Her head was turned away from me, a striped parasol leaned over her
shoulder. With a faintly defiant tilt of her beautiful head, as if
exclaiming, "See, Strangeness, I come!" she stepped firmly on over the
turf. A breath of some delicate indoor perfume was wafted across to my
nostrils. I clung to my stone, watching her.
Simply because it seemed a meanness to play the spy on her in her
solitude, I called her name. But her start of surprise was mere
feigning. The silk of her parasol encircled her shoulders like an
immense nimbus. Her eyes dwelt on me, as if gathering up the strands of
an unpleasing memory.
"Ah, Midgetina," she called softly, "it is you, is it, on your little
stone? Are you better?" The very voice seemed conscious of its own
cadences. "What a delicious old garden. The contrast!"
The contrast. With a cold gathering apprehension at my heart I glanced
around me. Why was it that of all people only Fanny could so shrink me
up like this into my body? And there floated back to remembrance the
vast, dazzling room, the flower-clotted table, and, in that hideous
vertigo, a face frenzied with disgust and rage, a hand flung out to cast
me off. But I entered her trap none the less.
"Contrast, Fanny?"
"No, _no_, now, my dear! Not quite so disingenuous as all that,
_please_. You can't have quite forgotten the last time we met."
"There was nothing in that, Fanny. Only that the midge was drunk. You
should see the wasps over there in the nectarines."
"Only?" she echoed lightly, raising her eyebrows. "I am not sure that
every one would put it quite like that. You couldn't see yourself, you
see. They call you little Miss Cassandra now. Woe! Woe! you know. Mrs
Monnerie asked me if I thought you were--you know--'all there,' as they
say."
"I don't care what they say."
"If I weren't an old friend," she returned with crooked lip, "you might
be made to care. I have brought the money you were kind enough to lend
me; I'll give it you when I have unpacked--to-morrow night."
My body sank into a stillness that might well have betrayed its mind's
confusion to a close observer. _Had_ she lingered satirically,
meaningly, on those two last words? "I don't want the money, Fanny:
aren't you generous enough to accept a gift?"
"Well," said she, "it needs a good deal of generosity sometimes. Surely,
a gift depends upon the spirit in which it is given. That last little
message, now--was that, shall we say, an acceptable gift?" Her tones
lost their silkiness. "See here, Midgetina," she went on harshly, "you
and I are going to talk all this out. But I'm thirsty. I hate this
spawning sun. Where are the nectarines?"
Much against my will I turned my back on her, and led her off to the
beehives.
"One for you," she said, stooping forward, balancing the sheeny toe of
her shoe on the brown mould, "and the rest for me. Catch!" She dropped a
wasp-bitten, pulpy fruit into my hands. "Now then. It's shadier here. No
eavesdroppers. Just you and me and God. _Please_ sit down?"
There was no choice. Down I sat; and she on a low wooden seat opposite
me in the shade, her folded parasol beside her, the leaf-hung wall
behind. She bit daintily into the juicy nectarine poised between finger
and thumb, and watched me with a peculiar fixed smile, as if of
admiration, on her pale face.
"Tell me, pretty Binbin," she began again, "what is the name of that
spiked red and blue and violet thing behind your back? It colours the
edges of your delicate china cheeks. Most becoming!"
It was viper's bugloss--a stray, I told her, shifting my head uneasily
beneath her scrutiny.
"Ah, yes, _viper's_ bugloss. Personally I prefer the common variety.
Though no doubt that may stray, too. But fie, fie! You naughty thing,"
she sprang up and plucked another nectarine, "you have been blacking
your eyebrows. I shouldn't have dreamt it of you. What would mother
say?"
"Listen, Fanny," I said, pronouncing the words as best I could with a
tongue that seemed to be sticking to the roof of my mouth; "I am tired
of the garden. What do you really want to say to me? I don't much care
for your--your fun."
"And I just beginning to enjoy it! There's contrariness!--To _say_?
Well, now, a good deal, my dear. I thought of writing. But it's
better--safer to talk. The first thing is this. While you have been
malingering down here I have had to face the whole Monnerie orchestra.
It hasn't been playing quite in tune; and you know why. That lovesick
Susan, now, and her nice young man. But since you seem to be quite
yourself again--more of yourself than ever, in fact: listen." I gazed,
almost hypnotized, through the sunshine into her shady face.
"What I am going to suggest," she went on smoothly, "concerns only you
and me. If you and I are to go on living in the same house--which heaven
forbid--I give you fair warning that we shall have nothing more to do
with one another than is absolutely inevitable. I am not so forgiving as
I ought to be, Midgetina, and insults rankle. Treachery, still more."
The low voice trembled.
"Oh, yes, you may roll your innocent little eyes and look as harmless as
a Chinese god, but answer me this: Am _I_ a hypocrite? Am I? And while
you are thinking it over, hadn't you better tumble that absurd little
pumpkin off your knee? It's staining your charming frock."
"I never said you were a hypocrite," I choked.
"No?" The light gleamed on the whites of her eyes as they roved to and
fro. "Then I say, _you_ are. Fair to face, false to back. Who first
trapped me out star-gazing in the small hours, then played informer? Who
wheedled her way on with her mincing humbug--poof! _naivete!_--and set
my own mother against me? Who told some one--_you_ know who--that I was
not to be trusted, and far better cast-off? Who stuffed that
lackadaisical idiot of a Sukie Monnerie with all _those_ old horrors?
Who warned that miserable little piece of deformity that I might
come--borrowing? Who hoped to betray me by sending an envelope through
the post packed with mousey bits of paper? Who made me a guy, a
laughing-stock and poisoned---- Oh, it's a long score, Miss M. When I
think of it all, what I've endured--well, honestly when a wasp crawls
out of my jam, I remind myself that it's stinged."
The light smouldering eyes held me fast. "You mean, I suppose, Fanny,
that you'd just kill it," I mumbled, looking up into her distorted face.
"I don't think I should much mind even that. But it's no use. It would
take hours to answer your questions. You have only put them your own
way. They may sound true. But in your heart you know they are false. Why
should you bother to hurt me? You know--you know how idiotically I loved
you."
"_Loved me, false, kill_," echoed Fanny scornfully, with a leer which
transformed her beauty into a mere vulgar grimace. "Is there any end to
the deceits of the little gaby? Do you really suppose that to be loved
is a new experience for me; that I'm not smeared with it wherever I go;
that I care a snap of my fingers whether I'm loved or not; that I
couldn't win through without that? Is that what you suppose? Well, then,
here's one more secret. Open your ears. I am going to marry Percy
Maudlen. Yes, _that_ weed of a creature. You may remember my little
prophecy when he brought his Aunt Alice's manikin some lollipops. Well,
the grace of God is too leisurely, and since you and I are both, I
suppose, of the same sex, I tell you I care no more for him than
that----" She flung the nectarine stone at the beehive. "And I _defy_
you, defy you to utter a word. I am glad I was born what I am. All your
pretty little triumphs, first to last, what are they?--accidents and
insults. Isn't half the world kicking down the faces of those beneath
them on the ladder? _I_ have had to fight for a place. And I tell you
this: I am going to teach these supercilious money-smelling ladies a
lesson. I am going to climb till I can sneer down on _them_. And Mrs
Monnerie is going to help me. She doesn't care a jot for God or man. But
she enjoys intelligence, and loves a fighter. Is that candour? Is it
now?"
"I detest Percy Maudlen," I replied faintly. "And as for sneering, that
only makes another wall. Oh, Fanny, do listen to yourself, to what you
are. I swear I'm not the sneak you think me. I'd help you, if I could,
to my last breath. Indeed, I would. Yes, and soon I _can_."
"Thank you: and I'd rather suffocate than accept your help--now. Listen
to myself, indeed! That's just the pious hypocrite all over. Well,
declarations of love you know quite enough about for your--for your age.
Now you shall hear one of a different kind. I tell you, Midgetina, I
hate you: I can't endure the sight or sound or creep or thought of you
any longer. Why? Because of your unspeakable masquerade. You play the
pygmy; pygmy you are: carried about, cosseted, smirked at, fattened on
nightingales' tongues--the last, though, you'll ever eat. But where have
you come from? What are you in your past--in your mind? I ask you that:
a thing more everywhere, more thief-like, more detestable than a
conscience. Look at me, as we sit here now. _I_ am the monstrosity. You
see it, you think it, you hate even to touch me. From first moment to
last you have secretly despised me--me! I'm not accusing you. You
weren't your own maker. As often as not you don't know what you are
saying. You are just an automaton. But these last nights I have lain
awake and thought of it all. It came on me as if my life had been
nothing but a filthy, aimless nightmare; and chiefly because of you.
I've worked, I've thought, I've contrived and forced my way. Oh, that
house, the wranglings, the sermons. Did I make myself what I am, ask to
be born? No, it's all a devilish plot. And I say this, that while things
are as they are, and this life is life, and this world _my_ world, I
refuse to be watched and taunted and goaded and defamed."
Her face stooped closer, fascinating, chilling me like a cold cloud with
its bright, hunted, malevolent stare. She stretched out a hand and wrung
my shoulder. "Listen, I say. Come out of that trance! I loathe you, you
holy imp. You haunt me!"
My eyes shut. I sat shivering, empty of self, listening, as if lost in a
fog in a place desperately strange to me; and only a distant sea
breaking and chafing on its stones far below. Then once more I became
conscious of the steady and resolute droning of the bees; felt the
breathing of actuality on my hair, on my cheek. My eyes opened on a
garden sucked dry of colour and reality, and sought her out. She had
left me, was standing a few paces distant now, looking back, as if
dazed, her lips pale, her eyes dark-ringed.
"Perhaps you didn't quite hear all that, Midgetina. You led me on. You
force things out of me till I am sick. But some day, when you are as
desperate as I have been, it will come back to you. Then you'll know
what it is to be human. But there can't be any misunderstanding left
now, can there?"