Standing up on his feet against the background of Mrs. Bowater’s ink-black flounces, with his rather humped shoulders and straight hair, he had looked an eccentric, and, even to my view, a stunted figure. Now the whole scene around us seemed to be sorting itself into a different proportion before my eyes. He it was who was become the unit of space, the yardstick of the universe. The flowers, their roots glintily netted with spiderwebs, nodded serenely over his long hands. A peacock butterfly with folded colours sipped of the sunshine on a tuft nearly at evens with his cheek. The very birds sang to his size, and every rift between the woodlands awaited the cuckoo. Only his clothes were grotesque, but less so than in my parlour Mr. Crimble’s skirts, or even Lady Pollacke’s treacherous bonnet.
I folded my white silk gloves into a ball. A wren began tweeting in a bush near by. “I am going away soon,” I said, “to the sea.”
The wren glided away out of sight amongst its thorns. I knew by his sudden stillness that this had been unwelcome news. “That will be very pleasant for me, won’t it?” I said.
“The sea?” he returned coldly, with averted head. “Well, I am bound still further.”
The reply fretted me. I wanted bare facts just then. “Why are you so angry? What is your name? And where do you live?” It was my turn to ask questions, and I popped them out as if from a Little by Little.
And then, with his queer, croaking, yet captivating voice, he broke into a long, low monologue. He gave me his name—and “Mr. Anon” describes him no worse. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the house he lived in. But instead of apologizing for his ill-temper, he accused me of deceiving and humiliating him; of being, so I gathered, a toy of my landlady’s, of betraying and soiling myself.
Why all this wild stuff only seemed to flatter me, I cannot say. I listened and laughed, pressing flat with both hands the sorry covers of my book, and laughed also low in my heart.
“Oh, contempt!” he cried. “I am used to that.”
The words curdled on his tongue as he expressed his loathing of poor Mrs. Bowater and her kind—mere Humanity—that ate and drank in musty houses stuck up out of the happy earth like warts on the skin, that battened on meat, stalked its puddled streets and vile, stifling towns, spread its rank odours on the air, increased and multiplied. Monstrous in shape, automatic, blinded by habit, abandoned by instinct, monkey-like, degraded!
What an unjust tirade! He barked it all out at me as if the blame were mine; as if I had nibbled the Apple. I turned my face away, smiling, but listening. Did I realize, he asked me, what a divine fortune it was to be so little, and in this to be All. On and on he raved: I breathed air “a dewdrop could chill”; I was as near lovely naught made visible as the passing of a flower; the mere mattering of a dream. And when I died my body would be but a perishing flake of manna, and my bones. …
“Yes, a wren’s picking,” I rudely interrupted. “And what of my soul, please? Why, you talk like—like a poet. Besides, you tell me nothing new. I was thinking all that and more on my way here with my landlady. What has size to do with it? Why, when I thought of my mother after she was dead, and peered down in the place of my imagination into her grave, I saw her spirit—young, younger than I, and bodiless, and infinitely more beautiful even than she had been in my dreams, floating up out of it, free, sweet, and happy, like a flame—though shadowy. Besides, I don’t see how you can help pitying men and women. They seem to fly to one another for company; and half their comfort is in their numbers.”
Never in all my life had I put my thoughts into words like this; and he—a stranger.
There fell a silence between us. The natural quietude of the garden was softly settling down and down like infinitesimal grains of sand in a pool of water. It had forgotten that humans were harbouring in its solitude. And still he maintained that his words were not untrue, that he knew mankind better than I, that to fall into their ways and follow their opinions and strivings was to deafen my ears, and seal up my eyes, and lose my very self. “The Self everywhere,” he said.
And he told me, whether in time or space I know not, of a country whose people were of my stature and slenderness. This was a land, he said, walled in by enormous, ice-capped mountains couching the furnace of the rising sun, and yet set at the ocean’s edge. Its sand-dunes ring like dulcimers in the heat. Its valleys of swift rivers were of a green so pale and vivid and so flower-encrusted that an English—even a Kentish—spring is but a coarse and rustic prettiness by comparison. Vine and orange and trees of outlandish names gave their fruits there; yet there also willows swept the winds, and palms spiked the blue with their fans, and the cactus flourished with the tamarisk. Geese, of dark green and snow, were on its inland waters, and a bird clocked the hours of the night, and the conformation of its stars would be strange to my eyes. And such was the lowliness and simplicity of this people’s habitations that the most powerful sea-glass, turned upon and searching their secret haunts from a ship becalmed on the ocean, would spy out nothing—nothing there,
