Memoirs of a Midget. Walter de la Mare

photograph she produced from upstairs had in fading almost become a caricature. It had both blackened and greyed. It depicted herself many years younger but hardly less grim in appearance in full flounced skirts, Fanny as a child of about five or six standing at her knee, and Mr Bowater leaning with singular amenity behind her richly-carved chair, the fingers of his left hand resting disposedly on her right shoulder. I looked anxiously at the child. It was certainly crosspatch “F.”, and a far from prepossessing little creature with that fixed, level gaze. Mr Bowater, on the other hand, had not yet adopted the wild and rigid stare which dominated the small parlour.

      Mrs Bowater surveyed the group with a lackadaisical detachment. “Fractious!—you can see the tears on her cheeks for all what the young man could do with his woolly lamb and grimaces. It was the heyday.”

      What was the heyday, I wondered. “Was Mr Bowater—attached to her?” seemed a less intrusive question.

      “Doted,” she replied, polishing the glass with her apron. “But not to much purpose—with an eye for every petticoat.”

      This seemed a difficult conversation to maintain. “Don’t you think, Mrs Bowater,” I returned zealously, “there is just the faintest tinge of Mr Bowater in the chin? I don’t,” I added candidly, “see the faintest glimpse of you.”

      Mrs Bowater merely tightened her lips.

      “And is she like that now?” I asked presently.

      Mrs Bowater re-wrapped frame and photograph in their piece of newspaper. “It’s looks, miss, that are my constant anxiety: and you may be thankful for being as you might say preserved from the world. What’s more, the father will out, I suppose, from now till Day of Judgment.”

      How strangely her sentiments at times resembled my godmother’s, and yet how different they were in effect. My thoughts after this often drifted to Mrs Bowater’s early married life. And so peculiar are the workings of the mind that her husband’s star-chart, his sleek appearance as a young father, the mysterious reference to the petticoats, awoke in me an almost romantic interest in him. To such a degree that it gradually became my custom to cast his portrait a satirical little bow of greeting when I emerged from my bedroom in the morning, and even to kiss my hand to his invisible stare when I retired for the night. To all of which advances he made no reply.

      * * * *

      My next bout of star-gazing presaged disaster. I say star-gazing, for it is true that I stole out after honest folk are abed only when the heavens were swept and garnished. But, as a matter of fact, my real tryst was with another Self. Had my lot been different, I might have sought that self in Terra del Fuego or Malay, or in a fine marriage. Mine was a smaller world. Bo-peep I would play with shadow and dew-bead. And if Ulysses, as my father had read me, stopped his ears against the Sirens, I contrariwise unsealed mine to the ethereal airs of that bare wintry solitude.

      The spectral rattle of the parched beechleaves on the saplings, the faintest whisper in the skeleton bracken set me peeping, peering, tippeting; and the Invisibles, if they heeded me, merely smiled on me from their grave, all-seeing eyes. As for the first crystal sparking of frost, I remember in my folly I sat down (bunched up, fortunately, in honest lamb’s-wool) and remained, minute by minute, unstirring, unwinking, watching as if in my own mind the exquisite small fires kindle and flit from point to point of lichen and bark, until—out of this engrossment—little but a burning icicle was left to trudge along home.

      It was December 23rd. I remember that date, and even now hardly understand the meaning or intention of what it brought me. Love for the frosty, star-roofed woods, that was easy. And yet what if—though easy—it is not enough? I had lingered on, talking in my childish fashion—a habit never to leave me—to every sudden lovely morsel in turn, when, to my dismay, I heard St Peter’s clock toll midnight. Was it my fancy that at the stroke, and as peacefully as a mother when she is alone with her sleeping children, the giant tree sighed, and the whole night stilled as if at the opening of a door? I don’t know, for I would sometimes pretend to be afraid merely to enjoy the pretending. And even my small Bowater astronomy had taught me that as the earth has her poles and equator, so these are in relation to the ecliptic and the equinoctial. So too, then, each one of us—even a mammet like myself—must live in a world of the imagination which is in everlasting relation to its heavens. But I must keep my feet.

      I waved adieu to the woods and unseen Wanderslore. As if out of the duskiness a kind of reflex of me waved back; and I was soon hastening along down the hill, the only thing stirring in the cold, white, luminous dust. Instinctively, in drawing near, I raised my eyes to the upper windows of Mrs Bowater’s crouching house. To my utter confusion. For one of them was wide open, and seated there, as if in wait for me, was a muffled figure—and that not my landlady’s—looking out. All my fine boldness and excitement died in me. I may have had no apprehension of telling Mrs Bowater of my pilgrimages, but, not having told her, I had a lively distaste of being “found out.”

      Stiff as a post, I gazed up through the shadowed air at the vague, motionless figure—to all appearance completely unaware of my presence. But there is a commerce between minds as well as between eyes. I was perfectly certain that I was being thought about, up there.

      For a while my mind faltered. The old childish desire gathered in me—to fly, to be gone, to pass myself away. There was a door in the woods. Better sense, and perhaps a creeping curiosity, prevailed, however. With a bold front, and as if my stay in the street had been of my own choosing, I entered the gate, ascended my “Bateses,” and so into the house. Then I listened. Faintly at last sounded a stealthy footfall overhead; the window was furtively closed. Doubt vanished. In preparation for the night’s expedition I had lain down in the early evening for a nap. Evidently while I had been asleep, Fanny had come home. The English mistress had caught her mother’s lodger playing truant!

      Chapter Eleven

      If it was the child of wrath in me that hungered at times after the night, woods, and solitude to such a degree that my very breast seemed empty within me; it was now the child of grace that prevailed. With girlish exaggeration I began torturing myself in my bed with remorse at the deceit I had been practising. Now Conscience told me that I must make a full confession the first thing in the morning; and now that it would be more decent to let Fanny “tell on me.” At length thought tangled with dream, and a grisly night was mine.

      What was that? It was day; Mrs Bowater was herself softly calling me beyond my curtains, and her eye peeped in. Always before I had been up and dressed when she brought in my breakfast. Through a violent headache I surveyed the stooping face. Something in my appearance convinced her that I was ill, and she insisted on my staying in bed.

      “But, Mrs Bowater.…” I expostulated.

      “No, no, miss; it was in a butt they drowned the sexton. Here you stay; and its being Christmas Eve, you must rest and keep quiet. What with those old books and all, you have been burning the candle at both ends.”

      Early in the afternoon on finding that her patient was little better, my landlady went off to the chemist’s to get me some physic; I could bear inactivity no longer, and rose and dressed. The fire was low, the room sluggish, when in the dusk, as I sat dismally brooding in my chair, the door opened, and a stranger came in with my tea. She was dressed in black, and was carrying a light. With that raised in one hand, and my tea-tray held between finger and thumb of the other, she looked at me with face a little sidelong. Her hair was dark above her clear pale skin, and drawn, without a fringe, smoothly over her brows. Her eyes were almost unnaturally light in colour. I looked at her in astonishment; she was new in my world. She put the tray on my table, poked the fire into a blaze, blew out her candle at a single puff from her pursed lips, and seating herself on the hearthrug, clasped her hands round her knees.

      “Mother told me you were in bed, ill,” she said, “I hope you are better.”

      I assured her in a voice scarcely above a whisper that I was quite well again.

      She nestled her chin down and broke into a little laugh: “My! how you startled me!”

      “Then it was you,” I managed