There had been no need to reserve the small hours for these ruminations.
The next few days were wet and windy; every glance at the streaming
panes cast my mind into a sort of vacancy. The wind trumpeted smoke into
the room; I could fix my mind on nothing. Then the weather faired. There
came "a red sky at night," and Spica flashing secrets to me across the
darkness; and that supper-time I referred as casually as possible to Mr
Anon.
"I suppose one _must_ keep one's promises, Mrs Bowater, even to a
stranger. Would half-past six be too early to keep mine, do you think?
Would it look too--forward? Of course he may have forgotten all about me
by this time."
Mrs Bowater eyed me like an owl as I bent my cheeks over my bowl of
bread and milk, and proceeded to preach me yet another little sermon on
the ways of the world. Nevertheless, the next morning saw us setting out
together in the crisp, sparkling air to my tryst, with the tacit
understanding that she accompanied me rather in the cause of propriety
than romance.
Owing, I fancy, to a bunion, she was so leisurely a walker that it was I
who must set my pace to hers. But the day promised to be warm, and we
could take our ease. As we wandered on among the early flowers and
bright, green grass, and under the beeches, a mildness lightened into
her face. Over her long features lay a vacant yet happy smile, of which
she seemed to be unaware. This set me off thinking in the old, old
fashion; comparing my lot with that of ordinary human beings. How
fortunate I was. If only she could have seen the lowlier plants as I
could--scarcely looking down on any, and of the same stature as some
among the taller of them, so that the air around me was dyed and
illumined with their clear colours, and burthened with their breath.
The least and humblest of them--not merely crisp-edged lichen,
speckle-seed whitlow-grass and hyssop in the wall--are so close to
earth, the wonder, indeed, is that common-sized people ever see them at
all. They must, at any rate, I thought, commit themselves to their
stomachs, or go down on their knees to see them _properly_. So, on we
went, Mrs Bowater and I, she pursuing her private musings, and I mine.
I smiled to myself at remembrance of Dr Phelps and his blushes. After
all, if humanity should "dwindle into a delicate littleness," it would
make a good deal more difference than he had supposed. What a
destruction would ensue, among all the lesser creatures of the earth,
the squirrels, moles, voles, hedgehogs, and the birds, not to mention
the bees and hornets. _They_ would be the enemies then--the traps and
poisons and the nets! No more billowy cornfields a good yard high, no
more fine nine-foot hedges flinging their blossoms into the air. And all
the long-legged, "doubled," bloated garden flowers, gone clean out of
favour. It would be a little world, would it be a happier? The dwarfed
Mrs Bowaters, Dr Phelpses, Miss Bullaces, Lady Pollackes.
But there was little chance of such an eventuality--at least in my
lifetime. It was far likelier that the Miss M.'s of the world would
continue to be a by-play. Yet, as I glanced up at my companion, and
called to mind other such "Lapland Giants" of mine, I can truthfully
avouch that I did not much envy their extra inches. So much more
thin-skinned surface to be kept warm and unscratched. The cumbersome
bones, the curious distance from foot and fingertip to brain, too; and
those quarts and quarts of blood. I shuddered. It was little short of a
miracle that they escaped continual injury; and what an extended body in
which to die.
On the other hand, what real loss was mine--with so much to my
advantage? These great spreading beech-trees were no less shady and
companionable to me than to them. Nor, thought I, could moon or sun or
star or ocean or mountain be any the less silvery, hot, lustrous, and
remote, forlorn in beauty, or vast in strangeness, one way or the other,
than they are to ordinary people. Could there be any doubt at all, too,
that men had always coveted to make much finer and more delicate things
than their clumsiness allowed?
What fantastic creatures they were!--with their vast mansions,
pyramids, palaces, scores of sizes too large either for carcass or mind.
Their Satan a monster on whose wrist the vulture of the Andes could
perch like an aphis on my thumb; yet their Death but skeleton-high, and
their Saviour of such a stature that wellnigh without stooping He could
have laid His fingers on my head.
Time's sands had been trickling fast while I thought these small
thoughts that bright spring daybreak. So, though we had loitered on our
way, it seemed we had reached our destination on the wings of the
morning. Alas, Mrs Bowater's smile can have been only skin-deep; for,
when, lifting my eyes from the ground I stopped all of a sudden, spread
out my hands, and cried in triumph, "There! Mrs Bowater"; she hardly
shared my rapture.
She disapproved of the vast, blank "barn of a place," with its blackshot
windows and cold chimneys. The waste and ruination of the garden
displeased her so much that I grew a little ashamed of my barbarism.
"It's all going to wrack and ruin," she exclaimed, snorting at my stone
summer-house no less emphatically than she had snorted at Mrs Monnerie.
"Not a walkable walk, nor the trace of a border; and was there ever such
a miggle-maggle of weeds! A fine house in its prime, miss, but now,
money melting away like butter in the sun."
"But," said I, standing before her in the lovely light amid the dwelling
dewdrops, "really and truly, Mrs Bowater, it is only going back to its
own again. What you call a miggle-maggle is what these things were made
to be. They are growing up now by themselves; and if you could look as
close as I can, you'd see they breathe only what each can spare. They
are just racing along to live as wildly as they possibly can. It's the
tameness," I expostulated, flinging back my hood, "that would be
shocking to _me_."
Mrs Bowater looked down at me, listening to this high-piped recitative
with an unusual inquisitiveness.
"Well, that's as it may be," she retorted, "but what _I'm_ asking is,
Where's the young fellow? He don't seem to be as punctual as they were
when I was a girl."
My own eyes had long been busy, but as yet in vain.
"I did not come particularly to see him," was my airy reply. "Besides,
we said no time--_any_ fine day. Shall we sit down?"
With a secretive smile Mrs Bowater spread a square of waterproof
sheeting over a flat stone that had fallen out of the coping of the
house, unfolded a newspaper over the grass, and we began our breakfast.
Neither of us betrayed much appetite for it; she, I fancy, having
already fortified herself out of her brown teapot before leaving the
house, and I because of the odour of india-rubber and newspaper--an
odour presently intensified by the moisture and the sun. Paying no heed
to my fastidious nibblings, she munched on reflectively, while I grew
more and more ill at ease, first because the "young fellow" was almost
visibly sinking in my old friend's esteem, and next because her
cloth-booted foot lay within a few inches of the stone beneath which was
hidden Fanny's letter.
"It'll do you good, the sea," she remarked presently, after sweeping yet
one more comprehensive glance around her, "and we can only hope Mrs
Monnerie will be as good as her word. A spot like this--trespassing or
not--is good for neither man nor beast. And when you are young the more
human company you get, with proper supervising, the better."
"Were _you_ happy as a girl, Mrs Bowater?" I inquired after a pause.
Our voices went up and up into the still, mild air. "Happy enough--for
my own good," she said, neatly screwing up her remaining biscuits in
their paper bag. "In my days children were brought up. Taught to make
themselves useful. I would as soon have lifted a hand against my mother
as answer her back."
"You mean she--she whipped you?"
"If need be," my landlady replied complacently, folding her
thread-gloved hands on her lap and contemplating the shiny toecaps of
her boots. "She had large hands, my mother; and plenty of temper kept
well under control. What's more, if life isn't a continual punishment
for the stoopidities and wickedness of others, not to mention ourselves,
then it must be even a darker story than was ever told me."
"And was, Mrs Bowater, Mr Bowater your--your first----" I looked
steadily at a flower at my foot in case she might be affected at so
intimate a question, and not wish me to see her face.
"If Mr Bowater was not the first," was her easy response, "he may well
live to boast of being the last. Which is neither here nor there, for we
may be sure he's enjoying attentive nursing. Broken bones are soon
mended. It's when things are disjointed from the root that the wrench
comes."
The storm-felled bole lay there beside us, as if for picture to her
parable. I began to think rather more earnestly than I had intended to
that morning. In my present state of conscience, it was never an easy
matter to decide whether Mrs Bowater's comments on life referred openly
to things in general or covertly to me in particular. How fortunate that
the scent of Fanny's notepaper was not potent enough to escape from its
tomb. And whether or not, speech seemed less dangerous than silence.
"It seems to me, Mrs Bowater," I began rather hastily, "at least to
judge from my own father and mother, that a man _depends_ very much on a
woman. Men don't seem to grow up in the same way, though I suppose they
are practical enough as men."
"If it were one female," was the reply, "there'd be less to be found
fault with. That poor young creature over there took her life for no
better reason, even though the reason was turned inside out as you may
say."
I met the frightful, louring stare of the house. "What was her name?" I
whispered--but into nothing, for, bolt upright as she was, Mrs Bowater
had shut her eyes, as if in preparation for a nap.
A thread-like tangle of song netted the air. We were, indeed,
trespassers. I darted my glance this way and that, in and out of the
pale green whispering shadows in this wild haunt. Then, realizing by
some faint stir in my mind that the stiff, still, shut-away figure
beside me was only feigning to be asleep, I opened the rain-warped
covers of my _Sense and Sensibility_, and began plotting how to be rid
of her for a while, so that my solitude might summon my stranger, and I
might recover Fanny's letter.
Then once more I knew. Raising my eyes, I looked straight across at him,
scowling there beneath his stunted thorn in a drift of flowers like
fool's parsley. He was making signs, too, with his hands. I watched him
pensively, in secret amusement. Then swifter than Daphne into her
laurel, instantaneously _he_ vanished, and _I_ became aware that its
black eyes were staring out from the long face of the motionless figure
beside me, as might an owl's into an aviary.
"Did you hear a bird, Mrs Bowater?" I inquired innocently.
"When I was a girl," said the mouth, "sparrowhawks were a common sight,
but I never heard one sing."
"But isn't a sparrowhawk quite a large bird?"
"We must judge," said Mrs Bowater, "not by the size, but the kind.
Elseways, miss, your old friend might have been found sleeping, as they
say, at her box." She pretended to yawn, gathered her legs under her,
and rose up and up. "I'll be taking a little walk round. And you shall
tell your young acquaintance that I mean him no harm, but that I mean
you the reverse; and if show himself he won't, well, here I sit till the
Day of Judgment."
An angry speech curled the tip of my tongue. But the simple-faced
flowers were slowly making obeisance to Mrs Bowater's black, dragging
skirts, and when she was nearly out of sight I sallied out to confront
my stranger.
His face was black with rage and contempt. "_That_ contaminating
scarecrow; who's she?" was his greeting. "The days I have waited!"
The resentment that had simmered up in me on his behalf now boiled over
against him. I looked at him in silence.
"That contaminating scarecrow, as you are pleased to call her, is the
best friend I have in the world. I need no other."
"And I," he said harshly, "have no friend in _this_ world, and need
you."
"Then," said I, "you have lost your opportunity. Do you suppose I am a
child--to be insulted and domineered over only because I am alone?
Possibly," and my lips so trembled that I could hardly frame the words,
"it is _your_ face I shall see when I think of those windows."
I was speaking wiselier than I knew. He turned sharply, and by a play of
light it seemed that at one of them there stood looking down on us out
of the distance a shape that so had watched for ever, leering darkly out
of the void. And there awoke in me the sense of this stranger's
extremity of solitude, of his unhappy disguise, of his animal-like
patience.
"Why," I said, "Mrs Bowater! You might far rather be _thanking_ her
for--for----"
"Curses on her," he choked, turning away. "There was everything to tell
you."
"What everything?"
"Call her back now," he muttered furiously.
"That," I said smoothly, "is easily done. But, forgive me, I don't know
your name."
His eyes wandered over the turf beneath me, mounted slowly up, my foot
to my head, and looked into mine. In their intense regard I seemed to be
but a bubble floating away into the air. I shivered, and turned my back
on him, without waiting for an answer. He followed me as quietly as a
sheep.
Mrs Bowater had already come sauntering back to our breakfast table, and
with gaze impassively fixed on the horizon, pretended not to be aware of
our approach.
I smiled back at my companion as we drew near. "This, Mrs Bowater," said
I, "is Mr Anon. Would you please present him to Miss Thomasina of
Bedlam?"
For a moment or two they stood facing one another, just as I have seen
two insects stand--motionless, regardful, exchanging each other's
presences. Then, after one lightning snap at him from her eye, she rose
to my bait like a fish. "A pleasant morning, sir," she remarked affably,
though in her Bible voice. "My young lady and I were enjoying the spring
air."
Back to memory comes the darkness of a theatre, and Mrs Monnerie
breathing and sighing beside me, and there on the limelit green of the
stage lolls ass-headed Bottom the Weaver cracking jokes with the
Fairies.
My Oberon addressed Mrs Bowater as urbanely as St George must have
addressed the Dragon--or any other customary monster.
He seemed to pass muster, none the less, for she rose, patted her sheet,
pushed forward her bonnet on to her rounded temples, and bade him a
composed good-morning. She would be awaiting me, she announced, in an
hour's time under my beech tree.
"I think, perhaps, _two_, Mrs Bowater," I said firmly.
She gave me a look--all our long slow evening firelit talks together
seemed to be swimming in its smile; and withdrew.
The air eddied into quiet again. The stretched-out blue of the sky was
as bland and solitary as if a seraph sat dreaming on its Eastern
outskirts. Mr Anon and I seated ourselves three or four feet apart, and
I watched the sidelong face, so delicately carved against the green;
yet sunken in so sullen a stare.
Standing up on his feet against the background of Mrs Bowater's
ink-black flounces, with his rather humped shoulders and straight hair,
he had looked an eccentric, and, even to my view, a stunted figure. Now
the whole scene around us seemed to be sorting itself into a different
proportion before my eyes. He it was who was become the unit of space,
the yard-stick of the universe. The flowers, their roots glintily netted
with spider-webs, nodded serenely over his long hands. A peacock
butterfly with folded colours sipped of the sunshine on a tuft nearly at
evens with his cheek. The very birds sang to his size, and every rift
between the woodlands awaited the cuckoo. Only his clothes were
grotesque, but less so than in my parlour Mr Crimble's skirts, or even
Lady Pollacke's treacherous bonnet.
I folded my white silk gloves into a ball. A wren began tweeting in a
bush near by. "I am going away soon," I said, "to the sea."
The wren glided away out of sight amongst its thorns. I knew by his
sudden stillness that this had been unwelcome news. "That will be very
pleasant for me, won't it?" I said.
"The sea?" he returned coldly, with averted head. "Well, _I_ am bound
still further."
The reply fretted me. I wanted bare facts just then. "Why are you so
angry? What is your name? And where do you live?" It was my turn to ask
questions, and I popped them out as if from a _Little by Little_.
And then, with his queer, croaking, yet captivating voice, he broke into
a long, low monologue. He gave me his name--and "Mr Anon" describes him
no worse. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the house he
lived in. But instead of apologizing for his ill-temper, he accused me
of deceiving and humiliating him; of being, so I gathered, a toy of my
landlady's, of betraying and soiling myself.
Why all this wild stuff only seemed to flatter me, I cannot say. I
listened and laughed, pressing flat with both hands the sorry covers of
my book, and laughed also low in my heart.
"Oh, contempt!" he cried. "I am used to that."
The words curdled on his tongue as he expressed his loathing of poor Mrs
Bowater and her kind--mere Humanity--that ate and drank in musty houses
stuck up out of the happy earth like warts on the skin, that battened
on meat, stalked its puddled streets and vile, stifling towns, spread
its rank odours on the air, increased and multiplied. Monstrous in
shape, automatic, blinded by habit, abandoned by instinct, monkey-like,
degraded!
What an unjust tirade! He barked it all out at me as if the blame were
mine; as if _I_ had nibbled the Apple. I turned my face away, smiling,
but listening. Did I realize, he asked me, what a divine fortune it was
to be so little, and in this to be All. On and on he raved: I breathed
air "a dewdrop could chill"; I was as near lovely naught made visible as
the passing of a flower; the mere mattering of a dream. And when I died
my body would be but a perishing flake of manna, and my bones....
"Yes, a wren's picking," I rudely interrupted. "And what of my soul,
please? Why, you talk like--like a poet. Besides, you tell me nothing
new. I was thinking all that and more on my way here with my landlady.
What has _size_ to do with it? Why, when I thought of my mother after
she was dead, and peered down in the place of my imagination into her
grave, I saw her spirit--young, younger than I, and bodiless, and
infinitely more beautiful even than she had been in my dreams, floating
up out of it, free, sweet, and happy, like a flame--though shadowy.
Besides, I don't see how you can help _pitying_ men and women. They seem
to fly to one another for company; and half their comfort is in their
numbers."
Never in all my life had I put my thoughts into words like this; and
he--a stranger.
There fell a silence between us. The natural quietude of the garden was
softly settling down and down like infinitesimal grains of sand in a
pool of water. It had forgotten that humans were harbouring in its
solitude. And still he maintained that his words were not untrue, that
he knew mankind better than I, that to fall into their ways and follow
their opinions and strivings was to deafen my ears, and seal up my eyes,
and lose my very self. "The Self everywhere," he said.
And he told me, whether in time or space I know not, of a country whose
people were of my stature and slenderness. This was a land, he said,
walled in by enormous, ice-capped mountains couching the furnace of the
rising sun, and yet set at the ocean's edge. Its sand-dunes ring like
dulcimers in the heat. Its valleys of swift rivers were of a green so
pale and vivid and so flower-encrusted that an English--even a
Kentish--spring is but a coarse and rustic prettiness by comparison.
Vine and orange and trees of outlandish names gave their fruits there;
yet there also willows swept the winds, and palms spiked the blue with
their fans, and the cactus flourished with the tamarisk. Geese, of dark
green and snow, were on its inland waters, and a bird clocked the hours
of the night, and the conformation of its stars would be strange to my
eyes. And such was the lowliness and simplicity of this people's
habitations that the most powerful sea-glass, turned upon and searching
their secret haunts from a ship becalmed on the ocean, would spy out
nothing--nothing there, only world wilderness of snow-dazzling
mountain-top and green valley, ravine, and condor, and what might just
be Nature's small ingenuities--mounds and traceries. Yet within all was
quiet loveliness, feet light as goldfinches', silks fine as gossamer,
voices as of a watery beading of silence. And their life being all
happiness they have no name for their God. And it seems--according to Mr
Anon's account of it--that such was the ancient history of the world,
that Man was so once, but had swollen to his present shape, of which he
had lost the true spring and mastery, and had sunk deeper and deeper
into a kind of oblivion of the mind, suffocating his past, and now all
but insane with pride in his own monstrosities.
All this my new friend (and yet not so _very_ new, it seemed)--all this
he poured out to me in the garden, though I can only faintly recall his
actual words, as if, like Moses, I had smitten the rock. And I listened
weariedly, with little hope of understanding him, and with the suspicion
that it was nothing but a Tom o' Bedlam's dream he was recounting. Yet,
as if in disproof of my own incredulity, there sat I; and over the trees
yonder stood Mrs Bowater's ugly little brick house; and beyond that, the
stony, tapering spire of St Peter's, the High Street. And I looked at
him without any affection in my thoughts, and wished fretfully to be
gone. What use to be lulled with fantastic pictures of Paradise when I
might have died of fear and hatred on Mrs Stocks's doorstep; when
everything I said was "touching, touching"?
"Well," I mockingly interposed at last, "the farthing dip's guttering.
And what if it's all true, and there _is_ such a place, what then? How
am I going to get there, pray? Would you like to mummy me and shut me up
in a box and _carry_ me there, as they used to in Basman? Years and
years ago my father told me of the pygmy men and horses--the same size
as yours, I suppose--who lived in caves on the banks of the Nile. But I
doubt if I believed in them much, even then. I am not so ignorant as all
that."
The life died out of his face, just as, because of a cloud carried up
into the sky, the sunlight at that moment fled from Wanderslore. He
coughed, leaning on his hands, and looked in a scared, empty, hunted
fashion to right and left. "Only that you might stay," he scarcely
whispered. " ... I love you."
Instinctively I drew away, lips dry, and heart numbly, heavily beating.
An influence more secret than the shadow of a cloud had suddenly chilled
and darkened the garden and robbed it of its beauty. I shrank into
myself, cold and awkward, and did not dare even to glance at my
companion.
"A fine thing," was all I found to reply, "for a toy, as you call me. I
don't know what you mean."
Miserable enough that memory is when I think of what came after, for now
my only dread was that he might really be out of his wits, and might
make my beloved, solitary garden for ever hateful to me. I drew close my
cape, and lifted my book.
"There is a private letter of mine hidden under that stone," I said
coldly. "Will you please be so good as to fetch it out for me? And you
are never, never to say that again."
The poor thing looked so desperately ill and forsaken with his humped
shoulders--and that fine, fantastic story still ringing in my
ears!--that a kind of sadness came over me, and I hid my face in my
hands.
"The letter is not there," said his voice.
I drew my fingers from my face, and glared at him from between them;
then scrambled to my feet. Out swam the sun again, drenching all around
us with its light and heat.
"Next time I come," I shrilled at him, "the letter _will_ be there. The
thief will have put it back again! Oh, how unhappy you have made me!"