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Memoirs of a Midget

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Title: Memoirs of a Midget

Adapter: Walter De la Mare


        
Release date: March 25, 2012 [eBook #39122]

Language: English

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Produced by David Starner, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)






Memoirs of a Midget


BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE THREE MULLA-MULGARS

_Illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop._


"The story concerns the adventures of three monkeys of royal blood ... a
tale of strange creatures and strange landscapes, of adventures and
misadventures in faery forests. One of those rare books that everyone
will love.

"Miss Lathrop's illustrations have placed her, at a bound, in the first
rank of American imaginative illustrators."

--_Chicago Evening Post._

_Boxed, $4.00 net at all bookshops_

_NEW YORK: ALFRED A. KNOPF_




MEMOIRS _of a_ MIDGET

_by_ WALTER _de la_ MARE

[Illustration: Logo]

NEW YORK MCMXXI
ALFRED A. KNOPF


COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
WALTER DE LA MARE

_Published, January, 1922_

_Set up and printed by the Veil-Ballon Co., Binghamton, N. Y._
_Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York, N. Y._
_Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass._

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

_A wild beast there is in AEgypt, called orix, which the AEgyptians say,
doth stand full against the dog starre when it riseth, looketh wistly
upon it, and testifieth after a sort by sneesing, a kind of worship...._

Philemon Holland.

'_Did'st thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body:
this world is like her little turf of grass; and the heaven o'er our
heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of
the small compass of our prison...._'

John Webster.

'_Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words; the heavens are
gracious...._'

Thomas Kyd.




Contents


Introduction         13

Lyndsey              19

Beechwood            71

Wanderslore         155

Lyme Regis          239

London              263

Monks' House        355

Wanderslore         399

Lyndsey             433




Memoirs of a Midget




Introduction


A few introductory and explanatory remarks are due, I think, to the
reader of the following Memoirs. The Memoirs themselves will disclose
how I became acquainted with Miss M. They also refer here and there to
the small part I was enabled to take in straightening matters out at
what was a critical juncture in her affairs, and in securing for her
that independence which enabled her to live in the privacy she loved,
without any anxiety as to ways and means. At the time, it is clear that
she considered me a dilatory intermediary. I had not realized how
extreme was her need. But she came at last to take a far too generous
view of these trifling little services--services as generously rewarded,
since they afforded me the opportunity of frequently seeing her, and so
of becoming, as I hope, one of her most devoted friends.

One of the duties devolving on me as her sole executor--certain unusual
legal proceedings having been brought to completion--was the examination
of her letters and papers. Amongst these were her Memoirs--which I found
sealed up with her usual scrupulous neatness in numerous small, square,
brown-paper packages, and laid carefully away in a cupboard in her old
nursery. They were accompanied by a covering letter addressed to myself.

Miss M.'s handwriting was even more minute than one might naturally,
though not perhaps justifiably, have anticipated. Her manuscript would
therefore have been difficult enough for aging eyes to decipher, even if
it had not been almost inextricably interlined, revised and corrected.
Literary composition to this little woman-of-letters was certainly no
"primrose path." The packages were therefore handed over to a
trustworthy typist; and, at my direction, one complete and accurate copy
was made of their contents.

After careful consideration, and after disguising the names of certain
persons and places to preclude every possibility of giving offence--even
Mrs Percy Maudlen, for instance, if she ever scans these pages, may
blush unrecognized!--I concluded that though I was under no absolute
obligation to secure the publication of the Memoirs, this undoubtedly
had been Miss M.'s intention and wish. At the same time, and for similar
reasons, I decided that their publication should not take place until
after my death. Instructions have therefore been left by me to this
effect. Here then my editorial duties begin and end. Nothing has been
altered; nothing suppressed.

Even if such a task were within my province, I should not venture to
make any critical estimate of Miss M.'s work. I am not a writer: and, as
a reader, have an inveterate preference to be allowed to study and enjoy
my authors with as little external intervention as possible. The perusal
of the Memoirs has afforded me the deepest possible pleasure. The
serious-minded may none the less dismiss a midget's lucubrations as
trifling; and no doubt--it could hardly be otherwise--a more practised
taste than mine will discover many faults, crudities, and
inconsistencies in them, though certain little prejudices on Miss M.'s
side may not be so easily detectable. Whatever their merits or
imperfections may be, I should be happy to think that the following
pages may prove as interesting to other readers--however few--as they
have been to myself.

My own prejudices, I confess, are in Miss M.'s favour. Indeed, she
herself assured me in the covering letter to which reference has been
made, that a chance word of mine had been her actual incentive to
composition--the remark, in fact, that "the _truth_ about even the least
of things--_e. g._, your Self, Miss M.!--may be a taper in whose beam
one may peep at the truth about everything." I cannot recall the
occasion, or this little apophthegm. Indeed, only with extreme
reluctance would I have helped to launch my small friend on her gigantic
ordeal. As a matter-of-fact, she had a little way of carrying off scraps
of the conversation of the "common-sized," as a bee carries off a drop
of nectar, and of transforming them into a honey all her own.

As characteristic of her is the fact that during the whole time she was
engaged on her writing (and there is ample evidence in her manuscript
that, whether in fatigue, disinclination, or despair, she sometimes left
it untouched for weeks together) she never made the faintest allusion to
it. Authors, I believe--if I may take the elder Disraeli for my
authority--are seldom so secretive concerning their activities. No less
characteristically, her letter to me was dated February 14th. Her
Memoirs were to be my Valentine.

"'Little drops of water ...' my dear Sir Walter," she wrote; "you know
the rest. Nevertheless, if only I had been given but one sharp spark of
genius, what 'infinite pains' I should have been spared. Yet what is
here concerns only my early days, and chiefly one long year of them. I
might have written on--almost _ad infinitum_. But I did not, because I
feared to weary us both--of myself. The years that have followed my
'coming of age' have been outwardly uneventful; and other people's
thoughts, I find, are not so interesting as their experiences. There's
much to forgive in what I have written--the rawness, the
self-consciousness, the vanity, the folly. I am older now; but am I
wiser--or merely not so young?

"Just as it stands, then, I shall leave my story to, and for, you....
Again and again, as I have pored over the scenes of my memory, I have
asked myself: What can life be about? What does it mean? What was my
true course? Where my compass? How many times, too, have I vainly
speculated what _inward_ difference being a human creature of my
dimensions really makes. What is--deep, deep in--at variance between Man
and Midget? _You_ may discover this; even if _I_ never shall. For after
all, life's beads are all on one string, however loosely threaded they
may seem to be.

"I have tried to tell nothing but the truth about myself. But I realize
that it cannot be the whole truth. For while so engaged (just as when
one peers into a looking-glass in the moonlight) a something has at
times looked out of some secret den or niche in me, and then has
vanished. Supposing, then, my dear Sir W., my story convinces you that
all these years you have unawares been harbouring in your friendship not
a woman, scarcely a human being, but an ASP! Oh dear, and oh dear! Well,
there are three and-thirty ingredients (ingrediments as I used to call
them, when I was a child) in that sovran antidote, Venice Treacle.
Scatter a pennyweight of it upon my tombstone; and so lay my
in-fi-ni-te-si-mal ap-pa-ri-ti-on!

"Maybe though, there are not so very many vital differences between
'midgets' and people of the common size; no more, perhaps, than there
are between them and 'the Great.' Even then it is possible that after
reading my small, endless story you may be very thankful that you are
not a Midget too.

"Whether or not, I have tried to be frank, if not a Warning. Keep or
destroy what I have written, as you will. But please show it to nobody
until nobody would mind. And now, good-bye.

"M."


There was a tacit compact between Miss M. and myself that I should visit
her at Lyndsey about once a month. Business, indisposition, advancing
age, only too frequently made the journey impracticable. But in general,
I would at such intervals find myself in her company at her old house,
Stonecote; drinking tea with her, gossiping, or reading to her, while
she sat in her chair beside my book, embroidering her brilliant tiny
flowers and beetles and butterflies with her tiny needle, listening or
day-dreaming or musing out of the high window at the prospect of Chizzel
Hill.

At times she was an extremely quiet companion. At others she would rain
questions on me, many of them exceedingly unconventional, on a score of
subjects at once, scarcely pausing for answers which I was frequently at
a loss to give. In a mixed company she was, perhaps, exaggeratedly
conscious of her minute stature.

But in these quiet talks--that shrill-sweet voice, those impulsive
little gestures--she forgot it altogether. Not so her visitor, who must
confess to having been continually convicted in her presence of a kind
of clumsiness and gaucherie--and that, I confess, not merely physical.
To a stranger this experience, however wholesome, might be a little
humiliating.

When interested, Miss M. would sit perfectly still, her hands tightly
clasped in her lap, her eyes fixed with a piercing, yet curiously
remote, scrutiny. In complete repose, her features lost this keenness,
and she became an indescribably beautiful little figure, in her
bright-coloured clothes, in the large quiet room. I can think of no
comparison that would not seem fanciful. Her self is to some extent in
her book. And yet that unique volatile presence, so frail, yet so
vigorous, "so very nearly nothing," in her own whimsical phrase, is only
fitfully manifest.

Naturally enough, she loved solitude. But I am inclined to think she
indulged in it to excess. It was, at any rate, in solitude that she
wrote her book; and in solitude apparently that her unknown visitor
found her, in the following mysterious circumstances.

The last of our reunions--and one no less happy than the rest--was
towards the end of the month of March. On the morning of the following
25th of April I received a telegram summoning me to Lyndsey. I arrived
there the same afternoon, and was admitted by Mrs Bowater, Miss M.'s
excellent, but somewhat Dickensian, housekeeper, then already a little
deaf and elderly. I found her in extreme distress. It appeared that the
evening before, about seven o'clock, Mrs Bowater had heard voices in the
house--Miss M.'s and another's. Friendly callers were infrequent;
unfamiliar ones extremely rare; and Mrs Bowater confessed that she had
felt some curiosity, if not concern, as to who this stranger might be,
and how he had gained admission. She blamed herself beyond
measure--though I endeavoured to reassure the good woman--for not
instantly setting her misgivings at rest.

Hearing nothing more, except the rain beating at the basement window, at
half-past seven she went upstairs and knocked at Miss M.'s door. The
large, pleasant room--her old nursery--at the top of the house, was in
its usual scrupulous order, but vacant. Nothing was disarranged, nothing
unusual, except only that a slip of paper had been pinned to the carpet
a little beyond the threshold, with this message: "I have been called
away.--M."

This communication, far from soothing, only increased Mrs Bowater's
anxiety. She searched the minute Sheraton wardrobe, and found that a
garden hat and cape were missing. She waited a while--unlike her usual
self--at a loss what to be doing, and peering out of the window. But as
darkness was coming on, and Miss M. rarely went out in windy or showery
weather, or indeed descended the staircase without assistance, she
became so much alarmed that a little before eight she set out to explore
the garden with a stable lantern, and afterwards hurried off to the
village for assistance.

As the reader will himself discover, this was not the first occasion on
which Miss M. had given her friends anxiety. The house, the garden, the
surrounding district, her old haunts at Wanderslore were repeatedly
submitted at my direction to the most rigorous and protracted search.
Watch was kept on the only gipsy encampment in the neighbourhood, near
the Heath. Advertisement failed to bring me any but false clues. At
length even hope had to be abandoned.

Miss M. had been "called away." By whom? I ask myself: on what errand?
for what purpose? So clear and unhurried was the writing of her last
message as to preclude, I think, the afflicting thought that her visitor
had been the cause of any apprehension or anxiety. An even more tragic
eventuality is out of the question. After the events recorded in her
last chapter not only had she made me a certain promise, but her later
life at Lyndsey had been, apparently, perfectly serene and happy. Only a
day or two before she had laughed up at her housekeeper, "Why, Mrs
Bowater, there's not _room_ enough in me for all that's there!" Nor is
it to be assumed that some "inward" voice--her own frequent term--had
summoned her away; for Mrs Bowater immovably maintains that its tones
reached her ear, though she herself was at the moment engaged in the
kitchen referred to in the first chapter of the Memoirs.

WALTER DADUS POLLACKE.

BRUNSWICK HOUSE,
BEECHWOOD.




Lyndsey




Chapter One


Some few years ago a brief account of me found its way into one or two
country newspapers. I have been told, that it reappeared, later, in
better proportion, in the Metropolitan Press! Fortunately, or
unfortunately, very little of this account was true. It related, among
other things, that I am accustomed to wear shoes with leaden soles to
them to keep me from being blown away like thistledown in the wind, that
as a child I had narrowly escaped being scalded to death in a soup
tureen, that one of my ancestors came from Poland, that I am an expert
painter of miniatures, that I am a changeling and can speak the fairy
tongue. And so on and so forth.

I think I can guess where my ingenuous biographer borrowed these fables.
He meant me no harm; he was earning his living; he made judicious use of
his "no doubts" and "it may be supposed"; and I hope he amused his
readers. But by far the greater part of his account was concerned with
mere _physical_ particulars. He had looked at me in fancy through
spectacles which may or may not have been rosy, but which certainly
minified. I do not deserve his inches and ounces, however flattering his
intentions may have been. It is true that my body is among the smaller
works of God. But I think he paid rather too much attention to this
fact. He spared any reference not only to my soul (and I am not
ungrateful for that), but also to my mind and heart. There may be too
much of all three for some tastes in the following pages, and
especially, perhaps, of the last. That cannot be helped. Finally, my
anonymous journalist stated that I was born in Rutlandshire--because, I
suppose, it is the smallest county in England.

That was truly unkind of him, for, as a matter of fact, and to begin at
the (apparent) beginning, I was born in the village of Lyndsey in
_Kent_--the prettiest country spot, as I believe, in all that county's
million acres. So it remains to this day in spite of the fact that
since my childhood its little church with its decaying stones and
unfading twelfth--or is it thirteenth?--century glass has been
"restored," and the lord of the manor has felled some of its finest
trees, including a grove of sweet chestnuts on Bitchett Heath whose
forefathers came over with the Romans. But he has not yet succeeded in
levelling the barrow on Chizzel Hill. From my window I looked out
(indeed, look out at this moment) to the wave-like crest of this beloved
hill across a long straggling orchard, and pastures in the valley, where
cattle grazed and sheep wandered, and unpolled willows stooped and
silvered in the breeze. I never wearied of the hill, nor ever shall, and
when, in my girlhood, my grandfather, aware of this idle, gazing habit
of mine, sent me from Geneva a diminutive telescope, my day-dreams
multiplied. His gift, as an old Kentish proverb goes, spread butter on
bacon. With his spyglass to my eye I could bring a tapping green
woodpecker as close as if it were actually laughing at me, and could all
but snuff up the faint rich scent of the cowslips--paggles, as we called
them, in meadows a good mile away.

My father's house, Stonecote, has a rather ungainly appearance if viewed
from across the valley. But it is roomy and open and fairly challenges
the winds of the equinoxes. Its main windows are of a shallow bow shape.
One of them is among my first remembrances. I am seated in a bright
tartan frock on a pomatum pot--a coloured picture of Mr Shandy, as I
remember, on its lid--and around me are the brushes, leather cases,
knick-knacks, etc., of my father's dressing table. My father is shaving
himself, his chin and cheeks puffed out with soapsuds. And now I look at
him, and now at his reflection in the great looking-glass, and every
time _that_ happens he makes a pleasant grimace at me over his
spectacles.

This particular moment of my childhood probably fixed itself on my mind
because just as, with razor uplifted, he was about to attack his upper
lip, a jackdaw, attracted maybe by my gay clothes, fluttered down on the
sill outside, and fussing and scrabbling with wing and claw pecked hard
with its beak against the glass. The sound and sight of this bird with
its lively grey-blue eyes, so close and ardent, startled me. I leapt up,
ran across the table, tripped over a hairbrush, and fell sprawling
beside my father's watch. I hear its ticking, and also the little
soothing whistle with which he was wont to comfort his daughter at any
such mishap. Then perhaps I was five or six.

That is a genuine memory. But every family, I suppose, has its little
pet traditions; and one of ours, relating to those early years, is
connected with our kitchen cat, Miaou. She had come by a family of
kittens, and I had crept, so it was said, into her shallow basket with
them. Having, I suppose, been too frequently meddled with, this old
mother cat lugged off her kittens one by one to a dark cupboard. The
last one thus secured, she was discovered in rapt contemplation of
myself, as if in debate whether or not it was her maternal duty to carry
me off too. And there was I grinning up into her face. Such was our
cook's--Mrs Ballard's--story. What I actually remember is different. On
the morning in question I was turning the corner of the brick-floored,
dusky passage that led to the kitchen, when Miaou came trotting along
out of it with her blind, blunt-headed bundle in her mouth. We were
equally surprised at this encounter, and in brushing past she nearly
knocked me over where I stood, casting me at the same moment the
queerest animal look out of her eyes. So truth, in this case, was not so
strange as Mrs Ballard's fiction.


My father was then a rather corpulent man, with a high-coloured face,
and he wore large spectacles. His time was his own, for we were
comfortably off on an income derived from a half-share in the small
fortune amassed by my grandfather and his partner in a paper mill. He
might have been a more successful, though not perhaps a happier, man if
he had done more work and planned to do less. But he only so far
followed his hereditary occupation as to expend large quantities of its
best "handmade" in the composition of a monograph: _The History of Paper
Making_. This entailed a vast accumulation of books and much solitude. I
fancy, too, he believed in the policy of sleeping on one's first
thoughts.

Since he was engaged at the same time on similar compilations with the
Hop and the Cherry for theme, he made indifferent progress in all three.
His papers, alas, were afterwards sold with his books, so I have no
notion of what became of them or of their value. I can only hope that
their purchaser has since won an easy distinction. These pursuits, if
they achieved little else but the keeping of "the man of the house"
quiet and contented, proved my father, at any rate, to be a loyal and
enthusiastic Man of Kent; and I have seen to it that a fine Morello
cherry-tree blossoms, fruits, and flourishes over his grave.

My father was something of a musician too, and could _pizzicato_ so
softly on his muted fiddle as not to jar even my too sensitive ear. He
taught me to play chess on a little board with pygmy men, but he was apt
to lose interest in the game when it went against him. Whereas it was
then that our old friend, Dr Grose, played his hardest. As my father's
hands were rather clumsy in make, he took pains to be gentle and adroit
with me. But even after shaving, his embrace was more of a discipline
than a pleasure--a fact that may partly account for my own
undemonstrativeness in this direction.

His voice, if anything, was small for his size, except when he discussed
politics with Dr Grose; religion or the bringing up of children with my
godmother, Miss Fenne; or money matters with my mother. At such times,
his noise--red face and gesticulations--affected one of his listeners,
as eager as possible to pick up the crumbs, far more than ever thunder
did, which is up in the clouds. My only other discomfort in his company
was his habit of taking snuff. The stench of it almost suffocated me,
and at tap of his finger-nail on the lid of his box, I would scamper off
for shelter like a hare.

By birth he came of an old English family, though no doubt with the
usual admixtures. My mother's mother was French. She was a Daundelyon.
The blood of that "sweet enemy" at times burned in her cheek like a
flag; and my father needed his heaviest guns when the stormy winds did
blow, and those colours were flying. At such moments I preferred to hear
the engagement from a distance, not so much (again) because the mere
discord grieved me, as to escape the din. But usually--and especially
after such little displays--they were like two turtle-doves, and I did
my small best to pipe a decoy.

My father had been a man past forty when he married my mother. She about
fifteen years younger--a slim, nimble, and lovely being, who could slip
round and encircle him in person or mind while he was pondering whether
or not to say Bo to a goose. Seven years afterwards came I. Friends, as
friends will, professed to see a likeness between us. And if my mother
could have been dwindled down to be of my height and figure, perhaps
they would have been justified.

But in hair and complexion, possibly in ways, too, I harked back to an
aunt of hers, Kitilda, who had died of consumption in her early
twenties. I loved to hear stories of my great-aunt Kitilda. She sang
like a bird, twice ran away from her convent school, and was so fond of
water that an old gentleman (a friend of Mr Landor's, the poet) who fell
in love with her, called her "the Naiad."

My mother, in her youth at Tunbridge Wells, had been considered "a
beauty," and had had many admirers--at least so Mrs Ballard, our cook,
told Pollie: "Yes, and we know who might have turned out different if
things hadn't been the same," was a cryptic remark she once made which
filled two "little pitchers" to overflowing. Among these admirers was a
Mr Wagginhorne who now lived at Maidstone. He had pocketed his passion
but not his admiration; and being an artist in the same sense that my
father was an author, he had painted my mother and me and a pot of
azaleas in oils. How well I remember those interminable sittings, with
the old gentleman daubing along, and cracking his beloved jokes and
Kentish cobbs at one and the same time. Whenever he came to see us this
portrait was taken out of a cupboard and hung up in substitution for
another picture in the dining-room. What became of it when Mr
Wagginhorne died I could never discover. My mother would laugh when I
inquired, and archly eye my father. It was clear, at any rate, that
author was not jealous of artist!

My mother was gentle with me, and had need to be; and I was happier in
her company than one might think possible in a world of such
fleetingness. I would sit beside her workbox and she would softly talk
to me, and teach me my lessons and small rhymes to say; while my own
impulse and instinct taught me to sing and dance. What gay hours we
shared. Sewing was at first difficult, for at that time no proportionate
needles could be procured for me, and I hated to cobble up only coarse
work. But she would give me little childish jobs to do, such as
arranging her silks, or sorting her beads, and would rock me to sleep
with her finger to a drone so gentle that it might have been a distant
bee's.

Yet shadows there were, before the darkness came. Child that I was, I
would watch gather over her face at times a kind of absentness, as if
she were dreaming of something to which she could give no name, of some
hope or wish that was now never to be fulfilled. At this I would grow
anxious and silent, doubting, perhaps, that I had displeased her; while,
to judge from her look, I might not have been there at all.

Or again, a mischievousness and mockery would steal into her mood. Then
she would treat me as a mere trivial plaything, talking _small_ things
to me, as if our alphabet consisted of nothing but "little o"--a letter
for which I always felt a sort of pity: but small affection. This habit
saddened my young days, and sometimes enraged me, more than I can say. I
was _always_ of a serious cast of mind--even a little priggish perhaps;
and experience had already taught me that I could share my mother's
thoughts and feelings more easily than she could share mine.




Chapter Two


When precisely I began to speculate _why_ I was despatched into this
world so minute and different I cannot say. Pretty early, I fancy,
though few opportunities for comparison were afforded me, and for some
time I supposed that all young children were of my stature. There was
Adam Waggett, it is true, the bumpkin son of a village friend of Mrs
Ballard's. But he was some years older than I. He would be invited to
tea in the kitchen, and was never at rest unless stuffing himself out
with bread-and-dripping or dough-cake--victuals naturally odious to me;
or pestering me with his coarse fooling and curiosity. He was to prove
useful in due season; but in those days I had a distaste for him almost
as deep-rooted as that for "Hoppy," the village idiot--though I saw poor
Hoppy only once.

Whatever the reason may be, except in extremely desperate moments, I do
not remember much regretting that I was not of the common size. Still,
the realization was gradually borne in on me that I was a disappointment
and mischance to my parents. Yet I never dared to let fall a question
which was to be often in my young thoughts: "Tell me, mamma, are you
_sorry_ that your little daughter is a Midget?" But then, does any one
ask questions like that until they cannot be answered?

Still, cross-examine her I did occasionally.

"Where did I come from, mamma?"

"Why, my dear, I am your mother."

"Just," I replied, "like Pollie's mother is _her_ mother?"

She cast a glance at me from eyes that appeared to be very small, unless
for that instant it was mine that I saw reflected there.

"Yes, my dear," she replied at length. "We come and we go." She seemed
tired with the heat of the day, so I sate quietly, holding her finger,
until she was recovered.

Only, perhaps, on account of my size was there any occasion for me to
be thoroughly ashamed of myself. Otherwise I was, if anything, a rather
precocious child. I could walk a step or two at eleven months, and began
to talk before the Christmas following the first anniversary of my
birthday, August 30th. I learned my letters from the big black capitals
in the Book of Genesis; and to count and cipher from a beautiful little
Abacus strung with beads of silver and garnets. The usual ailments came
my way, but were light come, light go. I was remarkably sinewy and
muscular, strong in the chest, and never suffered from snuffling colds
or from chilblains, though shoes and gloves have always been a
difficulty.

I can perfectly recall my childish figure as I stood with endless
satisfaction surveying my reflection in a looking-glass on the Christmas
morning after my ninth birthday. My frock was of a fine puffed scarlet,
my slippers loose at heel, to match. My hair, demurely parted in the
middle, hung straight on my narrow shoulders (though I had already
learned to plait it) and so framed my face; the eyebrows faintly arched
(eyebrows darker and crookeder now); the nose in proportion; the lips
rather narrow, and of a lively red.

My features wore a penetrating expression in that reflection because my
keen look was searching them pretty close. But if it was a sharp look,
it was not, I think, a bold or defiant; and then I smiled, as if to say,
"So this is to be my companion, then?"

It was winter, and frost was on the window that day. I enjoyed the crisp
air, for I was packed warm in lamb's-wool underneath. There I stood, my
father's round red face beaming on one side of the table, my mother's
smiling but enigmatic, scrutinizing my reflection on the other, and
myself tippeting this way and that--a veritable miniature of Vanity.

Who should be ushered at this moment into the room, where we were so
happy, but my godmother, Miss Fenne, come to bring my father and mother
her Christmas greetings and me a little catechism sewn up in a pink silk
cover. She was a bent-up old lady and a rapid talker, with a voice
which, though small, jangled every nerve in my body, like a pencil on a
slate. Being my godmother, she took great liberties in counselling my
parents on the proper way of "managing" me. The only time, indeed, I
ever heard my father utter an oath was when Miss Fenne was just beyond
hearing. She peered across at me on this Christmas morning like a bird
at a scorpion: "Caroline, Caroline," she cried, "for shame! The Shrimp!
You will turn the child's head."

_Shrimp!_ I had seen the loathsome, doubled-up creatures (in their
boiled state) on a kitchen plate. My blood turned to vinegar; and in
rage and shame I fell all of a heap on the table, hiding from her sight
my face and my hands as best I could under my clothes, and wishing that
I might vanish away from the world altogether.

My father's voice boomed out in protest; my mother took me into her arms
to soothe and scold me; but long after the ruffled old lady had taken
her departure I brooded on this affront. "Away, away!" a voice seemed to
cry within; and I listened to it as if under a spell. All that day I
nursed my wounded vanity, and the same evening, after candle light, I
found myself for a moment alone in the kitchen. Pollie had gone to the
wood-shed to fetch kindling, leaving the door into the garden ajar. The
night air touched my cheek. Half beside myself with desire of I know not
what, I sprang out from the doorstep into an inch or so of snow, and
picking myself up, ran off into the darkness under the huge sky.

It was bitterly cold. Frost had crusted the virgin surface of the snow.
My light footsteps can hardly have shattered its upper crystals. I ran
on and on into the ghostly world, into this stiff, marvelous, gloating
scene of frozen vegetation beneath that immense vacancy. A kind of
stupor must have spread over my young mind. It seemed I was transported
out of myself under the stars, in the mute presence of the Watchman of
Heaven. I stood there lost in wonder in the grey, luminous gloom.

But my escapade was brief and humiliating. The shock of the cold, the
excitement, quickly exhausted me. I threw myself down and covered my
face with my hands, trying in vain to stifle my sobs. What was my
longing? Where its satisfaction? Soft as wool a drowsiness stole over my
senses that might swiftly have wafted me off on the last voyage of
discovery. But I had been missed. A few minutes' search, and Pollie
discovered me lying there by the frozen cabbage stalks. The woeful Maenad
was carried back into the kitchen again--a hot bath, a hot posset, and a
few anxious and thankful tears.

The wonder is, that, being an only child, and a sore problem when any
question of discipline or punishment arose, I was not utterly spoiled.
One person at least came very near to doing so, my grandfather, Monsieur
Pierre de Ronvel. To be exact, he was my step-grandfather, for my
mother's charming mother, with her ringlets and crinoline, after my real
grandfather's death, had married a second time. He crossed the English
Channel to visit my parents when I was in my tenth year--a tall, stiff,
jerky man, with a sallow face, speckled fur-like hair that stood in a
little wall round his forehead, and the liveliest black eyes. His
manners were a felicity to watch even at my age. You would have supposed
he had come _courting_ my mother; and he took a great fancy to me. He
was extremely fond of salad, I remember: and I very proud of my mustard
and cress--which I could gather for him myself with one of my own
table-knives. So copiously he talked, with such a medley of joys and
zests and surprises on his face, that I vowed soon to be mistress of my
stepmother tongue. He could also conjure away reels and thimbles, even
spoons and forks, with a skill that precluded my becoming a materialist
for ever after. I _worshipped_ my grandfather--and yet without a vestige
of fear.

To him, indeed--though I think he was himself of a secular turn of
mind--I owe the story of my birthday saint, St Rosa of Lima in Peru, the
only saint, I believe, of the New World. With myself pinnacled on his
angular knee, and devouring like a sweetmeat every broken English word
as it slipped from his tongue, he told me how pious an infant my Saint
had been; how, when her mother, to beautify her, had twined flowers in
her hair, she had _pinned_ them to her skull; how she had rubbed
quicklime on her fair cheeks to disenchant her lovers ("_ses
pretendants_"), and how it was only veritable showers of roses from
heaven that had at last persuaded Pope Clement to make her a saint.

"Perhaps, _bon papa_," said I, "I shall dig and sow too when I am grown
up, like St Rosa, to support _my_ mamma and papa when _they_ are very
old. Do you think I shall make enough money? Papa has a very good
appetite?" He stared at me, as if in consternation.

"_Dieu vous en garde, ma p'tite_," he cried; and violently blew his
nose.

So closely I took St Rosa's story to heart that, one day, after bidding
my beauty a wistful farewell in the glass, I rubbed my cheek too, but
with the blue flowers of the--_brook_lime. It stained them a little,
but soon washed off. In my case a needless precaution; my _pretendants_
have been few.

It was a mournful day when my grandfather returned to France never to be
seen by me again. Yet he was to remember me always; and at last when I
myself had forgotten even my faith in his fidelity. Nearly all my
personal furnishings and belongings were gifts of his from France, and
many of them of his own making. There was my four-post bed, for
instance; with a flowered silk canopy, a carved tester and half a dozen
changes of linen and valance. There were chairs to match, a wardrobe,
silk mats from Persia, a cheval glass, and clothes and finery in
abundance, china and cutlery, top-boots and sabots. Even a silver-hooped
bath-tub and a crystal toilet set, and scores of articles besides for
use or ornament, which it would be tedious to mention. My grandfather
had my measurements to a nicety, and as the years went by he sagaciously
allowed for growth.

I learned to tell the time from an eight-day clock which played a sacred
tune at matins and vespers; and later, he sent me a watch, the least bit
too large for me to be quite comfortable, but an exquisite piece of
workmanship. As my birthdays (and his) drew near, I could scarcely sleep
for thinking what fresh entrancing novelty the festive morning would
bring. The only one of his gifts--by no means the least ingenious--which
never, after the first flush of excitement, gave me much pleasure, was a
two-chambered thatched summer-house, set up on a pole, and reached by a
wide, shallow ladder. The roof opened, so that on very hot days a block
of ice could be laid within, the water from its slow melting running out
by a gutter. But I loved sunshine. This was a plaything that
ridiculously amused chance visitors; it attracted flies; I felt silly up
in it: and gladly resigned it to the tits, starlings, and sparrows to
quarrel over as they pleased.

My really useful furniture--of plain old Sheraton design--was set out in
my bedroom. In one half of the room slept Pollie, a placid but, before
her marriage, rather slow-witted creature about six years my senior. The
other half was mine and had been made proportionate to my needs by a
cabinet-maker from London. My father had had a low stone balcony built
on beyond my window. This was fenced with fine trellis work to screen it
from the colder winds. With its few extremely dwarf trees set along in
green Nankin tubs, and the view it commanded, I could enjoy this eyrie
for hours--never wearied of it in my youth, nor shall if I live to be a
hundred.


I linger over these early recollections, simply because they are such
very happy things to possess. And now for out-of-doors.

Either because my mother was shy of me, or because she thought vulgar
attention would be bad for me, she seldom took me far abroad. Now and
then Pollie carried me down to the village to tea with _her_ mother, and
once or twice I was taken to church. The last occasion, however,
narrowly escaped being a catastrophe, and the experiment was not
repeated. Instead, we usually held a short evening service, on Sundays,
in the house, when my father read the lessons, "like a miner prophet,"
as I wrote and told Miss Fenne. He certainly dug away at the texts till
the words glittered for me like lumps of coal. On week-days more people
were likely to be about, and in general I was secluded. A mistake, I
think. But fortunately our high, plain house stood up in a delightful
garden, sloping this way and that towards orchard and wood, with a
fine-turfed lawn, few "cultivated" flowers, and ample drifts of shade.
If Kent is the garden of England, then this was the garden of Kent.

I was forbidden to be alone in it. But Pollie would sometimes weary of
her charge (in which I encouraged her) and when out of sight of the
windows she would stray off to gossip with the gardener or with some
friend from the village, leaving me to myself. To judge from the tales
which I have read or have been told about children, I must have been old
for my age. But perhaps the workings of the mind and heart of a girl in
her teens are not of general interest. Let me be brief. A stream of
water ran on the southern side all the length of the garden, under a
high, rocky bank (its boundary) which was densely overhung with ash and
willow, and hedges of brier and bramble looped with bindweed,
goose-grass, and traveller's joy. On the nearer bank of this stream
which had been left to its wild, I would sit among the mossy rocks and
stones and search the green tops of my ambush as if in quest of
Paradise.

When the sun's rays beat down too fiercely on my head I would make
myself an umbrella of wild angelica or water parsnip.

Caring little for playthings, and having my smallest books with me
chiefly for silent company, I would fall into a daydream in a world that
in my solitude became my own. In this fantastic and still world I forgot
the misadventure of my birth, which had now really begun to burden me,
forgot pride, vanity, and chagrin; and was at peace. There I had many
proportionate friends, few enemies. An old carrion crow, that sulked out
a black existence in this beauty, now and then alarmed me with his
attentions; but he was easily scared off. The lesser and least of living
things seemed to accept me as one of themselves. Nor (perhaps because I
never killed them) had I any silly distaste for the caterpillars,
centipedes, and satiny black slugs. Mistress Snail would stoop out at me
like a foster-mother. Even the midges, which to his frenzy would swarm
round my father's head like swifts round a steeple, left me entirely
unmolested. Either I was too dry a prey, or they misliked the flavour of
my blood.

My eyes dazzled in colours. The smallest of the marvels of flowers and
flies and beetles and pebbles, and the radiance that washed over them,
would fill me with a mute, pent-up rapture almost unendurable.
Butterflies would settle quietly on the hot stones beside me as if to
match their raiment against mine. If I proffered my hand, with quivering
wings and horns they would uncoil their delicate tongues and quaff from
it drops of dew or water. A solemn grasshopper would occasionally
straddle across my palm, and with patience I made quite an old friend of
a harvest mouse. They weigh only two to the half-penny. This sharp-nosed
furry morsel would creep swiftly along to share my crumbs and snuggle
itself to sleep in my lap. By-and-by, I suppose, it took to itself a
wife; I saw it no more. Bees would rest there, the panniers of their
thighs laden with pollen: and now and then a wasp, his jaws full of wood
or meat. When sunbeetles or ants drew near, they would seem to pause at
my whisper, as if hearkening. As if in their remote silence pondering
and sharing the world with me. All childish fancy, no doubt; for I
proved far less successful with the humans.

But how, it may be asked, seeing that there must have been a shrill
piping of birds and brawling of water among the stones, how could
Mademoiselle's delicate ear endure _that_ racket? Perhaps it is because
the birds being loose in the hollow of space, it carried away into its
vacancy their cries. It is, too, the harsh, rather than the shrill, that
frets me. As for the noise of the water, it was so full and limpid, yet
made up of such infinitely entangled chimings and drummings, that it
would lull me into a kind of trance, until to a strange eye I must have
appeared like a lifeless waxen mammet on my stone.

What may wholly have been another childish fancy was that apart from the
silvery darting flies and the rainbow-coloured motes in the sunbeams,
fine and airy invisible shapes seemed to haunt and hover around me when
all was still. Most of my fellow creatures to my young nose had an odour
a good deal denser than the fainter scented flowers, and I can fancy
such a fog, if intensified, would be distressing to beings so bodiless
and rare. Whereas the air I disturbed and infected with my presence can
have been of but shallow volume.

Fairies I never saw--I had a kind of fear and distaste for them even in
books. Nor for that matter--perhaps because the stream here was too
tumbling and opaque--a kingfisher. But whatever other company may have
been mine, I had the clouds and the water and the insects and the
stones--while pimpernel, mousetail, tormentil, the wild strawberry, the
feathery grasses seemed to have been made expressly for my delight.
Ego-centric Midget that I was!




Chapter Three


Not that in an existence so passive riddles never came my way. As one
morning I brushed past a bush of lads' love (or maidens' ruin, as some
call it), its fragrance sweeping me from top to toe, I stumbled on the
carcass of a young mole. Curiosity vanquished the first gulp of horror.
Holding my breath, with a stick I slowly edged it up in the dust and
surveyed the white heaving nest of maggots in its belly with a peculiar
and absorbed recognition. "Ah, ha!" a voice cried within me, "so this is
what is in wait; this is how things are"; and I stooped with lips drawn
back over my teeth to examine the stinking mystery more closely. That
was a lesson I have never unlearned.

One of a rather different kind had another effect. I was sitting in the
garden one day watching in the distance a jay huffling and sidling and
preening its feathers on a bit of decrepit fencing. Suddenly there fell
a sharp crack of sound. In a flash, with a derisive chattering, the jay
was flown: and then I saw Adam Waggett, half doubled up, stealing along
towards the place. I lay in wait for him. With catapult dangling in one
hand, the other fist tight shut, he came along like a thief. And I cried
hollowly out of my concealment, "Adam, what have you there?"

Such a picture of foolish shame I have never seen. He was compelled none
the less to exhibit his spoil, an eye-shut, twinkle-tailed,
needle-billed Jenny Wren crumpled up in his great, dirty paw. Fury burnt
up in me like a fire. What I said to him I cannot remember, but it was
nothing sweet; and it was a cowed Adam Waggett that loafed off as
truculently as he could towards the house, his catapult and victim left
behind him. But that was his lesson rather than mine, and one which _he_
never forgot.

When in my serener moods Pollie's voice would be heard slyly hallooing
for me, I would rouse up with a shock to realize again the little cell
of my body into which I had been confined. Then she and I would eat our
luncheon, a few snippets of biscuit, a cherry or two, or slice of apple
for me, and for her a hunch of bread and bacon about half my size in
length and thickness. I would turn my back on her, for I could not
endure to see her gobble her meal, having an abhorrence of cooked flesh,
and a dainty stomach. Still, like most children I could be greedy, and
curious of unfamiliar foods. To a few forbidden black currants which I
reached up and plucked from their rank-smelling bush, and devoured, skin
and all, I owe lesson Number 3. This one, however, had to be repeated.

Childhood quickly fleets away. Those happy, unhappy, far-away days seem
like mere glimpses of a dragon-fly shimmering and darting over my garden
stream, though at the actual time they more closely resembled, perhaps,
a continuous dream broken into bits of vivid awakening.

As I grew older, my skirts grew longer, my desire for independence
sharper, and my wits more inquiring. On my seventeenth birthday I put up
my hair, and was confirmed by a bishop whom my godmother persuaded to
officiate in the house. It was a solemn occasion; but my mother was a
good deal concerned about the lunch, and I with the ballooning lawn
sleeves and the two square episcopal finger-tips disposed upon my head.
The experience cast a peaceful light into my mind and shook my heart,
but it made me for a time a little self-conscious of both my virtue and
my sins. I began to brood not only on the deplorable state of my own
soul, but also on Pollie's and Mrs Ballard's, and became for a time a
diminutive Miss Fenne. I suppose innocence is a precarious bliss. On the
other hand, if one's mind is like a dead mole's belly, it is wise, I
think, to examine it closely but not too often, and to repeat that
confirmation for one's self every morning and evening.

As a young child I had been, of course, as naturally religious as a
savage or an angel. But even then, I think, I never could quite believe
that Paradise was a mere Fenne-land.

Once I remember in the midst of my multiplication table I had broken out
unannounced with, "Then _God_ made the world, mamma?"

"Yes, my dear."

"And all things in the forests and the birds in the sky and--and moles,
and this?" I held down my limp, coral-coloured arithmetic.

"Yes," said she.

I wondered a while, losing myself, as if in wanderings like Ariel's,
between the clouds. "What, mamma, did He make them of?" my voice
interrupted me.

"He made them," said my mother steadily, "of His Power and Love."

Rapidly I slid back into her company. "And can we, can I, make things of
_my_ power and love?"

"I suppose, my dear," replied my mother reflectively and perhaps
thinking of my father in his study, over his Paper and Hops, "it is only
_that_ in life that is really worth doing."

"Then," I said sagely, "I _suspects_ that's how Mullings does the
garden, mamma."

Long before Miss Fenne's and the bishop's visitation my mother had set
about teaching me in earnest. A governess--a Miss Perry--was our first
experiment. Alas, apart from her tendency to quinsy, it was I who was
found wanting. She complained of the strain on her nerves. My mother
feared that quinsy was catching; and Miss Perry had no successor.
Reading was always a difficulty. My father bought me as tiny old books
as could be found, including a dwarf Bible, a midget Pickering
Shakespeare, and a grammar (with a menagerie for frontispiece) from
which I learned that "irony is a figure which intends the reverse of
what it speaks, and under the masque of praise, conceals the most biting
satyr"; and the following stanza:--


     Hail Energeia! hail my native tongue
     Concisely full, and musically strong;
     Thou with the pencil hold'st a glorious strife,
     And paint'st the passions equal to the life.


My mother agreed that _strung_ would be preferable to "_strong_," and
explained that "the passions" did not signify merely ill-temper; while,
if I pecked over-nicely at my food, my father would cry "Hail Energeia!"
a challenge which rarely failed to persuade me to set to.

My grandfather sent me other pygmy books from Paris, including a minute
masterpiece of calligraphy, _Une Anthologie de Chansons pour une
Minuscule Aimante et Bien-aimee par P. de R_. These I could easily carry
about with me. I soon learned to accustom my arms and shoulders to
bulkier and more cumbrous volumes. My usual method with a common-sized
book was to prop it up towards the middle of the table and then to seat
myself at the edge. The page finished, I would walk across and turn over
a fresh leaf. Thus in my solitude I studied my lessons and read again
and again my nursery favourites, some of them, I gather, now
undeservedly out of fashion.

Perhaps even better than fiction or folk-tales, I liked books of
knowledge.

There were two of these in particular, _The Observing Eye; or Lessons to
Children on the Three Lowest Divisions of Animal Life--The Radiated,
Articulated, and Molluscous_, and _The Childhood of the World_. Even at
nine I remarked how nimbly the anonymous author of the former could skip
from St Paul to the lobster; and I never wearied of brooding on Mr
Clodd's frontispiece. This depicts a large-headed and seemingly
one-legged little girl in a flounced frock lying asleep under a wall on
which ivy is sprawling. For pillow for herself and her staring doll
there lies on the ground a full-sized human skull, and in the middle
distance are seen the monoliths of Stonehenge. Beyond these gigantic
stones, and behind the far mountains, rises with spiky rays an enormous
Sun.

_I_ was that child; and mine her sun that burned in heaven, and he a
more obedient luminary than any lamp of man's. I would wonder what she
would do when she awoke from sleep. The skull, in particular, both
terrified and entranced me--the secret of all history seemed to lie
hidden in the shadows beneath its dome. Indeed I needed no reminder from
Mr Clodd that "Children (and some grown-up people too) are apt to think
that things are wonderful only when they are big, which is not true."

I knew already, out of nowhere, that "the bee's waxen cell is more
curious than the chimpanzee's rough hut" (though I should have dearly
liked to see the latter); and that "an ant is more wonderful than the
huge and dull rhinoceros." Such is childishness, however: I pitied the
poor rhinoceros his "dull." Over such small things as a nut, a shell, a
drop of rain-water in a buttercup, a frond of frost (for there were cold
winters at Lyndsey in those days), I would pore and pore, imbibing the
lesson that the eye alone if used in patience will tell its owner far
more about an object than it can merely see.

Among my few framed pictures I cannot resist mentioning one by a painter
of the name of Bosch. Below the middle of it kneeled naked Adam and Eve
with exquisite crimped hair on their shoulders; and between them stood
God. All above and beneath them, roamed the animals, birds, insects, and
infinitesimals of Eden, including a long-tailed monkey on an elephant, a
jerboa, a dancing crocodile, and--who but our cat Miaou, carrying off a
mouse! An astonishing, inexhaustible piece of thoughtfulness. I loved
Mynheer Bosch.

Shameful dunce Miss M. may remain, but she did in her childhood
supremely enjoy any simple book about the things of creation great or
small. But I preferred my own notions of some of them. When my father of
a dark, clear night would perch me up at a window to see the
stars--Charles's Wain and the Chair; and told me that they were huge
boiling suns, roaring their way through the vast pits of space, I would
shake my head to myself. I was grateful for the science, but preferred
to keep them just "stars." And though I loved to lave my hands in a
trickle of light that had been numberless years on its journey to this
earth, that of a candle also filled me with admiration, and I was
unfeignedly grieved that the bleak moon was naught but a sheer hulk,
sans even air or ice or rain or snow.

How much pleasanter it would be to think that her shine was the
reflection of our cherry orchards, and that her shadows were just
Kentish hay-ricks, barns, and oast-houses. It was, too, perhaps rather
tactless of my father to beguile me with full-grown authors' accounts of
the Lives of the Little. Accomplished writers they may be, but--well,
never mind. As for the Lives of the Great, I could easily adjust
Monsieur Bon Papa's spyglass and reduce them to scale.


My father taught me also to swim in his round bath; and on a visit to
Canterbury purchased for me the nimblest little dun Shetland pony, whom
we called Mopsa. I learned to become a fearless rider. But hardy though
her race may be, perhaps I was too light a burden to satisfy Mopsa's
spirit. In a passing fit of temper she broke a leg. Though I had stopped
my ears for an hour before the Vet came, I heard the shot.

My mother's lessons were never very burdensome. She taught me little,
but she taught it well--even a morsel of Latin. I never wearied of the
sweet oboe-like nasal sound of her French poems, and she instilled in me
such a delight in words that to this day I firmly believe that things
are at least twice the better and richer for being called by them. Apart
from a kind of passionate impatience over what was alien to
me--arithmetic, for instance, and "analysis"--and occasional fits of the
sulks, which she allowed to deposit their own sediment at leisure, I was
a willing, and, at times, even a greedy scholar. Apparently from infancy
I was of a firm resolve to match my wits with those of the common-sized
and to be "grown-up" some day.

So much for my education, a thing which it seems to me is likely to
continue--and specially in respect of human nature--as long as I keep
alive. With so little childish company, without rivalry, I was inclined
to swell myself out with conceit and complacency. "It's easy holding
down the latchet when nobody pulls the string." But whatever size we may
be, in soul or body, I have found that the world wields a sharp pin, and
is pitiless to bubbles.

Though inclined to be dreamy and idle when alone, I was, of course, my
own teacher too. My senses were seven in number, however few my wits. In
particular I loved to observe the clustering and gathering of plants,
like families, each of a shape, size, and hue, each in their kind and
season, though tall and lowly were intermingled. Now and then I would
come on some small plant self-sown, shining and flourishing, free and
clear, and even the lovelier for being alone in its kind amid its
greater neighbours. I prized these discoveries, and if any one of them
was dwarfed a little by its surroundings I would cosset it up and help
it against them. How strange, thought I, if men so regarded each other's
intelligence. If from pitying the dull-witted the sharp-witted slid to
mere toleration, and from toleration to despising and loathing. What a
contest would presently begin between the strong-bodied stupid and the
feeble-bodied clever, and how soon there would be no strong-bodied
stupid left in the world! They would dwindle away and disappear into
Time like the mammoth and the woolly bear. And then I began to be sorry
for the woolly bear and to wish I could go and have a look at him.
Perhaps this is putting my old head on those young shoulders, but when
I strive to re-enter the thoughts of those remote days, how like they
seem to the noisy wasting stream beside which they flowed on, and of
whose source and destination I was unaware.

All this egotism recalls a remark that Mrs Ballard once made apropos of
some little smart repartee from Miss M. as she sat beside her pasteboard
and slapped away at a lump of dough, "Well _I_ know a young lady who's
been talking to the young man that rubbed his face with a brass
candlestick."




Chapter Four


In the midst of my eighteenth year fortune began to darken. My mother
had told me little of the world, its chances and changes, cares and
troubles. What I had learned of these came chiefly from books and my own
speculations. We had few visitors and from all but the most familiar I
was quickly packed away. My mother was sensitive of me, for both our
sakes. But I think in this she was mistaken, for when my time came, Life
found me raw, and it rubbed in the salt rather vigorously.

My father had other views. He argued for facing the facts, though
perhaps those relating to fruit and paper are not very intimidating. But
he seldom made his way against my mother, except in matters that
concerned his own comfort. He loved me fondly but throughout my
childhood seems to have regarded me as a kind of animated marionette.
When he came out from his Mills and Pockets it amused him to find me
nibbling a raspberry beside his plate. He'd rub his round stubbly head,
and say, "Well, mamma, and how's Trot done this morning?" or he would
stoop and draw ever so heedfully his left little finger down my nose to
its uttermost tip, and whisper: "And so to Land's End, my love." Now and
then I would find his eyes fixed on me as if in stupefaction that I was
actually his daughter.

But now that I was getting to be a young woman and had put up my hair,
and the future frowned near, this domestic problem began seriously to
concern him. My mother paled at the very mention of it. I remember I had
climbed up on to his writing desk one morning, in search of a pair of
high boots which I had taken off in his study the evening before. We had
been fishing for sticklebacks. Concealed from view, while the wind
whined at the window, I heard a quarrel between my father and mother
about me which I will never repeat to mortal ear. It darkened my mind
for days, and if ... but better not.

At this time anxiety about money matters must have begun its gnawing in
my poor father's brains. And I know what _that_ means. He had
recommended to others and speculated himself in some experiment in the
cultivation of the trees from which the Chinese first made paper, and
had not only been grossly cheated, but laughed at in the press. _The
Kentish Courier_--I see his ears burning now--had referred to him as
"the ingenious Mr Tapa"; and my mother's commiseration had hardly
solaced him: "But, my dear, you couldn't have gone to Canton by
yourself. We must just draw in our horns a little." The ingenious Mr
Tapa patted the hand on his shoulder, but his ears burned on.

"Besides," my mother added, with a long, sighing breath, as she seated
herself again, "there are the books." He plucked his spectacles off, and
gazed vaguely in her direction: "Oh, yes, yes, there are the books."

Nor was he long daunted by this attack. He fell in love with some notion
of so pickling hop-poles that they would last for ever. But the press
was no kinder to his poles than to his mulberries.

And then befell the blackest misfortune of my life. I had been ill; and
for a few days had been sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms in a cot
beside my mother, so that she should be near me if I needed her. This
particular evening, however, I had gone back to my own room. We cannot
change the past, or foresee the future. But if only Pollie had not been
a heavy sleeper; if only I had escaped that trivial ailment--how tangled
is life's skein! It was the May after my eighteenth birthday and full
moonlight.

Troubled in mind by my illness and other worries and mortifications, my
mother, not fully aroused perhaps, got up in the small hours and mounted
the stone staircase in order to look in on me. I was awake, and heard
the rustling of her nightdress and the faint touch of her slippered feet
ascending from stone to stone. I guessed her errand, and in my folly
thought I would pretend to be asleep and give her a "surprise." I drew
my curtains and lay motionless on my back as if I were dead. With eyes
closed, listening, I smilingly waited.

Then suddenly I heard a muffled, gasping cry; and all was utterly,
icily still. I flung aside the silk curtains and leapt out of bed.


The moonlight was streaming in a lean ray across the floor of my room. I
ran down this luminous pathway into the dusk at the open door. At the
stair-head beyond, still and silent, I saw my poor dear. On through the
cold dark air I ran, and stood in her loosened hair beside her head. It
lay unstirring, her cheek colourless, her hand stretched out, palm
upward, on the stone. I called into her ear, first gently and
pleadingly, then loud and shrill. I ran and chafed her fingers, then
back again, and stooped, listening with my cheek to her lips. She
exhaled a trembling sigh. I called and called; but my shrillness was
utterly swallowed up in the vast night-hung house. Then softly in the
silence her lids unsealed and her eyes, as if wonderful with a remote
dream, looked up into my face. "My dear," she whispered, wakefulness
gathering faintly into her gaze, "my dear, is it you?" There was an
accent in her voice that I had never heard before. Perhaps her tranceful
eyes had magnified me. Then once more the lids closed down and I was
alone. I fell on my knees beside her and crouched, praying into her
heedless ear.

It was my first acquaintance with calamity, and physically powerless to
aid her, I could think of nothing for a moment but to persuade her to
speak to me again. Then my senses returned to me. To descend that flight
of stairs--down which hitherto I had always been carried--would waste
more precious time than I could spare. There seemed to be but one
alternative--to waken Pollie. I ran back into my bedroom and tugged
violently at the slack of her bedclothes. A mouse might as well have
striven to ring Great Paul. She breathed on with open mouth, flat on her
back, like a log. Then a thought came to me.

There was a brass-bound box under my bed, a full fifteen inches long,
though shallow, in which my grandfather had lately sent me some gowns
and finery from Paris. With some little difficulty I lugged and pushed
this all across the room, and out on to the staircase. My strength
seemed to be superhuman. One moment I flew to my mother, but now she lay
in a profound sleep indeed, her cheek like marble. With a last effort I
edged my box on its side between the balusters, and at some risk of
falling after it, shoved it over into the moon-silvered dusk below. The
house echoed with its resounding brazen clatter as it pitched from stair
to stair. Then quiet. Clutching with either hand the baluster I leaned
over, listening. Then a voice cried sleepily: "Hah!" then a call,
"Caroline!" and a moment afterwards I discerned my father ascending the
staircase....


For weeks I lay desperately ill. The chill, the anguish, and horror of
that night had come upon a frame already weakened. Life was nothing but
an evil dream, a world of terrifying shadows and phantoms. But our old
friend Dr Grose was familiar with my constitution, and at last I began
to mend. Pollie, stricken with remorse, nursed me night and day, giving
my small bed every hour she could spare in a house stricken and
disordered. I was never told in so many words that my mother was dead.
In my extreme weakness I learned it of the air around me, of every
secret sound and movement in the house.

Morning and evening appeared my father's great face in the doorway, his
eyebrows lifted high above his spectacles. To see his misery I almost
wished that I might die to spare him more. When Dr Grose gave him
permission, he sat down beside my bed and stooping low, told me that my
mother had remembered our last speech together on the staircase, and he
gave me her last message. A thousand and one remembrances of her
patience and impulsiveness, of our long hours of solitude together, of
her fits of new life as if she were a tree blossoming in the Spring, of
her voice, her dignified silence with Miss Fenne, her sallies with my
grandfather, her absent musings--these all return to me.

Alas, that it was never in my power, except perhaps at that last moment,
to be to her a true comfort and companion, anything much better, in
fact, than a familiar and tragic playmate. Worse beyond words; how
little I had done for her that I might have done!

But regret must not lead me into extremes. That is not the whole truth.
There were occasions, I think, when she almost forgot my disabilities,
when we were just two quiet, equal spirits in the world and conversed
together gravely and simply, not as children, but as fellow-women. It is
these I treasure dearest, while thanking her for all. Why, in the
whirligig of time, if my authorities are trustworthy, and my life had
fallen out differently, the problem might now have been reversed! I
myself might have had natural-sized children and they a pygmy mother.
The strangeness of the world.

Out of the listlessness of convalescence my interests began to renew
themselves. Across the gulf that separated us I could still commune with
my mother's quiet spirit. Her peace and the peace of her forgiveness
began to descend on me; and her grave in my imagination has now no more
sorrow than the anticipation of my own. From my windowsill loggia I
could command a full "Hundred" of Kent. Up there on the barrowed
hill-top it was said that on fine days a keen eye could descry the sea
to north and south; though Dr Grose dismissed it as a piece of local
presumption. Now that my mother was gone the clouds were stranger, the
birds more sweetly melancholy, the flowers more fleeting. Something of
youth had passed away to return no more.

Half my thoughts were wasted in futile resentment at my incapacities.
Yet it was a helplessness that in part was forced on me from without.
Still less now could my father take me seriously. We shared our silent
meals together. He would sit moping, pushing his hand over his whitening
hair, or staring over his spectacles out of the window to the low
whistling of some endless, monotonous tune that would haunt him for days
together and fret me to distraction. Now and again he would favour me
with a serious speech, and then, with a glance, perhaps hurry away to
his study before I could answer. To his half-completed dissertations on
Hop, Cherry, and Paper, I learned he had added another, on the Oyster.
Many of his letters were now postmarked Whitstable. He even advertised
in his old enemy, the _Courier_, for information: and would break out
into furious abuse at the stupidity of his correspondents. Meanwhile his
appetite increased; he would nod in his chair; his clothes grew shabby;
his appearance neglected. Poor dear, he missed my mother.

But I made a struggle to take her place. Every morning Pollie would
carry me off to the kitchen for a discussion with Mrs Ballard over the
household affairs of the day. With her fat, floury hand, she would hide
her mouth and gravely nod her head at my instructions. But I knew she
was concealing her amusement. "Oh, these men!" she once exclaimed at
some new caprice of "the master's," "they are never happy unless they
can be where they bain't." With my own hand I printed out for her a list
of my father's favourite dishes. I left off my black and wore bright
colours again, so that he might not be constantly reminded of the past.
But when after long debate I took courage one day to propose myself as
his housekeeper--I shall never forget the facial expression which he
quickly rubbed off with his hand.

He fetched out of his trousers pocket a great bunch of keys, and jangled
them almost ferociously in the air at me for a full minute together with
tears of amusement in his eyes. Then he tossed down the last gulp or two
of his port and went off. A moment after he must have realized how cruel
a blow he had dealt my vanity and my love. He returned, seated himself
heavily in his chair, and looked at me. Then stretching out his hand he
dropped his face on to his arm. A horrible quietness spread over the
room. For the first time I looked with a kind of terror at the hairy
fingers and whitening head, and could not stir.

How oddly chance repeats itself. The door opened and once more,
unannounced, Miss Fenne appeared in our midst. My father hastily rose to
greet her, pretending that nothing was amiss. But when she held out her
clawlike hand to me to be kissed, I merely stared at her. She screwed up
her countenance into a smile; mumbled that I was looking pale and peaked
again; and, with difficulty keeping her eyes from mine, explained that
she had come for a business talk with my father.

A few days afterwards I was standing up at the window of my mother's
little sewing-room--always a favourite refuge of mine, for there the
afternoon sun and the colours of evening used to beat into the corner.
And I saw a small-sized woman with a large black bonnet come waddling up
the drive. She was followed by a boy wheeling a square box on a
two-wheeled trolley. It was Mrs Sheppey come to be housekeeper to the
widower and his daughter.

Mrs Sheppey proved to be a harassed and muddling woman, and she came to
a harassed home. My father's affairs had gone from bad to worse. He was
gloomy and morose. A hunted look sometimes gleamed in his eyes, and the
spectacled nose seemed to grow the smaller the more solemn its
surroundings were. He spent most of the day in his dressing-gown now,
had quarrelled with Dr Grose, and dismissed Mrs Ballard. The rooms were
dirty and neglected. Pollie would maunder about with a broom, or stand
idly staring out of the window. She was in love. At least, so I realize
now. At the time I thought she was merely lumpish and stupid.

Only once in my recollection did Mrs Sheppey pay my own quarters a
visit. I was kneeling on my balcony and out of sight, and could watch
her unseen. She stood there--tub-shaped, a knob of dingy hair sticking
out from her head, her skirts suspended round her boots--passively
examining my bed, my wardrobe, and my other belongings. Her scrutiny
over, she threw up her hands and the whites of her eyes as if in
expostulation to heaven, turned about in her cloth boots, and waddled
out again. Pollie told me, poor thing, that her children had been thorns
in her side. I brooded over this. Had I not myself, however
involuntarily, been a thorn in _my_ mother's side? I despised and yet
pitied Mrs Sheppey.

She was, if anything, frightened of me, and of my tongue, and would
address me as "little lady" in a cringing, pursed-up fashion. But I am
thankful to say she never attempted to touch me or to lift me from the
floor. Her memory is inextricably bound up with a brown, round pudding
with a slimy treacle sauce which she used to send to table every
Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. My father would look at it with his
nose rather than with his eyes; and after perhaps its fiftieth
appearance, he summoned Mrs Sheppey with a violent tug at the bell. She
thrust her head in at the door. "Take it away," he said, "take it away.
Eat it. Devour it. Hide it from God's sight, good woman. Don't gibber.
Take it away!"

His tone frightened me out of my wits and Mrs Sheppey out of the house.
Then came the end. At the beginning of August in my twentieth year, my
father, who had daily become stranger in appearance and habits, though
steadfastly refusing to call in his old friend, Dr Grose, was found dead
in his bed. He was like a boy who never can quite succeed in pleasing
himself or his masters. He had gone to bed and shut his eyes, never in
this world to open them again.




Chapter Five


Am I sorry that almost beside myself with this new affliction, and
bewildered and frightened by the incessant coming and going of strangers
in the house, I refused to be carried down to bid that unanswering face
good-bye? No, I have no regret on that score. The older I grow the more
closely I seem to understand him. If phantoms of memory have any
reality--and it is wiser, I think, to remember the face of the living
rather than the stony peace of the dead--he has not forgotten his only
daughter.

Double-minded creature I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with
arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized
humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of
these differences I have to submit. At times I have been tempted to
blame my parents for my shortcomings. What wicked folly--they did not
choose their only child. After all, too, fellow creatures of any size
seem much alike. They rarely have _nothing_ to blame Providence for--the
length of their noses or the size of their feet, their bones or their
corpulence, the imbecilities of their minds or their bodies, the
"accidents" of birth, breeding, station, or circumstance. Yet how secure
and perhaps wholesome is Man's self-satisfaction. To what ideal does he
compare himself but to a self-perfected abstraction of his own image?
Even his Venus and Apollo are mere flattering reflections of his own he-
or she-shapes. And what of his anthropomorphic soul?

As for myself, Dame Nature may some day take a fancy to the dwarf. "What
a pretty play it would be"--I have clean forgotten where I chanced on
this amusing passage--"What a pretty play it would be if, from the next
generation onwards, the only humans born into the world should be of
mere pygmy stature. Fifty years hence there would remain but few of the
normal-sized in the land. Imagine these aged few, miserably stalking
through the dwarfed streets, picking up a scanty livelihood in city or
country-side, where their very boots would be a public danger, their
very tread would set the bells in the steeples ringing, and their
appetites would be a national incubus. House, shop, church, high road,
furniture, vehicles abandoned or sunken to the pygmy size; wars and
ceremonies, ambitions and enterprises, everything but prayers, dwindled
to the petty. Would great-grandfather be venerated, cherished, admired,
a welcome guest, a lamented emigrant? Would there be as many mourners as
sextons at his funeral, as many wreaths as congratulations at his
grave?" And so on and so forth--like Jonathan Swift.

But I must beware. Partly from fatigue and partly from dislike of the
version of Miss M. that stared out of his picture at me, I had begun, I
remember, to be a little fretful when old Mr Wagginhorne was painting my
portrait. And I complained pertly that I thought there were far too many
azaleas on the potted bush.

"Ah, little Miss Finical," he said, "take care, if you please. Once
there was a Diogenes whom the gods shut up in a tub and fed on his own
spleen. He died.... He died," he repeated, drawing his brush slowly
along the canvas, "of dyspepsia."

He popped round, "Think of that."

I can think of that to better purpose now, and if there is one thing in
the world whose company I shall deplore in my coffin, that thing is a
Cynic. That is why I am trying as fast as I can to put down my
experiences in black and white before the black predominates.

But I must get back to my story. My poor father had left his affairs in
the utmost disorder. His chief mourners were his creditors. Apart from
these, one or two old country friends and distant relatives, I believe,
attended his funeral, but none even of them can have been profoundly
interested in the Hop, the Oyster, or the Cherry, at least in the
abstract. Dr Grose, owing to ill-health, had given up his practice and
was gone abroad. But though possibly inquiry was made after the small
creature that had been left behind, I stubbornly shut myself away in my
room under the roof, listening in a fever of apprehension to every
sinister movement in the house beneath.

Yet if a friend in need is a friend indeed, then I must confess that my
treatment of Miss Fenne was the height of ingratitude.

In my grief and desolation, the future seemed to be only a veil beyond
the immediate present, which I had neither the wish nor the power to
withdraw. Miss Fenne had no such illusions. I begged Pollie to make any
excuse she could think of to prevent her from seeing me. But at last she
pushed her way up, and doubtless, the news and the advice she brought
were the best tonic that could have been prescribed for me.

As a child I had always associated my godmother with the crocodile
(though not with Mr Bosch's charming conception of it, in his picture of
the Creation). Yet there were no tears in her faded eyes when she
explained that of my father's modest fortune not a pittance remained. In
a few days the house, with everything in it except my own small sticks
of furniture, was to be sold by auction. I must keep my door locked
against intruders. All that would be left to me was a small income of
about L110 per annum, derived from money bequeathed to me by a relative
of my mother's whom I had never seen.

"I fancy your father knew nothing about it," she concluded, "at least so
your dear _mother_ seemed to imply. But there! it's a sad business, a
sad business. And that Tapa scandal; a lamentable affair." Having thus
prepared the way, my godmother proposed that I should take up my
residence in her house, and commit my future entirely to her charge.

"You cannot be an expensive guest," she explained, "and I am sure you
will try to be a grateful one. No truly _conscientious_ godparent, my
dear child, _ever_ relinquishes the soul committed to her care. I
sometimes wonder whether your poor dear mother realized this."

But it was my soul, if that is brother to the spirit and can be
neighbour to pride, that revolted against her proposition. I had to shut
my eyes at the very remembrance of Miss Fenne's prim and musty
drawing-room. Every intimation, every jerk of her trembling head, every
pounce of her jewelled fingers only hardened my heart. Poor Miss Fenne.
Her resentment at my refusal seemed to increase her shortness of sight.
Looking in on her from my balcony, I had the advantage of her, as she
faced me in the full light in her chair, dressed up in her old lady's
clothes like a kind of human Alp among my pygmy belongings. I tried to
be polite, but this only increased her vexation. One smart tap of the
ivory ball that topped her umbrella would have been my _coup de grace_.
She eyed me, but never administered it.

At last she drew in her lips and fell silent. Then, as may happen at
such moments, her ill-temper and chagrin, even the sense of her own
dignity drooped away, and for a while in the quietness we were simply
two ill-assorted human beings, helpless in the coils of circumstance.
She composed her mouth, adjusted her bonnet strings, peered a moment
from dim old eyes out of the window, then once more looked at me.

"It must be, then, as God wills," she said in a trembling voice. "The
spirit of your poor dear mother must be judge between us. She has, we
may trust, gone to a better world."

For a moment my resolution seemed to flow away like water, and I all but
surrendered. But a rook cawed close overhead, and I bit my lip. Little
more was said, except that she would consider it her duty to find me a
comfortable and God-fearing home. But she admonished me of the future,
warned me that the world was a network of temptations, and assured me of
her prayers. So we parted. I bowed her out of my domain. It was the last
time we met. Two days afterwards I received her promised letter:--


     "MY DEAR GODCHILD,--Mr Ambrose Pellew, an old _clergyman_ friend of
     mine, in whose discretion and knowledge of the world I have every
     confidence, has spoken for you to an old married, respectable
     servant of his now living a few miles from London--a Mrs Bowater.
     For the charge of thirty shillings a week she has consented to give
     you board, lodging, and _reasonable_ attendance. In all the
     circumstances this seems to me to be a moderate sum. Mr Pellew
     assures me that Mrs B. is clean, honest, and a _practising_
     Christian. When this dreadful Sale is over, I have arranged that
     Pollie shall conduct you safely to what will in future be your
     _home_. I trust that you will be as happy there as Providence
     permits, though I cannot doubt that your poor dear mother and your
     poor father, too, for that matter, would have wished
     otherwise--that the roof of her old friend who was present at your
     Baptism and _insisted_ on your Confirmation, should have been your
     refuge and asylum now that you are absolutely alone in the world.

     "However, you have rejected this proposal, and have _chosen your
     own path_. I am not your legal guardian, and I am too deeply
     _pained_ to refer again to your obstinacy and ingratitude. Rest
     assured that, in spite of all, I shall remember you in my prayers,
     and I trust, D. V., that you will escape the temptations of this
     wicked world--a world in which it has pleased God, in spite of
     self-sacrificing and anxious friends, to place you at so
     distressing a disadvantage. But in His Sight all men are equal. Let
     that be your continual consolation. See Amos vii. 2; Prov. xxxi.
     24-28; Eccles. xii. 1.

     "I remain, your affectionate godmother,

     "EMMA E. FENNE.

     "PS.--I reopen this letter to explain that your _financial_ affairs
     are in the hands of Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris, respectable
     solicitors of Gray's Inn. They will remit you on every quarter
     day--Christmas Day, Lady Day, June 25th and September 29th--the sum
     of L28 10s. 0d. Of this you will pay L19 10s. _at once_ to Mrs
     Bowater, who, I have no doubt, will advise you on the expenditure
     of what remains on wearing apparel, self-improvement, missions,
     charity, and so on. It _grieves_ me that from the wreckage of your
     father's affairs you must not anticipate a further straw of
     assistance. All his money and property will be swallowed up in the
     dreadful storm that has broken over what we can only _trust_ is a
     tranquil resting place. R. I. P.--E. E. F."


So sprawling and straggling was my godmother's penmanship that I spelled
her letter out at last with a minifying glass, though rather for forlorn
amusement's sake than by necessity. Not that this diminishment of her
handwriting in any sense lessened the effect upon me of the sentiments
it conveyed. They at once daunted me and gave me courage. For a little I
hesitated, then at last I thought _out_ in my heart that God might be
kinder to me than Miss Fenne wished. Indeed I was so invigorated by the
anticipation of the "wicked world," that I all but called her a
crocodile to her phantasmal face. Couldn't I--didn't I--myself "mean
well" too? What pictures and prospects of the future, of my journey, of
Mrs Bowater and the "network" pursued each other through my brain. And
what a darkness oppressed me when a voice kept repeating over in my
mind--_Harris and Harris and Harris_, as if it were a refrain to one of
my grandfather's _chansons_. _Messrs Harris and Harris and Harris_--I
_saw_ all three of them (dark men with whiskers), but trusted profoundly
they would never come to see _me_.

Nor from that day to this, through all my giddying "ups" and sobering
"downs" have I ever for a moment regretted my decision--though I might
have conveyed it with a little better grace. My body, perhaps also my
soul, would have been safer in the seclusion of my godmother's house.
But my spirit? I think it would have beaten itself to death there like a
wasp on a window-pane. Whereas--well, here I am.




Chapter Six


Those last few days of August dragged on--days of a burning, windless
heat. Yet, as days, I enjoyed them. On some upper branch of my family
tree must have flourished the salamander. Indeed I think I should have
been a denizen of Venus rather than of this colder, darker planet. I sat
on my balcony, basking in the hot sunshine, my thoughts darting hither
and thither like flies under a ceiling--those strange, winged creatures
that ever seem to be attempting to trace out in their flittings the
starry "Square of Pegasus." In spite of my troubles and forebodings, and
fleeting panics, my inward mind was calm. I carefully packed away my few
little valuables. The very notion of food gave me nausea, but that I
determined to conquer, since of course to become, at either extreme, a
slave to one's stomach, is a folly.

The noise and tramplings of the men in the rooms beneath never ceased,
until Night brought quiet. The Sale lasted for two days. A stale and
clouded air ascended even into my locked bedroom from the human beings
(with their dust and tobacco and perfumes and natural presences)
collected together in the heat of the great dining-room. A hum, a
murmur, the scuffling of feet toiling downstairs with some heavy and
cumbrous burden, the cries of the auctioneer, the coarse voices and
laughter, the tinkle of glass--the stretching hours seemed endless; and
every minute of them knelled the fate of some beloved and familiar
object. I was glad my father couldn't hear the bidding, and sorry that
perhaps he did not know that the most valuable of his curios--_how_
valuable I was to learn later--was safely hidden away in an upper room.
So passed my birthday--the twentieth--nor tapped me on the shoulder
with, "Ah, but, my dear, just you wait till I come again!"

None the less I thought a good deal about birthdays that afternoon, and
wondered how it was that we human beings can bear even to go on living
between two such mysteries as the beginning and the end of life. Where
was my mother now? Where was I but two-and-twenty years ago? What was
all this "Past," this "History," of which I had heard so much and knew
so little? Just a story? Better brains than mine have puzzled over these
questions, and perhaps if I had studied the philosophers I should know
the answers. In the evenings, wrapped up in a shawl, Pollie carried me
downstairs, and we took a sober whispering walk in the hush and perfumes
of the deserted garden. Loud rang the tongues of the water over the
stones. The moths were fluttering to their trysts, and from some dark
little coign the cricket strummed me a solo. Standing up there in the
starry night the great house looked down on me like an elder brother,
mute but compassionate.

By the second day after the conclusion of the Sale, the removers' vans
and carts should have gutted the rooms and be gone. It had, therefore,
been arranged that Pollie should as usual share my bedroom the last
night, and that next day we should set off on our journey. After
luncheon--the flavour of its sliced nectarine (or is it of one that came
later?) is on my tongue at this moment--all the rest of the house being
now hollow and vacant, Pollie put on her hat, thrust the large door key
into her pocket, and went off to visit her mother in the village and to
fetch a clean nightdress. She promised to return before dark. Her shoes
clattered down the stone stairs, the outer door boomed like a gun. I
spread out my hands in the air, and as if my four-poster could bear
witness, cried softly, "I am alone." Marvel of marvels, even as I sit
here to-day gazing at my inkpot, there in its original corner stands
that same old four-poster. Pollie is living down in the village with her
husband and her two babies; and once more: I am alone. Is there anything
in life so fascinating, so astonishing, as these queer, common little
repetitions? Perhaps on the Last Day--but I anticipate.

I read a little; wrote on the flyleaf of my diminutive Johnson,
"September 1st, Lyndsey for the last time.--M."; arranged my morrow's
clothes on a chair, then sat down in my balcony to do nothing, to be
nothing, merely to dream. But nature decreed otherwise. Soon after six
by my grandfather's clock--it struck the hour out of its case, as if out
of a sepulchre--a storm, which all the afternoon had been steadily
piling its leaden vapours into space, began to break. Chizzel Hill with
its prehistoric barrow was sunk to a green mound beneath those lowering
cloudy heights, pooling so placid and lovely a blue between them. The
very air seemed to thicken, and every tree stood up as if carved out of
metal. Of a sudden a great wind, with heavy plashing drops of rain,
swept roaring round the house, thick with dust and green leaves torn
from the dishevelled summer trees. There was a hush. The darkness
intensified, and then a vast sheet of lightning seemed to picture all
Kent in my eyes, and the air was full of water.

One glance into the obscure vacancy of the room behind me persuaded me
to remain where I was, though the rain drove me further and further into
the corner of my balcony. Cold, and a little scared by the glare and
din, yet not unhappy, I cowered close up against the glass, and, shading
my eyes as best I could from the flames of the lightning, I watched the
storm. How long I sat there I cannot say. The clamour lulled and
benumbed my brain into a kind of trance. My only company was a blackbird
which had flown or been blown into my refuge, and with draggled feathers
stared black-eyed out of the greenery at me. It was gathering towards
dark when the rain and lightning began to abate, and the sullen thunder
drew away into the distance, echoing hollowly along the furthest
horizons. At last, with teeth chattering, and stiff to my bones, I made
my way into the room again, and the benighted blackbird went squawking
to his nest.

Slipping off my gown and shoes, and huddling myself in the blankets and
counterpane of my bed, I sat there pondering what next was to be done.
It would soon be night; and Pollie seemed unlikely to appear until all
this turmoil was over. I was not only alone, but forsaken and infinitely
solitary, a mere sentient living speck in the quiet sea of light that
washed ever and again into the gloomiest recesses of the room. And that
familiar room itself seemed now almost as cold and inhospitable as a
neglected church. I could hear the dark, vacant house beneath echoing
and murmuring at every prolonged reverberation of thunder, and sighing
through all its crannies and keyholes. My bedhangings softly shook in
the air. Gone beyond recovery were my father and mother: and I now
realized how irrevocably. I was no longer a child; and the
responsibilities of life were now wholly on my own shoulders.

Yet I was not utterly forlorn. The great scene comforted me, and now and
then I prayed, almost without thinking and without words, just as a
little tune will keep recurring in the mind. And now, darkness being
spread over the garden, in the east the moon was rising. Moreover, a
curious sight met my eyes; for as the storm settled, heavy rain in
travelling showers was still occasionally skirting the house; and when,
between the heaped-up masses of cloud, the distant lightning gleamed a
faint vaporous lilac, I saw motionless in the air, and as if suspended
in their falling between earth and sky, the multitudinous glass-clear,
pear-shaped drops of water. At sight of these jewels thus crystalling
the dark air I was filled with such a rapture that I actually clapped my
hands. And presently the moon herself appeared, as if to be my
companion. Serene, remote, she glided at last from cover of an enormous
bluff of cloud into the faint-starred vault of space, seemed to pause
for an instant in contemplation of the dark scene, then went musing on
her way. Beneath her silver all seemed at peace, and it was then that I
fell asleep.

And while I slept, I dreamed a dream. My dreams often commit me to a
quiet and radiant life, as if of a reality less strange to me than that
of waking. Others are a mere uneasiness and folly. In the old days I
would sometimes tell my dreams to Mrs Ballard; and she would look them
up in a frowsy book she kept in the dresser drawer, a brown,
grease-stained volume entitled _Napoleon's Book of Fate_. Then she would
promise me a prince for a husband, or that I would be a great traveller
across the sea, or that I must beware of a red-haired woman, and
nonsense of that kind. But this particular dream remains more vividly in
my memory than any.

Well, I dreamed that I was walking in a strange garden--an orchard. And,
as it seemed, I was either of the common human size, or this was a world
wherein of human beings I was myself of the usual stature. The night was
still, like the darkest picture, yet there must have been light there,
since I could see as I walked. The grasses were coarse and deep, but
they did not encumber my feet, and presently I found myself standing
beneath a tree whose branches in their towering sombre heaviness seemed
to be made of iron. Dangling here and there amid the pendulous leaves
hung enormous fruits--pears stagnant and heavy as shaped lumps of lead
or of stone. Why the sight of these fruits in the obscure luminosity of
the air around them laid such a spell upon me, I cannot say. I stood
there in the dew-cold grass, gazing up and up into those monstrous
branches as if enchanted, and then of a sudden the ground under my feet
seemed faintly to tremble as if at a muffled blow. One of the fruits in
my dream, now come to ripeness, had fallen stone-like from above. Then
again--thud! Realization of the dreadful danger in which I stood swept
over me. I turned to escape, and awoke, shivering and in a suffocating
heat, to discover in the moonlight that now flooded my room where in
actuality I was.

Yet still, as it seemed, the dying rumour of the sound persisted, and
surely, I thought, it must be poor, careless Pollie, her key forgotten,
come back in the darkness after the storm, and hammering with the great
knocker on the door below. Hardly a minute had passed indeed before the
whole house resounded again with her thumping. One seldom finds Courage
keeping tryst on the outskirts of sleep, and there was a vehemence in
the knocking as if Pollie was in an extremity of fear at finding herself
under the vacant house alone in the night. The thought of going to her
rescue set my teeth chattering. I threw back the bedclothes and gazed at
the moon, and the longer I sat there the more clearly I realized that I
must somehow descend the stairs, convey to her that I was safe, and, if
possible, let her in.

Three steep stone flights separated us, stairs which I had very rarely
ascended or descended except in her arms. I thrust my foot out; all was
still; I must go at once. But what of light? The moon was on this side
of the house. It might be pitch dark on the lower landings and in the
hall. On the stool by her bedside stood Pollie's copper candlestick,
with an inch or two of candle in it and a box of matches. It was a
thick-set tallow candle and none too convenient for me to grasp. With
this alight in my hand, the stick being too cumbersome, I set out on my
errand. The air was cool; the moon shone lustily. Just waked from sleep
my mind was curiously exalted. I sallied out into the empty corridor. A
pace or two beyond the threshold my heart seemed to swell up in my body,
for it seemed that at the head of the staircase lay stretched the still
form of my mother as I had found her in the cold midnight hours long
ago. It was but a play of light, a trick of fantasy. I recovered my
breath and went on.

To leap from stair to stair was far too formidable a means of
progression. I should certainly have dashed out my brains. So I must
sit, and jump sitting, manipulating my candle as best I could. In this
sidling, undignified fashion, my eyes fixed only on the stair beneath
me, I mastered the first flight, and paused to rest. What a medley of
furtive sounds ascended to my ear from the desolate rooms below: the
heavy plash of raindrop from the eaves, scurry and squeak of mouse,
rustle of straw, a stirring--light as the settling of dust, crack of
timber, an infinitely faint whisper; and from without, the whistle of
bat, the stony murmur of the garden stream, the hunting screech of some
predatory night-fowl over the soaked and tranquil harvest fields. And
who, Who?--that shape?... I turned sharply, and the melted tallow of the
guttering candle welled over and smartly burned the hand that held it.
The pain gave me confidence. But better than that, a voice from below
suddenly broke out, not Pollie's but Adam Waggett's, hollaing in the
porch. Adam--the wren-slaughterer--prove me a coward? No, indeed. All
misgiving gone, I girded my dressing-gown tighter around me, and
continued the descent.

It was a jolting and arduous business, and as I paused on the next
landing, I now looked into the moon-bathed vacancy of my father's
bedroom. Dismantled, littered with paper and the fragments of wood and
glass of a picture my mother had given him, a great hole in the plaster,
a broken chair straddling in the midst--a hideous spectacle it was. An
immense moth with greenly glowing eyes, lured out of its roosting place,
came fluttering round my candle, fanning my cheek with its plumy wings.
I shaded the flame and smiled up at the creature which, not being of a
kind that is bent on self-slaughter, presently wafted away. The lower I
descended the filthier grew my journey. My stub of candle was fast
wasting; and what use should I be to Pollie's messenger? When indeed in
the muck and refuse left by the Sale, I reached the door, it was too
late. He was now beating with his fists at the rear of the house; and I
must needs climb down the last flight of the back wooden staircase used
by the servants. When at last the great stagnant kitchen came into
view, it was my whole inward self that cried out in me. Its stone flags
were swarming with cockroaches.

These shelled, nocturnal, sour-smelling creatures are among the few
insects that fill me with horror. By comparison the devil's coachman may
be worse-tempered, but he is a gentleman. The very thought of one of
them rearing itself against my slippered foot filled me with disgust;
and the males were winged. They went scurrying away into hiding, infants
seemingly to their mothers, whisper, whisper--I felt sick at the sight.
There came a noise at the window. Peering from round my candle flame I
perceived Adam's dusky face, with its long nose, staring in at me
through the glass. At sight of the plight I was in, he burst into a
prolonged guffaw of laughter. This enraged me beyond measure. I stamped
my foot, and at last he sobered down enough to yell through the glass
that Pollie's mother had sent him to see that I was safe and had
forgotten to give him the house-key. Pollie herself would be with me
next morning.

I waved my candle at him in token that I understood. At this the melted
grease once more trickled over and ran scalding up my arm. The candle
fell to the floor, went out; the pale moonshine spread through the air.
I could see Adam's conical head outlined against the soft light of the
sky; though he could no longer see me. Horror of the cockroaches
returned on me. Instantly I turned tail, leaving the lump of tallow for
their spoil.

How, in that dark, high house, I managed to remount those stairs, I
cannot conceive. Youth and persistency, I suppose. I doubt if I could do
it now. Utterly exhausted and bedraggled I regained my bedroom at last
without further misadventure. I sponged the smoke and grime from face
and hands in my washbowl, hung my dressing-gown where the morning air
might refresh it, and was soon in a dead sleep, from which I think even
the Angel Gabriel would have failed to arouse me.




Chapter Seven


When I awoke, the morning sky was gay with sunshine, there was a lisping
and gurgling of starlings on the roof, the roar of the little river in
flood after the rains shook the air at my window, and there sat Pollie,
in her outdoor clothes, the rest of the packing done and she awaiting
breakfast. Unstirringly from my pillow I scrutinized the plump,
red-cheeked face with its pale-blue prominent eyes dreaming out of the
window; and sorrow welled up in me at the thought of the past and of how
near drew our separation. She heard me move, and kneeling and stooping
low over my bed, with her work-roughened finger she stroked the hand
that lay on my coverlet. A pretty sight I must have looked--after my
night's experiences. We whispered a little together. She was now a
sedater young woman, but still my Pollie of the apples and novelettes.
And whether or not it is because early custom is second nature, she is
still the only person whom my skin does not a little creep against when
necessity calls for a beast of burden.

Her desertion of me the night before had been caused by the untimely
death of one of her father's three Alderney cows--a mild, horned
creature, which I had myself often seen in the meadows cropping among
the buttercups, and whose rich-breathed nose I had once had the courage
to ask to stroke with my hand. This ill-fated beast at first threat of
the storm, had taken shelter with her companions under an oak. Scarcely
had the lightnings begun to play when she was struck down by a
"thunderbolt." It was a tragedy after Pollie's heart. She had (she said)
fainted dead off at news of it--and we bemoaned the event in concert. In
return I told her my dream of the garden. Nothing would then content her
but she must fetch from under her mattress _Napoleon's Book of Fate_, a
legacy from Mrs Ballard.

"But, Pollie," I demurred; "a dream is only a dream."

"Honest, miss," she replied, thumbing over the pages, "there's some of
'em means what happens and comes true, and they'll tell secrets too if
they be searched about. More'n a month before Mrs Ballard fell out with
master she dreamed that one of the speckled hens had laid an egg in the
kitchen dresser. There it was clucking among the crockery. And to dream
of eggs, the book says, is to be certain sure of getting the place you
are after, and which she wrote off to a friend in London and is there
now!"

What more was there to say? So presently Pollie succeeded in turning to
"Pears" in the grease-grimed book, and spelled out slowly:--


     "PEARS.--To dream of pears is in-di-ca-tive of great wealth (which
     means riches, miss); and that you will rise to a much higher spear
     than the one you at present occupy. To a woman they denote that she
     will marry a person far above her in rank (lords and suchlike,
     miss, if you please), and that she will live in great state. To
     persons in trade they denote success and future prosperity and
     eleviation. They also indi- indicate constancy in love and
     happiness in the marriage state."


Her red cheeks grew redder with this exertion of scholarship, and I
burst out laughing. "Ah, miss," she cried in confusion, "laugh you may,
and that's what Sarah said to the Angel. But mark my words if something
of it don't hap out like what the book says."

"Then, Pollie," said I, "there's nothing for it but to open a butcher's
shop. For live in great state I can't and won't, not if the Prince of
Wales himself was to ask me in marriage."

"Lor, miss," retorted Pollie in shocked accents, "and him a married man
with grown-up sons and all." But she forgave me my mockery. As for the
Dream Book, doubtless young Bonaparte must often have dreamed of Pears
in Corsica; and no less indubitably have I lived in "great
state"--though without much eleviation.

But the day was hasting on. My toilet must be made, and the preparations
for our journey completed. Now that the dawn of my new fortunes was
risen, expectancy filled my mind, and the rain-freshened skies and
leaves of the morning renewed my spirits. Our train--the first in my
experience--was timed to leave our country railway station at 3.3 p.m.
By one o'clock, all the personal luggage that I was to take with me had
been sewn up in a square of canvas, and corded. The rest of my
belongings--my four-poster, etc.--were to be stowed in a large
packing-case and sent after me. First impressions endure. No great store
of sagacity was needed to tell me that. So I had chosen my clothes
carefully, determined to show my landlady that I meant to have my own
way and not be trifled with. My dear Mrs Bowater!--she would be amused
to hear that.

Pollie bustled downstairs. I stood in the midst of the sunlit,
dismantled room, light and shadow at play upon ceiling and walls, the
sun-pierced air a silvery haze of dust. A host of memories and thoughts,
like a procession in a dream, traversed my mind. A strangeness, too--as
if even this novel experience of farewell was a vague recollection
beyond defined recall. Pollie returned with the new hat in the paper bag
in which she had brought it from home: and I was her looking-glass when
she had put it on. Then from top to basement she carried me through
every room in the house, and there on the kitchen floor, mute witness of
the past, lay the beetle-gnawn remnant of my candle-stub. We wandered
through the garden, glinting green in the cool flocking sunbeams after
the rain; and already vaunting its escape from Man. Pollie was returning
to Lyndsey--I not! My heart was too full to let me linger by the water.
I gazed at the stones and the wild flowers in a sorrowful hunger of
farewell. Trifles, soon to be dying, how lovely they were. The thought
of it swallowed me up. What was the future but an emptiness? Would that
I might vanish away and be but a portion of the sweetness of the
morning. Even Pollie's imperturbable face wore the appearance of
make-believe; for an instant I surprised the whole image of me reflected
in her round blue eye.

The Waggetts' wagonette was at the door, but not--and I was
thankful--not _my_ Adam, but the old Adam, his father. My luggage was
pushed under the seat. I was set up, to be screened as far as possible
from the wind, beside Pollie and behind Mr Waggett--no stranger to me
with his neat, dark whiskers, for in the old days, at dinner parties, he
would wait at table. I see him now--as gentlemanlike as a Devil's
Coachhorse--entering the kitchen with his little black bag. Only once I
swiftly turned my head over my shoulder toward the house. Then we were
outside the iron gates, and bumping along through the puddles between
the bowery hedges towards the station.

I thought of my father and mother lying side by side, beyond the sullen
drift of nettles, under the churchyard wall. Miss Fenne had taken me
there many weeks before in her faded barouche with the gaunt white mare.
Not a word had I breathed to her of my anguish at sight of the
churchyard. The whole afternoon was a nightmare. She regaled the journey
with sentiments on death and the grave. Throughout it, I was in danger
of slipping out of her sight; for the buttons on the sage-green leather
seat were not only a discomfort but had failed to aid me to sit upright;
and nothing would have induced me to catch at the trimmings of her
dolman to save myself from actually falling off into the pit of her
carriage. There sat her ancient coachman; clutter-clutter plodded the
hoofs; what a monstrous, monstrous world--and she cackling on and
on--like a hen over its egg.

But now the novelty of this present experience, the flowery cottages, Mr
Waggett's square, sorrel nag, the ballooning northwesterly clouds, the
aromatic rusty hedgerows, the rooks in the cornfields--all these sights
and sounds called joy into my mind, and far too soon the bright-painted
railway station at the hill-bottom hove into sight, and our drive was
over. I was lifted down into Pollie's arms again. Then followed a
foolish chaffering over the tickets, which Mr Waggett had volunteered to
purchase for us at the rounded window. The looming face beyond had
caught sight of me, and the last words I heard bawled through for any to
hear were: "Lor, Mr Waggett, I'd make it a _quarter_ for 'ee if it was
within regulations. But 'tain't so, the young lady's full natural size
in the eye of the law, and I couldn't give in to 'ee not even if 'twas a
honeymooning you was after." No doubt it was wholesome to learn as
quickly as possible how easy a butt I was to be for the jests of the
good-humoured. On that occasion it was a bitter pill. I felt even Pollie
choke down a laugh into her bosom. My cheek whitened, but I said
nothing.

An enormous din at the moment shattered around me, ten thousand times
harsher to my nerves than any mere witticism could be. My first
"steam-monster" was entering the station. All but stunned by its
clatter, I barely had the presence of mind to thank Mr Waggett for the
little straw basket of three greengages, and the nosegay of cherry-pie
which he had thrust into my arms. My canvas-wrapped package was pushed
in under the seat, the door was slammed to, the guard waved his green
flag, Mr Waggett touched his hat: and our journey was begun.

Fortunately Pollie and I found ourselves in an empty carriage. The
scream of the whistle, the grinding jar of the wheels, the oppressive
odour of Mr Waggett's bouquet--I leaned back on her to recover my wits.
But the cool air blowing in on my face and a far-away sniff from a
little glass bottle with which her mother had fortified her for the
journey, quickly revived me, and I was free to enjoy the novelties of
steam-travel. My eyes dizzied at the wide revolving scene that was now
spread out beneath the feathery vapours. How strange it was to see the
green country world--meadow and stream and wooded hill--thus wheel
softly by. If Pollie and I could have shared it alone, it would have
been among my pleasantest memories.

But at the next stopping places other passengers climbed into the
carriage; and five complete strangers soon shared the grained wood box
in which we were enclosed. There was a lady in black, with her hair
smoothed up under her bonnet, and a long pale nose; and up against her
sat her little boy, a fine fair, staring child of about five years of
age. A black-clothed, fat little man with a rusty leather bag, over the
lock of which he kept clasped his finger and thumb, quietly seated
himself. He cast but one dark glance about him and immediately shut his
eyes. In the corner was an older man with a beard under his chin,
gaiters, and a hard, wide-brimmed hat. Besides these, there was a fat
countrywoman on the same side as Pollie and I, whom I could hear
breathing and could not see, and a dried-up, bird-eyed woman opposite in
a check shawl, with heavy metal ear-rings dangling at her ears. She sat
staring blankly and bleakly at things close as if they were at a
distance.

My spirit drank in this company. So rapt was I that I might have been a
stock of wood. Gathered together in this small space they had the
appearance of animals, and, if they had not been human, what very
alarming ones. As long as I merely sat and watched their habits I
remained unnoticed. But the afternoon sun streamed hot on roof and
windows: and the confined air was soon so dense with a variety of
odours, that once more my brain dizzied, and I must clutch at Pollie's
arm for support. At this movement the little boy, who had more than once
furtively glanced at me, crouched wriggling back against his mother,
and, edging his face aside, piped up into her ear, "Mamma, is that
alive?"

The train now stood motionless, a fine array of hollyhocks and
sunflowers flared beyond the window, and his voice rang out shrill as a
bird in the quiet of afternoon. Tiny points of heat broke out all over
me, as one by one my fellow passengers turned their astonished faces in
my direction. Even the man with the leather bag heard the question. The
small, bead-brown eyes wheeled from under their white lids and fixed me
with their stare.

"Hush, my dear," said the lady, no less intent but less open in her
survey; "hush, look at the pretty cows!"

"But she _is_, mamma. It moved. I saw that move," he asseverated,
looking along cornerwise at me out of his uptilted face.

Those blue eyes! a mingling of delight, horror, incredulity, even greed
swam in their shallow deeps. I stood leaning close to Pollie's bosom,
breathless and helpless, a fascinating object, no doubt. Never before
had I been transfixed like this in one congregated stare. I felt myself
gasp like a fish. It was the old farmer in the corner who at last came
to my rescue. "Alive! _I_ warrant. Eh, ma'am?" he appealed to poor
Pollie. "And an uncommon neat-fashioned young lady, too. Off to Whipham
Fair, I'll be bound."

The bag-man turned with a creeping grin on his tallowy features and
muttered some inaudible jest out of the corner of his mouth to the
gipsy. She eyed him fiercely, drawing her lips from her bright teeth in
a grimace more of contempt than laughter. Once more the engine hooted
and we glided on our way.

"I _want_ that, mamma," whispered the child. "I _want_ that dear little
lady. Give that teeny tiny lady a biscuit."

At this new sally universal merriment filled the carriage. We were
jogging along in fine style. This, then, was Miss Fenne's "network." A
helpless misery and bitterness swept through me, the heavy air swirled;
and then--whence, from whom, I know not--self-possession returned to me.
Why, I had _chosen_ my fate: I must hold my own.

My young admirer, much against his mother's inclination, had managed to
fetch out a biscuit from her reticule--a star-shaped thing, graced with
a cone of rose-tinted sugar. Still crouching back like a chick under her
wing, he stretched his bribe out at arm's length towards me, in a pink,
sweat-sparked hand. All this while Pollie had sat like a lump beside me,
clutching her basket, a vacant, flushed smile on her round face. I drew
myself up, and supporting myself by her wicker basket, advanced with all
the dignity at my command to the peak of her knees, and, stretching out
my hand in return, accepted the gift. I even managed to make him an
indulgent little bow, feigned a nibble at the lump of food, then planted
it on the dusty ledge beneath the carriage window.

A peculiar silence followed. With a long sigh the child hid his face in
his mother's sleeve. She drew him closer and smiled carefully into
nothingness. "There," she murmured, "now mother's treasure must sit
still and be a good boy. I can't think why papa didn't
take--second-class tickets."

"But nor did that kind little lady's papa," returned the child stoutly.

The kindly old farmer continued to gloat on me, gnarled hands on knees.
But I could not bear it. I quietly surveyed him until he was compelled
to rub his face with his fingers, and so cover its retreat to his own
window. The gipsy woman kept her ferocious, birdlike stare on me, with
an occasional stealthy glance at Pollie. The bag-man's lids closed down.
For the rest of the journey--though passengers came and went--I kept
well back, and was left in peace. It was my first real taste of the
world's curiosity, mockery, aversion, and flattery. One practical lesson
it taught me. From that day forward I never set out on any such journey
unless thickly veiled. For then, though the inquisitive may see me, they
cannot tell whether or not I see them, or what my feelings may be. It is
a real comfort; though, from what I have read, it appears to be the
condition rather of a ghost than of a normal young lady.

But now the sun had begun to descend and the rays of evening to stain
the fields. We loitered on from station to station. To my relief Pollie
had at last munched her way through the pasties and sweetmeats stowed in
her basket. My nosegay of cherry-pie was fainting for want of water. In
heavy sleep the bag-man and gipsy sat woodenly nodding and jerking side
by side. The lady had delicately composed her face and shut her eyes.
The little boy slumbered serenely with his small red mouth wide open.
Languid and heavy, I dared not relax my vigilance. But in the desolation
that gathered over me I almost forgot my human company, and returned to
the empty house which seemingly I had left for ever--the shadows of yet
another nightfall already lengthening over its flowers and sward.

Could I not hear the silken rustle of the evening primrose unfolding her
petals? Soon the cool dews would be falling on the stones where I was
wont to sit in reverie beside the flowing water. It seemed indeed that
my self had slipped from my body, and hovered entranced amid the
thousand jargonings of its tangled lullaby. Was there, in truth, a
wraith in me that could so steal out; and were the invisible inhabitants
in their fortresses beside my stream conscious of its presence among
them, and as happy in my spectral company as I in theirs?

I floated up out of these ruminations to find that my young pasha had
softly awakened and was gazing at me in utter incredulity from
sleep-gilded eyes. We exchanged a still, protracted, dwelling smile, and
for the only time in my life I actually _saw_ a fellow-creature fall in
love!

"Oh, but mamma, mamma, I do _beseech_ you," he called up at her from the
platform where he was taking his last look at me through the dingy
oblong window, "please, please, I want her for mine; I want her for
mine!"

I held up his biscuit in my hand, laughing and nodding. The whistle
knelled, our narrow box drew slowly out of the station. As if
heartbroken, he took his last look at me, petulantly flinging aside his
mother's hand. He had lost me for ever, and Pollie and I were alone
again.




Beechwood




Chapter Eight


Still the slow train bumped on, loath to drag itself away from the happy
harvest fields. Darkness was near when we ourselves alighted at our
destination, mounted into a four-wheeled cab, and once more were in
motion in the rain-laid dust. On and on rolled Pollie and I and our
luggage together, in such ease and concealment after the hard wooden
seats and garish light that our journey began to seem--as indeed I
wished for the moment it might prove--interminable. One after another
the high street lamps approached, flung their radiance into our musty
velvet cabin, and went gliding by. Ever and again the luminous square of
a window beyond the outspread branches of a tree would float on. Then
suddenly our narrow solitude was invaded by the bright continuous flare
flung into it from a row of shops.

Never before had I been out after nightfall. I gazed enthralled at the
splendours of fruit and cakes, silks and sweetmeats packed high behind
the glass fronts. Wasn't I myself the heiress of L110 a year? Indeed I
was drinking in Romance, and never traveller surveyed golden Moscow or
the steeps of Tibet with keener relish than I the liquid amber, ruby,
and emerald that summoned its customers to a wayside chemist's shop.
Twenty--what a child I was! I smile now at these recollections with an
indulgence not unmixed with envy. It is Moscow survives, not the artless
traveller.

After climbing a long hill--the wayside houses steadily thinning out as
we ascended--the cab came to a standstill. The immense, shapeless old
man who had so miraculously found our way for us, and who on this mild
August evening was muffled up to his eyes in a thick ulster, climbed
down backwards from his box and opened the door. At the same moment, as
if by clockwork, opened another door--that of the last house on the
hill. I was peering out of the cab, then, at my home; and framed in
that lighted oblong stood Mrs Bowater. All utterly different from what I
had foreseen: this much smaller house, this much taller landlady,
and--dear me, how fondly I had trusted that she would not for the first
time set eyes on her lodger being _carried_ into her house. I had in
fancy pictured myself bowing a composed and impressive greeting to her
from her own hearthrug. But it was not to be.

Pollie lifted me out, settled me on her arm, and my feet did not touch
_terra firma_ again until she had ascended the five stone steps and we
were within the passage.

"Lor, miss; then here we are," she sighed breathlessly, then returned to
the cabman to pay him his fare. Even dwarfed a little perhaps by my
mourning, there I stood, breathed upon by the warm air of the house, in
the midst of a prickly doormat, on the edge of the shiny patterned
oilcloth that glossed away into the obscurity from under the gaslight in
front of me; and there stood my future landlady. For the first time,
with head thrown back, I scanned a countenance that was soon to become
so familiar and so endeared. Mrs Bowater's was a stiff and angular
figure. She, too, was in black, with a long, springside boot. The bony
hands hung down in their peculiar fashion from her elbows. A large cameo
brooch adorned the flat chest. A scanty velvet patch of cap failed to
conceal the thin hair sleekly parted in the middle over the high narrow
temples. The long dark face with its black, set eyes, was almost without
expression, except that of a placid severity. She gazed down at me, as I
up at her, steadily, silently.

"So this is the young lady," she mused at last, as if addressing a
hidden and distant listener. "I hope you are not over-fatigued by your
journey, miss. Please to step in."


To my ear, Mrs Bowater's was what I should describe as a low, roaring
voice, like falling water out of a black cloven rock in a hill-side; but
what a balm was its sound in my ear, and how solacing this dignified
address to jaded nerves still smarting a little after my victory on the
London, Chatham, and Dover Railway. Making my way around a grandfather's
clock that ticked hollowly beside the door, I followed her into a room
on the left of the passage, from either wall of which a pair of
enormous antlers threatened each other under the discoloured ceiling.
For a moment the glare within and the vista of furniture legs confused
my eyes. But Mrs Bowater came to my rescue.

"Food was never mentioned," she remarked reflectively, "being as I see
nothing to be considered except as food so-called. But you will find
everything clean and comfortable; and I am sure, miss, what with your
sad bereavements and all, as I have heard from Mr Pellew, I hope it will
be a home to you. There being nothing else as I suppose that we may
expect."

My mind ran about in a hasty attempt to explore these sentiments. They
soothed away many misgivings, though it was clear that Mrs Bowater's
lodger was even less in dimensions than Mrs Bowater had supposed.
_Clean_: after so many months of Mrs Sheppey's habits, it was this word
that sang in my head. Wood, glass, metal flattered the light of gas and
coal, and for the first time I heard my own voice float up into my new
"apartment": "It looks _very_ comfortable, thank you, Mrs Bowater; and I
am quite sure I shall be happy in my new abode." There was nothing
intentionally affected in this formal little speech.

"Which being so," replied Mrs Bowater, "there seems to be trouble with
the cabman, and the day's drawing in, perhaps you will take a seat by
the fire."

A stool nicely to my height stood by the steel fender, the flames played
in the chimney; and for a moment I was left alone. "Thank God," said I,
and took off my hat, and pushed back my hair.... Alone. Only for a
moment, though. Its mistress gone, as fine a black cat as ever I have
seen appeared in the doorway and stood, green-eyed, regarding me. To
judge from its countenance, this must have been a remarkable experience.

I cried seductively, "Puss."

But with a blink of one eye and a shake of its forepaw, as if
inadvertently it had trodden in water, it turned itself about again and
disappeared. In spite of all my cajoleries, Henry and I were never to be
friends.

Whatever Pollie's trouble with the cabman may have been, Mrs Bowater
made short work of it. Pollie was shown to the room in which she was to
sleep that night. I took off my bodice and bathed face, hands, and arms
to the elbow in the shallow bowl Mrs Bowater had provided for me. And
soon, wonderfully refreshed and talkative, Pollie and I were seated over
the last meal we were to share together for many a long day.

There were snippets of bread and butter for me, a little omelette, two
sizes too large, a sugared cherry or two sprinkled with "hundreds and
thousands," and a gay little bumper of milk gilded with the enwreathed
letters, "A Present from Dover." Alack-a-day for that omelette! I must
have kept a whole family of bantams steadily engaged for weeks together.
But I was often at my wits' end to dispose of their produce. Fortunately
Mrs Bowater kept merry fires burning in the evening--"Ladies of some
sizes can't warm the air as much as most," as she put it. So at some
little risk to myself among the steel fire-irons, the boiled became the
roast. At last I made a clean breast of my horror of eggs, and since by
that time my landlady and I were the best of friends, no harm came of
it. She merely bestowed on me a grim smile of unadulterated amusement,
and the bantams patronized some less fastidious stomach.

My landlady was a heavy thinker, and not a copious--though a
leisurely--talker. Minutes would pass, while with dish or duster in hand
she pondered a speech; then perhaps her long thin lips would only shut a
little tighter, or a slow, convulsive rub of her lean forefinger along
the side of her nose would indicate the upshot. But I soon learned to
interpret these mute signs. She was a woman who disapproved of most
things, for excellent, if nebulous, reasons; and her silences were due
not to the fact that she had nothing to say, but too much.

Pollie and I talked long and earnestly that first evening at Beechwood.
She promised to write to me, to send me all the gossip of the village,
and to come and see me when she could. The next morning, after a
sorrowful breakfast, we parted. Standing on the table in the parlour
window, with eyes a little wilder than usual, I watched her pass out of
sight. A last wave of her handkerchief, and the plump-cheeked,
fair-skinned face was gone. The strangeness and solitude of my situation
flooded over me.

For a few days, strive as she might, Mrs Bowater's lodger moped. It was
not merely that she had become more helpless, but of far less
importance. This may, in part, be accounted for by the fact that, having
been accustomed at Lyndsey to live at the top of a high house and to
look down on the world, when I found myself foot to foot with it, so to
speak, on Beechwood Hill, it alarmingly intensified the _sense_ of my
small stature. Use and habit however. The relative merits of myself and
of the passing scene gradually readjusted themselves with a proper
respect for the former. Soon, too, as if from heaven, the packing-case
containing my furniture arrived. Mrs Bowater shared a whole morning over
its unpacking, ever and again standing in engrossed consideration of
some of my minute treasures, and, quite unaware of it, heaving a great
sigh. But how to arrange them there in a room already over-occupied?




Chapter Nine


A carpenter of the name of Bates was called in, so distant a relative of
Mrs Bowater's apparently that she never by nod, word, or look
acknowledged the bond. Mr Bates held my landlady in almost speechless
respect. "A woman in a thousand," he repeatedly assured me, when we were
grown a little accustomed to one another; "a woman in _ten_ thousand.
And if things hadn't been what they was, you may understand, they might
have turned out different. Ah, miss, there's one looking down on us
could tell a tale." I looked up past his oblong head at the ceiling, but
only a few flies were angling round the chandelier.

Mrs Bowater's compliments were less indirect. "That _Bates_," she would
say, surveying his day's handiwork after he was gone, "is all thumbs."

He was certainly rather snail-like in his movements, and spent most of
his time slowly rubbing his hands on the stiff apron that encased him.
But I minded his thumbs far less than his gluepot.

Many years have passed, yet at the very whisper of his name, that
inexpressible odour clouds up into my nose. It now occurs to me for the
first time that he never sent in his bill. Either his memory failed him,
or he carpentered for love. Level with the wide table in the window
recess, strewn over with my small Persian mats, whereon I sat, sewed,
read, and took my meals, Mr Bates constructed a broad shelf, curtained
off on three sides from the rest of the room. On this wooden stage stood
my four-poster, wardrobe, and other belongings. It was my bedchamber.
From table to floor he made a staircase, so that I could easily descend
and roam the room at large. The latter would have been more commodious
if I could have persuaded Mrs Bowater to empty it a little. If I had
_kept on_ looking at the things in it I am sure I should have gone mad.
Even tact was unavailing. If only there had been the merest tinge of a
Cromwell in my character, the baubles that would have been removed!

There were two simpering plaster figures--a Shepherd and
Shepherdess--nearly half my height on the chimney-piece, whom I
particularly detested; also an enlarged photograph in a discoloured
frame on the wall--that of a thick-necked, formidable man, with a bush
of whisker on either cheek, and a high, quarrelsome stare. He made me
feel intensely self-conscious. It was like a wolf looking all day into a
sheep-fold. So when I had my meals, I invariably turned my back on his
portrait.

I went early to bed. But now that the autumnal dusks were shortening, an
hour or two of artificial light was necessary. The flare of the gas
dazzled and stupefied me, and gave me a kind of hunted feeling; so Mrs
Bowater procured for me a couple of fine little glass candlesticks. In
bed I sometimes burned a wax-light in a saucer, a companionable thing
for night-thoughts in a strange place. Often enough I sat through the
evening with no other illumination than that of the smouldering coals,
so that I could see out of the window. It was an endless source of
amusement to withdraw the muslin curtains, gaze out over the darkened
fields beyond the roadway, and let my day-dreams wander at will.

At nine o'clock Mrs Bowater would bring me my supper--some fragments of
rusk, or of bread, and milk. My food was her constant anxiety. The
difficulty, as she explained, was to supply me with _little_ enough to
eat--at least of cooked food: "It dries up in the winking of an eye." So
her cat, Henry, fared more sumptuously than ever, though the jealous
creature continued to reject all my advances, and as far as possible
ignored my existence. "Simple victuals, by all means, miss," Mrs Bowater
would admit. "But if it don't enjoy, the inside languishes; and you are
not yet of an age that can fall back on skin and bone."

The question of food presently introduced that of money. She insisted on
reducing her charges to twenty shillings a week. "There's the lodging,
and there's the board, the last being as you might say all but
unmentionable; and honesty the best policy though I have never tried the
reverse." So, in spite of all my protestations, it was agreed. And I
thus found myself mistress of a round fifty-eight pounds a year over
and above what I paid to Mrs Bowater. Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris
were punctual as quarter-day: and so was I. I "_at once_" paid over to
my landlady L13 and whatever other sum was needful. The "charity" my
godmother had recommended began, and, alas, remained at home. I stowed
the rest under lock and key in one of my grandfather's boxes which I
kept under my bed. This was an imprudent habit, perhaps. Mrs Bowater
advocated the Penny Bank. But the thought of my money being so handy and
_palpable_ reassured me. I would count it over in my mind, as if it were
a means to salvation; and became, in consequence, near and parsimonious.

Occasionally when she had "business" to transact, Mrs Bowater would be
off to London. There she would purchase for me any little trifle
required for the replenishment of my wardrobe. Needing so little, I
could afford the finest materials; my sovereign was worth at least sixty
shillings. Rather than "fine," Mrs Bowater preferred things "good"; and
for this "goodness," I must confess, she sometimes made rather alarming
sacrifices of appearance. Still, I was already possessed of a
serviceable stock of clothes, and by aid of one of my dear mother's last
presents to me, a shiny Swiss miniature workbox with an inlaid picture
of the Lake of Geneva on the lid, I soon became a passable needlewoman.

I love bright, pure colours, and, my sweeping and dusting and bedmaking
over, and my external mourning for my father at an end, a remarkably
festive figure would confront me in my cheval glass of an afternoon. The
hours I spent in dressing my hair and matching this bit of colour with
that. I would talk to myself in the glass, too, for company's sake, and
make believe I was a dozen different characters. I was young. I pined
for life and companionship, and having only my own--for Mrs Bowater was
rather a faithful feature of the landscape than a fellow being--I made
as much, and as many, of myself as possible.

Another question that deeply engaged my landlady was my health. She
mistrusted open windows, but strongly recommended "air." What insidious
maladies she spied around me! Indeed that September was unusually hot. I
sat on my table in the window like a cricket in an oven, sorely missing
my high open balcony, the garden, and the stream. Once and again Mrs
Bowater would take me for a little walk after sunset. Discretion to her
was much the better part of valour; nor had I quite recovered from my
experiences in the train. But such walks--though solitary enough at that
hour of the day--were straggly and irksome. Pollie's arm had been a kind
of second nature to me; but Mrs Bowater, I think, had almost as
fastidious a disinclination to carrying me as I have to being carried. I
languished for liberty. Being a light sleeper, I would often awake at
daybreak and the first call of the birds. Then the hill--which led to
Tyddlesdon End and Love (or Loose) Lane--was deserted. Thought of the
beyond haunted me like a passion. At a convenient moment I intimated to
Mrs Bowater how secure was the street at this early hour, how fresh the
meadows, and how thirsty for independent outings her lodger. "Besides,
Mrs Bowater, I am not a child, and who could see me?"

After anxious and arduous discussion, Mr Bates was once more consulted.
He wrapped himself in a veritable blanket of reflection, and all but
became unconscious before he proposed a most ingenious device. With Mrs
Bowater's consent, she being her own landlady and amused at the idea, he
cut out of one of the lower panels of her parlour door a round-headed
opening just of an easy size to suit me. In this aperture he hung a
delicious little door that precisely fitted it. So also with the door
into the street--to which he added a Brahmah lock. By cementing a small
square stone into the corner of each of the steps down from the porch,
he eased _that_ little difficulty. May Heaven bless Mr Bates! With his
key round my neck, stoop once, stoop twice, a scamper down his steps,
and I was free--as completely mistress of my goings-out and of my
comings-in as every self-respecting person should be.

"That's what my father would have called a good job, Mr Bates," said I
cordially.

He looked yearningly at me, as if about to impart a profound secret; but
thought better of it. "Well, miss, what I say is, a job's a _job_; and
if it _is_ a job, it's a job that should be made a job _of_."

As I dot the i's and cross the t's of this manuscript, I often think--a
little ruefully--of Mr Bates.

As soon as daybreak was piercing into my region of the sky, and before
Mrs Bowater or the rest of the world was stirring, I would rise, make my
candlelit toilet, and hasten out into the forsaken sweet of the morning.
If it broke wet or windy, I could turn over and go to sleep again. A few
hundred yards up the hill, the road turned off, as I have said, towards
Tyddlesdon End and Loose Lane--very stony and steep. On the left, and
before the fork, a wicket gate led into the woods and the park of empty
"Wanderslore." To the verge of these deserted woods made a comfortable
walk for me.

If, as might happen, any other wayfarer was early abroad, I could
conceal myself in the tussocks of grass and bushes that bordered the
path. In my thick veil, with my stout green parasol and inconspicuous
shawl, I made a queer and surprising figure no doubt. Indeed, from what
I have heard, the ill fame of Wanderslore acquired a still more piquant
flavour in the town by reports that elf-folk had been descried on its
outskirts. But if I sometimes skipped and capered in these early
outings, it was for exercise as well as suppressed high spirits. To be
prepared, too, for the want of such facilities in the future, I had the
foresight to accustom myself to Mrs Bowater's steep steps as well as to
my cemented-in "Bateses," as I called them. My only difficulty was to
decide whether to practice on them when I was fresh at the outset of my
walk, or fatigued at the end of it. Naturally people grow "peculiar"
when much alone: self plays with self, and the mimicry fades.

These little expeditions, of course, had their spice of danger, and it
made them the more agreeable. A strange dog might give me a fright.
There was an old vixen which once or twice exchanged glances with me at
a distance. But with my parasol I was a match for most of the creatures
which humanity has left unslaughtered. My sudden appearance might
startle or perplex them. But if few were curious, fewer far were
unfriendly. Boys I feared most. A hulking booby once stoned me through
the grass, but fortunately he was both a coward and a poor marksman.
Until winter came, I doubt if a single sunshine morning was wasted. Many
a rainy one, too, found me splashing along, though then I must be a
careful walker to avoid a sousing.

The birds renewed their autumn song, the last flowers were blossoming.
Concealed by scattered tufts of bracken where an enormous beech forked
its roots and cast a golden light from its withering leaves, I would
spend many a solitary hour. Above the eastern tree-tops my Kent
stretched into the distance beneath the early skies. Far to my left and
a little behind me rose the chimneys of gloomy Wanderslore. Breathing in
the gentle air, the dreamer within would stray at will. There I kept the
anniversary of my mother's birthday; twined a wreath for her of
ivy-flowers and winter green; and hid it secretly in a forsaken
blackbird's nest in the woods.

Still I longed for my old home again. Mrs Bowater's was a stuffy and
meagre little house, and when meals were in preparation, none too sweet
to the nose. Especially low I felt, when a scrawling letter was now and
then delivered by the postman from Pollie. Her spelling and grammar
intensified my homesickness. Miss Fenne, too, had not forgotten me. I
pored over her spidery epistles till my head ached. Why, if I had been
so rash and undutiful, was she so uneasy? Even the texts she chose had a
parched look. The thought of her spectacling my minute handwriting and
examining the proof that I was still a child of wrath, gave my pride a
silly qualm. So Mrs Bowater came to my rescue, and between us we
concocted replies to her which, I am afraid, were not more intelligible
for a tendency on my landlady's part to express my sentiments in the
third person.

This little service set her thinking of Sunday and church. She was not,
she told me, "what you might call a religious woman," having been
compelled "to keep her head up in the world, and all not being gold that
glitters." She was none the less a regular attendant at St Peter's--a
church a mile or so away in the valley, whose five bells of a Sabbath
evening never failed to recall my thoughts to Lyndsey and to dip me into
the waters of melancholy. I loved their mellow clanging in the lap of
the wind, yet it was rather doleful to be left alone with my candles,
and only Henry sullenly squatting in the passage awaiting his mistress's
return.

"Not that you need making any _better_, miss," Mrs Bowater assured me.
"Even a buttercup--or a retriever dog, for that matter--being no fuller
than it can hold of what it is, in a manner of speaking. But there's the
next world to be accounted for, and hopes of reunion on another shore,
where, so I understand, mere size, body or station, will not be
noticeable in the sight of the Lamb. _Not_ that I hold with the notion
that only the good so-called will be there."

This speech, I must confess, made me exceedingly uncomfortable.

"Wherever I go, Mrs Bowater," I replied hastily, "I shall not be happy
unless you are there."

"D. V.," said Mrs Bowater, grimly, "I will."

Still, I remained unconverted to St Peter's. Why, I hardly know: perhaps
it was her reference to its pew rents, or her description of the vicar's
daughters (who were now nursing their father at Tunbridge Wells), or
maybe even it was a stare from her husband which I happened at that
precise moment to intercept from the wall. Possibly if I myself had
taken a "sitting," this aura of formality would have faded away. Mrs
Bowater was a little reassured, however, to hear that my father and
mother, in spite of Miss Fenne, had seldom taken me to church. They had
concluded that my absence was best both for me and for the congregation.
And I told her of our little evening services in the drawing-room, with
Mrs Ballard, the parlourmaid, Pollie, and the Boy on the sofa, just as
it happened to be their respective "Sundays in."

This set her mind at rest. Turn and turn about, on one Sunday evening
she went to St Peter's and brought back with her the text and crucial
fragments of Mr Crimble's sermon, and on the next we read the lessons
together and sang a hymn. Once, indeed, I embarked upon a solo, "As
pants the hart," one of my mother's favourite airs. But I got a little
shaky at "O for the wings," and there was no rambling, rumbling chorus
from my father. But Sunday was not my favourite day on Beechwood Hill.
Mrs Bowater looked a little formal with stiff white "frilling" round her
neck. She reminded me of a leg of mutton. To judge from the gloom and
absentmindedness into which they sometimes plunged her, quotations from
Mr Crimble could be double-edged. My real joy was to hear her views on
the fashions and manners of her fellow-worshippers.

Well, so the months went by. Winter came with its mists and rains and
frosts, and a fire in the polished grate was no longer an evening luxury
but a daily need. As often as possible I went out walking. When the
weather was too inclement, I danced for an hour or so, for joy and
exercise, and went swimming on a chair. I would entertain myself also in
watching through the muslin curtains the few passers-by; sorting out
their gaits, and noses, and clothes, and acquaintances, and guessing
their characters, occupations, and circumstances. Certain little looks
and movements led me to suppose that, even though I was perfectly
concealed, the more sensitive among them were vaguely uneasy under this
secret scrutiny. In such cases (though very reluctantly) I always drew
my eyes away: first because I did not like the thought of encroaching on
their privacy, and next, because I was afraid their uneasiness might
prevent them coming again. But this microscopic examination of mankind
must cease with dusk, and the candle-hours passed rather heavily at
times. The few books I had brought away from Lyndsey were mine now
nearly by heart. So my eye would often wander up to a small bookcase
that hung out of reach on the other side of the chimney-piece.




Chapter Ten


One supper-time I ventured to ask Mrs Bowater if she would hand me down
a tall, thin, dark-green volume, whose appearance had particularly taken
my fancy. A simple enough request, but surprisingly received. She
stiffened all over and eyed the bookcase with a singular intensity. "The
books there," she said, "are what they call the dead past burying its
dead."

Spoon in hand, I paused, looking now at Mrs Bowater and now at the
coveted book. "_Mr_ Bowater," she added from deep down in herself,
"followed the sea." This was, in fact, Mr Bowater's debut in our
conversation, and her remark, uttered in so hollow yet poignant a tone,
produced a romantic expectancy in my mind.

"Is----" I managed to whisper at last: "I hope Mr Bowater isn't _dead_?"

Mrs Bowater's eyes were like lead in her long, dark-skinned face. She
opened her mouth, her gaze travelled slowly until, as I realized, it had
fixed itself on the large yellowing photograph behind my back.

"Dead, no"; she echoed sepulchrally. "Worse than."

By which I understood that, far from being dead, Mr Bowater was still
actively alive. And yet, apparently, not much the happier for that.
Instantaneously I caught sight of a rocky, storm-strewn shore, such as I
had seen in my _Robinson Crusoe_, and _there_ Mr Bowater, still
"following the sea."

"Never, never," continued Mrs Bowater in her Bible voice, "never to
darken these doors again!" I stole an anxious glance over my shoulder.
There was such a brassy boldness in the responsive stare that I was
compelled to shut my eyes.

But Mrs Bowater had caught my expression. "He was, as some would say,"
she explained with gloomy pride, "a handsome man. _Do_ handsome he did
never. But there, miss, things being as they must be, and you in the
green of your youth--though hearing the worst may be a wholesome physic
if taken with care, as I have told Fanny many a time...." She paused to
breathe. "What I was saying is, there can be no harm in your looking at
the book if that's all there's to it." With that she withdrew the
dry-looking volume from the shelf and laid it on the table beside my
chair.

I got down, opened it in the middle (as my father had taught me, in
order to spare the binding), opened it on a page inky black as night all
over, but starred with a design as familiar to me as the lines on the
palm of my hand.

"But oh! Mrs Bowater!" I cried, all in a breath, running across,
dragging back the curtain, and pointing out into the night; "look, look,
it's there! It's Orion!"

There, indeed, in the heavens beyond my window, straddling the dark,
star for star the same as those in the book, stood the Giant, shaking
his wondrous fires upon the air. Even Mrs Bowater was moved by my
enthusiasm. She came to the table, compared at my direction chart with
sky, and was compelled rather grudgingly to admit that her husband's
book was at least true to the facts. Stooping low, I read out a brief
passage. She listened. And it seemed a look of girlhood came into the
shadowy face uplifted towards the window. So the stars came into my
life, and faithful friends they have remained to this day.

Mrs Bowater's little house being towards the crest of the hill, with
sunrise a little to the left across the meadows, my window commanded
about three-fifths of the southern and eastern skies. By day I would
kneel down and study for hours the charts, and thus be prepared for the
dark. Night after night, when the weather was fair, or the windy clouds
made mock of man's celestial patternings, I would sit in the glow of the
firelight and summon these magic shiners each by name--Bellatrix, huge
Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and the rest. I would look at one, and, while so
doing, watch another. This not only isolated the smaller stars, but
gradually I became aware that they were one and all furtively signalling
to _me_! About a fortnight later my old Lyndsey friend, the Dogstar,
topped the horizon fringe of woodland. I heard myself shout at him
across the world. His sudden molten bursts of crimson betwixt his
emeralds and sapphires filled me with an almost ridiculous delight.

By the middle of December I had mastered all the greater stars in my
region, and with my spyglass a few even of the Gammas and Deltas. But
much of the zenith and all the north was closed to me, and--such is
human greed--I began to pine beyond measure for a sight of Deneb, Vega,
and the Chair. This desire grew unendurable, and led me into a piece of
genuine foolhardiness. I determined to await the first clear still night
and then to sally out and make my way, by hook or crook, up to my
beech-roots, from which I should be able to command a fair stretch of
the northern heavens. A quiet spell favoured me.

I waited until Mrs Bowater had gone to her bedroom, then muffled myself
up in my thickest clothes and stole out into the porch. At my first
attempt, one glance into the stooping dark was enough. At the second, a
furtive sighing breath of wind, as I breasted the hill, suddenly flapped
my mantle and called in my ear. I turned tail and fled. But never faint
heart won fair constellation. At the third I pressed on.

The road was deserted. No earthly light showed anywhere except from a
lamp-post this side of the curve of the hill. I frisked along, listening
and peering, and brimming over with painful delight. The dark waned; and
my eyes grew accustomed to the thin starlight. I gained the woods
unharmed. Rich was my reward. There and then I begged the glimmering
Polestar to be true to Mr Bowater. Fear, indeed, if in a friendly
humour, is enlivening company. Instead of my parasol I had brought out a
curved foreign knife (in a sheath at least five inches long) which I had
discovered on my parlour what-not.

The whisperings of space, the calls of indetectable birds in the wastes
of the sky, the sudden appearance of menacing or sinister shapes which
vanished or melted themselves into mere stocks or stones as I drew
near--my heart gave many an anguished jump. But quiet, and the
magnificence of night, vanquished all folly at last. It seemed to me
that a Being whom one may call Silence was brooding in solitude where
living and human visitants are rare, and that in his company a harmless
spirit may be at peace. Oblivious of my ungainly knife, yet keeping a
firm arm on it, self seemed to be the whole scene there, and my body
being so small I was perhaps less a disturber than were most intruders
of that solemn repose.

Why I kept these night-walks secret, I cannot say. It was not
apprehension of Mrs Bowater. She would have questioned my discretion,
but would not, I think, have attempted to dissuade me from them against
my will. No. It may be that every true astronomer is a miser at heart,
and keeps some Lambda or Mu or lost nebula his eternal friend, named
with his name, but unrecorded on any chart. For my part I hoarded the
complete north for a while.

A fright I got one night, however, kept me indoors for the better part
of a week. In my going out the little house door had been carelessly
left unlatched. Algol and the red planet Mars had been my quarry among
the floating woolpack clouds. The wind was lightly blowing from the
north-west after the calm. I drew down my veil and set off briskly and
lightheartedly for home.

The sight of the dark-looking hole in the door quickly sobered me down.
All was quiet, however, but on entering my room, there was a strangeness
in the air, and that not due to my landlady's forlorn trumpetings from
above. Through the floating vaporous light I trod across to my staircase
and was soon in bed. Hardly had my eyes closed when there broke out of
the gloom around me a dismal, appalling cry. I soon realized that the
creeping horror this caused in me was as nothing compared with that of
the poor beast, lured, no doubt, into the house by Henry, at finding
itself beneath a strange roof.

"Puss, puss," I pleaded shakenly; and again broke out that heart-sick
cry.

Knife in hand, I descended my staircase and edging as far as possible
from the baleful globes greenly burning beneath a mahogany chair, I
threw open both doors and besought my unwelcome visitor to take his
departure. The night wind came fluttering; there was the blur of a
scuttering, shapeless form, and in the flash of an eye I was sprawling
on the floor. A good deal shaken, with a nasty scratch on my thigh, but
otherwise unharmed, I waved my hand after the fugitive and returned to
bed.

The blood soon ceased to flow. Not daring to send my blood-stained
nightgown to the wash, I concealed it behind my dresses in the wardrobe,
and the next fine morning carried it off with me and buried it as deeply
as I could in a deserted rabbit-burrow in the woods. Such is an evil
conscience that, first, I had the fancy that during my digging a twig
had inexplicably snapped in the undergrowth; and next, for "burnt
offering," I made Mrs Bowater the present of an oval handglass set in
garnets (one of my grandfather's gifts). This she took down to a local
jeweller's to be mounted with a pin, and wore it on Sundays in place of
her usual cameo depicting the Three Graces disporting themselves under a
Palm-tree beside a Fountain.

Meanwhile I had heard a little more about the "Fanny" whom Mrs Bowater
had mentioned. My landlady was indeed a slow confider. Fanny, I
gathered, had a post as mistress at a school some forty miles away. She
taught the little boys "English." The fleeting Miss Perry returned to
mind, and with a faint dismay I heard that Fanny would soon be returning
home for the Christmas holidays. Mrs Bowater's allusions to her were the
more formidable for being veiled. I dreaded the invasion. Would she not
come "between us"?

Then by chance I found hidden in my star-book the photograph of an
infant in arms and of a pensive, ringleted woman, who, in spite of this
morsel in her lap, seemed in her gaze out of nowhere to be vaguely
afraid. On the back was scrawled in pencil: "F.: six weeks"--and an
extremely cross six weeks "F." looked. For some inexplicable reason I
pushed back this lady's photograph into the book, and said nothing about
it. The suspicion had entered my mind that Fanny was only a daughter by
marriage. I sank into a kind of twilight reflection at this. It seemed,
in an odd fashion, to make Mrs Bowater more admirable, her husband more
formidable, and the unknown Fanny more mysterious and enigmatical. At
the first opportunity I crept my way to the subject and asked my
landlady if she could show me a portrait of her daughter.

The photograph she produced from upstairs had in fading almost become a
caricature. It had both blackened and greyed. It depicted herself many
years younger but hardly less grim in appearance in full flounced
skirts, Fanny as a child of about five or six standing at her knee, and
Mr Bowater leaning with singular amenity behind her richly-carved chair,
the fingers of his left hand resting disposedly on her right shoulder. I
looked anxiously at the child. It was certainly crosspatch "F.", and a
far from prepossessing little creature with that fixed, level gaze. Mr
Bowater, on the other hand, had not yet adopted the wild and rigid stare
which dominated the small parlour.

Mrs Bowater surveyed the group with a lackadaisical detachment.
"Fractious!--you can see the tears on her cheeks for all what the young
man could do with his woolly lamb and grimaces. It was the heyday."

_What_ was the heyday, I wondered. "Was Mr Bowater--attached to her?"
seemed a less intrusive question.

"Doted," she replied, polishing the glass with her apron. "But not to
much purpose--with an eye for every petticoat."

This seemed a difficult conversation to maintain. "Don't you think, Mrs
Bowater," I returned zealously, "there is just the faintest tinge of
_Mr_ Bowater in the _chin_? I don't," I added candidly, "see the
faintest glimpse of _you_."

Mrs Bowater merely tightened her lips.

"And is she like that now?" I asked presently.

Mrs Bowater re-wrapped frame and photograph in their piece of newspaper.
"It's _looks_, miss, that are my constant anxiety: and you may be
thankful for being as you might say preserved from the world. What's
more, the father will out, I suppose, from now till Day of Judgment."

How strangely her sentiments at times resembled my godmother's, and yet
how different they were in effect. My thoughts after this often drifted
to Mrs Bowater's early married life. And so peculiar are the workings of
the mind that her husband's star-chart, his sleek appearance as a young
father, the mysterious reference to the petticoats, awoke in me an
almost romantic interest in him. To such a degree that it gradually
became my custom to cast his portrait a satirical little bow of greeting
when I emerged from my bedroom in the morning, and even to kiss my hand
to his invisible stare when I retired for the night. To all of which
advances he made no reply.


My next bout of star-gazing presaged disaster. I say star-gazing, for it
is true that I stole out after honest folk are abed only when the
heavens were swept and garnished. But, as a matter of fact, my real
tryst was with another Self. Had my lot been different, I might have
sought that self in Terra del Fuego or Malay, or in a fine marriage.
Mine was a smaller world. Bo-peep I would play with shadow and dew-bead.
And if Ulysses, as my father had read me, stopped his ears against the
Sirens, I contrariwise unsealed mine to the ethereal airs of that bare
wintry solitude.

The spectral rattle of the parched beechleaves on the saplings, the
faintest whisper in the skeleton bracken set me peeping, peering,
tippeting; and the Invisibles, if they heeded me, merely smiled on me
from their grave, all-seeing eyes. As for the first crystal sparking of
frost, I remember in my folly I sat down (bunched up, fortunately, in
honest lamb's-wool) and remained, minute by minute, unstirring,
unwinking, watching as if in my own mind the exquisite small fires
kindle and flit from point to point of lichen and bark, until--out of
this engrossment--little but a burning icicle was left to trudge along
home.

It was December 23rd. I remember that date, and even now hardly
understand the meaning or intention of what it brought me. Love for the
frosty, star-roofed woods, that was easy. And yet what if--though
easy--it is not enough? I had lingered on, talking in my childish
fashion--a habit never to leave me--to every sudden lovely morsel in
turn, when, to my dismay, I heard St Peter's clock toll midnight. Was it
my fancy that at the stroke, and as peacefully as a mother when she is
alone with her sleeping children, the giant tree sighed, and the whole
night stilled as if at the opening of a door? I don't know, for I would
sometimes pretend to be afraid merely to enjoy the pretending. And even
my small Bowater astronomy had taught me that as the earth has her poles
and equator, so these are in relation to the ecliptic and the
equinoctial. So too, then, each one of us--even a mammet like
myself--must live in a world of the imagination which is in everlasting
relation to its heavens. But I must keep my feet.

I waved adieu to the woods and unseen Wanderslore. As if out of the
duskiness a kind of reflex of me waved back; and I was soon hastening
along down the hill, the only thing stirring in the cold, white,
luminous dust. Instinctively, in drawing near, I raised my eyes to the
upper windows of Mrs Bowater's crouching house. To my utter confusion.
For one of them was wide open, and seated there, as if in wait for me,
was a muffled figure--and that not my landlady's--looking out. All my
fine boldness and excitement died in me. I may have had no apprehension
of telling Mrs Bowater of my pilgrimages, but, not having told her, I
had a lively distaste of being "found out."

Stiff as a post, I gazed up through the shadowed air at the vague,
motionless figure--to all appearance completely unaware of my presence.
But there is a commerce between minds as well as between eyes. I was
perfectly certain that I was being _thought_ about, up there.

For a while my mind faltered. The old childish desire gathered in me--to
fly, to be gone, to pass myself away. There was a door in the woods.
Better sense, and perhaps a creeping curiosity, prevailed, however. With
a bold front, and as if my stay in the street had been of my own
choosing, I entered the gate, ascended my "Bateses," and so into the
house. Then I listened. Faintly at last sounded a stealthy footfall
overhead; the window was furtively closed. Doubt vanished. In
preparation for the night's expedition I had lain down in the early
evening for a nap. Evidently while I had been asleep, Fanny had come
home. The English mistress had caught her mother's lodger playing
truant!




Chapter Eleven


If it was the child of wrath in me that hungered at times after the
night, woods, and solitude to such a degree that my very breast seemed
empty within me; it was now the child of grace that prevailed. With
girlish exaggeration I began torturing myself in my bed with remorse at
the deceit I had been practising. Now Conscience told me that I must
make a full confession the first thing in the morning; and now that it
would be more decent to let Fanny "tell on me." At length thought
tangled with dream, and a grisly night was mine.

What was that? It was day; Mrs Bowater was herself softly calling me
beyond my curtains, and her eye peeped in. Always before I had been up
and dressed when she brought in my breakfast. Through a violent headache
I surveyed the stooping face. Something in my appearance convinced her
that I was ill, and she insisted on my staying in bed.

"But, Mrs Bowater...." I expostulated.

"No, no, miss; it was in a _butt_ they drowned the sexton. Here you
stay; and its being Christmas Eve, you must rest and keep quiet. What
with those old books and all, you have been burning the candle at both
ends."

Early in the afternoon on finding that her patient was little better, my
landlady went off to the chemist's to get me some physic; I could bear
inactivity no longer, and rose and dressed. The fire was low, the room
sluggish, when in the dusk, as I sat dismally brooding in my chair, the
door opened, and a stranger came in with my tea. She was dressed in
black, and was carrying a light. With that raised in one hand, and my
tea-tray held between finger and thumb of the other, she looked at me
with face a little sidelong. Her hair was dark above her clear pale
skin, and drawn, without a fringe, smoothly over her brows. Her eyes
were almost unnaturally light in colour. I looked at her in
astonishment; she was new in my world. She put the tray on my table,
poked the fire into a blaze, blew out her candle at a single puff from
her pursed lips, and seating herself on the hearthrug, clasped her hands
round her knees.

"Mother told me you were in bed, _ill_," she said, "I hope you are
better."

I assured her in a voice scarcely above a whisper that I was quite well
again.

She nestled her chin down and broke into a little laugh: "My! how you
startled me!"

"Then it _was_ you," I managed to say.

"Oh, yes; it was me, it was me." The words were uttered as if to
herself. She stooped her cheek over her knees again, and smiled round at
me. "I'm not _telling_," she added softly.

Her tone, her expression, filled me with confusion. "But please do not
suppose," I began angrily, "that I am not my own mistress here. I have
my own key----"

"Oh, yes, your own mistress," she interrupted suavely, "but you see
that's just what I'm _not_. And the key! why, it's just envy that's
gnawing at the roots. I've never, never in my life seen anything so
queer." She suddenly raised her strange eyes on me. "What were you doing
out there?"

A lie perched on my lip; but the wide, light eyes searched me through.
"I went," said I, "to be in the woods--to see the stars"; then added in
a rather pompous voice, "only the southern and eastern constellations
are visible from _this_ poky little window."

There was no change in the expression of the two eyes that drank me in.
"_I_ see; and you want them all. That's odd, now," she went on
reflectively, stabbing again at the fire; "they have never attracted me
very much--angels' tin-tacks, as they say in the Sunday Schools. Fanny
Bowater was looking for the moon."

She turned once more, opened her lips, showing the firm row of teeth
beneath them, and sang in a low voice the first words, I suppose, of
some old madrigal: "'_She enchants me._' And if _I_ had my little key,
and my little secret door.... But never mind. 'Tell-tale Tit, her tongue
shall be slit.' It's safe with me. I'm no sneak. But you might like to
know, Miss M., that my mother thinks the very world of you. And so do I,
for that matter; though perhaps for different reasons."

The calm, insolent words infuriated me, and yet her very accents, with
a curious sweet rasp in them, like that in a skylark's song when he
slides his last twenty feet from the clouds, were an enchantment. Ever
and always there seemed to be two Fannies; one visible, her face; the
other audible, her voice. But the enchantment was merely fuel for the
flames.

"Will you please remember," I broke out peremptorily, "that neither
myself nor what I choose to do is any affair of yours. Mrs Bowater is an
excellent landlady; you can tell her precisely what you please;
and--and" (I seemed to be choking) "I am accustomed to take my meals
alone."

The sidelong face grew hard and solemn in the firelight, then slowly
turned, and once more the eyes surveyed me under lifted brows--like the
eyes of an angel, empty of mockery or astonishment or of any meaning but
that of their beauty. "There you are," she said. "One talks like one
human being to another, and I should have thought you'd be grateful for
that; and this is the result. Facts are facts; and I'm not sorry for
them, good or bad. If you wish to see the last of me, here it is. I
don't thrust myself on people--there's no need. But still; I'm not
telling."

She rose, and with one light foot on my fender, surveyed herself for a
moment with infinite composure in the large looking-glass that spanned
the chimney-piece.

And I?--I was exceedingly tired. My head was burning like a coal; my
thoughts in confusion. Suddenly I lost control of myself and broke into
an angry, ridiculous sobbing. I simply sat there, my face hidden in my
dry, hot hands, miserable and defeated. And strange Fanny Bowater, what
did she do?

"Heavens!" she muttered scornfully, "I gave up snivelling when I was a
baby." Then voice, manner, even attitude suddenly changed--"And there's
mother!"

When Mrs Bowater knocked at my door, though still in my day-clothes, I
was in bed again, and my tea lay untasted on a chair beside it.

"Dear, dear," she said, leaning anxiously over me, "your poor cheeks are
red as a firebrand, miss. Those chemists daren't put a nose outside
their soaps and tooth powders. It must be Dr Phelps to-morrow if you are
no better. And as plump a little Christmas pudding boiling for you in
the pot as ever you could see! Tell me, now; there's no _pain_
anywhere--throat, limbs, or elsewhere?"

I shook my head. She sprinkled a drop or two of eau de Cologne on my
sheet and pillow, gently bathed my temples and hands, kindled a
night-light, and left me once more to my own reflections.

They were none too comfortable. One thing only was in my mind--Fanny
Bowater, her face, her voice, every glance and intonation, smile, and
gesture. That few minutes' talk seemed now as remote and incredible as a
nightmare. The stars, the woods, my solitary delights in learning and
thinking were all suddenly become empty and meaningless. She despised
me: and I hated her with a passion I cannot describe.

Yet in the midst of my hatred I longed for her company again,
distracting myself with the sharp and clever speeches I might have made
to her, and picturing her confounded by my contempt and indifference.
But should I ever see her alone again? At every sound and movement in
the house, which before had so little concerned me, I lay listening,
with held breath. I might have been a mummy in a Pyramid hearkening
after the fluttering pinions of its spirit come back to bring it life.
But no tidings came of the stranger.

When my door opened again, it was only to admit Mrs Bowater with my
supper--a bowl of infant's gruel, not the customary old lady's rusk and
milk. I laughed angrily within to think that her daughter must have
witnessed its preparation. Even at twenty, then, I had not grown used to
being of so little consequence in other people's eyes. Yet, after all,
who ever quite succeeds in being that? My real rage was not that Fanny
had taken me as a midget, but as _such_ a midget. Yet can I honestly say
that I have _ever_ taken her as mere Fanny, and not as _such_ a Fanny?

The truth is she had wounded my vanity, and vanity may be a more
fractious nursling even than a wounded heart. Tired and fretful, I had
hardly realized the flattering candour of her advances. Even her
promises not to "tell" of my night-wanderings, implied that she trusted
in my honour not to tell of her promise. I thought and thought of her.
She remained an enigma. Cold and hard--no one had ever spoken to me like
that before. Yet her voice--it was as if it had run about in my blood,
and made my eyes shine. A mere human sound to set me sobbing! More
dangerous yet, I began to think of what Miss Bowater must be thinking of
me, until, exhausted, I fell asleep, to dream that I was a child again
and shut up in one of Mrs Ballard's glass jars, and that a hairy woman
who was a kind of mixture of Mrs Bowater and Miss Fenne, was tapping
with a thimbled finger on its side to increase my terror.

Next morning, thank Heaven, admitted me to my right mind again. I got
out of bed and peered through the window. It was Christmas Day. A thin
scatter of snow was powdering down out of the grey sky. The fields were
calm and frozen. I felt, as I might say, the hunger in my face, looking
out. There was something astonishingly new in my life. Everything
familiar had become a little strange.

Over night, too, some one--and with mingled feelings I guessed who--must
have stolen into my room while I lay asleep. Laid out on a bedside chair
was a crimson padded dressing-jacket, threaded with gold, a delicate
piece of needlework that would have gladdened my grandfather. Rolled up
on the floor beside it was a thick woollen mat, lozenged in green and
scarlet, and just of a size to spread beside my bed. These gifts
multiplied my self-reproaches and made me acutely homesick.

What should I do? Beneath these thoughts was a quiet fizz of expectation
and delight, like water under a boat. Pride and common sense fought out
their battle in my mind. It was pride that lost the day. When Mrs
Bowater brought in my breakfast, she found her invalid sitting up in
Fanny's handsome jacket, and the mat laid over the bedrail for my
constant contemplation. Nor had I forgotten Mrs Bowater. By a little
ruse I had found out the name and address of a chemist in the town, and
on the tray beside my breakfast was the fine bottle of lavender water
which I had myself ordered him to send by the Christmas Eve post.

"Well there, miss, you did take me in that time," she assured me. "And
more like a Valentine than a Christmas present; and its being the only
scent so-called that I've any nose for."

Clearly this was no occasion for the confessional, even if I had had a
mind to it. But I made at least half a vow never to go star-gazing again
without her knowledge. My looks pleased her better, too, though not so
much better as to persuade her to countermand Dr Phelps. Her yellowish
long hand with its worn wedding-ring was smoothing my counterpane. I
clutched at it, and, shame-stricken, smiled up into her face.

"You have made me very happy," I said. At this small remark, the heavy
eyelids trembled, but she made no reply.

"Did," I managed to inquire at last, "did she have any breakfast before
she went for the doctor?"

"A cup of tea," said Mrs Bowater shortly. A curious happiness took
possession of me.

"She is very young to be teaching; not much older than I am."

"The danger was to keep her back," was the obscure reply. "We don't
always see eye to eye."

For an instant the dark, cavernous face above me was mated by that other
of birdlike lightness and beauty. "Isn't it funny?" I observed, "I had
made quite, quite a different picture of her."

"Looks are looks, and brains are brains; and between them you must tread
very wary."


About eleven o'clock a solemn-looking young man of about thirty, with a
large pair of reddish leather gloves in his hand, entered the room. For
a moment he did not see my bed, then, remarking circumspectly in a
cheerful, hollow voice, "So this is our patient," he bade me
good-morning, and took a seat beside my bed. A deep blush mounted up
into the fair, smooth-downed cheeks as he returned my scrutiny and asked
me to exhibit my tongue. I put it out, and he blushed even deeper.

"And the pulse, please," he murmured, rising. I drew back the crimson
sleeve of Fanny's jacket, and with extreme nicety he placed the tip of a
square, icy forefinger on my wrist. Once more his fair-lashed eyelids
began to blink. He extracted a fine gold watch from his waistcoat
pocket, compared beat with beat, frowned, and turned to Mrs Bowater.

"You are not, I assume, aware of the--the young lady's _normal_ pulse?"

"There being no cause before to consider it, I am not," Mrs Bowater
returned.

"Any _pain_?" said Dr Phelps.

"Headache," replied Mrs Bowater on my behalf, "and shoots in the limbs."

At that Dr Phelps took a metal case out of his waistcoat, glanced at
it, glanced at me, and put it back again. He leaned over so close to
catch the whisper of my breathing that there seemed a danger of my
losing myself in the labyrinth of his downy ear.

"H'm, a little fever," he said musingly. "Have we any reason to suppose
that we can have taken a chill?"

The head on the pillow stirred gently to and fro, and I think its cheek
was dyed with an even sprightlier red than had coloured his. After one
or two further questions, and a low colloquy with Mrs Bowater in the
passage, Dr Phelps withdrew, and his carriage rolled away.

"A painstaking young man," Mrs Bowater summed him up in the doorway,
"but not the kind I should choose to die under. You are to keep quiet
and warm, miss; have plenty of light nourishment; and physic to follow.
Which, except for the last-mentioned, and that mainly water, one don't
have to ride in a carriage to know for one's self."

But "peace and goodwill": I liked Dr Phelps, and felt so much better for
his skill that before his wheels had rolled out of hearing I had leapt
out of bed, dragged out the trunk that lay beneath it, and fetched out
from it a treasured ivory box. On removal of the lid, this ingenious
work disclosed an Oriental Temple, with a spreading tree, a pool, a
long-legged bird, and a mountain. And all these exquisitely tinted in
their natural colours. It had come from China, and had belonged to my
mother's brother, Andrew, who was an officer in the Navy and had died at
sea. This I wrapped up in a square of silk and tied with a green thread.
During the whole of his visit my head had been so hotly in chase of this
one stratagem that it is a marvel Dr Phelps had not deciphered it in my
pulse.

When Mrs Bowater brought in my Christmas dinner--little but bread sauce
and a sprig of holly!--I dipped in the spoon, and, as innocently as I
knew how, inquired if her daughter would like to see some really fine
sewing.

The black eyes stood fast, then the ghost of a smile vanished over her
features; "I'll be bound she would, miss. I'll give her your message."
Alone again, I turned over on my pillow and laughed until tears all but
came into my eyes.

All that afternoon I waited on, the coals of fire that I had prepared
for my enemy's head the night before now ashes of penitence on my own.
A dense smell of cooking pervaded the house; and it was not until the
evening that Fanny Bowater appeared.

She was dressed in a white muslin gown with a wreath of pale green
leaves in her hair. "I am going to a party," she said, "so I can't waste
much time."

"Mrs Bowater thought you would like to see some _really_ beautiful
needlework," I replied suavely.

"Well," she said, "where is it?"

"Won't you come a little closer?"

That figure, as nearly like the silver slip of the new moon as ever I
have seen, seemed to float in my direction. I held my breath and looked
up into the light, dwelling eyes. "It is this," I whispered, drawing my
two hands down the bosom of her crimson dressing-jacket. "It is only,
Thank you, I wanted to say."

In a flash her lips broke into a low clear laughter. "Why, _that's_
nothing. Really and truly I hate that kind of work; but mother often
wrote of you; there was nothing better to do; and the smallness of the
thing amused me."

I nodded humbly. "Yes, yes," I muttered, "Midget is as Midget wears. I
know that. And--and here, Miss Bowater, is a little Christmas present
from me."

Voraciously I watched her smooth face as she untied the thread. "A
little ivory box!" she exclaimed, pushing back the lid, "and a Buddhist
temple, how very pretty. Thank you."

"Yes, Miss Bowater, and, do you see, in the corner there? a moon. 'She
enchants' you."

"So it is," she laughed, closing the box. "I was supposing," she went on
solemnly, "that I had been put in the corner in positively everlasting
disgrace."

"Please don't say that," I entreated. "We _may_ be friends, mayn't we? I
am better now."

Her eyes wandered over my bed, my wardrobe, and all my possessions. "But
yes," she said, "of course"; and laughed again.

"And you believe me?"

"Believe you?"

"That it was the stars? I thought Mrs Bowater might be anxious if she
knew. It was quite, quite safe, really; and I'm _going_ to tell her."

"Oh, dear," she replied in a cold, small voice, "so you are still
worrying about that. I--I envied you." With a glance over her shoulder,
she leaned closer. "Next time you go," she breathed out to me, "we'll go
together."

My heart gave a furious leap; my lips closed tight. "I could tell you
the names of some of the stars now," I said, in a last wrestle with
conscience.

"No, no," said Fanny Bowater, "it isn't the stars I'm after. The first
fine night we'll go to the woods. You shall wait for me till everything
is quiet. It will be good practise in _practical_ astronomy." She
watched my face, and began silently laughing as if she were reading my
thoughts. "That's a bargain, then. What is life, Miss M., but
experience? And what is experience, but knowing thyself? And what's
knowing thyself but the very apex of wisdom? Anyhow it's a good deal
more interesting than the Prince of Denmark."

"Yes", I agreed. "And there's still all but a full moon."

"Aha!" said she. "But _what_ a world with only one! Jupiter has scores,
hasn't he? Just think of _his_ Love Lanes!" She rose to her feet with a
sigh of boredom, and smoothed out her skirts with her long, narrow
hands. I stared at her beauty in amazement.

"I hate these parties here," she said. "They are not worth while."

"You look lov--you look all right."

"H'm; but what's that when there's no one to see."

"But you see yourself. You _live_ in it."

The reflected face in the glass, which, craning forward, I could just
distinguish, knitted its placid brows. "Why, if that were enough, we
should all be hermits. I rather think, you know, that God made man
almost solely in the hope of his two-legged appreciation. But perhaps
you disapprove of incense?"

"Why should I, Miss Bowater? My Aunt Kitilda was a Catholic: and so was
my mother's family right back."

"_That's_ right," said Miss Bowater. She kissed her hand to
looking-glass and four-poster, flung me a last fervid smile, and was
gone. And the little box I had given her lay on the table, beside my
bed.

I was aroused much later by the sound of voices drawing nearer.
Instinctively I sat up, my senses fastened on the sound like a vampire.
The voices seemed to be in argument, then the footsteps ceased and clear
on the night air came the words:--

"But you made me promise _not_ to write. Oh, Fanny, and you have broken
your own!"

"Then you must confess," was the cautious reply, "that I am consistent.
As for the promises, you are quite, quite welcome to the pieces."

"You mean that?" was the muffled retort.

"That," cried the other softly, "depends entirely on what you mean by
'mean.' Please look happy! You'd soon grow old and uglier if there was
only that scrap of moon to light your face."

"Oh, Fanny. Will you never be serious?"--the misery in the words seemed
to creep about in my own mind for shelter. They were answered by a
sparkling gush of laughter, followed by a crisp, emphatic knock at the
door. Fanny had returned from her party, and the eavesdropper buried her
face in her pillow. So she enjoyed hurting people. And yet....




Chapter Twelve


The next afternoon Mrs Bowater was out when Dr Phelps made his call. It
was Fanny who ushered him into the room. He felt my pulse again, held up
the phial of medicine to the light, left unconsulted my tongue, and
pronounced that "we are doing very nicely." As indeed I was. While this
professional inquiry was in progress Fanny stood silently watching us,
then exclaimed that it was half-past four, and that I must have my tea.
She was standing behind Dr Phelps, and for a few seconds I watched with
extreme interest but slow understanding a series of mute little
movements of brows and lips which she was directing at me while he was
jotting down a note in a leather pocket-book. At length I found myself
repeating--as if at her dictation--a polite little invitation to him to
take tea with me. The startled blue eyes lifted themselves above the
pocket-book, the square, fair head was bowing a polite refusal, when,
"But, of course, Dr Phelps," Fanny broke in like one inspired, "how very
thoughtless of me!"

"Thank you, thank you, Miss Bowater, but----" cried Dr Phelps, with a
smooth uplifted hand, and almost statuesque in his pose. His refusal was
too late. Miss Bowater had hastened from the room.

His panic passed. He reseated himself, and remarking that it was a very
cold afternoon, predicted that if the frost continued, skating might be
expected. Conversation of this kind is apt so soon to faint away like a
breeze in hot weather, that I kept wondering what to say next. Besides,
whenever Dr Phelps seemed impelled to look at me, he far more quickly
looked away, and the sound of his voice suggested that he was uncertain
if he was not all but talking to himself. To put him more at his ease I
inquired boldly if he had many other midgets among his patients.

The long lashes swept his cheeks; he pondered a while on my landlady's
window curtains. "As a matter of fact perhaps _not_," he replied at
last, as if giving me the result of a mathematical calculation.

"I suppose, Dr Phelps," I then inquired, "there _might_ be more, at any
time, might there not?" Our glances this time met. He blinked.

"My father and mother, I mean," I explained in some confusion, "were
just of the com--of the ordinary size. And what I was wondering is,
whether you yourself would be sorry--in quite a general way, of
course--if you found your practice going down like that."

"Going down?"

"I mean the _patients_ coming smaller. I never had the opportunity of
asking our own doctor, Dr Grose. At Lyndsey, you know. Besides, I was a
child then. Now, first of all, it is true, isn't it, that giants are
usually rather dull-witted people? So nobody would deliberately choose
_that_ kind of change. If, then, quality does vary with quantity,
mightn't there be an improvement in the other direction? You will think
I am being extremely ego--egotistical. But one must take Jack's side,
mustn't one?--even if one's Jill?"

"Jack?"

"The Giant Killer."

He looked at me curiously, and his finger and thumb once more strayed up
towards the waistcoat pocket in which he kept his thermometer. But
instead of taking it out, he coughed.

"There is a norm----" he began in a voice not quite his own.

"Ah," I cried, interrupting him, and throwing up my hands, "there is
indeed. But why, I ask myself, so vast a number of examples of it!"

It was as if a voice within were prompting me. Perhaps the excitement of
Fanny's homecoming was partly to blame. "I sit at my window here and
watch the passers-by. Norms, in mere size, Dr Phelps, every one of them,
if you allow for the few little defects in the--the moulding, you know.
And just think what London must be like. Why, _nobody_ can be
noticeable, there."

"But surely," Dr Phelps smiled indulgently, though his eyelashes seemed
to be in the way, "surely variety is possible, without--er--excess.
Indeed there must be variety in order to arrive at our norm, mustn't
there?"

"You'd be astonished," I assured him, "how slight the differences
really are. A few inches or ounces; red or black or fawn; and age, and
sex, of course; that's all. Now, isn't it true, Dr Phelps, that almost
any twenty women--unselected, you know--would weigh about a ton? And
surely there's no particular reason why just human shells should weigh
as much as that. We are not lobsters. And yet, do you know, I have
watched, and they really seem to enjoy being the same as one another.
One would think they tried to be--manners and habits, knowledge and
victuals, hats and boots, everything. And if on the outside, I suppose
on the inside, too. What a mysterious thing it seems. All of them
_thinking_ pretty much the same: Norm-_Thoughts_, you know; just
five-foot-fivers. After all, one wouldn't so much mind the monotonous
packages, if the contents were different. 'Forty feeding like one'--who
said that? Now, truly, Dr Phelps, don't you feel?---- It would, of
course, be very serious at first for their mothers and fathers if all
the little human babies here came midgets, but it would be amusing, too,
wouldn't it?... And it isn't quite my own idea, either."

Dr Phelps cleared his throat, and looked at his watch. "But surely," he
said, with a peculiar emphasis which I have noticed men are apt to make
when my sex asks intelligent or unintelligent questions: "Surely you and
I are understanding one another. _I_ try to make myself clear to _you_.
So extremes _can_ meet; at least I hope so." He gave me a charming
little awkward bow. "Tell me, then, what is this peculiar difference you
are so anxious about? You wouldn't like a pygmy England, a pygmy
Universe, now, would you, Miss M.?"


It was a great pity. A pygmy England--the thought dazzled me. In a few
minutes Dr Phelps would perhaps have set all my doubts at rest. But at
that moment Miss Bowater came in with the tea, and the talk took quite
another turn. She just made it Fanny's size. Even Dr Phelps looked a
great deal handsomer in her company. More sociable. Nor were we to
remain "three's none." She had finished but one slice of toast over my
fire, and inflamed but one cheek, when a more protracted but far less
vigorous knock than Dr Phelps's on the door summoned her out of the room
again. And a minute or two afterwards our tea-party became one of four,
and its sexes (in number, at any rate) equally matched.

By a happy coincidence, just as Good King Wenceslas had looked out on
the Feast of Stephen, so Mr Crimble, the curate-in-charge at St Peter's,
had looked in. By his "Ah, Phelps!" it was evident that our guests were
well acquainted with one another; and Fanny and I were soon enjoying a
tea enriched by the cream of local society. Mr Crimble had mild dark
eyes, gold spectacles, rather full red lips, and a voice that reminded
me of raspberries. I think he had heard of me, for he was very
attentive, and handled my small cup and saucer with remarkable, if
rather conspicuous, ingenuity.

Candles were lit. The talk soon became animated. From the weather of
this Christmas we passed to the weather of last, to Dr Phelps's
prospects of skating, and thence to the good old times, to Mr Pickwick,
to our respective childish beliefs in Santa Claus, stockings, and to
credulous parents. Fanny repeated some of the naive remarks made by her
pupils, and Mr Crimble capped them with a collection of biblical _bons
mots_ culled in his Sunday School. I couldn't glance fast enough from
one to the other. Dr Phelps steadily munched and watched Mr Crimble. He
in turn told us of a patient of his, a Mrs Hall, who, poor old creature,
was 101, and enjoyed nothing better than playing at "Old Soldier" with a
small grandson.

"Literally, second childhood. Senile decay," he said, passing his cup.

From Mrs Hall we naturally turned to parochial affairs; and then Mr
Crimble, without more ado, bolted his mouthful of toast, in order to
explain the inmost purpose of his visit.

He was anxious to persuade Miss Bowater to sing at the annual Parish
Concert, which was to be given on New Year's Eve. Try as he might, he
had been unable to persuade his vicar of the efficacy of Watch Night
Services. So a concert was to be given instead. Now, would Miss Bowater,
as ever, be ever so kind, and would I add my entreaties to his? As he
looked at Fanny and I did too--with one of those odd turns of the mind,
I was conscious that the peculiar leaning angle of his head was exactly
the same as my own. Whereupon I glanced at Dr Phelps, but he sat fair
and foursquare, one feeding like forty. Fanny remaining hesitant, appeal
was made to him. With almost more cordiality than Mr Crimble appeared
to relish, he agreed that the musical talent available was not so
abundant as it might be, and he promised to take as many of the
expensive tickets as Miss Bowater would sing songs.

"I don't pretend to be musical, not like you, Crimble. But I don't mind
a pleasant voice--in moderation; and I assure you, Miss Bowater, I am an
excellent listener--given a fair chance, you know."

"But then," said Fanny, "so am I. I believe now really--and one can
judge from one's speaking voice, can't one, Mr Crimble?--I believe you
sing yourself."

"Sing, Miss Bowater," interjected Mr Crimble, tipping back his chair.
"'The wedding guest here beat his chest, for he heard the loud bassoon.'
Now, conjuring tricks, eh, Phelps? With a stethoscope and a clinical
thermometer; and I'll hold the hat and make the omelette. It would bring
down the house."

"It was his _breast_ he beat; not his _chest_," I broke in.

The six eyes slid round, as if at a voice out of the clouds. There was a
pause.

"Why, exactly," cried Mr Crimble, slapping his leg.

"But I wish Dr Phelps _would_ sing," said Fanny in a small voice,
passing him the sugar.

"He must, he shall," said Mr Crimble, in extreme jubilation. "So that's
settled. _Thank_ you, Miss Bowater," his eyes seemed to melt in his head
at his success, "the programme is complete."

He drew a slip of paper from his inside pocket and brandished a silver
pencil-case. "Mrs Browning, 'The Better Land'--better and better every
year. 'Caller Herrin'' to follow--though what kind of herrings caller
herrings are I've never been able to discover." He beamed on me. "Miss
Finch--she is sending me the names of her songs this evening. Miss
Willett and Mr Bangor--'O that we two,' and a queer pair they'd look;
and 'My luv is like.' Hardy annuals. Mrs Bullace--recitations, 'Abt
Vogler,' and no doubt a Lord Tennyson. Flute, Mr Piper; 'Cello, Miss
Oran, a niece of Lady Pollacke's; and for comic relief, Tom Sturgess, of
course; though I hope he will be a little more--er--eclectic this year.
And you and I," again he turned his boyish brow on me, "will sit with
Mrs Bowater in the front row of the gallery--a claque, Phelps, eh?"

He seemed to be in the topmost height of good spirits. Well, thought I,
if social badinage and _bonhomie_ were as pleasant and easy as this, why
hadn't my mother----?

"But why in the gallery?" drawled Fanny suddenly from the hearthrug,
with the little steel poker ready poised; "Miss M. _dances_."

The clear voice rasped on the word. A peculiar silence followed the
lingering accents. The two gentlemen's faces smoothed themselves out,
and both, I knew, though I gave them no heed, sat gazing, _not_ at their
hostess. But Fanny herself was looking at me now, her light eyes quite
still in the flame of the candles, which, with their reflections in Mrs
Bowater's pier glass were not two, but four. It was into those eyes I
gazed, yet not into, only at.

All day my thoughts had remained on her, like bubbles in wine. All day
hope of the coming night and of our expedition to the woods had been, as
it were, a palace in which my girlish fancy had wandered, and now,
though only a few minutes ago I had been cheeping my small extemporary
philosophy into the ear of Dr Phelps, the fires of self-contempt and
hatred burned up in me hotter than ever.

I forgot even the dainty dressing-jacket on my back. "Miss Bowater is
pleased to be satirical," I said, my hand clenched in my lap.

"Now _was_ I?" cried Fanny, appealing to Dr Phelps, "be just to me." Dr
Phelps opened his mouth, swallowed, and shut it again.

"I really think not, you know," said Mr Crimble persuasively, coming to
her rescue. "Indeed it would be extremely kind and--er--entertaining;
though dancing--er--and--unless, perhaps, so many strangers.... We can
count in any case on your being _present_, can we not, Miss M.?" He
leaned over seductively, finger and thumb twitching at the plain gold
cross suspended from his watch-chain on his black waistcoat.

"Oh, yes," I replied, "you can count on me for the claque."

The room had sunk into a stillness. Constraint was in the air. "Then
that's settled. On New Year's Eve we--we all meet again. Unless, Miss
Bowater, there is any hope of seeing you meanwhile--just to arrange the
_titles_ and so on of your songs on the programme."

"No," smiled Fanny, "I see no hope whatever. You forget, Mr Crimble,
there are dishes to wash. And hadn't you better see Miss Finch first?"

Mr Crimble cast a strange look at her face. He was close to her, and it
was almost as if he had whispered, "Fanny." But there was no time for
further discussion. Dr Phelps, gloved and buttoned, was already at the
door.

Fanny returned into the room when our guests had taken their departure.
I heard their male voices in vivacious talk as they marched off in the
cold dark air beneath my window.

"I thought they were never going," said Fanny lightly, twisting up into
her hair an escaped ringlet. "I think, do you know, we had better say
nothing to mother about the tea--at least not yet a while. They are dull
creatures: it's pottering about so dull and sleepy a place, I suppose.
What _could_ have inspired you to invite Dr Phelps to tea? Really,
really, Miss M., you are rather astonishing. Aren't you, now?"

What right had she to speak to me like this, as if we had met again
after another life? She paused in her swift collection of the remnants
of our feast. "Sulking?" she inquired sweetly.

With an effort I kept my self-possession. "You meant what you said,
then? You really think I would sink to that?"

"'Sink!' To what? Oh, the dancing, you mean. How funny you should still
be fretting about that. Still, you look quite entertaining when you are
cross: 'Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly,' you know. Good Heavens!
Surely we shouldn't hide any kind of lights under bushels, should we?
I'm sure the Reverend Harold would agree to that. Isn't it being the
least bit pedantic?"

"I should think," I retorted, "Mr Crimble would say anything pleasant to
_any_ young woman."

"I have no doubt he would," she agreed. "The other cheek also, you know.
But the real question is what the young woman would say in reply. You
are too sensitive, Miss M."

"Perhaps I am." Oh that I could escape from this horrible net between
us. "I know this, anyhow--that I lay awake till midnight because you had
made a kind of promise to come in. Then I--I 'counted the pieces.'"

Her face whitened beneath the clear skin. "Oh, so we list----" she
began, turning on me, then checked herself. "I tell you this," she said,
her hand trembling, "I'm sick of it all. Those--those fools! Ph! I
thought that you, being as you are--snippeting along out of the
night--might understand. There's such a thing as friendship on false
pretences, Miss M."

Was she, too, addressing, as she supposed, a confidant hardly more
external to herself than that inward being whom we engage in such
endless talk and argument? Her violence shocked me; still more her
"fools." For the word was still next-door neighbour in my mind to the
dreadful "_Raca_."

"'Understand,'" I said, "I do, if you would only let me. You just hide
in your--in your own outside. You think because I am as I am that I'm
only of that much account. It's you are the--foolish. Oh, don't let us
quarrel. You just came. I never knew. Every hour, every minute...."
Inarticulate my tongue might be, but my face told its tale. She must
have heard many similar confessions, yet an almost childish incredulity
lightened in hers.

"Keep there," she said; "keep there! I won't be a moment."

She hastened out of the room with the tea things, poising an instant
like a bird on a branch as she pushed open the door with her foot. The
slave left behind her listened to her footsteps dying away in a mingling
of shame, sorrow, and of a happiness beyond words. I know now that it is
not when we are near people that we reach themselves, not, I mean, in
their looks and words, but only by following their thoughts to where the
spirit within plays and has its being. Perhaps if I had realized this
earlier,

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