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 perhapsnot," he replied at last, as if giving me the result of a mathematical calculation.
"I suppose, Dr Phelps," I then inquired, "theremightbe 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 thepatientscoming 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 choosethatkind 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,nobodycan 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 themthinkingpretty 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.Itry to make myself clear toyou. So extremescanmeet; 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 ortwo 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 naïve remarks made by her pupils, and Mr Crimble capped them with a collection of biblicalbons motsculled 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. Withalmost 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 hisbreasthe beat; not hischest," 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 Phelpswouldsing," said Fanny in a small voice, passing him the sugar.
"He must, he shall," said Mr Crimble, in extreme jubilation. "So that's settled.Thankyou, 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 andbonhomiewere 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,notat 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.
"NowwasI?" 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 beingpresent, 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 thetitlesand 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. Whatcouldhave 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 toanyyoung 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—thosefools! 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, I shouldn't have fallen so easy a prey to Fanny Bowater. I waited—but that particular exchange of confidences was never to be completed. A key sounded in the latch. Fanny had but time to show herself with stooping, almost serpent-like head, in the doorway. "To-night!" she whispered. "And not a word, not a word!"
Was there suspicion in the face of Mrs Bowater that evening? Our usual familiar talk dwindled to a few words this supper-time. The old conflict was raging in my mind—hatred of my deceit, horror at betraying an accomplice, and longing for the solemn quiet and solitude of the dark. I crushed my doubtings down and cast a dismal, hostile look at the long face, so yellow of skin and sombre in expression. When would she be gone and leave me in peace? The packed little parlour hung stagnant in the candlelight. It seemed impossible that Mrs Bowater could not hear the thoughts in my mind. Apparently not. She tidied up my few belongings, which, contrary to my usual neat habits, I had left scattered over the table. She bade me good-night; but paused in the doorway to look back at me. But what intimacy she had meant to share with me was put aside. "Good-night, miss," she repeated; "and I'm sure, God bless you." It was the dark, quiet look that whelmed over me. I gazed mutely, without response, and the silence was broken by a clear voice like that of a cautious mocking-bird out of a wood.
It called softly on two honeyed notes, "Mo—ther!"
The house draped itself in quiet. Until ten had struck, and footsteps had ascended to the rooms overhead, I kept close in my bedchamber. Then I hastily put on my outdoor clothes, shivering not with cold, but with expectation, and sat down by the fire, prepared for the least sound that would prove that Fanny had not forgotten our assignation. But I waited in vain. The cold gathered. The vaporous light of the waning moon brightened in the room. The cinders fainted to a darker glow. I heard the kitchen clock with its cracked, cantankerous stroke beat out eleven. Its solemn mate outside, who had seemingly lost his voice, ticked on.
Hope died out in me, leaving an almost physical nausea, a profound hatred of myself and even of being alive. "Well," a cold voice said in my ear, "that's how we are treated; thatcomes of those eyes we cannot forget. Cheated, cheated again, my friend."
In those young days disappointment set my heart aching with a bitterness less easy to bear than it is now. No doubt I was steeped in sentimentality and folly. It was the vehemence of this new feeling that almost terrified me. But my mind was my world; it is my only excuse. I could not get out ofthatby merely turning a tiny key in a Brahma lock. Nor could I betake myself to bed. How sleep in such an inward storm of reproaches, humiliation, and despised love?
I drew down my veil, wrapped my shawl closer round my shoulders, descended my staircase, and presently stood in the porch in confrontation of the night. Low on the horizon, at evens with me across space, and burning with a limpid fire, hung my chosen—Sirius. The sudden sight of him pouring his brilliance into my eyes brought a revulsion of feeling. He was "cutting me dead." I brazened him down. I trod with exquisite caution down the steps, daring but one fleeting glance, as I turned, at Fanny's window. It was blinded, empty. Toiling on heavily up the hill, I sourly comforted myself with the vow that she should realize how little I cared, that her room had been sweeter than her company. Never more would I put trust in "any child of man."
Gradually, however, the quiet night received me into its peace (just as, poor soul, did the Moor Desdemona), and its influence stole into my darkened mind. The smooth, columnar boughs of the beeches lifted themselves archingly into the sky. Soon I was climbing over the moss-bound roots of my customary observatory. But this night the stars were left for a while unsignalled and unadmired. The crisped, frost-lined leaves scattered between the snake-like roots sparkled faintly. Years seemed to have passed away, dwindled in Time's hour-glass, since my previous visit. That Miss M. had ghosted herself away for ever. In my reverie the vision of Fanny re-arose into my imagination—that secret still fountain—of herself. Asleep now.... I could no more free myself from her sorcery than I could disclaim the two hands that lay in my lap. She was indeed more closely mine than they—and nearer in actuality than I had imagined.
A faint stir in the woods suddenly caught my attention. The sound neared. I pressed my hand to my breast, torn now between two incentives, two desires—to fly, to stay. And on the path by which I had come, appeared, some yards distant, in the faint trickling light, the dark figure of my dreams.
She was dressed in a black cloak, its peaked old-fashioned hood drawn over her head. The moonbeams struck its folds as she moved. Her face was bowed down a little, her hand from within clutching her cloak together. And I realized instinctively and with joy that the silence and solitude of the woods alarmed her. It was I who was calm and self-contained. She paused and looked around her—stood listening with lips divided that yet could not persuade themselves to call me by name. For my part, I softly gathered myself closer together and continued to gloat. And suddenly out of the far-away of the woods a nightbird loosed its cry: "A-hoo.... Ahoo-oo-oo-hooh!"
There is a hunter in us all. I laughed inwardly as I watched. A few months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer ... but let me keep to one thing at a time. I needled myself in, and, almost hooting the sound through my mouth, as if in echo of the bird, I heard myself call stealthily across the air, "Fanny!—Fanny Bowater!"
The cloaked figure recoiled, with lifted head, like the picture of a fawn I have seen, and gazed in my direction. Seeing nothing of me amidst the leaves and shadows, she was about to flee, when I called again:—
"It is I, Fanny. Here: here!"
Instantly she woke to herself, came near, and looked down on me. No movement welcomed her. "I was tired of waiting," I yawned. "There is nothing to be frightened about."
Many of her fellow creatures, I fancy, have in their day wearied of waiting for Fanny Bowater, but few have had the courage or sagacity to tell her so. She had not recovered her equanimity fully enough to refrain from excuses.
"Surely you did not expect me while mother was moving? I am not accustomed, Miss M., to midnight wanderings."
"I gave up expecting you, and was glad to be alone."
The barb fell short. She looked stilly around her. The solemn beeches were like mute giants overarching with their starry,sky-hung boughs the dark, slim figure. What consciousness had they, I wonder, of those odd humans at their roots?
"Alone! Here!" she returned. "But no wonder. It's what you are all about."
A peculiar elation sprang up in me at this none too intelligible remark.
"I wonder, though," she added, "you are not frozen like—like a pebble, sitting there."
"But I am," I said, laughing softly. "It doesn't matter in me, because I'm so easy to thaw. You ought to know that. Oh, Miss Bowater, think if this were summer time and the dew and the first burning heat! Are you wrapped up? And shall we sit here, just—just for one dance of the Sisters: thou lost dove, Merope?"
For there on high—and I had murmured the last words all but inaudibly to myself—there played the spangling Pleiads, clear above her head in the twig-swept sky.
"What sisters?" she inquired, merely humouring me, perhaps.
"The Six, Fanny, look! You cannot see their Seventh—yet she is all thatthatis about." South to north I swept my hand across the powdery firmament. "And I myself trudge along down Watling Street; that's the Milky Way. I don't think, Fanny, I shall ever, ever be weaned. Please, may I call you that?"
She frowned up a moment into the emptiness, hesitated, then—just like a white peacock I had once seen when a child from my godmother's ancient carriage as we rolled by an old low house with terraces smooth as velvet beneath its cedars—she disposed her black draperies upon the ground at a little distance, disclosing, in so doing, beneath their folds the moon-blanched flounces of her party gown. I gazed spellbound. I looked at the white and black, and thought of what there was within their folds, and of the heart within that, and of the spirit of man. Such was my foolish fashion, following idly like a butterfly the scents of the air, flitting on from thought to thought, and so missing the full richness of the one blossom on which I might have hovered.
"Tell me some more," broke suddenly the curious voice into the midst of this reverie.
"Well, there," I cried, "is fickle Algol; the Demon. Andover there where the Crab crawls, is the little Beehive between the Roses."
"Præsepe," drawled Fanny.
"Yes," said I, unabashed, "the Beehive. And crane back your neck, Fanny—there's little Jack-by-the-Middle-Horse; and far down, oh, far down, Berenice's Hair, which would have been Fanny Bowater's Hair, if you had been she."
Even as I looked, a remote film of mist blotted out the infinitesimal cluster. "And see, beyond the Chair," I went on, laughing, and yet exalted with my theme, "that dim in the Girdle is the Great Nebula—s-sh! And on, on, that chirruping Invisible,that, Fanny, is the Midget. Perhaps you cannot even dream of her: but she watches."
"Never even heard of her," said Fanny good-humouredly, withdrawing the angle of her chin from the Ecliptic.
"Say not so, Horatia," I mocked, "there are more things...."
"Oh, yes, I know all about that. And these cold, monotonous old things really please you? Personally, I'd give the whole meaningless scramble of them for another moon."
"But your old glutton has gobbled up half of them already."
"Then my old glutton can gobble up what's left. Who taught you about them? And why," she scanned me closely, "why did you pick out the faintest; do you see them the best?"
"I picked out the faintest because they were meant especially for me so that I could give them to you. My father taught me a little about them; andyourfather the rest."
"Myfather," echoed Fanny, her face suddenly intent.
"His book. Do you miss him? Mine is dead."
"Oh, yes, I miss him," was the serene retort, "and so, I fancy, does mother."
"Oh, Fanny, I am sorry. She told me—something like that."
"You need not be. I suppose God chooses one's parents quite deliberately. Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow!" She smoothed out her black cloak over her ankles, raised her face again into the dwindling moonlight, and gently smiled at me. "I am glad I came, Midgetina, though it's suicidally cold. 'Pardi! on sent Dieu bien à son aise ici.' We are going to be great friends, aren't we?" Her eyes swept over me. "Would you like that?"
"Friends," indeed! and as if she had offered me a lump of sugar.
I gravely nodded. "But I must come to you. You can't come to me. No one has; except, perhaps, my mother—a little."
"Oh, yes," she replied cautiously, piercing her eyes at me, "thatisa riddle. You must tell me about your childhood. Not that I love children, or my own childhood either. I had enough of that to last me a lifetime. I shan't pass it on; though I promise you, Midgetina, if I everdohave a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles, bats, and dormice, and make it like you. Was your mother——" she began again, after a pause of reflection. "Areyousorry, I mean, you aren't—you aren't——?"
Her look supplied the missing words. "Sorry that I am a midget, Fanny? People think I must be. But why? It is all I am, all I ever was. I am myself, inside; like everybody else; and yet, you know, not quite like everybody else. I sometimes think"—I laughed at the memory—"I was asking Dr Phelps about that. Besides, wouldyoube—alone?"
"Not when I was alone, perhaps. Still, it must be rather odd, Miss Needle-in-a-Haystack. As for being alone"—once again our owl, if owl it was, much nearer now, screeched its screech in the wintry woods—"I hate it!"
"But surely," expostulated the wiseacre in me, "that's what we cannot help being. We even die alone, Fanny."
"Oh, but I'm going to help it. I'm not dead yet. Do you ever think of the future?"
For an instant its great black hole yawned close, but I shook my head.
"Well, that," replied she, "is what Fanny Bowater is doing all the time. There's nothing," she added satirically, "so important, so imperative for teachers as learning. And you must learn your lesson, my dear, before you are heard it—if you want to escape a slapping. Every little donkey knows that."
"I suppose the truth is," said I, as if seized with a bright idea, "there are two kinds of ambitions, of wants, I mean. We are all like those Chinese boxes; and some of us want to live in the biggest, the outsidest we can possibly manage; and some in the inmost one of all. The one," I added a little drearily, "no one can share."
"Quite, quite true," said Fanny, mimicking my sententiousness, "the teeniest, tiniest, ickiest one, which no mortal ingenuity has ever been able to open—and so discover the nothing inside. I know your Chinese Boxes!"
"Poor Fanny," I cried, rising up and kneeling beside the ice-cold hand that lay on the frosty leaves. "All that I have shall help you."
Infatuated thing; I stooped low as I knelt, and stroked softly with my own the outstretched fingers on which she was leaning.
I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress. "Fanny," I whispered tragically, "will you please sing to me—if you are not frozenly cold? You remember—the Moon Song: I have never forgotten it; and only three notes, yet it sometimes wakes me at night. It's queer, isn't it, being you and me?"
She laughed, tilting her chin; and her voice began at once to sing, as if at the scarcely opened door of her throat, and a tune so plain it seemed but the words speaking:—
"Twas a Cuckoo, cried 'cuck-oo'In the youth of the year;And the timid things nesting,Crouched, ruffled in fear;And the Cuckoo cried, 'cuck-oo,'For the honest to hear.One—two notes: a bell soundIn the blue and the green;'Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!'And a silence between.Ay, mistress, have a care, lestHarsh love, he hie by,And for kindness a monsterTo nourish you try—In your bosom to lie:'Cuck-oo,' and a 'cuck-oo,'And 'cuck-oo!'"
"Twas a Cuckoo, cried 'cuck-oo'In the youth of the year;And the timid things nesting,Crouched, ruffled in fear;And the Cuckoo cried, 'cuck-oo,'For the honest to hear.
"Twas a Cuckoo, cried 'cuck-oo'
In the youth of the year;
And the timid things nesting,
Crouched, ruffled in fear;
And the Cuckoo cried, 'cuck-oo,'
For the honest to hear.
One—two notes: a bell soundIn the blue and the green;'Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!'And a silence between.
One—two notes: a bell sound
In the blue and the green;
'Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!'
And a silence between.
Ay, mistress, have a care, lestHarsh love, he hie by,And for kindness a monsterTo nourish you try—In your bosom to lie:'Cuck-oo,' and a 'cuck-oo,'And 'cuck-oo!'"
Ay, mistress, have a care, lest
Harsh love, he hie by,
And for kindness a monster
To nourish you try—
In your bosom to lie:
'Cuck-oo,' and a 'cuck-oo,'
And 'cuck-oo!'"
The sounds fell like beads into the quiet—as if a small child had come up out of her heart and gone down again; and shecallous and unmoved. I cannot say why the clear, muted notes saddened and thrilled me so. Wasshethe monster?
I had drawn back, and stayed eyeing her pale face, the high cheek, the delicate straight nose, the darkened lips, the slim black eyebrows, the light, clear, unfathomable eyes reflecting the solitude and the thin brilliance of the wood. Yet the secret of herself remained her own. She tried in vain not to be disturbed at my scrutiny.
"Well," she inquired at last, with motionless glance fixed on the distance. "Do you think you could honestly give me a testimonial, Miss Midget?"
It is strange. The Sphinx had spoken, yet without much enlightenment. "Now look at me," I commanded. "If I went away, you couldn't follow. When you go away, you cannot escape from me. I can go back and—andbewhere I was." My own meaning was half-concealed from me; but a startled something that had not been there before peeped out of those eyes so close to mine.
"If," she said, "I could care like that too, yet wanted nothing, then I should be free too."
"What do you mean?" said I, lifting my hand from the unanswering fingers.
"I mean," she exclaimed, leaping to her feet, "that I'm sick to death of the stars and am going home to bed. Hateful, listening old woods!"
I turned sharp round, as if in apprehension that some secret hearer might have caught her remark. But Fanny stretched out her arms, and, laughing a foolish tune, in affected abandonment began softly to dance in the crisp leaves, quite lost to me again. So twirling, she set off down the path by which she had come trespassing. A physical exhaustion came over me. I watched her no more, but stumbled along, with unheeding eyes, in her wake. What had I not given, I thought bitterly, and this my reward. Thus solitary, I had gone only a little distance, and had reached the outskirts of the woods, when a far from indifferent Fanny came hastening back to intercept me.
And no wonder. She had remembered to attire herself becomingly for her moonlight tryst, but had forgotten the door key. We stood looking at one another aghast, as, from eternity, I suppose, have all fellow-conspirators in danger of discovery.It was I who first awoke to action. There was but one thing to be done, and, warning Fanny that I had never before attempted to unlatch the big front door of her mother's house, I set off resolutely down the hill.
"You walk so slowly!" she said suddenly, turning back on me. "I will carry you."
Again we paused. I looked up at her with an inextricable medley of emotions struggling together in my mind, and shook my head.
"But why, why?" she repeated impatiently. "We could get there in half the time."
"If you couldfly, Fanny, I'd walk," I replied stubbornly.
"You mean——" and her cold anger distorted her face. "Oh, pride! What childish nonsense! And you said we were to be friends. Do you suppose I care whether...?" But the question remained unfinished.
"Iamyour friend," said I, "and that is why I will not, Iwillnot give way to you." It was hardly friendship that gleamed out of the wide eyes then. But mine the victory—a victory in which only a tithe of the spoils, unrecognized by the vanquished, had fallen to the victor.
Without another word she turned on her heel, and for the rest of our dejected journey she might have been mistaken for a cross nurse trailing on pace for pace beside a rebellious child. My dignity was less ruffled than hers, however, and for a brief while I had earned my freedom.
Arrived at the house, dumbly hostile in the luminous night, Fanny concealed herself as best she could behind the gate-post and kept watch on the windows. Far away in the stillness we heard a footfall echoing on the hill. "There is some one coming," she whispered, "you must hurry." She might, I think, have serpented her way in by my own little door. Where theheadleads, the heart may follow. But she did not suggest it. Nor did I.
I tugged and pushed as best I could, but the umbrella with which from a chair I at last managed to draw the upper bolt of the door was extremely cumbersome. The latch for a while resisted my efforts. And the knowledge that Fanny was fretting and fuming behind the gatepost hardly increased my skill. The house was sunken in quiet; Mrs Bowater apparently was sleepingwithout her usual accompaniment; only Henry shared my labours, and he sat moodily at the foot of the stairs, refusing to draw near until at the same moment Fanny entered, and he leapt out.
Once safely within, and the door closed and bolted again, Fanny stood for a few moments listening. Then with a sigh and a curious gesture she bent herself and kissed the black veil that concealed my fair hair.
"I am sorry, Midgetina," she whispered into its folds, "I was impatient. Mother wouldn't have liked the astronomy, you know. That was all. And I am truly sorry for—for——"
"My dear," I replied in firm, elderly tones, whose echo is in my ear to this very day; "My dear, it was my mind you hurt, not my feelings." With that piece of sententiousness I scrambled blindly through my Bates's doorway, shut the door behind me, and more disturbed at heart than I can tell, soon sank into the thronging slumber of the guilty and the obsessed.
When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs Bowater scattered out on the windowsill for my pleasure. And yet—their every virtue, every grace, Fanny Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled breast and song to a thrush, its sheen to a starling? It is a riddle that still baffles me. If we are all shut up in our bodies as the poets and the Scriptures say we are, then how is it that many of the loveliest seem to be all but uninhabited, or to harbour such dingy tenants; while quite plain faces may throng with animated ghosts?
Fanny did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr Crimble came to see her that afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he paused at the gate-post to push his spectacles more firmly on to his nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his face towards St Peter's. Next day, Holy Innocents', he came again; but this time with more determination, for he asked to see me.
To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs Bowater boldly invited him to stay to tea. With a flurriedglance of the eye in her direction he accepted my invitation.
"A cold afternoon, Mrs Bowater," he intoned. "The cup that cheers, the cup that cheers."
My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and presently he and I found ourselves positivelytête-à-têteover her seed cake and thin bread and butter.
But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his thoughts were not wholly with me.
"Are you long with us?" he inquired, stirring his tea.
"I am quite, quite happy here," I replied, with a sigh.
"Ah!" he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, "how few of us have the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are miserable. It is this pessimism—of a mechanical, a scientific age—which we have chiefly to contend against. We don't often see you at St Peter's, I think?"
"You wouldn't seeverymuch of me, if I did come," I replied a little tartly. Possibly it was his "we" that had fretted me. It seemed needlessly egotistical. "On the other hand," I added, "wouldn't there be a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?"
Mr Crimble opened his mouth and laughed. "I wish," he said, with a gallant little bow, "there were more like you."
"More likeme, Mr Crimble?"
"I mean," he explained, darting a glance at the furniture of my bedroom, whose curtains, to my annoyance, hung withdrawn, "I mean that—that you—that so many of us refuse to see the facts of life. To look them in the face, Miss M. There is nothing to fear."
We were getting along famously, and I begged him to take some of Mrs Bowater's black currant jam.
"But then, I have plenty of time," I said agreeably. "And the real difficulty is to get the facts to face me. Dear me, if only, now, I had some of Miss Bowater's brains."
A veil seemed suddenly to lift from his face and as suddenly to descend again. So, too, he had for a moment stopped eating, then as suddenly begun eating again.
"Ah, Miss Bowater! She is indeed clever; a—a brilliant young lady. The very life of a party, I assure you. And, yet, do you know, in parochial gatherings, try as I may, Ioccasionally find it very difficult to get people to mix. The little social formulas, the prejudices. Yet, surely, Miss M., religionshouldbe the great solvent. At least, that is my view."
He munched away more vigorously, and gazed through his spectacles out through my window-blinds.
"Mixing people must be very wearisome," I suggested, examining his face.
"'Wearisome,'" he repeated blandly. "I am sometimes at my wits' end. No. A curate's life is not a happy one." Yet he confessed it almost with joy.
"And the visiting!" I said. And then, alas! my tongue began to run away with me. He was falling back again into what I may call his company voice, and I pined to talk to the real Mr Crimble, little dreaming how soon that want was to be satiated.
"I sometimes wonder, do you know, if religion is made difficult enough."
"But I assure you," he replied, politely but firmly, "a true religion is exceedingly difficult. 'The eye of a needle'—we mustn't forget that."
"Ah, yes," said I warmly; "that 'eye' will be narrow enough even for a person with my little advantages. I remember my mother's cook telling me, when I was a child, that in the old days, really wicked people if they wanted to return to the Church, had to do so in a sheet, with ashes on their heads, you know, and carrying a long lighted candle. She said that if the door was shut against them, they died in torment, and went to Hell. But she was a Roman Catholic, like my grandmother."
Mr Crimble peered at me as if over a wall.
"I remember, too," I went on, "one summer's day as a very little girl I was taken to the evening service. And the singing—bursting out like that, you know, with the panting and the yowling of the organ, made me faint and sick; and I jumped right out of the window."
"Jumped out of the window!" cried my visitor in consternation.
"Yes, we were at the back. Pollie, my nursemaid, had put me up in the niche, you see; and I dragged her hand away. But I didn't hurt myself. The grass was thick in thechurchyard; I fell light, and I had plenty of clothes on. I rather enjoyed it—the air and the tombstones. And though I had my gasps, the 'eye' seemed big enough when I was a child. But afterwards—when I was confirmed—I thought of Hell a good deal. I can'tseeit so plainly now. Wide, low, and black, with a few demons.Thatcan't be right."
"My dear young lady!" cried Mr Crimble, as if shocked, "is it wise to attempt it? It must be admitted, of course, that if we do not take advantage of the benefits bestowed upon us by Providence in a Christian community, we cannot escape His displeasure. The absence from His Love."
"Yes," I said, looking at him in sudden intimacy, "I believe that." And I pondered a while, following up my own thoughts. "Have you ever read Mr Clodd'sChildhood of the World, Mr Crimble?"
By the momentary confusion of his face I gathered that he had not. "Mr Clodd?... Ah, yes, the writer on Primitive Man."
"This was only a little book, for the young, you know. But in it Mr Clodd says, I remember, that even the most shocking old forms of religion were not invented by devils. They were 'Man's struggles from darkness to twilight.' What he meant was that no manlovesdarkness. At least," I added, with a sudden gush of remembrances, "not without the stars."
"That is exceedingly true," replied Mr Crimble. "And, talking of stars, what a wonderful sight it was the night before last, the whole heavens one spangle of diamonds! I was returning from visiting a sick parishioner, Mr Hubbins." Then it washisfoot that Fanny and I had heard reverberating on the hill! I hastily hid my face in my cup, but he appeared not to have noticed my confusion. He took another slice of bread and butter; folded it carefully in two, then peered up out of the corner of his round eye at me, and added solemnly: "Sick, I regret to say, no longer."
"Dead?" I cried from the bottom of my heart, and again looked at him.
Then my eyes strayed to the silent scene beyond the window, silent, it seemed, with the very presence of poor Mr Hubbins. "I should not like to go to Hell in the snow," I said ruminatingly. Out of the past welled into memory an old ballad my mother had taught me:—