Even as I looked, a remote film of mist blotted out the infinitesimal cluster. “And see, beyond the Chair,” I went on, laughing, and yet exalted with my theme, “that dim in the Girdle is the Great Nebula—s-sh! And on, on, that chirruping Invisible, that, Fanny, is the Midget. Perhaps you cannot even dream of her: but she watches.”
“Never even heard of her,” said Fanny good-humouredly, withdrawing the angle of her chin from the Ecliptic.
“Say not so, Horatia,” I mocked, “there are more things. …”
“Oh, yes, I know all about that. And these cold, monotonous old things really please you? Personally, I’d give the whole meaningless scramble of them for another moon.”
“But your old glutton has gobbled up half of them already.”
“Then my old glutton can gobble up what’s left. Who taught you about them? And why,” she scanned me closely, “why did you pick out the faintest; do you see them the best?”
“I picked out the faintest because they were meant especially for me so that I could give them to you. My father taught me a little about them; and your father the rest.”
“My father,” echoed Fanny, her face suddenly intent.
“His book. Do you miss him? Mine is dead.”
“Oh, yes, I miss him,” was the serene retort, “and so, I fancy, does mother.”
“Oh, Fanny, I am sorry. She told me—something like that.”
“You need not be. I suppose God chooses one’s parents quite deliberately. Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow!” She smoothed out her black cloak over her ankles, raised her face again into the dwindling moonlight, and gently smiled at me. “I am glad I came, Midgetina, though it’s suicidally cold. ‘Pardi! on sent Dieu bien à son aise ici.’ We are going to be great friends, aren’t we?” Her eyes swept over me. “Would you like that?”
“Friends,” indeed! and as if she had offered me a lump of sugar.
I gravely nodded. “But I must come to you. You can’t come to me. No one has; except, perhaps, my mother—a little.”
“Oh, yes,” she replied cautiously, piercing her eyes at me, “that is a riddle. You must tell me about your childhood. Not that I love children, or my own childhood either. I had enough of that to last me a lifetime. I shan’t pass it on; though I promise you, Midgetina, if I ever do have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles, bats, and dormice, and make it like you. Was your mother—” she began again, after a pause of reflection. “Are you sorry, I mean, you aren’t—you aren’t—?”
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?”
“Not when I was alone, perhaps. Still, it must be rather odd, Miss Needle-in-a-Haystack. As for being alone”—once again our owl, if owl it was, much nearer now, screeched its screech in the wintry woods—“I hate it!”
“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.
“Well, that,” replied she, “is what Fanny Bowater is doing all the time. There’s nothing,” she added satirically, “so important, so imperative for teachers as learning. And you must learn your lesson, my dear, before you are heard it—if you want to escape a slapping. Every little donkey knows that.”
“I suppose the truth is,” said I, as if seized with a bright idea, “there are two kinds of ambitions, of wants, I mean. We are all like those Chinese boxes; and some of us want to live in the biggest, the outsidest we can possibly manage; and some in the inmost one of all. The one,” I added a little drearily, “no one can share.”
“Quite, quite true,” said Fanny, mimicking my sententiousness, “the teeniest, tiniest, ickiest one, which no mortal ingenuity has ever been able to open—and so discover the nothing inside. I know your Chinese Boxes!”
“Poor Fanny,” I cried, rising up and kneeling beside the ice-cold hand that lay on the frosty leaves. “All that I have shall help you.”
Infatuated thing; I stooped low as I knelt, and stroked softly with my own the outstretched fingers on which she was leaning.
I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress. “Fanny,” I whispered tragically, “will you please sing to me—if you are not frozenly cold? You remember—the Moon Song: I have never forgotten it; and only three notes, yet it sometimes wakes me at night. It’s queer, isn’t it, being you and me?”
She laughed, tilting her chin; and her voice began at once to sing, as if at the scarcely opened door of her throat, and a tune so plain it seemed but the words speaking:—
“ ’Twas a Cuckoo, cried ‘cuck-oo’
In the youth of the year;
And the timid things nesting,
Crouched, ruffled in fear;
And the Cuckoo cried, ‘cuck-oo,’
For the honest to hear.One—two notes: a bell sound
In the blue and the green;
‘Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!’
And a silence between.Ay, mistress, have a care, lest
Harsh love, he hie by,
And for kindness a monster
To nourish you try—
In your bosom to lie:
‘Cuck-oo,’ and a ‘cuck-oo,’
And ‘cuck-oo!’ ”
The sounds fell like beads into the quiet—as if a small child had come up out of her heart and gone down again; and she callous and unmoved. I cannot say why the clear, muted notes saddened and thrilled me so. Was she the monster?
I had drawn back, and stayed eyeing her pale face, the high cheek, the delicate straight nose, the darkened lips, the slim black eyebrows, the light, clear, unfathomable eyes reflecting the solitude and the thin brilliance
