Foggerty's Fairy and Other Tales/Little Mim
LITTLE MIM.
The only point on which Joe Paulby and I could ever bring ourselves to agree was that his cousin Mim was the only young lady in the world who was worth falling in love with. Joe Paulby was eight, I was seven, and his cousin Mim was six. Joe was a strong, rough, troublesome boy, and I was small and weak and delicate; and if it had not been that we were both deeply in love with the same young lady I believe I should have hated him. That solitary bond of sympathy served to bind us more or less firmly to each other, and I seldom quarrelled with him except when his regard for her showed signs of cooling down.
She was a pretty, fragile little lady, with quaint ways of her own, and a gentle frightened manner of dealing with her boisterous playmate which seldom failed to bring him to a sense of order. She loved us both very dearly, but I think Joe was her favourite. Although a rude, unpleasant boy to others, to her he was quiet and gentle enough; but perhaps this palpable submission appealed more directly to the little lady than my undemonstrative and colourless affection. But she was very fond of me for all that.
Neither Mim nor I had any parents, and we lived with Joe's papa in a great gaunt, draughty house in Bloomsbury Square. Captain Paulby was our guardian—a tall, bony, unsympathetic widower—who governed his house as though it had been a regiment of soldiers. A scale of dietary was hung up in the nursery, and from it one learnt how many quarter-ounces of cocoa, how many half pounds of bread, and how many tablespoonfuls of arrowroot we consumed in the week. An order-book was brought into the nursery every morning, in which the detail of the day's duties was carefully set out, and to the instructions it contained implicit and unmurmuring obedience was exacted. It regulated the hours of rising and going to bed, the school hours and the hours of relaxation, when and where we were to walk, and what we were to wear.
We were placed in charge of a nurse—Nurse Starke—a tall, muscular, hardened woman of forty. She had a stern unrelenting face, close lips, hard grey eyes, and a certain smooth roundness of figure, which on looking back, suggests the idea of her having been turned in a lathe. I never see the masculine old woman who lets lodgings in a pantomime without thinking of Nurse Starke. I am bound to say, however, that she was scrupulously, indeed aggravatingly, clean and neat, and in that respect of course, the analogy falls to the ground.
Nurse Starke was not actively unkind to us. Indeed, I believe she had cheated herself into a belief that she was rather weak-minded and indulgent than otherwise; but in this she was in error. I believe she was fond of us in a hard unyielding way, but she was sudden and impulsive in her movements, and never handled us without hurting us. There was a housemaid—Jane Cotter—who occasionally helped to put us to bed, and sometimes Nurse Starke undressed us while Jane put our hair into curl papers, and sometimes Nurse Starke did the curling while Jane undressed us. And the manner in which these duties were to be divided became a matter of no light speculation to us as evening approached, for it was Nurse Starke's custom to pull the locks of hair out to their full length, and then roll them round a piece of paper, twisting the ends together when the curl had been rolled well home, whereas Jane Cotter first made the curl up flat with her fingers, and then encased it gently in a triangular paper, which she pinched with the tongs. Jane Cotter's flat curls were pleasant to sleep upon, but Nurse Starke's corkscrews placed a comfortable night's rest out of the question. It is impossible to sleep in peace with a double row of balls, each as big as a large chestnut, round your head. You can't move without giving four or five of them a wrench.
I think we must have been sufficiently happy as a rule, or Sunday would not have stood out in such gaunt and desolate contrast to the other days of the week. There reigned in our nursery an unaccountable fiction that Sunday was a holiday; and in deference to this tradition we endeavoured to cheat ourselves into a belief that we were glad when that day arrived. Sunday began at a very early hour in Bloomsbury. It began to ring itself in at half-past seven when we got up, and continued to ring itself through the day at short intervals until it finally rang itself out, and us into bed, at half-past eight in the evening. There were drawbacks, however, to our enjoyment of the day. I think we were required to tackle more Collect than is good for a child of six or seven, and perhaps we did not quite understand the bearing of that Shorter Catechism which a bench of thoughtful Bishops has prepared for the express use of very young children. Even Nurse Starke, a high authority on all points of Church controversy, never succeeded in placing its meaning quite beyond all question. But Nurse Starke had a special Sunday frame of mind which discouraged close questioning, and on that day of the week, she was exceptionally short and sharp in her replies. She baffled our interrogatories by pointing out to us that there was nothing so unbecoming as a tendency to ask questions; which seemed to us a little unreasonable, when we considered the inquisitive character of her share in the Catechism.
I believe I liked going to Church, though I am sure Joe Paulby did not. That rugged boy never looked so hot or so rumpled as he did during Divine Service. As I look back upon Joe in church, I am always reminded of the appearance of restless decorum presented by a Christy Minstrel "Bones" during the singing of a plaintive ballad. Joe occupied himself during the service in laying the foundations of a series of pains and penalties which usually lasted well into Thursday, for Nurse Starke had a quick eye for misdemeanours, and every crime had its apportioned punishment. Poor little Mim was too delicate to go to church, and used to sit at home in theological conference with Jane Cotter, whose picturesque and highly dramatic ideas of future rewards and punishments had a special interest for the poor little lady.
For Mim had been told that even children die sometimes, and both Nurse Starke and Jane had a long catalogue of stories in which good little people were cut off in their earliest years, and bad little people lived on to an evil old age. Mim was often weak and ailing, and at such times the recollection of these stories came upon her. Nurse Starke's grim, hard manner relaxed when she was speaking to the little sick child, and her kindness to Mim, gaunt and grudging as it was, seemed to increase with the trouble the child gave her—a never-ceasing source of wonderment to Joe and myself, who were only in favour when we ceased to occupy Nurse Starke's attention. Nurse Starke had a brother, a boy of twelve or thereabouts (though we believed him to be eight-and-twenty at least), who was a page at a doctor's in Charlotte Street; and Nurse Starke, as a great treat, used to allow this young gentleman to spend the afternoon with us, and entertain us with his varied social powers. Gaspar—for that was his unfortunate name—was a talented boy with a taste for acrobatics, conjuring, killing flies, and putting lob-worms down Mim's back; but notwithstanding these powerful recommendations we looked coldly upon him, and, on the whole, discouraged his visits. He had a way of challenging Joe and me to fight him with one of his hands tied behind his back, by way of a handicap, which was not what you look for in a visitor, and moreover compromised our reputation for valour in Mim's eyes. On the whole he was not popular with us, and eventually he was proscribed by Nurse Starke herself on a charge of filling the nursery candle with gunpowder, which exploded and burnt poor little Mim's eyebrows and eye-lashes. Gaspar eventually got into trouble about some original draughts of his own composition, which he supplied to his master's patients as healing waters made up in accordance with that gentleman's prescriptions, and spent several years in a reformatory.
I have a dismal impression of the wretched afternoons that Mim and Joe and I used to spend together in our great bare play-room. We were locked in by Nurse Starke at about five every afternoon, and not released until seven, when we had supper, and as the shadows deepened and the fire got lower and lower, we crowded together in a corner for warmth, and told each other strange stories of princes and noblemen who were tortured by cruel and vindictive page-boys; with an occasional touch from Joe Paulby upon caverns, demons, vampires, and other ghostly matters until poor little Mim screamed aloud with terror.
She was a pretty, fragile, sweet-tempered, clinging little soul, far too delicate for the coarse inconsiderate treatment to which she was subjected in common with ourselves. So at last she became seriously ill, and we noticed that the poor little child grew paler and thinner in her cot, day after day, day after day. She was very cheerful, although so weak, and when the tall, grave, kind doctor came—once a day at first, and then toward the last (for she died) two or three times a day—she would say in reply to his question, "And how is our Little Mim?" that she was much better, and hoped in a day or two to be quite well again. After a time she was removed to another room which was always darkened, and to which we were seldom admitted, and only one at a time. An odd change seemed to come over us all. Nurse Starke was quite kind now, and used to read to her (but now about good children who lived and were very happy), and tell stories, and make beef-tea for her, and turn the cold side of the pillow to her poor little fevered head. And the oddest part of the thing was that Nurse Starke was kind to us too, and used to come of her own accord to tell us how Mim was (she was always a little better), and what messages she had sent to us, and how she seemed to take a new pleasure in the toys she had once discarded. And then she would take us, one at a time, to the sick room, and we were allowed at first to speak to her, but afterwards only to sit on the edge of the bed, (it was such a big bed now!), and hold her little dry hand. Joe Paulby would come back crying (it was a strange thing to see him cry, and it touched me as it touches me now to see a strong man in tears), and he would spend his half-pence—they were rare enough, poor fellow—in picture-books for our poor little dying wife. But a time came when even the picture-books were forbidden, and then the whole house was enjoined to silence, and the grave doctor—graver now than ever—came and went on tip-toe. And if we stole to the little girl's bedroom, as we often did, we were pretty sure to find great hard Nurse Starke in tears, or with traces of tears upon her face; and once when Joe and I crept down to the room, and looked in at the half-opened door, we saw the shadow of Nurse Starke on her knees, thrown by the flickering firelight on the wall. Then we knew that the end was near.
One day Captain Paulby came home earlier than usual, looking very grave, and with him came the kind doctor, and with them another doctor, an older man, but also very kind. They went up into little Mim's room, and they stayed so long that Joe and I stole down from our old dark play-room to hear, if we could, the reason of his father's unexpected return. And Joe and I cried as if our hearts would break, for our dear little wife was dying.
Captain Paulby came out of the room, and seeing us in the passage, told us quite kindly to go back to the play-room. Joe Paulby went, but I begged Captain Paulby to let me see my dear little playmate once more, and alarmed by my excited manner and my choking sobs, he admitted me.
I had not seen her for two days, and she was greatly changed. She looked so little in that big bed that the two doctors and Captain Paulby and Nurse Starke seemed absolutely gigantic as they all bent, silently and without motion, over the little child. I think we must have remained so for nearly two hours, the silence undisturbed except by an occasional whisper from one of the doctors, and a sob from Nurse Starke. When I first went into the dark room Mim was asleep, but eventually she recognized me, and begged to be allowed to kiss me as she was nearly quite well. They laid me on the bed by her side, and her little thin arms were placed round my neck, and there we lay motionless, both of us in deep silence. At length I became conscious of a movement among the doctors, and then a loud ringing wail from Nurse Starke told me that my little wife was quite, quite well again.