensitive the stumps where, if I turned into a bird, my wings would grow, and which bade me “escape.”
“She’s getting devilish old and creaky on her pins,” yawned Percy, when the curtain had descended, and I had sighingly shrunk back into my own tasselled nook from the noise and emptiness of actuality.
“No,” said Mrs. Monnerie, “it is you, Percy, who are getting old. You were born blasé. You’ll be positively yawning your head off at the last trump.”
“Dear Aunt Alice,” said Percy, squinting through his opera-glasses, “nothing of the kind. I shall be helping you to find the mislaid knucklebones. Besides, it’s better to be born—”
But the rest of his sentence—and I listened to him only because I hated him—passed unheeded, for all my attention had been drawn to Susan. The hand beside me had suddenly clutched at her silk skirt, and a flush, gay as the Queen’s Union Jacks in Bond Street, had mounted into her clear, pale cheek, as with averted chin she sat looking down upon someone in the stalls. At sight of her blushing, a richer fondness for her lightened my mind. I followed her eye to its goal, and gazed enthralled, now up, now down, stringing all kinds of little beads of thoughts together; until, perhaps conscious that she was being watched, she turned and caught me. Flamed up her cheeks yet hotter; and now mine too; for my spirits had suddenly sunk into my shoes at the remembrance of Wanderslore and my “ghostly, gloating little dwarfish creature.” Then once more darkness stole over the vast, quieting house, and the curtain reascended upon Romance.
XXXV
Instead of its being a month as had been arranged, it was over six weeks before I was deposited again with my elegant dressing-case—a mere flying visitor—on Mrs. Bowater’s doorstep. A waft of cooked air floated out into the June sunshine through the letter-box. Then, in the open door, just as of old, flushed and hot in her black clothes, there stood my old friend, indescribably the same, indescribably different. She knelt down on her own doormat, and we exchanged loving greetings. Once more I trod beneath the wreathing, guardian horns, circumnavigated the age-stained eight-day clock, and so into my parlour.
Nothing was changed. There stood the shepherdess ogling the shepherd; there hung Mr. Bowater; there dangled the chandelier; there angled the same half-dozen flies. Not a leg, caster, or antimacassar was out of place. Yet how steadfastly I had to keep my back turned on my landlady lest she should witness my discomfiture. Faded, dingy, crowded, shrunken—it seemed unbelievable, as I glanced around me, that here I could have lived and breathed so many months, and been so ridiculously miserable, so tragically happy. All that bygone happiness and wretchedness seemed, for the moment, mere waste and folly. And not only that—“common.” I climbed Mr. Bates’s clumsy staircase, put down my dressing-case, and slowly removing my gloves, faced dimly the curtained window. Beyond it lay the distant hills, misty in the morning sunbeams, the familiar meadows all but chin-high with buttercups.
“Oh, Mrs. Bowater,” I turned at last, “here I am. You and the quiet sky—I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one’s self, if one is always changing?”
“There comes a time, miss, when we don’t change; only the outer walls crumble away morsel by morsel, so to speak. But that’s not for you yet. Still, that’s the reason. Me and the old sticks are just what we were, at least to the eye; and you—well, there!—the house has been like a cage with the bird gone.”
She stood looking at me with one long finger stretching bonily out on the black and crimson tablecloth, a shining sea of loving kindness in her eyes. “I can see they have taken good care of you and all, preened the pretty feathers. Why, you are a bit plumper in figure, miss; only the voice a little different, perhaps.” The last words were uttered almost beneath her breath.
“My voice, Mrs. Bowater; oh, they cannot have altered that.”
“Indeed they have, miss; neater-twisted, as you might say; but not scarcely to be noticed by any but a very old friend. Maybe you are a little tired with your long drive and those two solemnities on the box. I remember the same thing—the change of voice—when Fanny came back from her first term at Miss Stebbings’.”
“How is she?” I inquired in even tones. “She has never written to me. Not a word.”
But, strange to say, as Mrs. Bowater explained, and not without a symptom of triumph, that’s just what Fanny had done. Her letter was awaiting me on the mantelpiece, tucked in behind a plush-framed photograph.
“Now, let me see,” she went on, “there’s hot water in your basin, miss—I heard the carriage on the hill; a pair of slippers to ease your feet, in case in the hurry of packing they’d been forgot; and your strawberries and cream are out there icing themselves on the tray. So we shan’t be no time, though disturbing news has come from Mr. Bowater, his leg not mending as it might have been foreseen—but that can wait.”
An unfamiliar Miss M. brushed her hair in front of me in the familiar looking-glass. It was not that her Monnerie raiment was particularly flattering, or she, indeed, pleasanter to look at—rather the contrary: and I gazed long and earnestly into the glass. But art has furtive and bewitching fingers. While in my homemade clothes I had looked just myself, in these I looked like one or other of my guardian angels, or perhaps, as an unprejudiced Fleming would have expressed it—the perfect lady. How gradual must have been the change in me to have passed thus unnoticed. But I didn’t want to think. I felt dulled and dispirited. Even Mrs. Bowater had not been so entranced to see me as I had anticipated. It was tiresome to be disappointed. I rummaged in a bottom drawer, got out an old gown, made a grimace at myself in my mind, and sat down to Fanny’s letter. But then again, what are externals? Who was this cool-tempered Miss M. who was now scanning the once heartrending handwriting?
