Memoirs of a Midget quotes

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.

Still, cross-examine her I did occasionally.

“Where did I come from, mamma?”

“Why, my dear, I am your mother.”

She cast a glance at me from eyes that appeared to be very small, unless for that instant it was mine that I saw reflected there.

“Yes, my dear,” she replied at length. “We come and we go.”

She seemed tired with the heat of the day, so I sat quietly, holding her finger, until she was recovered.

I began to brood not only on the deplorable state of my own soul, but also on Pollie’s and Mrs. Ballard’s, and became for a time a diminutive Miss Fenne.

I suppose innocence is a precarious bliss.

On the other hand, if one’s mind is like a dead mole’s belly, it is wise, I think, to examine it closely but not too often, and to repeat that confirmation for one’s self every morning and evening.

Marvel of marvels, even as I sit here today gazing at my inkpot, there in its original corner stands that same old four-poster. Pollie is living down in the village with her husband and her two babies; and once more: I am alone.

Is there anything in life so fascinating, so astonishing, as these queer, common little repetitions?

Perhaps on the Last Day—but I anticipate.

At this movement the little boy, who had more than once furtively glanced at me, crouched wriggling back against his mother, and, edging his face aside, piped up into her ear,

“Mamma, is that alive?”

The train now stood motionless, a fine array of hollyhocks and sunflowers flared beyond the window, and his voice rang out shrill as a bird in the quiet of afternoon.

“But she is, mamma. It moved. I saw that move,” he asseverated, looking along cornerwise at me out of his uptilted face.

Those blue eyes! a mingling of delight, horror, incredulity, even greed swam in their shallow deeps.

I stood leaning close to Pollie’s bosom, breathless and helpless, a fascinating object, no doubt. Never before had I been transfixed like this in one congregated stare. I felt myself gasp like a fish.

then perhaps her long thin lips would only shut a little tighter, or a slow, convulsive rub of her lean forefinger along the side of her nose would indicate the upshot. But I soon learned to interpret these mute signs.

She was a woman who disapproved of most things, for excellent, if nebulous, reasons; and her silences were due not to the fact that she had nothing to say, but too much.

Pollie and I talked long and earnestly that first evening at Beechwood. She promised to write to me, to send me all the gossip of the village, and to come and see me when she could. The next morning, after a sorrowful breakfast, we parted.

Bowater’s steep steps as well as to my cemented-in “Bateses,” as I called them. My only difficulty was to decide whether to practice on them when I was fresh at the outset of my walk, or fatigued at the end of it.

Naturally people grow “peculiar” when much alone: self plays with self, and the mimicry fades.

These little expeditions, of course, had their spice of danger, and it made them the more agreeable. A strange dog might give me a fright. There was an old vixen which once or twice exchanged glances with me at a distance.

Mrs. Bowater’s eyes were like lead in her long, dark-skinned face. She opened her mouth, her gaze travelled slowly until, as I realized, it had fixed itself on the large yellowing photograph behind my back.

“Dead, no”; she echoed sepulchrally. “Worse than.”

By which I understood that, far from being dead, Mr. Bowater was still actively alive. And yet, apparently, not much the happier for that. Instantaneously I caught sight of a rocky, storm-strewn shore, such as I had seen in my Robinson Crusoe, and there Mr.

Why I kept these night-walks secret, I cannot say. It was not apprehension of Mrs. Bowater. She would have questioned my discretion, but would not, I think, have attempted to dissuade me from them against my will. No.

It may be that every true astronomer is a miser at heart, and keeps some Lambda or Mu or lost nebula his eternal friend, named with his name, but unrecorded on any chart.

For my part I hoarded the complete north for a while.

The calm, insolent words infuriated me, and yet her very accents, with a curious sweet rasp in them, like that in a skylark’s song when he slides his last twenty feet from the clouds, were an enchantment.

Ever and always there seemed to be two Fannies; one visible, her face; the other audible, her voice.

But the enchantment was merely fuel for the flames.

my thoughts in confusion. Suddenly I lost control of myself and broke into an angry, ridiculous sobbing. I simply sat there, my face hidden in my dry, hot hands, miserable and defeated. And strange Fanny Bowater, what did she do?

“Heavens!” she muttered scornfully, “I gave up snivelling when I was a baby.”

Then voice, manner, even attitude suddenly changed—“And there’s mother!”

My real rage was not that Fanny had taken me as a midget, but as such a midget. Yet can I honestly say that I have ever taken her as mere Fanny, and not as such a Fanny?

The truth is she had wounded my vanity, and vanity may be a more fractious nursling even than a wounded heart.

Tired and fretful, I had hardly realized the flattering candour of her advances. Even her promises not to “tell” of my night-wanderings, implied that she trusted in my honour not to tell of her promise. I thought and thought of her. She remained an enigma.

The slave left behind her listened to her footsteps dying away in a mingling of shame, sorrow, and of a happiness beyond words.

I know now that it is not when we are near people that we reach themselves, not, I mean, in their looks and words, but only by following their thoughts to where the spirit within plays and has its being.

Perhaps if I had realized this earlier, I shouldn’t have fallen so easy a prey to Fanny Bowater. I waited—but that particular exchange of confidences was never to be completed. A key sounded in the latch.

For my part, I softly gathered myself closer together and continued to gloat. And suddenly out of the faraway of the woods a nightbird loosed its cry: “A-hoo. … Ahoo-oo-oo-hooh!”

There is a hunter in us all.

I laughed inwardly as I watched. A few months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer … but let me keep to one thing at a time.

Her look supplied the missing words. “Sorry that I am a midget, Fanny? People think I must be. But why? It is all I am, all I ever was.

I am myself, inside; like everybody else; and yet, you know, not quite like everybody else.

I sometimes think”—I laughed at the memory—“I was asking Dr. Phelps about that. Besides, would you be—alone?”

“But surely,” expostulated the wiseacre in me, “that’s what we cannot help being. We even die alone, Fanny.”

“Oh, but I’m going to help it. I’m not dead yet. Do you ever think of the future?”

For an instant its great black hole yawned close, but I shook my head.

Far away in the stillness we heard a footfall echoing on the hill. “There is someone coming,” she whispered, “you must hurry.” She might, I think, have serpented her way in by my own little door.

Where the head leads, the heart may follow.

But she did not suggest it. Nor did I.

“My dear,” I replied in firm, elderly tones, whose echo is in my ear to this very day;

“My dear, it was my mind you hurt, not my feelings.”

With that piece of sententiousness I scrambled blindly through my Bates’s doorway, shut the door behind me, and more disturbed at heart than I can tell, soon sank into the thronging slumber of the guilty and the obsessed.

Then my eyes strayed to the silent scene beyond the window, silent, it seemed, with the very presence of poor Mr. Hubbins.

“I should not like to go to Hell in the snow,” I said ruminatingly.

Out of the past welled into memory an old ballad my mother had taught me:—

Mr. Ruskin, senior, was, as a matter of fact, in the wine trade. Mr. Hubbins, I believe, was in linen, though, of course, it amounts to the same thing. But haven’t we,” and he cleared his throat, “haven’t we—er—strayed into a rather lugubrious subject?”

“We have strayed into a rather lugubrious world,” said I.

“Of course, of course; but, believe me, we mustn’t always think too closely. ‘Days and moments quickly flying,’ true enough, though hardly appropriate, as a matter of fact, at this particular season in the Christian year.

But whatever her mood, or her treatment of me, or her lapses into a kind of commonness to which I deliberately shut my eyes, her beauty remained.

Whomsoever we love becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what we give as well as for what we accept.

The very memory of her beauty, when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal.

I surveyed all with just that sense of aloofness and absorption with which as children Cathy and Heathcliff, barefoot in the darkness of the garden, had looked in that Sunday evening on the Lintons’ crimson taper-lit drawing-room.

If, in February, you put a newly gathered sprig of budding thorn into the fire; instantaneously, in the influence of the heat, it will break into bright-green tiny leaf. That is what Emily Brontë did for me.

Not so for Fanny. In her “vapid listlessness” she often pretended to yawn over Wuthering Heights, and would shock me with mocking criticism, or cry “Ah!” at the poignant passages. But I believe it was pure concealment.

What ridiculous care I took to conceal my misery from Mrs. Bowater. Hardly a morning passed but that I carried out in a bag the food I couldn’t eat the day before, to hide it away or bury it. But such journeys were brief.

I have read somewhere that love is a disease.

Or is it that Life piles up the fuel, a chance stranger darts a spark, and the whole world goes up in smoke? Was I happier in that fever than I am in this literary calm?

Was she to blame? Would my mind have been at peace even in its solitary woe if she had dealt truly with me? Would anyone believe it?—it never occurred to me to remind myself that it might be a question merely of size.

Simply because I loved, I deemed myself lovable.

Yet in my heart of hearts that afternoon I had been twitting Mr. Crimble for saying his prayers!

“But then,” I remarked with a sigh, “Fanny seems to make friends wherever she goes.”

“It isn’t the making,” replied her mother, “but the keeping.”

The heavy weeks dragged slowly by, and a one-sided correspondence is like posting letters into a dream. My progress with Miss Austen was slow, because she made me think and argue with her.

She was gone; and, feeling very uncomfortable in my humiliation, I sat down and stared—at “the workbox.” Why, why indeed, I thought angrily, why should I be responsible?

Well, I suppose it’s only when the poor fish⁠—sturgeon or stickleback⁠—struggles, that he really knows he’s in the net.

But this is not teatime. Worse still, the coming Thursday seemed to have sucked all the virtue out of the Wednesday in between. I prefer to see the future stretching out boundless and empty in front of me—like the savannas of Robinson Crusoe’s island.

Visitors, and I am quite sure he would have agreed with me, are hardly at times to be distinguished from visitations.

All this merely means that I was a rather green and backward young woman, and, far worse, unashamed of being so.

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.

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.

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.

It seemed to my young mind that there was not a day, scarcely an hour, I lived, but that Life was unfolding itself in ever new and ravishing disguises. I had not begun to be in the least tired or afraid of it.

Smallest of bubbles I might be, tossing on the great waters, but I reflected the universe.

What need of courage when no danger was apparent? Surely one need not mind being different if that difference added to one’s share in the wonderful Banquet.

Yet part for honesty and part for shame, I had remained silent. I could only comfort myself with remembering that we should soon meet again, and that the future might be kinder.

Well, sometimes the future is kinder, but it is never the same thing as the past.

“They may perhaps talk about that unfortunate … about that poor young Mr. Crimble, miss,” was one of my landlady’s last remarks, as she sat staring rigidly at the great, empty house. “We all take good care to spread about each other’s horrors;

and I was free to invite any friend to visit me I chose. “And especially, my dear, anyone an eighth as exquisite,” Mrs. Monnerie had kindly put it. It may seem a little strange that all these obligations should have been on her side. But

Mrs. Monnerie’s whims were far more vigorous than most people’s principles.

The dews of her loving kindness descended on me in a shower, and it was some little time before I began to feel a chill.

“Oh, yes, the Pollackes,” said she; and having glanced at me again, said no more.

The smallest confidence, I find, is a shortcut to friendship.

And after this little conversation there was no ice to break between Susan Monnerie and myself, and she often championed me in my little difficulties—even if only by her silence.

“H’m. Providence packs his mercies into precious small quarters at times,” he yawned.

“Which suggests an uncivil speculation,” replied his aunt, “on the size of your hat.”

“But candidly, Aunt Alice,” he retorted, “is your little attachée quite all there—I mean, all of her that there is? Personally I wouldn’t touch her, if I could help it, with a pair of tongs. … A nasty trick!”

namely, when I needed his presence and his help. As a matter of fact, I had small time to think. Even the doubts and misgivings that occasionally woke me in the night melted like dreams in the morning.

Every morrow blotted out its yesterday⁠—as faded flowers are flung away out of a vase.

In that vortex of visits and visitors, that endless vista of amusements and eating and drinking—some hidden spring of life in me began to fail. What a little self-conscious affected donkey I became, shrilly hee-hawing away;

Well, well, well; of one burden at least I can absolve Mrs. Monnerie—that of making me so sententious. Somehow or other, but ever more sluggishly, those few crowded summer months of my twentieth year wore away.

It is more of a mercy than a curse, I suppose, that Time never stands still.

Meanwhile two events occurred which, for the time being, sobered and alarmed me. A few days before I had actually planned to pay a second visit to Mrs. Bowater’s, the almost incredible news reached me that she was sailing for South America.

Perhaps I exaggerate.

Love, living or dying, even if it is not blind, cannot, I suppose, focus objects very precisely. It sees only itself or disillusionment.

Whether or not, the duel was interrupted. In the full light of the window, Fanny turned softly at the opening of the door. Marvell was announcing another caller. At his name my heart leapt up like William Wordsworth’s at the rainbow.

‘They are all gone into a world of light’—though I’ve now and then suspected that a few of the disreputable ones have been buried alive. There’s nothing very dreadful in that.

Life consists, of course, in shedding various kinds of skin⁠—and tanning the remainder.

”

still strangers and pilgrims. Of course we must help one another. … Just think of this house! The servants! The folly of it, and all for Madame Monnerie—though I wouldn’t mind being in her shoes, even for one season.

Socialism, my dear, is all a question of shoes.

And this is Poppetkin’s little boudoir? A pygmy palace, my dear, and if only the lightning would last a little longer I might get a real glimpse of that elfin little exquisite over there in her beautiful blue brocade. But then;

But drops of water will wear away a stone. From being Court Favourite I gradually sank to being Court Fool. In sheer ennui and desperation I waggled my bells and brandished my bladder.

A cat may look at a Queen, but it should, I am sure, make faces only at her Ladies-in-waiting.

Fanny inherited yet another sinecure; and it was not envy on my side that helped her to shine in it, though I had my fits of jealousy. She was determined to please;

I firmly believe that what one means is the best thing to say, and the very last thing, however unaffected, most of these clever people said was seemingly what they meant. Their conversation rarely had more than an intellectual interest.

You asked for a penny, and they gave you what only looked like a threepenny bit.

Perhaps this is nothing but prejudice, but I have certainly always got on very much better with stupid people. Chiefly, perhaps, because I could share experiences with them; and the latest thoughts did not matter so much.

and about “beauty,” too, as if it were something you could eat with a spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it meant no more than—well, its “meaning.”

As if a butterfly were a chrysalis.

I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother’s way.

His face grew very solemn. “Lord have mercy upon me,” he said, “to write, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of:

Take a quart or more of lifeblood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots.

” Then he laughed at me, and polished his eyeglasses with his silk pocket handkerchief.

Gulliver, of course, was purposely made unaccustomed to the gigantic; while I was born and bred, though not to such an extreme, in its midst. And habit is second nature, or, as an old Lyndsey proverb goes,

“There’s nowt like eels for eeliness.”

I am, none the less, ever so thankful that neither my ears, nose, nor eyes, positively magnify, so to speak.

and even scolded her for omitting the redoubtable Mrs. Bellamy with her life-size family of nine. I criticized the images too, as not to be compared, even as sugar, with the alabaster William of Windsor and Blanche, in the Tower.

The truth is, when real revulsions of body and soul come, they come in a gush, all at once.

Fleming, on the Night, was actually putting the last touches to my coiffure when suddenly, with a wicked curse, I turned from the great glass and announced my decision.

… sitting quietly together in the sunshine on the green grass bank when a smart, short step sounded in the lane, and who should come springily pacing out of the country through the gates but Adam Waggett—red hands, black boots, and Londonish billycock hat all complete.

Adam must have been born in a fit of astonishment; and when he dies, so he will enter Paradise.

He halted abruptly, a ring of shifting sunshine through the leaves playing on his purple face, and, after one long glance of theatrical astonishment, he burst into his familiar guffaw.

Not “Your Master is dead,” but “Your mistress is come to life again!” I whispered to the bees. And if I had been wearing a scarlet garter I would have tied it round their skep.

Money! Money!⁠—a few even of my handfuls of that, and I was free.

I would teach “them” a lesson. I would redeem myself. Ah, if only I had had a fraction of Fanny’s courage, should I so long have remained wilting and festering at No. 2? The sweet, sharp juices of the clumsy fruit quenched my thirst.

But what else had I been doing those long, dragging months? What had Miss M. hired herself out to be but a pot of caviar to the gourmets?

Puffed up with conceit and complacency, I had been merely feeding on the world’s contempt sauced up as flattery. Nonsensical child.

“Ah, I can make honey, too,” I nodded at the bees; whereupon a wasp pounced out of nowhere upon my oozy fruit, and I thrust it away into the weeds.

“Ah, I can make honey, too,” I nodded at the bees; whereupon a wasp pounced out of nowhere upon my oozy fruit, and I thrust it away into the weeds.

But how refreshing a draught is the thought of action, how comforting the first returning trickle of self-esteem.

My body sank into motionlessness. The shadows lengthened. The August sun slid down the sky.

with every nerve and sinew of his corpulent body he was coveting me: and with a curse he at last accepted my terms. I shrugged my shoulders, but still refused to stir a finger until our contract had been written down in black and white.

Maybe some tiny lovebird of courage roosts beneath every human skull, maybe my mother’s fine French blood had rilled to the surface.

However that may be, there could be no turning back.

He drew out a stump of pencil and a dirty envelope. “That, my fine cock,” he said to Adam, as he wrote, “that’s a woman; and you make no mistake about it. To hell with your fine ladies.”

It remains, if not the most delicate, certainly one of the most substantial compliments I ever earned in my life.

“That’s that,” he pretended to groan, presenting me with his scrawl. “Ask a shark for a stamp, and if ruined I must be—ruined I am.”

“And what sort be this un?” roared an ox-faced, red-haired man from the back. “This un” hung on his shoulder, tiptoe, fair, young, and blowsy.

“She’ll coin you money,” I cried pleasantly, “and spend it. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”

“And him, and him? the toad!” cried the girl half-angrily at the shout of merriment that had shaken the tent.

“And him, and him? the toad!” cried the girl half-angrily at the shout of merriment that had shaken the tent.

“Why, pretty maid,” piped I, “the nearer the wine the sweeter the cork; the plumper the pig the fatter the pork.”

The yell that followed was a better advertisement than drum or pan-pipes. The showman had discovered an oracle! For the next half-hour my booth was a mass of “Sixpennies”—the squirming Threepennies were told to wait.

The Oracle was unwilling. When a genteel yet foxy looking man, with whiskers and a high stiff collar under his chin, sneakishly invited me to tell his fortune, and I replied that

“Prudent chickens roost high,”

the thrust was a little too deft. My audience was amused, but nobody laughed.

I was conscious of a hardening of the skin, of a grimness stealing over my mouth, and of a tendency to stare at the world rather more boldly than modesty should. At least, so it seemed.

In reality it may have been that Life was merely scraping off the “cream.” Quite a wholesome experience.

On the practical side, all was well. Two pounds to Adam, which I had promised to make three if he earned it, would leave me with thirteen or twelve pounds odd, apart from my clumsy “douceur.” I thirsted for my wages.

For the first instant in the intimacy of my love and hatred, Fanny seemed to be just any young woman standing there, spiteful, meaningless. The virtue had gone out of her. She made up her mouth, glanced uneasily over her shoulder and turned away.

We were never again to be alone together, except in remembrance.

I sat on in the garden till the last thin ray of sunlight was gone.

The thought of the day still ahead of me, through which I must somehow press on, keep alive, half stupefied me with dread. We can shut our eyes and our mouths and our hearts; why cannot we stop thinking?

The awful passive order of life: its mechanicalness.

All that I could see was the blank white face of its clock—but no more of the wheels than of the Winder. No haste, no intervention, no stretching-out beyond one’s finger tips. So the world wore away; life decayed; the dunghill smoked. Mrs. Monnerie there;

“Mere scruples, Poppet,” she retorted. “Think of it. If only you could have pocketed that pretty little fastidiousness of yours, the newspapers would now be ringing with your fame. And the fortune! You are too pernickety.

Aren’t we all of us on show? And aren’t nine out of ten of us striving to be more on show than we are entitled to be?

If man’s first disobedience and the rest of it doesn’t mean that, then what, I ask you, Mademoiselle Bas Bleu, was the sour old Puritan so concerned about? Assist me, Susan, if I stumble.”

and there’s the old sun waggishly illuminating the whole creaking stage. Blind beggar and dog, Toby, artists, authors, parsons, statesmen—heart and everything else, or everything else but heart, on sleeve—and all on show—every one of them—at something a look.

No, my dear, there’s only one private life, the next: and, according to some accounts, that will be more public than ever. And so twirls the Merry-go-Round.

”

“I don’t think, Mrs. Monnerie,” I said, “if you don’t mind—I don’t think I really wish to go.”

As if Joshua had spoken, the world stood still.

Mrs. Monnerie slowly turned her head. “Another headache?”

She could write. Think of all those horrible people! The poor thing may have been kidnapped, forced to do her silly tricks like one of those wretched, little barbered-up French poodles. Anyhow, I don’t suppose she’s there—or anywhere else, for that matter—for fun!”

Even Susan’s sympathy had its sting.

“Thank you, Susan,” was Mrs. Monnerie’s acid retort. “Your delicate soul can always be counted on. But advice, my child, is much the more valuable when asked for.”

I denied it emphatically, wiping my cheeks and forehead with the hem of my skirt—for my handkerchief was stuffed into my shoe.

“Look at me!” I smiled up at him, confident and happy.

Was my face lying about me? Oh, I knew what a dreadful object I must be, but then, “I’ve been tramping for hours and hours in the dust; and why!—haven’t you come to meet me; to give me a lift?”

Was my face lying about me? Oh, I knew what a dreadful object I must be, but then, “I’ve been tramping for hours and hours in the dust; and why!—haven’t you come to meet me; to give me a lift?”

What foolish speeches makes a happy heart.

Indeed Mr. Anon had come to meet me, but not exactly there and then. He fetched out of his pocket the minute note that had summoned him. Here it is, still faintly scented:—

But I can vow that in spite of the grime on my face the happiest smile shone through as I stuffed it into my bodice. So this was all that her harrowing “husband” had come to—a summoning of friend to friend.

If every little malicious plot ended like this, what a paradise the world would be.

All tiredness passed away, though perhaps it continued to effervesce in my head a little. It seemed that I had been climbing on and on;

It seemed that I had been climbing on and on; and now suddenly the mist had vanished, and mountain and snow lay spread out around me in eternal peace and solitude.

If Susan Monnerie’s was my first stranger’s kiss, Mr. Anon’s were my quietest tears.

His crazy cart seemed more magical than all the carpets of Arabia. I poured out my story—though not quite to its dregs. “This very afternoon,” I told him, “I was writing to you—in my mind. And you see, you have come.”

The queer creature frowned into my smiling face and flicked the pony with his whip.

“And here,” he muttered moodily, “who knows but by the Grace of God go I?”

Anxiety gone now, and responsibility but a light thing, my tongue rattled on quite as noisily as the cart. Kent’s rich cornfields were around us, their stubble a pale washed-out gold in the last light of evening.

He glanced at me without turning his head. Involuntarily I sighed.

Things never were so easy as one supposed or hoped they would be.

Already my fingers were busy at the knots of my bundle, and for a while, simply because what Mr. Anon was saying was so monstrous and incredible, I continued to fumble at them without attempting to answer him.