Chapter Twenty-One

Previous

That night I wrote to Fanny, copying out my letter from the scrawling draft from which I am copying it now:—

"Dear Fanny,—I have given Mr Crimble your message; first, exactly in your own words, though he did not quite hear them, and then, leaving out a little. You may be angry at what I am going to say—but I am quite sure you ought to answer him at once. Fanny, he's dreadfully fond of you. I never even dreamed people were like that—in such torture for what can't be, unless you mean you do care, but are too proud to tell him so. If he knows you have no heart for him, he may soon be better. This sounds hateful. But I am not such a pin in a pincushion as not to know that even the greatest sorrows and disappointments wear out. Why, isn't that beech-tree we sat under a kind of cannibal of its own dead leaves?

"Your private letter is quite safe; though I prefer not to burn it—indeed, cannot burn it. You know how I have longed for it. But please, if possible, don't send me two in future. It doesn't seem fair; and your mother knew already about our star-gazing. You see, how else could the door have been bolted!! But it's best to have been found out—next, I mean, to telling oneself.

"What day are you coming home? I look at it, as if it were a lighthouse—even though it is out of sight. Shall we go on with Wuthering Heights when you do come? I saw the 'dazzling' moon—but there, Fanny, what I want most to beg of you is to write to Mr. Crimble—all that you feel, even if not all that you think. No, perhaps I mean the reverse. He must have been wondering about you long before I began to. And there it was, all sunken in; no one could have guessed his longing by looking at him. I am afraid it must affect his health.

"And now good-bye. I have made a vow to myself not to think into things too much. Your affectionate friend (as much of her as there is)—

"Midgetina.

"PS.—Please tell me the day you are coming; and that shall be my birthday."

Fanny was prompt in reply:—

"Dear Midgetina,—It's a strange fact, but while, to judge from your letter, you seem to be growing smaller, I (in spite of Miss Stebbings's water porridge) am growing fatter. Now, which is the tragedy? I may come home on the 30th. If so, kill the fatted calf; I will supply the birthday-cake. How foolish of you to keep letters. I never do, lest I should remember the answers. Anyhow, I shall not write again. But if, by any chance, Mr Crimble should make another call, will you explain that my chief motive in not singing at the concert was because I should have been a second mezzo-soprano. One of two in one concert must be superfluous. Perhaps I did not explain this clearly; nor did I say how charming I thought my double was.

"I am tired—of overwork. I have finished Wuthering Heights. It is a mad, untrue book. The world is not like Emily BrontË's conception of it. It is neither dream nor nightmare, Midgetina, but wide, wide awake. And I am convinced that the poets are only cherubs with sugar-sticks to their little rosebud mouths. I abominate whitewash. As for 'putting people out of their misery,' and cannibal beech-trees: no, fretful midge! If you could see me sitting here looking down on rows and rows of vacant and hostile faces—though one or two are infatuated enough—you would realize that such a practice would lead me into miscellaneous infanticide.

"Personally, I never did think into things too painfully; though as regards 'telling,' the reverse is certainly the wiser course. So you will forgive so short, and perhaps none too sweet, a letter from your affec.—F."

Enclosed with this was a narrow slip of paper:—

"I shall not write to you know who. Think, if you like, but don't feel like a microscope. He is only in love. And however punctilious your own practice may be, pray, Miss M., do not preach—at any rate to your affecte. but unregenerate friend.—F."

I believe I drafted and destroyed three answers to this letter. It broke down my defences far more easily than had the errand boys. It shamed me for a prig, a false friend, a sentimentalist. And the "fretful midge" rankled like salt in a wounded heart. Yet Fanny was faithless even to her postscript. A sheaf of narcissuses hooded in blue tissue paper was left at the house a day or two afterwards. It was accompanied by Mr Crimble's card in a little envelope tied in with the stalks:—

"I am given a ray of hope."

Mrs Bowater had laid this offering on my table with a peculiar grimace, whether scornful or humorous, it was impossible to detect. "From Mr Crimble, miss. Why, one might think he had two irons in the fire!"

I sat gazing at this thank-offering long after she had gone—the waxy wings, the crimson-rimmed corona, the pale-green cluster of pistil and stamen. The heavy perfume stole over my senses, bringing only weariness and self-distaste to my mind. Fly that I was, caught in a web—once more I began a letter to Fanny, imploring her to write to her mother, to tell her everything. But that letter, too, was torn up into tiny pieces and burnt in the fire.

Next morning, heavily laden with my parasol, a biscuit or two in my bag, my Sense and Sensibility and a rug in my arms, I set off very early for Wanderslore, having arranged with Mrs Bowater over night that she should meet me under my beech at a quarter to one.

Under the flat, bud-pointed branches, I pressed on between clusters of primrose, celandine, and wild wood anemone, breathing in the earthy freshness of grass and moss. And presently I came out between the stones and jutting roots in sight of the vacant windows. I stood for a moment confronting their black regard, then descended the knoll and was soon making myself comfortable beside the garden house. But first I managed to clamber up on a fragment of the fallen masonry and peep in at its low windows. A few dead, last-year's flies lay dry on their backs; dusty, derelict spider-webs; a litter of straw, and a few potsherds—the place was empty. But it was mine, and the very remembrance of which it whispered to me—the picture of my poor father's bedroom that night of the storm—only increased my sense of possession.

What was wrong with me just then, what I had sallied out in hope to be delivered from, was the unhappy conviction that my life was worthless, and I of no use in the world. I had taught myself to make knots in strings, but actual experience seemed to have proved that most human fumblings resulted only in "grannies" and not in the true lover's variety. They secured nothing, only tangled and jammed. I was young then, and yet as heavily burdened with other people's responsibilities as was poor Christian with the bundle of his sins. But my bundle, too, in that lovely, desolate loneliness at last fell off my shoulders.

Could I not still be loyal in heart and mind to Fanny, even though now I knew how little she cared whether I was loyal or not? I even climbed up behind Mr Crimble's thick spectacles and looked down again at myself from that point of vantage. Whether or not I was his affair, I could try to make him mine—perhaps even persuade Fanny to love him.

Oh, dear; was not every singing bird in that wilderness, every unfolding flower and sunlit March leaf welcoming the spirit within me to their quiet habitation? As if in response to this naÏve thought, welled up in my memory the two last stanzas of my Tom o' Bedlam, which, either for pride or shame, had stuck in my throat on the skin mat in Lady Pollacke's sky-lit drawing-room:——

Parasol for spear, the youngest Miss Shanks's pony for horse of air, there was I (even though common-sized boots might reckon it a mere mile or so), ten leagues at least beyond—Mrs Bowater's. Nor, like her husband, had I broken my leg; nor had Fanny broken my heart. All would come right again. Why, what a waste of Fanny it would be to make her Mrs Crimble. My bishop, according to Miss Fenne, had had quite a homely helpmate, "little short of a frump, Caroline, as I remember her thirty years ago." Perhaps if I left off my fine colours and bought a nice brown stuff dress and a bonnet, might not Mr Crimble change his mind...? I have noticed that as soon as I begin to laugh at myself, the whole world seems to smile in return.

Absurd, contrary, volatile creature that I was—a kind of thankfulness spread over my mind. I turned on to my knees where I sat and repeated the prayers which in my haste to be off I had neglected before coming out. And thus kneeling, I opened my eyes on the garden again, bathed delicately in the eastern sunshine. There was my old friend, Mr Clodd's Nature, pranking herself under the nimble fingers of spring; and in her sight as well as in the sight of my godmother's God, and Mr Crimble's Almighty, and, possibly, of Dr Phelps's Norm, were not, in deed and in truth, all men equal? How mysterious and how entrancing! If "sight," then eyes: but whose? where? I gazed round me dazzledly, and if wings had been mine, would have darted through the thin, blue-green veil and been out into the morning.

Poor she-knight! romantical Miss Midge! she had no desire to hunt Big Game, or turn steeplejack; her fancies were not dangerously "furious"; but, as she knelt there, environed about by that untended garden, and not so ridiculously pygmy either, even in the ladder of the world's proportion—saw-edged blade of grass, gold-cupped moss, starry stonecrop, green musky moschatel, close-packed pebble, wax-winged fly—well, I know not how to complete the sentence except by remarking that I am exceedingly glad I began to write my Life.

I realized too that it is less flattering to compare oneself with the very little things of the world than with the great. Given time, I might scale an Alp; I could only kill an ant. Besides, I am beginning to think that one of the pleasantest ways of living is in one's memory. How much less afflicting at times would my present have been if I had had the foresight to remind myself how beguiling it would appear as the past. Even my old sharpest sorrows have now hushed themselves to sleep, and those for whom I have sorrowed are as quiet.

Having come to a pause in my reflections, I opened my Sense and Sensibility at Chapter XXXV. Yet attend to Miss Austen I could not. She is one of those compact and cautious writers that will not feed a wandering mind; and at last, after three times re-reading the same paragraph, an uneasy conviction began to steal over me. There was no doubt now in my mind. I was being watched. Softly, stealthily, I raised my eyes from my book and with not the least motion of head or body, glanced around me. Whereupon, as if it had been playing sentinel out of the thicket near at hand, a blackbird suddenly jangled its challenge, and with warning cries fled away on its wings towards the house.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Clyx.com


Top of Page
Top of Page