Short Stories 1927-1956 (49 page)

Nella nodded.

That,’ said Miss Miller, ‘is how it goes in the
pome.
But oh, Pollie, if
only
you could have seen the shadows on the cobblestones and the silvering of the snails!’

‘I don’t
think
,’
said Nella, ‘I quite like snails.’

Miss Miller merely beamed on her as though, if she had not entirely
disagreed
with her visitor, she could not have so easily comprehended a very natural aversion. ‘There
are
such people; I admit it,’ she cried cordially:

But as
I
was saying,’ she went rapidly on, ‘there might have been dew and there
were
snails, but there was positively nothing else. It had come, my dear; and it had gone, my dove. And if you should ask me what I mean by
it,
I should say it is called being
young
– like you and me, Miss Cosy. And
as for that, and with all due respect for nursemaids and such, the first part of it is apt to be much nicer than the last.’

The little girl stared at this fantastic Miss Miller sitting so stiff and vertical on her scroll-shaped seat with its iron legs bent under her on the patch of gravel. It was deliciously cool under the fan-like fronds of the great spiky-fruited chestnut tree overhead. The leaves shed a dry fragrance, and the sun-burned grass, too; and there came floating on the air from afar the hypnotic whiff of an early autumn bonfire.

Miss Miller appeared for the moment to have forgotten she was not alone, while the round blue eyes of her visitor went on busily examining her from top to toe.

‘Do you live in a great big enormous house now?’ Nella presently inquired.

‘By no means. Not at all,’ Miss Miller replied, her black eyes fixed on the far-away. ‘Still, for shelter from what are called the Ellimans, my child, only four walls are required, excluding floor and ceiling. What is
space
?’

‘But you see,’ said Nella, ‘I didn’t quite understand what you meant it was when what you couldn’t see ran away, out of all those little windows, I mean.’

Miss Miller penetrated the slight ambiguity of this sentence as if with a needle.

‘And what more likely?’ she agreed. ‘No more did I. But you see,
me
never having noticed much that it was there, it wasn’t scarcely right or proper to go laveering and lamenting up and down when it was gone. Which is what is called reasoning, Rosie. Besides, as I say, we moved. What is 17 from, say, 55?’

‘I think,’ said Nella, after a long pause, ‘sit must be thirty something.’

‘Well, then, it is about thirty something whatever-you-like-to-call-them ago since I climbed up the Tower for the last time.’ Miss Miller suddenly stooped and pressed the ringers of her right hand on the toe of her left shoe. Her face had gone a little stiff and surprised-looking.

‘Does that bump on your toe hurt you?’ inquired her visitor courteously.

‘Now and then,’ replied Miss Miller in her richest tones. ‘It does its best. It’s what is called a bunion. Not John, of course, though it
may
come, they say, from walking about. And that, my dear, I am pretty well used to. Now the Tower, you must understand, please, was in our park. In what is called the centre, Rosie. Where we went to next, I mean. Two parks in all. But
not,
as I have said before, a public prairie like this!’ And yet again Miss Miller swept the panorama with the point of her umbrella. ‘This Tower I mention faced to the
east,
you will please imagine, and was of the fairest choicest marble. It might almost be ivory; something like a roly-poly jam-pudding, but pinker and more, as they say, diffused. And its top was like a
pepper-pot
,
marble too, with heads and wings and faces, and cut out with holes like flowers for peeping places, and all, all of stone. Quite quite solid too.
And
’ – Miss Miller paused and looked at her toe – ‘perhaps I ought to
mention
that it was also in the middle of a box-wood. And, as dear Alfred Lord Tennyson says:

In the middle of a box-wood, Rosie; and you could see for
miles
– if, that is, and you’ll forgive the reminder, you troubled to look. Well, I climbed that tower one morning, birds chimchamping, grasshoppers whirring, larks in the sky, sun burning, and as I peered up the spiral staircase – you know what a corkscrew is, my child – a twist, a wheeze and a pop?’

Nella, with a small dumpy forefinger pointing upward, pushed that finger round and round and up and up under the tree.

‘Exactly. And just at the topmost bend of it, bless your heart, what if I didn’t go and see it yet again! Or something: at any rate so much like it, you could scarcely tell them apart; not at first.’

‘What was it doing then?’

‘
Just
the same as usual,’ said Miss Miller airily. ‘Running away. And all as the old song goes.’ She actually sang it too, but not loud enough to get
beyond
the circuit of her chestnut since she had her respectability to consider, and at times her voice, even to her own ear, seemed almost too powerful:

So up I went, of course. Round and round and up and up until at last I reached the top, and never a sign of it
no
where.’

Miss Miller inhaled a deep breath of the thin autumnal air, as if to restore her after that long climb in memory. But Nella still stood her ground.

‘Not but what I might not say,’ said her new acquaintance a little craftily, ‘there was no vestige of a sign of where it might have
been.
On the other hand it wasn’t there then. And everything so calm and still and
trarn
quil you could have dined off thistledown. Why, it might have been carried off in its sleep the very moment I got to the top step and came out into the gallery. So, you see, once more, or, in other words, yet again’ – and the
lengthy angular face turned slowly about towards the little girl rather like the ominous top of an oast house – ‘I had been cheated of everything.

Though how you can call it cheating when every single card from the Queen of Hearts to the Ace of Spades was on the table, I’ll be dashed, Rosie, if I can see. And you will, I hope, excuse the vigour of the remark.

‘Now when you say “It”, my dear Miss Sheepshanks,’ Miss Miller
continued
reflectively, ‘I suppose we neither of us know exactly what we are talking about. What, I mean, we
mean
;
even though it’s something we might, given a good supper and a feather bed, dream of, say, every
Monday
, Wednesday and Friday for years and years.
And
on Tuesdays,
Thursdays
and Saturdays, including the Sabbath, be trusted to forget. But there is no need for high horses. None whatever.

You follow me?’

The round clear eyes under the compact little brow beneath the fair straight fringe of hair and the rim of bonnet gazed steadily back. Then Nella nodded.

‘Precisely,’ said Miss Miller with a smile like that of the Conqueror at Hastings, as with a sharp little gesture she planted the point of her umbrella emphatically between the pebbles. ‘Precisely. And so between you and me and the gate-post it has been ever since. This prairie, you understand, these here people, and all these trees; you sit, you scarcely need to look, but you know it just comes and goes. And the complete
entourage
dispersed! In fact, who would believe, Rosie, that looking out of one’s
own
indefatigably poky little top-floor window, square this time, of course, or rather obbolongy, with a jar of geranium or mignonette on the sill – and I must say some of those young men who look after the gardens are very civil –
and
millions of chimney pots over the roofs of every shape and smell and size, and the wires simply humming in the breezes, not to speak of the noise and – er – odours from down below and only twopence-halfpenny to pay for it,
and
a land
lady
who
never
has
change
– who, I say, who would believe, my dear, there could be anything left at all?’

‘In the chimney pots?’

‘In the chimney pots.’

‘Are there many smuts?’

‘In winter, hosts,’ said Miss Miller, ‘and in summer, fewer.’

‘Do you mean you can’t see anything, of what you were saying, there, either? Not even now?’ And Miss Miller’s square-headed little visitor looked quite anxious about it.

‘For certain; never: but of signs of it exactly a thousand and one. Now look at this,’ Miss Miller with some little fumbling managed at last to
unfasten
an old leather vanity bag that hung on her arm, ‘look at this.’

Nella with a deep sigh drew a step or two nearer, but not too close, while her odd friend held up between cotton-gloved finger and thumb an acorn with a long stalk. ‘That,’ said Miss Miller almost ingratiatingly as she rapidly twirled it, ‘that is an acorn. No doubt of it. And did you ever in your life see anything that fitted better – John Bunyan apart, you know? As if the cup and the seed, or the “a” and the “corn” had been waiting for one another for ages on ages until at last there was no keeping them back. Now that, Rosie, dropped on to my hat as I was walking under its parent tree – this very hat, and not an hour ago. And what did I say to myself when I looked at it, come clean out of the blue sky, so to speak? I said: Observe, Miss Miller; it fits!

Ah, my dear Rosie, I have sat on that tower at noonday when the clocks were striking the hour, and in the height – though I prefer to say heighth – of the summer, and I have listened to the nightingales in the midst of the box-wood, though of course in the best families they come at night, and we mustn’t get poetical. And bless my soul – now that your own smudged tears are dry upon your cheeks – I could weep about a bucketful at thought of it – and partly at what didn’t fit, you know – if only it were not improper to do so in so public a resort as this.’

Nella watched Miss Miller closely, as if in hope of seeing at least one large tear course slowly down her cheek. It would probably keep very close to that long long nose. But far from weeping, Miss Miller was smiling with greater intensity than ever as she sat with that nose turned sidelong towards her little visitor in the shade of the chestnut tree.

‘And now,’ she said, ‘instead, my dear Susie, of giving it to you, which might be troublesome, I will return my acorn to my bag. I shall plant it, as a matter of fact, in a pot, and after two or three leaves have appeared it will
die. That, my child, is how things go.
And
come.’ Up went her thin
eyebrows
,
‘And
go again. So why, why, make too much fuss about it?’

At the word ‘come’, Miss Miller’s singularly attentive eye, which had ever and anon roved the green expanse beyond her canopying chestnut tree, had alighted on an enemy, and one rapidly approaching them.

‘A fuss? Certainly not,’ she added emphatically. ‘We are simply
not
going to
lower
ourselves. And never, never, I say, because our horrid nurse, as I see, in her long grey odious coat and neat little bonnet is stamping after us at this moment like a buffalo over the savannas of the West. We are
not
going to make a fuss; oh, no! And it isn’t even mere pride that stops us. What? Eh?’

Nella had turned her small head with extreme rapidity over her shoulder.

‘I must say good-bye now,’ she said, a little drily and sedately, turning once more to her friend. ‘My nurse wants me. I suppose, you know, it must be nearly time for lunch.
Good
morning.’

‘Lunch,’ cried Miss Miller merrily. ‘Why, certainly.
I
seldom think of it, you know, until I find that most of it isn’t exactly
there
.
And what’s more, it’s a long lane, Miss Sheepshanks, that has no turning, which is
not
to
mention
in any particular respect merely
red
lanes.’

When Nella had reached the big stone floriated vase that stood beside the bridge over the water – and she hadn’t been listening very closely to the heated remarks which her nurse had been ejaculating from time to time during their walk – she turned her head and looked behind her; but the scroll-shaped seat under the chestnut tree was now vacant, and there was no sign at all of its late occupant.

But then, at this moment, any one of the ‘prairie’ trees might easily have hidden that long, spare, sharp-boned figure, including even its nose. And so intent was her small mind still upon her talk with this peculiar stranger, that when her nurse, snatching at her arm as if she were a tottering clockwork dummy which she intended to fling clean across the ornamental pond, said, ‘Now, mind your
step
,
you little imp! Just you wait till I get you home, my fine lady. Ooh, but
you
’ll
he hearing of this!
You
–
mark
–
ME
!’ – not the faintest change of expression showed on the child’s face. It was almost as if one could learn to be a ‘philo – so – sophoser’ after one lesson, and that in the open, and without any fee.