Memoirs of a Midget. Walter de la Mare

Seven

      When I awoke, the morning sky was gay with sunshine, there was a lisping and gurgling of starlings on the roof, the roar of the little river in flood after the rains shook the air at my window, and there sat Pollie, in her outdoor clothes, the rest of the packing done and she awaiting breakfast. Unstirringly from my pillow I scrutinized the plump, red-cheeked face with its pale-blue prominent eyes dreaming out of the window; and sorrow welled up in me at the thought of the past and of how near drew our separation. She heard me move, and kneeling and stooping low over my bed, with her work-roughened finger she stroked the hand that lay on my coverlet. A pretty sight I must have looked—after my night’s experiences. We whispered a little together. She was now a sedater young woman, but still my Pollie of the apples and novelettes. And whether or not it is because early custom is second nature, she is still the only person whom my skin does not a little creep against when necessity calls for a beast of burden.

      Her desertion of me the night before had been caused by the untimely death of one of her father’s three Alderney cows—a mild, horned creature, which I had myself often seen in the meadows cropping among the buttercups, and whose rich-breathed nose I had once had the courage to ask to stroke with my hand. This ill-fated beast at first threat of the storm, had taken shelter with her companions under an oak. Scarcely had the lightnings begun to play when she was struck down by a “thunderbolt.” It was a tragedy after Pollie’s heart. She had (she said) fainted dead off at news of it—and we bemoaned the event in concert. In return I told her my dream of the garden. Nothing would then content her but she must fetch from under her mattress Napoleon’s Book of Fate, a legacy from Mrs Ballard.

      “But, Pollie,” I demurred; “a dream is only a dream.”

      “Honest, miss,” she replied, thumbing over the pages, “there’s some of ’em means what happens and comes true, and they’ll tell secrets too if they be searched about. More’n a month before Mrs Ballard fell out with master she dreamed that one of the speckled hens had laid an egg in the kitchen dresser. There it was clucking among the crockery. And to dream of eggs, the book says, is to be certain sure of getting the place you are after, and which she wrote off to a friend in London and is there now!”

      What more was there to say? So presently Pollie succeeded in turning to “Pears” in the grease-grimed book, and spelled out slowly:—

      “Pears.—To dream of pears is in-di-ca-tive of great wealth (which means riches, miss); and that you will rise to a much higher spear than the one you at present occupy. To a woman they denote that she will marry a person far above her in rank (lords and suchlike, miss, if you please), and that she will live in great state. To persons in trade they denote success and future prosperity and eleviation. They also indi- indicate constancy in love and happiness in the marriage state.”

      Her red cheeks grew redder with this exertion of scholarship, and I burst out laughing. “Ah, miss,” she cried in confusion, “laugh you may, and that’s what Sarah said to the Angel. But mark my words if something of it don’t hap out like what the book says.”

      “Then, Pollie,” said I, “there’s nothing for it but to open a butcher’s shop. For live in great state I can’t and won’t, not if the Prince of Wales himself was to ask me in marriage.”

      “Lor, miss,” retorted Pollie in shocked accents, “and him a married man with grown-up sons and all.” But she forgave me my mockery. As for the Dream Book, doubtless young Bonaparte must often have dreamed of Pears in Corsica; and no less indubitably have I lived in “great state”—though without much eleviation.

      But the day was hasting on. My toilet must be made, and the preparations for our journey completed. Now that the dawn of my new fortunes was risen, expectancy filled my mind, and the rain-freshened skies and leaves of the morning renewed my spirits. Our train—the first in my experience—was timed to leave our country railway station at 3.3 p.m. By one o’clock, all the personal luggage that I was to take with me had been sewn up in a square of canvas, and corded. The rest of my belongings—my four-poster, etc.—were to be stowed in a large packing-case and sent after me. First impressions endure. No great store of sagacity was needed to tell me that. So I had chosen my clothes carefully, determined to show my landlady that I meant to have my own way and not be trifled with. My dear Mrs Bowater!—she would be amused to hear that.

      Pollie bustled downstairs. I stood in the midst of the sunlit, dismantled room, light and shadow at play upon ceiling and walls, the sun-pierced air a silvery haze of dust. A host of memories and thoughts, like a procession in a dream, traversed my mind. A strangeness, too—as if even this novel experience of farewell was a vague recollection beyond defined recall. Pollie returned with the new hat in the paper bag in which she had brought it from home: and I was her looking-glass when she had put it on. Then from top to basement she carried me through every room in the house, and there on the kitchen floor, mute witness of the past, lay the beetle-gnawn remnant of my candle-stub. We wandered through the garden, glinting green in the cool flocking sunbeams after the rain; and already vaunting its escape from Man. Pollie was returning to Lyndsey—I not! My heart was too full to let me linger by the water. I gazed at the stones and the wild flowers in a sorrowful hunger of farewell. Trifles, soon to be dying, how lovely they were. The thought of it swallowed me up. What was the future but an emptiness? Would that I might vanish away and be but a portion of the sweetness of the morning. Even Pollie’s imperturbable face wore the appearance of make-believe; for an instant I surprised the whole image of me reflected in her round blue eye.

      The Waggetts’ wagonette was at the door, but not—and I was thankful—not my Adam, but the old Adam, his father. My luggage was pushed under the seat. I was set up, to be screened as far as possible from the wind, beside Pollie and behind Mr Waggett—no stranger to me with his neat, dark whiskers, for in the old days, at dinner parties, he would wait at table. I see him now—as gentlemanlike as a Devil’s Coachhorse—entering the kitchen with his little black bag. Only once I swiftly turned my head over my shoulder toward the house. Then we were outside the iron gates, and bumping along through the puddles between the bowery hedges towards the station.

      I thought of my father and mother lying side by side, beyond the sullen drift of nettles, under the churchyard wall. Miss Fenne had taken me there many weeks before in her faded barouche with the gaunt white mare. Not a word had I breathed to her of my anguish at sight of the churchyard. The whole afternoon was a nightmare. She regaled the journey with sentiments on death and the grave. Throughout it, I was in danger of slipping out of her sight; for the buttons on the sage-green leather seat were not only a discomfort but had failed to aid me to sit upright; and nothing would have induced me to catch at the trimmings of her dolman to save myself from actually falling off into the pit of her carriage. There sat her ancient coachman; clutter-clutter plodded the hoofs; what a monstrous, monstrous world—and she cackling on and on—like a hen over its egg.

      But now the novelty of this present experience, the flowery cottages, Mr Waggett’s square, sorrel nag, the ballooning northwesterly clouds, the aromatic rusty hedgerows, the rooks in the cornfields—all these sights and sounds called joy into my mind, and far too soon the bright-painted railway station at the hill-bottom hove into sight, and our drive was over. I was lifted down into Pollie’s arms again. Then followed a foolish chaffering over the tickets, which Mr Waggett had volunteered to purchase for us at the rounded window. The looming face beyond had caught sight of me, and the last words I heard bawled through for any to hear were: “Lor, Mr Waggett, I’d make it a quarter for ’ee if it was within regulations. But ’tain’t so, the young lady’s full natural size in the eye of the law, and I couldn’t give in to ’ee not even if ’twas a honeymooning you was after.” No doubt it was wholesome to learn as quickly as possible how easy a butt I was to be for the jests of the good-humoured. On that occasion it was a bitter pill. I felt even Pollie choke down a laugh into her bosom. My cheek whitened, but I said nothing.

      An enormous din at the moment shattered around me, ten thousand times harsher to my nerves than any mere witticism could be. My first “steam-monster” was entering the station. All but stunned by its clatter, I barely had the presence of mind to thank Mr Waggett for the little straw basket of three greengages, and the nosegay of cherry-pie which he had