Chapter Twenty-Six
There had been no need to reserve the small hours for these ruminations. The next few days were wet and windy; every glance at the streaming panes cast my mind into a sort of vacancy. The wind trumpeted smoke into the room; I could fix my mind on nothing. Then the weather faired. There came "a red sky at night," and Spica flashing secrets to me across the darkness; and that supper-time I referred as casually as possible to Mr Anon.
"I suppose one must keep one's promises, Mrs Bowater, even to a stranger. Would half-past six be too early to keep mine, do you think? Would it look too—forward? Of course he may have forgotten all about me by this time."
Mrs Bowater eyed me like an owl as I bent my cheeks over my bowl of bread and milk, and proceeded to preach me yet another little sermon on the ways of the world. Nevertheless, the next morning saw us setting out together in the crisp, sparkling air to my tryst, with the tacit understanding that she accompanied me rather in the cause of propriety than romance.
Owing, I fancy, to a bunion, she was so leisurely a walker that it was I who must set my pace to hers. But the day promised to be warm, and we could take our ease. As we wandered on among the early flowers and bright, green grass, and under the beeches, a mildness lightened into her face. Over her long features lay a vacant yet happy smile, of which she seemed to be unaware. This set me off thinking in the old, old fashion; comparing my lot with that of ordinary human beings. How fortunate I was. If only she could have seen the lowlier plants as I could—scarcely looking down on any, and of the same stature as some among the taller of them, so that the air around me was dyed and illumined with their clear colours, and burthened with their breath.
The least and humblest of them—not merely crisp-edged lichen, speckle-seed whitlow-grass and hyssop in the wall—are so close to earth, the wonder, indeed, is that common-sized people ever see them at all. They must, at any rate, I thought, commit themselves to their stomachs, or go down on their knees to see them properly. So, on we went, Mrs Bowater and I, she pursuing her private musings, and I mine.
I smiled to myself at remembrance of Dr Phelps and his blushes. After all, if humanity should "dwindle into a delicate littleness," it would make a good deal more difference than he had supposed. What a destruction would ensue, among all the lesser creatures of the earth, the squirrels, moles, voles, hedgehogs, and the birds, not to mention the bees and hornets. They would be the enemies then—the traps and poisons and the nets! No more billowy cornfields a good yard high, no more fine nine-foot hedges flinging their blossoms into the air. And all the long-legged, "doubled," bloated garden flowers, gone clean out of favour. It would be a little world, would it be a happier? The dwarfed Mrs Bowaters, Dr Phelpses, Miss Bullaces, Lady Pollackes.
But there was little chance of such an eventuality—at least in my lifetime. It was far likelier that the Miss M.'s of the world would continue to be a by-play. Yet, as I glanced up at my companion, and called to mind other such "Lapland Giants" of mine, I can truthfully avouch that I did not much envy their extra inches. So much more thin-skinned surface to be kept warm and unscratched. The cumbersome bones, the curious distance from foot and fingertip to brain, too; and those quarts and quarts of blood. I shuddered. It was little short of a miracle that they escaped continual injury; and what an extended body in which to die.
On the other hand, what real loss was mine—with so much to my advantage? These great spreading beech-trees were no less shady and companionable to me than to them. Nor, thought I, could moon or sun or star or ocean or mountain be any the less silvery, hot, lustrous, and remote, forlorn in beauty, or vast in strangeness, one way or the other, than they are to ordinary people. Could there be any doubt at all, too, that men had always coveted to make much finer and more delicate things than their clumsiness allowed?
What fantastic creatures they were!—with their vast mansions, pyramids, palaces, scores of sizes too large either for carcass or mind. Their Satan a monster on whose wrist the vulture of the Andes could perch like an aphis on my thumb; yet their Death but skeleton-high, and their Saviour of such a stature that wellnigh without stooping He could have laid His fingers on my head.