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Memoirs of a Midget
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To the memory of my mother
Introduction
A few introductory and explanatory remarks are due, I think, to the reader of the following Memoirs. The Memoirs themselves will disclose how I became acquainted with Miss M. They also refer here and there to the small part I was enabled to take in straightening matters out at what was a critical juncture in her affairs, and in securing for her that independence which enabled her to live in the privacy she loved, without any anxiety as to ways and means. At the time, it is clear that she considered me a dilatory intermediary. I had not realized how extreme was her need. But she came at last to take a far too generous view of these trifling little services—services as generously rewarded, since they afforded me the opportunity of frequently seeing her, and so of becoming, as I hope, one of her most devoted friends.
One of the duties devolving on me as her sole executor—certain unusual legal proceedings having been brought to completion—was the examination of her letters and papers. Amongst these were her Memoirs—which I found sealed up with her usual scrupulous neatness in numerous small, square, brown-paper packages, and laid carefully away in a cupboard in her old nursery. They were accompanied by a covering letter addressed to myself.
Miss M.’s handwriting was even more minute than one might naturally, though not perhaps justifiably, have anticipated. Her manuscript would therefore have been difficult enough for aging eyes to decipher, even if it had not been almost inextricably interlined, revised and corrected. Literary composition to this little woman-of-letters was certainly no “primrose path.” The packages were therefore handed over to a trustworthy typist; and, at my direction, one complete and accurate copy was made of their contents.
After careful consideration, and after disguising the names of certain persons and places to preclude every possibility of giving offence—even Mrs. Percy Maudlen, for instance, if she ever scans these pages, may blush unrecognized!—I concluded that though I was under no absolute obligation to secure the publication of the Memoirs, this undoubtedly had been Miss M.’s intention and wish. At the same time, and for similar reasons, I decided that their publication should not take place until after my death. Instructions have therefore been left by me to this effect. Here then my editorial duties begin and end. Nothing has been altered; nothing suppressed.
Even if such a task were within my province, I should not venture to make any critical estimate of Miss M.’s work. I am not a writer: and, as a reader, have an inveterate preference to be allowed to study and enjoy my authors with as little external intervention as possible. The perusal of the Memoirs has afforded me the deepest possible pleasure. The serious-minded may none the less dismiss a midget’s lucubrations as trifling; and no doubt—it could hardly be otherwise—a more practised taste than mine will discover many faults, crudities, and inconsistencies in them, though certain little prejudices on Miss M.’s side may not be so easily detectable. Whatever their merits or imperfections may be, I should be happy to think that the following pages may prove as interesting to other readers—however few—as they have been to myself.
My own prejudices, I confess, are in Miss M.’s favour. Indeed, she herself assured me in the covering letter to which reference has been made, that a chance word of mine had been her actual incentive to composition—the remark, in fact, that “the truth about even the least of things—e.g., your Self, Miss M.!—may be a taper in whose beam one may peep at the truth about everything.” I cannot recall the occasion, or this little apophthegm. Indeed, only with extreme reluctance would I have helped to launch my small friend on her gigantic ordeal. As a matter-of-fact, she had a little way of carrying off scraps of the conversation of the “common-sized,” as a bee carries off a drop of nectar, and of transforming them into a honey all her own.
As characteristic of her is the fact that during the whole time she was engaged on her writing (and there is ample evidence in her manuscript that, whether in fatigue, disinclination, or despair, she sometimes left it untouched for weeks together) she never made the faintest allusion to it. Authors, I believe—if I may take the elder Disraeli for my authority—are seldom so secretive concerning their activities. No less characteristically, her letter to me was dated February 14th. Her Memoirs were to be my Valentine.
“ ‘Little drops of water …’ my dear Sir Walter,” she wrote; “you know the rest. Nevertheless, if only I had been given but one sharp spark of genius, what ‘infinite pains’ I should have been spared. Yet what is here concerns only my early days, and chiefly one long year of them. I might have written on—almost ad infinitum. But I did not, because I feared to weary us both—of myself. The years that have followed my ‘coming of age’ have been outwardly uneventful; and other people’s thoughts, I find, are not so interesting as their experiences. There’s much to forgive in what I have written—the rawness, the self-consciousness, the vanity, the folly. I am older now; but am I wiser—or merely not so young?
“Just as it stands, then, I shall leave my story to, and for, you. … Again and again, as I have pored over the scenes of my memory, I have asked myself: What can life be about? What does it mean? What was my true course? Where my compass? How many times, too, have I vainly speculated what inward difference being a human creature of my dimensions really makes. What is—deep, deep in—at variance between Man and Midget? You may discover this; even if I never shall. For after all, life’s beads are all on one string, however loosely threaded they may seem to be.
“I have tried to tell nothing but the truth about myself. But I realize that it cannot be the whole truth. For while so engaged (just as when one peers into a looking-glass in the moonlight) a something has at times looked out of some secret den or niche in me, and then has vanished. Supposing, then, my dear Sir W., my story convinces you that all these years you have unawares been harbouring in your friendship not a woman, scarcely a human being, but an asp! Oh dear, and oh dear! Well, there are three and-thirty ingredients (ingrediments as I used to call them, when I was a child) in that sovran antidote, Venice Treacle. Scatter a pennyweight of it upon my tombstone; and so lay my in-fi-ni-te-si-mal ap-pa-ri-ti-on!
“Maybe though, there are not so very many vital differences between ‘midgets’ and people of the common size; no more, perhaps, than there are between them and ‘the Great.’ Even then it is possible that after reading my small, endless story you may be very thankful that you are not a Midget too.
“Whether or not, I have tried to be frank, if not a Warning. Keep or destroy what I have written, as you will. But please show it to nobody until nobody would mind. And now, goodbye.
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 daydreaming 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.
A wild beast there is in Aegypt, called orix, which the Aegyptians say, doth stand full against the dog starre when it riseth, looketh wistly upon it, and testifieth after a sort by sneesing, a kind of worship. …
Philemon Holland
Did’st thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass; and the heaven o’er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison. …
John Webster
Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words; the heavens are gracious. …
Thomas Kyd
Lyndsey
I
Some few years ago a brief account of me found its way into one or two country newspapers. I have been told, that it reappeared, later, in better proportion, in the Metropolitan Press! Fortunately, or unfortunately, very little of this account was true. It related, among other things, that I am accustomed to wear shoes with leaden soles to them to keep me from being blown away like thistledown in the wind, that as a child I had narrowly escaped being scalded to death in a soup tureen, that one of my ancestors came from Poland, that I am an expert painter of miniatures, that I am a changeling and can speak the fairy tongue. And so on and so forth.
I think I can guess where my ingenuous biographer borrowed these fables. He meant me no harm; he was earning his living; he made judicious use of his “no doubts” and “it may be supposed”; and I hope he amused his readers. But by far the greater part of his account was concerned with mere physical particulars. He had looked at me in fancy through spectacles which may or may not have been rosy, but which certainly minified. I do not deserve his inches and ounces, however flattering his intentions may have been. It is true that my body is among the smaller works of God. But I think he paid rather too much attention to this fact. He spared any reference not only to my soul (and I am not ungrateful for that), but also to my mind and heart. There may be too much of all three for some tastes in the following pages, and especially, perhaps, of the last. That cannot be helped. Finally, my anonymous journalist stated that I was born in Rutlandshire—because, I suppose, it is the smallest county in England.
That was truly unkind of him, for, as a matter of fact, and to begin at the (apparent) beginning, I was born in the village of Lyndsey in Kent—the prettiest country spot, as I believe, in all that county’s million acres. So it remains to this day in spite of the fact that since my childhood its little church with its decaying stones and unfading twelfth—or is it thirteenth?—century glass has been “restored,” and the lord of the manor has felled some of its finest trees, including a grove of sweet chestnuts on Bitchett Heath whose forefathers came over with the Romans. But he has not yet succeeded in levelling the barrow on Chizzel Hill. From my window I looked out (indeed, look out at this moment) to the wavelike crest of this beloved hill across a long straggling orchard, and pastures in the valley, where cattle grazed and sheep wandered, and unpolled willows stooped and silvered in the breeze. I never wearied of the hill, nor ever shall, and when, in my girlhood, my grandfather, aware of this idle, gazing habit of mine, sent me from Geneva a diminutive telescope, my daydreams multiplied. His gift, as an old Kentish proverb goes, spread butter on bacon. With his spyglass to my eye I could bring a tapping green woodpecker as close as if it were actually laughing at me, and could all but snuff up the faint rich scent of the cowslips—paggles, as we called them, in meadows a good mile away.
My father’s house, Stonecote, has a rather ungainly appearance if viewed from across the valley. But it is roomy and open and fairly challenges the winds of the equinoxes. Its main windows are of a shallow bow shape. One of them is among my first remembrances. I am seated in a bright tartan frock on a pomatum pot—a coloured picture of Mr. Shandy, as I remember, on its lid—and around me are the brushes, leather cases, knickknacks, etc., of my father’s dressing table. My father is shaving himself, his chin and cheeks puffed out with soapsuds. And now I look at him, and now at his reflection in the great looking-glass, and every time that happens he makes a pleasant grimace at me over his spectacles.
This particular moment of my childhood probably fixed itself on my mind because just as, with razor uplifted, he was about to attack his upper lip, a jackdaw, attracted maybe by my gay clothes, fluttered down on the sill outside, and fussing and scrabbling with wing and claw pecked hard with its beak against the glass. The sound and sight of this bird with its lively grey-blue eyes, so close and ardent, startled me. I leapt up, ran across the table, tripped over a hairbrush, and fell sprawling beside my father’s watch. I hear its ticking, and also the little soothing whistle with which he was wont to comfort his daughter at any such mishap. Then perhaps I was five or six.
That is a genuine memory. But every family, I suppose, has its little pet traditions; and one of ours, relating to those early years, is connected with our kitchen cat, Miaou. She had come by a family of kittens, and I had crept, so it was said, into her shallow basket with them. Having, I suppose, been too frequently meddled with, this old mother cat lugged off her kittens one by one to a dark cupboard. The last one thus secured, she was discovered in rapt contemplation of myself, as if in debate whether or not it was her maternal duty to carry me off too. And there was I grinning up into her face. Such was our cook’s—Mrs. Ballard’s—story. What I actually remember is different. On the morning in question I was turning the corner of the brick-floored, dusky passage that led to the kitchen, when Miaou came trotting along out of it with her blind, blunt-headed bundle in her mouth. We were equally surprised at this encounter, and in brushing past she nearly knocked me over where I stood, casting me at the same moment the queerest animal look out of her eyes. So truth, in this case, was not so strange as Mrs. Ballard’s fiction.
My father was then a rather corpulent man, with a high-coloured face, and he wore large spectacles. His time was his own, for we were comfortably off on an income derived from a half-share in the small fortune amassed by my grandfather and his partner in a paper mill. He might have been a more successful, though not perhaps a happier, man if he had done more work and planned to do less. But he only so far followed his hereditary occupation as to expend large quantities of its best “handmade” in the composition of a monograph: The History of Paper Making. This entailed a vast accumulation of books and much solitude. I fancy, too, he believed in the policy of sleeping on one’s first thoughts.
Since he was engaged at the same time on similar compilations with the Hop and the Cherry for theme, he made indifferent progress in all three. His papers, alas, were afterwards sold with his books, so I have no notion of what became of them or of their value. I can only hope that their purchaser has since won an easy distinction. These pursuits, if they achieved little else but the keeping of “the man of the house” quiet and contented, proved my father, at any rate, to be a loyal and enthusiastic Man of Kent; and I have seen to it that a fine Morello cherry-tree blossoms, fruits, and flourishes over his grave.
My father was something of a musician too, and could pizzicato so softly on his muted fiddle as not to jar even my too sensitive ear. He taught me to play chess on a little board with pygmy men, but he was apt to lose interest in the game when it went against him. Whereas it was then that our old friend, Dr. Grose, played his hardest. As my father’s hands were rather clumsy in make, he took pains to be gentle and adroit with me. But even after shaving, his embrace was more of a discipline than a pleasure—a fact that may partly account for my own undemonstrativeness in this direction.
His voice, if anything, was small for his size, except when he discussed politics with Dr. Grose; religion or the bringing up of children with my godmother, Miss Fenne; or money matters with my mother. At such times, his noise—red face and gesticulations—affected one of his listeners, as eager as possible to pick up the crumbs, far more than ever thunder did, which is up in the clouds. My only other discomfort in his company was his habit of taking snuff. The stench of it almost suffocated me, and at tap of his fingernail on the lid of his box, I would scamper off for shelter like a hare.
By birth he came of an old English family, though no doubt with the usual admixtures. My mother’s mother was French. She was a Daundelyon. The blood of that “sweet enemy” at times burned in her cheek like a flag; and my father needed his heaviest guns when the stormy winds did blow, and those colours were flying. At such moments I preferred to hear the engagement from a distance, not so much (again) because the mere discord grieved me, as to escape the din. But usually—and especially after such little displays—they were like two turtledoves, and I did my small best to pipe a decoy.
My father had been a man past forty when he married my mother. She about fifteen years younger—a slim, nimble, and lovely being, who could slip round and encircle him in person or mind while he was pondering whether or not to say Bo to a goose. Seven years afterwards came I. Friends, as friends will, professed to see a likeness between us. And if my mother could have been dwindled down to be of my height and figure, perhaps they would have been justified.
But in hair and complexion, possibly in ways, too, I harked back to an aunt of hers, Kitilda, who had died of consumption in her early twenties. I loved to hear stories of my great-aunt Kitilda. She sang like a bird, twice ran away from her convent school, and was so fond of water that an old gentleman (a friend of Mr. Landor’s, the poet) who fell in love with her, called her “the Naiad.”
My mother, in her youth at Tunbridge Wells, had been considered “a beauty,” and had had many admirers—at least so Mrs. Ballard, our cook, told Pollie: “Yes, and we know who might have turned out different if things hadn’t been the same,” was a cryptic remark she once made which filled two “little pitchers” to overflowing. Among these admirers was a Mr. Wagginhorne who now lived at Maidstone. He had pocketed his passion but not his admiration; and being an artist in the same sense that my father was an author, he had painted my mother and me and a pot of azaleas in oils. How well I remember those interminable sittings, with the old gentleman daubing along, and cracking his beloved jokes and Kentish cobbs at one and the same time. Whenever he came to see us this portrait was taken out of a cupboard and hung up in substitution for another picture in the dining-room. What became of it when Mr. Wagginhorne died I could never discover. My mother would laugh when I inquired, and archly eye my father. It was clear, at any rate, that author was not jealous of artist!
My mother was gentle with me, and had need to be; and I was happier in her company than one might think possible in a world of such fleetingness. I would sit beside her workbox and she would softly talk to me, and teach me my lessons and small rhymes to say; while my own impulse and instinct taught me to sing and dance. What gay hours we shared. Sewing was at first difficult, for at that time no proportionate needles could be procured for me, and I hated to cobble up only coarse work. But she would give me little childish jobs to do, such as arranging her silks, or sorting her beads, and would rock me to sleep with her finger to a drone so gentle that it might have been a distant bee’s.
Yet shadows there were, before the darkness came. Child that I was, I would watch gather over her face at times a kind of absentness, as if she were dreaming of something to which she could give no name, of some hope or wish that was now never to be fulfilled. At this I would grow anxious and silent, doubting, perhaps, that I had displeased her; while, to judge from her look, I might not have been there at all.
Or again, a mischievousness and mockery would steal into her mood. Then she would treat me as a mere trivial plaything, talking small things to me, as if our alphabet consisted of nothing but “little o”—a letter for which I always felt a sort of pity: but small affection. This habit saddened my young days, and sometimes enraged me, more than I can say. I was always of a serious cast of mind—even a little priggish perhaps; and experience had already taught me that I could share my mother’s thoughts and feelings more easily than she could share mine.
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