Memoirs of a Midget, page 31
part #3 of James Tait Black Memorial Fiction Prize Winners Series
“Dear Midgetina—When this will reach you, I don’t know. But somehow I cannot, or rather I can, imagine you the cynosure of the complete peerage, and prefer that my poor little letter should not uprear its modest head in the midst of all that Granjer. You may not agree—but if a few weeks of a High Life that may possibly continue into infinity has made no difference to you, then Fanny is not among the prophets.
“We have not met since—we parted. But did you ever know a ‘dead past’ bury itself with such ingratiating rapidity? Have you in your sublime passion for Nature ever watched a Sexton Beetle? But, mind you, I have helped. The further all that slips away, the less I can see I was to blame for it. What’s in your blood needs little help from outside. Cynical it may sound; but imagine the situation if I had married him! What could existence have been but a Nightmare-Life-in-Death? (Vide S. T. Coleridge). Now the Dream continues—for us both.
“Oh, yes, I can see your little face needling up at this. But you must remember, dear Midgetina, that you will never, never be able to see things in a truly human perspective. Few people, of course, try to. You do. But though your view may be delicate as gossamer and clear as a glass marble, it can’t be full-size. Boil a thing down, it isn’t the same. What remains has the virtues of an essence, but not the volume of its origin. This sounds horribly school-booky; but I am quite convinced you are too concentrated. And I being what I am, only the full volume can be my salvation. Enough. The text is as good as the sermon—far better, in fact.
“Now I am going to be still more callous. My own little private worries have come right—been made to. I’m tit for tat, that is, and wiser for it beyond words. Some day, when Society has taught you all its lessons, I will explain further. Anyhow, first I send you back £3 of what I owe you. And thank you. Next I want you to find out from Mrs. Mummery (as mother calls her—or did), if among her distinguished acquaintance she knows anyone with one or two, or at most three, small and adorable children who need an excellent governess. Things have made it undesirable for me to stay on here much longer. It shall be I who give notice, or, shall we say, terminate the engagement.
“Be an angel, then. First, wake up. Candidly, to think me better than I am is more grossly unfair than if I thought you taller than you are. Next, sweet cynosure, find me a sinecure. Don’t trouble about salary. (You wouldn’t, you positive acorn of quixoticism, not if I owed you half a million.) But remember: Wanted by the end of August at latest, a Lady, wealthy, amiable, with two Cherubic Doves in family, boys preferred. The simple, naked fact being that after this last bout of life’s fitful fever, I pine for a nap.
“Of course mother can see this letter if she wishes to, and you don’t mind. But personally I should prefer to have the bird actually fluttering in my hand before she contemplates it in the bush.
“I said pine just now. Do you ever find a word suddenly so crammed with meaning that at any moment it threatens to explode? Well, Midgetina, them’s my sentiments. Penitent I shall never be, until I take the veil. But I have once or twice lately awoke in a kind of glassy darkness—beyond all moonshine—alone. Then, if I hadn’t been born just thick-ribbed, unmeltable ice—well. … Vulgar, vulgar Fanny!
“Fare thee well, Midgetina. ‘One cried, “God bless us,” and “Amen,” the other.’ Prostituted though he may have been for scholastic purposes, W. S. knew something of Life.
“Yours,—F.”
What was the alluring and horrifying charm for me of Fanny’s letters? This one set my mind, as always, wandering off into a maze. There was a sour taste in it, and yet—it was all really and truly Fanny. I could see her unhappy eyes glittering through the mask. She saw herself—perhaps more plainly than one should. “Vulgar Fanny.” As for its effect on me; it was as if I had fallen into a bed of nettles, and she herself, picking me up, had scoffed, “Poor little Midgekin,” and supplied the dock. Her cynicism was its own antidote, I suppose. The selfishness, the vanity, and impenetrable hardness—even love had never been so blind as to ignore all that, and now what love remained for her had the sharpest of sharp eyes.
And yet, though my little Bowater parlour looked cheap and dingy after the splendours of No. 2, Fanny somehow survived every odious comparison. She was very intelligent, I whispered to myself. Mrs. Monnerie would certainly approve of that. And I prickled at the thought. And I—I was too “concentrated.” In spite of my plumping “figure,” I could never, never be full-size. If only Fanny had meant that as a compliment, or even as a kind of explanation to go on with. No, she had meant it for the truth. And it must be far easier for a leopard to change his spots than his inside. The accusation set all the machinery of my mind emptily whirring.
My glance fell on my Paris frock, left in a shimmering slovenly ring on the floor. It wandered off to Fanny’s postal order, spread over my lap like an expensive antimacassar. She had worked for that money; while I had never been anything more useful than “an angel.” In fancy I saw her blooming in a house as sumptuous as Mrs. Monnerie’s. Bloom indeed! I hated the thought, yet realized, too, that it was safer—even if for the time being not so profitable—to be life-size. And, as if out of the listening air, a cold dart pierced me through. Suppose my Messrs. Harris and Harris and Harris might not be such honest trustees as Miss Fenne had vouched for. Suppose they decamped with my £110 per annum!—I caught a horrifying glimpse of the wolf that was always sniffing at Fanny’s door.
Mrs. Bowater brought in my luncheon, and—as I insisted—her own, too. The ice from Mr. Tidy, the fishmonger’s, had given a slightly marine flavour to the cream, and I had to keep my face averted as much as possible from the scorched red chop sprawling and oozing on her plate. How could she bring herself to eat it? We are such stuff as dreams are made on, said Hamlet. So then was Mrs. Bowater. What a mystery then was this mutton fat! But chop or no chop, it was a happy meal.
Having waved my extremely “Fannyish” letter at her, I rapidly dammed that current of her thoughts by explaining that I had changed my clothes not (as a gleam from her eye had seemed to suspect) because I was afraid of spoiling my London finery, but in order to be really at home. For the first time I surprised her muttering a grace over the bone on her plate. Then she removed the tray, accepted a strawberry, folded her hands in her lap, and we began to talk. She asked a hundred and one questions concerning my health and happiness, but never once mentioned Mrs. Monnerie; and at last, after a small pause, filled by us both with the same thought, she remarked that “that young Mr. Anon was nothing if not persistent.”
Since I had gone, not a week had passed, she told me, but he had come rapping at the door after dusk to inquire after me. “Though why he should scowl like a pitchpot to hear that you are enjoying the lap of luxury—” The angular shoulders achieved a shrug at least as Parisian as my discarded gown.
“Why doesn’t he write to me, then? Twice in ten weeks!”
“Well it’s six, miss, I’ve counted, though seemingly sixty. But that being the question, he is there to answer it, at any time this evening, or at six tomorrow morning, if London ways haven’t cured you of early-rising.”
So we went off together, Mrs. Bowater and I, in the cool of the evening about half an hour after sunset—she, alas, a little ruffled because I had refused to change back again into my Monnerie finery. “But Mrs. Bowater, imagine such a thing in a real wild garden!” I protested, but without mollifying her, and without further explaining—how could I do that?—that the gown which Miss Sentimentality (or Miss Coquette) was actually wearing was that in which she had first met Mr. Anon.
XXXVI
I trod close in Mrs. Bowater’s track as she convoyed me through a sea of greenery breaking here and there to my waist and even above my hat. Summer had been busy in Wanderslore. Honeysuckle and acid-sweet brier were in bloom; sleeping bindweed and pimpernel. The air was liquidly sweet with uncountable odours. And the fading skies dyed bright the frowning front of the house, about which the new-come swifts shrieked in their play over my wilderness. Mr. Anon looked peculiar, standing alone there.
Having bidden him a gracious good evening, Mrs. Bowater after a long, ruminating glance at us, decided that she would “take a stroll through the grounds.” We watched her black figure trail slowly away up the overgrown terraces towards the house. Then he turned. His clear, dwelling eyes, with that darker line encircling the grey-black iris, fixed themselves on me, his mouth tight-shut.
“Well,” he said at last, almost wearily. “It has been a long waiting.”
I was unprepared for this sighing. “It has indeed,” I replied. “But it is exceedingly pleasant to see Beechwood Hill again. I wrote; but you did not answer my letter, at least not the last.”
My voice dropped away; every one of the fine little speeches I had thought to make, forgotten.
“And now you are here.”
“Yes,” I said quickly, a little timid of any silence between us, “and that’s pleasant too. You can have no notion what a stiff, glaring garden it is up there—geraniums and gravel, you know, and windows, windows, windows. They are wonderfully kind to me—but I don’t much love it.”
“Then why stay?” he smiled. “Still, you are, at least, safely out of her clutches.”
“Clutches!” I hated the way we were talking. “Thank you very much. You forget you are speaking of one of my friends. Besides, I can take care of myself.” He made no answer.
“You are so gloomy,” I continued. “So—oh, I don’t know—about everything. It’s because you are always cooped up in one place, I suppose. One must take the world—a little—as it is, you know. Why don’t you go away; travel; see things? Oh, if I were a man.”
His eyes watched my lips. Everything seemed to have turned sour. To have waited and dreamed; to have actually changed my clothes and come scuttling out in a silly longing excitement—for this. Why, I felt more lonely and helpless under Wanderslore’s evening sky than ever I had been in my cedarwood privacy in No. 2.
“I mean it, I mean it,” I broke out suddenly. “You domineer over me. You pamper me up with silly stories—‘trailing clouds of glory,’ I suppose. They are not true. It’s everyone for himself in this world, I can tell you; and in future, please understand, I intend to be my own mistress. Simply because in a little private difficulty I asked you to help me—”
He turned irresolutely. “They have dipped you pretty deep in the dye-pot.”
“And what, may I ask, do you mean by that?”
“I mean,” and he faced me, “that I am precisely what your friend, Miss Bowater, called me. What more is there to say?”
“And pray, am I responsible for everything my friends say? And to have dragged up that wretched fiasco after we had talked it out to the very dregs! Oh, how I have been longing and longing to come home. And this is what you make of it.”
He turned his face towards the west, and its vast light irradiated his sharp-boned features, the sloping forehead beneath the straight, black hair. Fume as I might, resentment fainted away in me.
“You don’t seem to understand,” I went on; “it’s the waste—the waste of it all. Why do you make it so that I can’t talk naturally to you, as friends talk? If I am alone in the world, so are you. Surely we can tell the truth to one another. I am utterly wretched.”
“There is only one truth that matters: you do not love me. Why should you? But that’s the barrier. And the charm of it is that not only the Gods, but the miserable Humans, if only they knew it, would enjoy the sport.”
“Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to me, I should like to know, in this—this cage?”
“Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars,” he sneered miserably. “Still we are sharing the same language now.”
The same language. Self-pitying tears pricked into my eyes; I turned my head away. And in the silence, stealthily, out of a dark woody hollow nearer the house, as if at an incantation, broke a low, sinister, protracted rattle, like the croaking of a toad. I knew that sound; it came straight out of Lyndsey—called me back.
“S-sh!” I whispered, caught up with delight. “A nightjar! Listen. Let’s go and look.”
I held out my hand. His sent a shiver down my spine. It was clammy cold, as if he had just come out of the sea. Thrusting our way between the denser clumps of weeds, we pushed on cautiously until we actually stood under the creature’s enormous oak. So elusive and deceitful was the throbbing croon of sound that it was impossible to detect on which naked branch in the black leafiness the bird sat churring. The wafted fragrances, the placid dusky air, and far, far above, the delicate, shallowing deepening of the faint-starred blue—how I longed to sip but one drop of drowsy mandragora and forget this fretting, inconstant self.
We stood, listening; and an old story I had read somewhere floated back into memory. “Once, did you ever hear it?” I whispered close to him, “there was a ghost came to a house near Cirencester. I read of it in a book. And when it was asked, ‘Are you a good spirit or a bad?’ it made no answer, but vanished, the book said—I remember the very words—‘with a curious perfume and most melodious twang.’ With a curious perfume,” I repeated, “and most melodious twang. There now, would you like me to go like that? Oh, if I were a moth, I would flit in there and ask that old Death-thing to catch me. Even if I cannot love you, you are part of all this. You feed my very self. Mayn’t that be enough?”
His grip tightened round my fingers; the entrancing, toneless dulcimer thrummed on.
I leaned nearer, as if to raise the shadowed lids above the brooding eyes. “What can I give you—only to be your peace? I do assure you it is yours. But I haven’t the secret of knowing what half the world means. Look at me. Is it not all a mystery? Oh, I know it, even though they jeer and laugh at me. I beseech you be merciful, and keep me what I am.”
So I pleaded and argued, scarcely heeding the words I said. Yet I realize now that it was only my mind that wrestled with him there. It was what came after that took the heart out of me. There came a clap of wings, and the bird swooped out of its secrecy into the air above us, a moment showed his white-splashed, cinder-coloured feathers in the dusk, seemed to tumble as if broken-winged upon the air, squawked, and was gone. The interruption only hastened me on.
“Still, still listen,” I implored: “if Time would but cease a while and let me breathe.”
“There, there,” he muttered. “I was unkind. A filthy jealousy.”
“But think! There may never come another hour like this. Know, know now, that you have made me happy. I can never be so alone again. I share my secretest thoughts—my imagination, with you; isn’t that a kind of love? I assure you that it is. Once I heard my mother talking, and sometimes I have wondered myself, if I am quite like—oh, you know what they say: a freak of Nature. Tell me; if by some enchantment I were really and indeed come from those snow mountains of yours, and that sea, would you recognize me? Would you? No, no; it’s only a story—why, even all this green and loveliness is only skin deep. If the Old World were just to shrug its shoulders, Mr. Anon, we should all, big and little, be clean gone.”
My words seemed merely to be like drops of water dripping upon a sponge. “Wake!” I tugged at his hand. “Look!” Kneeling down sidelong, I stooped my cheek up at him from a cool, green mat of grass, amid which a glowworm burned: “Is this a—a Stranger’s face?”
He came no nearer; surveyed me with a long, quiet smile of infinitely sorrowful indulgence. “A Stranger’s? How else could it be, if I love you?”
Intoxicated in that earthy fragrance, washed about with the colours of the motionless flowers, it seemed I was merely talking to someone who could assure me that I was still in life, still myself. A strand of my hair had fallen loose, and smiling, its gold pin between my lips, I looped it back. “Oh, but you see—haven’t I told you?—I can’t love you. Perhaps; I don’t know. … What shall I do? What shall I say? Now suppose,” I went on, “I like myself that much,” and I held my thumb and finger just ajar, “then I like you, think of you, hope for you, why, that!”—and I swept my hand clean across the empty zenith. “Now do you understand?”
“Oh, my dear, my dear,” he said, and smiled into my eyes.
I laughed out in triumph at the success of my device. And he laughed too, as if in a conspiracy with me—and with Misery, I could see, sitting like an old hag at the door from which the sound came. And out of the distance the nightjar set again to its churring.
“Then I have made you a little—a little less unhappy?” I asked him, and hid my face in my hands in a desolate peace and solitude.
He knelt beside me, held out his hand as if to touch me, withdrew it again. All presence of him distanced and vanished away in that small darkness. I prayed not to think any more, not to be exiled again into—how can I explain my meaning except by saying—Myself? Would some further world have withdrawn its veils and have let me in then and forever if that lightless quiet could have continued a little longer? Is it the experience of every human being seemingly to trespass at times so close upon the confines of existence as that?
