Memoirs of a Midget Part 28

"But I can't. I ask you: Can you _see_ f.a.n.n.y Bowater a Right Reverendissima? No, nor can I. And not even gaiters or an ap.r.o.n here and now would settle the question off-hand. Why I confide all this in you (why, for that matter, it has all been confided in _me_), I know not. You want nothing, and if you did, you wouldn't want it long. Now, would you? Perhaps that is the secret. But f.a.n.n.y wants a good deal. She cannot even guess how much. So, while Miss Stebbings and Beechwood Hill for ever and ever would be h.e.l.l before purgatory, H. C. and St Peter's would be merely the same thing, with the fires _out_. And I am quite sure that, given a chance, heaven is our home.

"Oh, Midgetina, I listen to all this; mumbling my heart like a dog a bone. What the devil has it got to do with _me_, I ask myself?

Who set the infernal trap? If only I could stop thinking and mocking and find some one--not 'to love me' (between ourselves, there are far too many of _them_ already), but capable of making me love him. They say a woman can't be driven. I disagree. She _can_ be driven--mad. And apart from that, though twenty men only succeed in giving me hydrophobia, one could persuade me to drink, if only his name was Mr Right, as mother succinctly puts it.

"But first and last, I am having a real, if not a particularly sagacious, holiday, and can take care of myself. And next and last, play, I _beseech_ you, the tiny good Samaritan between me and poor, plodding, blinded H. C.--even if he does eventually have to go on to Jericho.

"And I shall ever remain, your most affec.--F."

How all this baffled me. I tried, but dismally failed, to pour a trickle of wine and oil into Mr Crimble's wounded heart, for his sake and for mine, not for f.a.n.n.y's, for I knew in myself that his "Jericho" was already within view.

"I don't understand her; I don't understand her," he kept repeating, crushing his soft hat in his small, square hands. "I cannot reach her; I am not in touch with her."

Out of the fount of my womanly wisdom I reminded him how young she was, how clever, and how much flattered.

"You know, then, there are--others?" he gulped, darkly meeting me.

"That, surely, is what makes her so precious," I falsely insinuated.

He gazed at me, his eyes like an immense, empty shop-window. "That thought puts---- I can't," and he twisted his head on his shoulders as if shadows were around him; "I can't bear to think of her and--with--_others_. It unbalances me. But how can you understand?... A sealed book. Last night I sat at my window. It was raining. I know not the hour: and Spring!" He clutched at his knees, stooping forward. "I repudiated myself, thrust myself out. Oh, believe me, we are not alone.

And there and then I resolved to lay the whole matter before"--his glance groped towards the door--"before, in fact, her _mother_. She is a woman of sagacity, of proper feeling in her station, though how she came to be the mother of---- But that's neither here nor there. We mustn't probe. Probably she thinks--but what use to consider it? One word to her--and f.a.n.n.y would be lost to me for ever." For a moment it seemed his eyes closed on me. "How can I bring myself to speak of it?" a remote voice murmured from beneath them.

I looked at the figure seated there in its long black coat; and far away in my mind whistled an ecstatic bird--"The sea! the sea! You are going away--out, out of all this."

So, too, was Mr Crimble, if only I had known it. It was my weak and cowardly acquiescence in f.a.n.n.y's deceits that was speeding him on his dreadful journey. None the less, a wretched heartless impatience fretted me at being thus helplessly hemmed in by my fellow creatures. How clumsily they groped on. Why couldn't they be happy in just living free from the clouds and trammels of each other and of themselves? The selfish helplessness of it all. It was, indeed, as though the strange fires which f.a.n.n.y had burnt me in--which any sudden thought of her could still fan into a flickering blaze--had utterly died down. Whether or not, I was hardened; a poor little earthenware pot fresh from the furnace. And with what elixir was it brimmed.

I rose from my chair, walked away from my visitor, and peered through my muslin curtains at the green and shine and blue. A nursemaid was lagging along with a sleeping infant--its mild face to the sky--in a perambulator. A faint drift of dandelions showed in the stretching meadow. Kent's blue hems lay calm; my thoughts drew far away.

"Mr Crimble," I cried in a low voice: "is she _worth_ all our care for her?"

"'Our'--'our'?" he expostulated.

"Mine, then. When I gave her, just to be friends, because--because I loved her, a little ivory box, nothing of any value, of course, but which I have loved and treasured since childhood, she left it without a thought. It's in my wardrobe drawer--shall I show it to you? I _say_ it was nothing in itself; but what I mean is that she just makes use of me, and with far less generosity than--than other people do. Her eyes, her voice, when she moves her hand, turns her head, looks back--oh, I know!

But," and I turned on him in the light, "does it mean anything? Let us just help her all we can, and--keep away."

It was a treachery past all forgiveness: I see that now. If only I had said, "Love on, love on: ask nothing." But I did not say it. A contempt of all this slow folly was in my brain that afternoon. Why couldn't the black cowering creature take himself off? What concern of mine was his sick, sheepish look? What particle of a fig did he care for Me? Had he lifted a little finger when I myself bitterly needed it? I seemed to be struggling in a net of hatred.

He raised himself in his chair, his spectacles still fixed on me; as if some foul insect had erected its blunt head at him.

"Then _you_ are against her too," he uttered, under his breath. "I might have known it, I might have known it. I am a lost man."

It was pitiful. "Lost fiddlesticks!" I snapped back at him, with bared teeth. "I wouldn't--I've never harmed a fly. Who, I should like to know, came to _my_ help when...?" But I choked down the words. Silence fell between us. The idiot clock chimed five. He turned his face away to conceal the aversion that had suddenly overwhelmed him at sight of me.

"I see," he said, in a hollow, low voice, with his old wooden, artificial dignity. "There's nothing more to say. I can only thank you, and be gone. I had not realized. You misjudge her. You haven't the---- How could it be expected? But there! thinking's impossible."

How often had I seen my poor father in his last heavy days draw his hand across his eyes like that? Already my fickle mind was struggling to find words with which to retract, to explain away that venomous outbreak. But I let him go. The stooping, hatted figure hastened past my window; and I was never to see him again.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Yet, in spite of misgivings, no very dark foreboding companioned me that evening. With infinite labour I concocted two letters:--

"DEAR MR CRIMBLE,--I regret my words this afternoon. Bitterly.

Indeed I do. But still truth is important, isn't it? _One we know_ hasn't been too kind to either of us. I still say that. And if it seems inconsiderate, please remember Shakespeare's lines about the beetle (which I came across in a Birthday Book the other day)--a creature I detest. Besides, we can return good for evil--I can't help this sounding like hypocrisy--even though it is an extremely tiring exchange. I _feel_ small enough just now, but would do anything in the world that would help in the way we both want. I hope that you will believe this and that you will forgive my miserable tongue. Believe me, ever yours sincerely,--M. M."

My second letter was addressed to f.a.n.n.y's school, "c/o Miss Stebbings":--

"DEAR f.a.n.n.y,--He came again to-day and looks like a corpse. I can do no more. You must know how utterly miserable you are making him; that I can't, and won't, go on being so doublefaced. I don't call _that_ being the good Samaritan. Throw the stone one way or the other, however many birds it may kill. That's the bravest thing to do. A horrid boy I knew as a child once aimed at a jay and killed--a wren. Well, there's only one wren that I know of--your M.

"PS.--I hope this doesn't sound an angry letter. I thought only the other day how difficult it must be being as fascinating as you are.

And, of course, we are _what_ we are, aren't we, and cannot, I suppose, help acting like that? You can't think how he looked, and talked. Besides, I am sure you will enjoy your holiday much more when you have made up your mind. Oh, f.a.n.n.y, I can't say what's in mine. Every day there's something else to dread. And all that I do seems only to make things worse. _Do_ write: and, though, of course, it isn't my affair, do have a '_sagacious_' holiday, too."

Mrs Bowater almost squinted at my two small envelopes when she licked the stamps for me. "We can only hope," was her one remark, "that when the secrets of all hearts are opened, they'll excuse some of the letters we reach ourselves to write." But I did not ask her to explain.

Lyme Regis was but a few days distant when, not for the first time since our meeting at Mrs Bowater's gatepost, I set off to meet Mr Anon--this time to share with him my wonderful news. When showers drifted across the sun-shafted sky we took refuge under the shelter of the garden-house. As soon as the hot beams set the raindrops smouldering, so that every bush was hung with coloured lights, we returned to my smoking stone. And we watched a rainbow arch and fade in the windy blue.

He was gloomy at first; grudged me, I think, every moment that was to be mine at Lyme Regis. So I tempted him into talking about the books he had read; and about his childhood--far from as happy as mine. It hurt me to hear him speak of his mother. Then I asked him small questions about that wonderful country he had told me of, which, whether it had any real existence or not, filled me with delight as he painted it in his imagination. He was doing his best to keep his word to me, and I to keep our talk from becoming personal.

If I would trust myself to him, friend to friend--he suddenly broke out in a thick, low voice, when I least expected it--the whole world was open to us; and he knew the way.

"What way?" said I. "And how about poor Mrs Bowater? How strange you are. Where do you live? May I know?"

There was an old farm-house, he told me, on the other side of the park, and near it a few cottages--at the far end of Loose Lane. He lodged in one of these. Against my wiser inclinations he persuaded me to set off thither at once and see the farm for myself.

On the further side of Wanderslore, sprouting their pallid green frondlets like beads at the very tips of their black, were more yews than beeches. We loitered on, along the neglected bridle-path. Cuckoos were now in the woods, and we talked and talked, as if their voices alone were not seductive enough to enchant us onwards. Sometimes I spelled out incantations in the water; and sometimes I looked out happily across the wet, wayside flowers; and sometimes a robin flittered out to observe the intruders. How was it that human company so often made me uneasy and self-conscious, and nature's always brought peace?

"Now, you said," I began again, "that they have a G.o.d, and that they are so simple He hasn't a name. What did you mean by that? There can't be one G.o.d for the common-sized, and one for--for me; now, can there? My mother never taught me that; and I have thought for myself." Indeed I had.

"'G.o.d'!" he cried; "why, what is all this?"

All this at that moment was a clearing in the woods, softly shimmering with a misty, transparent green, in whose sunbeams a thousand flies darted and zigzagged like motes of light, and the year's first b.u.t.terflies fluttered and languished.

"But if I speak," I said, "listen, now, my voice is just swallowed up.

Out of just a something it faints into a nothing--dies. No, no;" (I suppose I was arguing only to draw him out), "all this cares no more for me than--than a looking-gla.s.s. Yet it is mine. Can you see Jesus Christ in these woods? Do you believe we are sinners and that He came to save us? I do. But I can see Him only as a little boy, you know, smiling, crystal, intangible: and yet I do not _like_ children much."

He paused and stared at me fixedly. "_My_ size?" he coughed.

"Oh, size," I exclaimed, "how you harp on that!"--as if _I_ never had.

"Did you not say yourself that the smaller the body is, the happier the ghost in it? Bodies, indeed!"

He plunged on, hands in pockets, frowning, clumsy. And up there in the north-west a huge cloud poured its reflected lights on his strange face.

Inwardly--with all my wits in a pleasant scatter--I laughed; and outwardly (all but) danced. Solemnly taking me at my word, and as if he were reading out of one of his dry old books, he began to tell me his views about religion, and about what we are, qualities, consciousness, ideas, and that kind of thing. As if you could be anything at any moment but just that moment's whole self. At least, so it seemed then: I was happy. But since in his earnestness his voice became almost as false to itself as was Mr Crimble's when he had conversed with me about h.e.l.l, my eyes stole my ears from him, and only a few scattered sentences reached my mind.