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 yard-stick of the universe. The flowers, their roots glintily netted with spider-webs, 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....