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.