heavily in his chair, and looked at me. Then stretching out his hand he dropped his face on to his arm. A horrible quietness spread over the room. For the first time I looked with a kind of terror at the hairy fingers and whitening head, and could not stir.
How oddly chance repeats itself. The door opened and once more, unannounced, Miss Fenne appeared in our midst. My father hastily rose to greet her, pretending that nothing was amiss. But when she held out her clawlike hand to me to be kissed, I merely stared at her. She screwed up her countenance into a smile; mumbled that I was looking pale and peaked again; and, with difficulty keeping her eyes from mine, explained that she had come for a business talk with my father.
A few days afterwards I was standing up at the window of my mother’s little sewing-room—always a favourite refuge of mine, for there the afternoon sun and the colours of evening used to beat into the corner. And I saw a small-sized woman with a large black bonnet come waddling up the drive. She was followed by a boy wheeling a square box on a two-wheeled trolley. It was Mrs Sheppey come to be housekeeper to the widower and his daughter.
Mrs Sheppey proved to be a harassed and muddling woman, and she came to a harassed home. My father’s affairs had gone from bad to worse. He was gloomy and morose. A hunted look sometimes gleamed in his eyes, and the spectacled nose seemed to grow the smaller the more solemn its surroundings were. He spent most of the day in his dressing-gown now, had quarrelled with Dr Grose, and dismissed Mrs Ballard. The rooms were dirty and neglected. Pollie would maunder about with a broom, or stand idly staring out of the window. She was in love. At least, so I realize now. At the time I thought she was merely lumpish and stupid.
Only once in my recollection did Mrs Sheppey pay my own quarters a visit. I was kneeling on my balcony and out of sight, and could watch her unseen. She stood there—tub-shaped, a knob of dingy hair sticking out from her head, her skirts suspended round her boots—passively examining my bed, my wardrobe, and my other belongings. Her scrutiny over, she threw up her hands and the whites of her eyes as if in expostulation to heaven, turned about in her cloth boots, and waddled out again. Pollie told me, poor thing, that her children had been thorns in her side. I brooded over this. Had I not myself, however involuntarily, been a thorn in my mother’s side? I despised and yet pitied Mrs Sheppey.
She was, if anything, frightened of me, and of my tongue, and would address me as “little lady” in a cringing, pursed-up fashion. But I am thankful to say she never attempted to touch me or to lift me from the floor. Her memory is inextricably bound up with a brown, round pudding with a slimy treacle sauce which she used to send to table every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. My father would look at it with his nose rather than with his eyes; and after perhaps its fiftieth appearance, he summoned Mrs Sheppey with a violent tug at the bell. She thrust her head in at the door. “Take it away,” he said, “take it away. Eat it. Devour it. Hide it from God’s sight, good woman. Don’t gibber. Take it away!”
His tone frightened me out of my wits and Mrs Sheppey out of the house. Then came the end. At the beginning of August in my twentieth year, my father, who had daily become stranger in appearance and habits, though steadfastly refusing to call in his old friend, Dr Grose, was found dead in his bed. He was like a boy who never can quite succeed in pleasing himself or his masters. He had gone to bed and shut his eyes, never in this world to open them again.
Chapter Five
Am I sorry that almost beside myself with this new affliction, and bewildered and frightened by the incessant coming and going of strangers in the house, I refused to be carried down to bid that unanswering face good-bye? No, I have no regret on that score. The older I grow the more closely I seem to understand him. If phantoms of memory have any reality—and it is wiser, I think, to remember the face of the living rather than the stony peace of the dead—he has not forgotten his only daughter.
Double-minded creature I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of these differences I have to submit. At times I have been tempted to blame my parents for my shortcomings. What wicked folly—they did not choose their only child. After all, too, fellow creatures of any size seem much alike. They rarely have nothing to blame Providence for—the length of their noses or the size of their feet, their bones or their corpulence, the imbecilities of their minds or their bodies, the “accidents” of birth, breeding, station, or circumstance. Yet how secure and perhaps wholesome is Man’s self-satisfaction. To what ideal does he compare himself but to a self-perfected abstraction of his own image? Even his Venus and Apollo are mere flattering reflections of his own he- or she-shapes. And what of his anthropomorphic soul?
As for myself, Dame Nature may some day take a fancy to the dwarf. “What a pretty play it would be”—I have clean forgotten where I chanced on this amusing passage—“What a pretty play it would be if, from the next generation onwards, the only humans born into the world should be of mere pygmy stature. Fifty years hence there would remain but few of the normal-sized in the land. Imagine these aged few, miserably stalking through the dwarfed streets, picking up a scanty livelihood in city or country-side, where their very boots would be a public danger, their very tread would set the bells in the steeples ringing, and their appetites would be a national incubus. House, shop, church, high road, furniture, vehicles abandoned or sunken to the pygmy size; wars and ceremonies, ambitions and enterprises, everything but prayers, dwindled to the petty. Would great-grandfather be venerated, cherished, admired, a welcome guest, a lamented emigrant? Would there be as many mourners as sextons at his funeral, as many wreaths as congratulations at his grave?” And so on and so forth—like Jonathan Swift.
But I must beware. Partly from fatigue and partly from dislike of the version of Miss M. that stared out of his picture at me, I had begun, I remember, to be a little fretful when old Mr Wagginhorne was painting my portrait. And I complained pertly that I thought there were far too many azaleas on the potted bush.
“Ah, little Miss Finical,” he said, “take care, if you please. Once there was a Diogenes whom the gods shut up in a tub and fed on his own spleen. He died.… He died,” he repeated, drawing his brush slowly along the canvas, “of dyspepsia.”
He popped round, “Think of that.”
I can think of that to better purpose now, and if there is one thing in the world whose company I shall deplore in my coffin, that thing is a Cynic. That is why I am trying as fast as I can to put down my experiences in black and white before the black predominates.
But I must get back to my story. My poor father had left his affairs in the utmost disorder. His chief mourners were his creditors. Apart from these, one or two old country friends and distant relatives, I believe, attended his funeral, but none even of them can have been profoundly interested in the Hop, the Oyster, or the Cherry, at least in the abstract. Dr Grose, owing to ill-health, had given up his practice and was gone abroad. But though possibly inquiry was made after the small creature that had been left behind, I stubbornly shut myself away in my room under the roof, listening in a fever of apprehension to every sinister movement in the house beneath.
Yet if a friend in need is a friend indeed, then I must confess that my treatment of Miss Fenne was the height of ingratitude.
In my grief and desolation, the future seemed to be only a veil beyond the immediate present, which I had neither the wish nor the power to withdraw. Miss Fenne had no such illusions. I begged Pollie to make any excuse she could think of to prevent her from seeing me. But at last she pushed her way up, and doubtless, the news and the advice she brought were the best tonic that could have been prescribed for me.
As a child I had always associated my godmother with the crocodile (though not with Mr Bosch’s charming conception of it, in his picture of the Creation). Yet there were no tears in her faded eyes when she explained that of my father’s modest fortune not a
