The Book of Small (7 page)

The birthday dawdled. Small went to bed early that night too.

“Small, you forgot your prayers! cried Bigger.

“I didn't—God's deaf.”

“You're dreadfully, dreadfully wicked—maybe you'll die in the night.”

“Don't care.”

YEARS PASSED. SMALL'S
father and mother were dead. The Elder was no more reasonable than Small's father had been about dogs. Small never asked now, but the want was still there, grown larger. Bigger, Middle and Small were grown up, but the Elder still regarded them as children, allowed them no rights. Like every girl Small built castles in the air. Her castle was an ark, her man a Noah, she tended the beasts.

Unexpected as amen in a sermon's middle came Small's dog. She had been away for a long, long time; on her return the Elder was softened. Wanting to keep Small home, she said, “There's a dog in the yard for you.”

Dabbing a kiss on the Elder's cheek Small rushed. Kneeling she took the dog's muzzle between her hands. He sniffed, licked, accepted. Maybe he too had waited for a human peculiarly his. She loosed him. He circled round and round. Was he scenting the dream-pup jealously?

He had been named already. The dream-pup would always keep the name that had been his for his own.

“He'll run away—chain him. Remember he must not come in the house Small!”

Small roamed beach and woods, the dog with her always. Owning him was better even than she had dreamed.

SMALL SAT ON A
park bench waiting for a pupil, the dog asleep at her feet. The child-pupil, planning a surprise for Small, stole up behind her and threw her arms round her neck. Small screamed.
The dog sprang, caught the child's arm between his teeth, made two tiny bruises and dropped down—shamed.

“That dog is vicious,” said the Elder.

“Oh, no, he thought someone was hurting me; he was dreadfully ashamed when he saw that it was a child.”

“He must be kept chained.”

Chickens for table use were killed close to the dog's kennel. He smelled the blood—heard their squawks. The maid took a long feather and tickled his nose with it. He sprang, caught the girl's hand instead of the feather. The Elder's mouth went hard and grim.

“I teased him beyond endurance,” pleaded the maid.

That day Small was hurt in an accident. The dog was not allowed to go to her room. Broken-hearted he lay in his kennel, disgraced, forsaken. Small was sent away to an old friend to recuperate. The day before she was to return, the old lady's son came to Small blurting, “They've killed your dog.”

“Cruel, unjust, beastly!” shrieked Small.

“Hush!” commanded the old lady. “The dog was vicious.”

“He was not! He was not! Both times he was provoked!”

Small ran and ran across the field till she dropped face down among the standing grain. There was a dark patch on the earth where her tears fell among roots of the grain.

“Only a dog! This is wrong, Small,” said the not-understanding old woman.

SMALL WENT HOME
and for six weeks spoke no word to the Elder—very few to anybody. She loathed the Elder's hands; they made her sick. Finally the Elder lost patience. “I did not kill the vicious brute,” she cried. “The police shot him.”

“You made them!”

Small could look at the Elder's hands again.

SMALL WAS MIDDLE-AGED
; she built a house. The Elder had offered her another dog. “Never till I have a home of my own,” she had said. The Elder shrugged.

Now that Small had her house, the Elder criticized it. “Too far forward,” she said. “You could have a nice front garden.”

“I wanted a large back yard.”

“A glut of dogs, eh Small?”

“A kennel of Bobtail sheep-dogs.”

THE ELDER POKED
a head, white now, into Small's puppy nursery. “What are you doing, Small?”

“Bottling puppies—too many for the mothers.”

“Why not bucket them?”

“There is demand for them—sheep-dogs—cattle-dogs.”

“How many pups just now?”

“Eve's eight, Rhoda's seven, Loo's nine.”

“Twenty-four—mercy! and, besides, those absurd bearded old patriarchs—Moses, Adam and the rest.”

“Open the door for Adam.”

The kennel sire entered, shaggy, noble, majestic. He rested his chin a moment on Small's shoulder where she sat with pup and feeding bottle, ran his eye round the walls where his mates and their families cuddled in boxes. He embraced all in good fellow-ship, including the Elder, picked the sunniest spot on the nursery floor and sprawled out.

“Oh, Small, I was throwing out Father's old wicker chair. Would you like it in the kennel nursery to sit in while bottling the pups?”

“The praying chair?—Oh, yes.”

So the praying chair came to Small's kennel. Sitting in it Small remembered Tibby, the picture pup, the want, her first dog. Adam rested his chin on the old chair's arm. Small leaned forward to rest her cheek against his woolly head. All rasp, all crispness gone, “Amen,” whispered the praying chair.

I HEARD TWO
women talking. One said to the other, “Mrs. Crane has a large heart.”

“Yes,” replied her companion, “and it is in the right place too.”

I thought, “That's queer—hearts are in the middle of people. How can any person know if another person's heart is big or small, or if it is in the right or the wrong place?”

Soon after I heard this conversation about Mrs. Crane's heart, our mother was seized with a very serious illness. My sister Alice and I—she was two years older—were hushed into the garden with our dolls and there, peeping from behind the currant bushes, we saw a high yellow dogcart stop in front of our gate. Mrs. Crane descended from it and came stalking up our garden walk.

“Come to enquire, I s'pose,” whispered Alice.

“My! Isn't she long and narrow?” I replied.

Silently I fell to trying to make all the different hearts I knew fit into Mrs. Crane's body—the gold locket one that made your neck shiver, beautiful valentine ones with forget-me-nots around them, sugar hearts, with mottoes, a horrible brown thing Mother said was a pig's heart and boiled for the cat—none of these would fit into Mrs. Crane's long narrow body.

She seemed to grow taller and taller as she came nearer. When she tiptoed up the steps, to us, crouched behind the currant bushes, she seemed a giant.

My big sister opened the door to Mrs. Crane. They whispered. Then my sister came to us and said, “Children, kind Mrs. Crane is going to take you home with her until Mother is better.”

Alice's big eyes darkened with trouble. Obediently she picked up her doll and turned towards the house. I set my doll down with a spank, planted my feet wide apart and said, “Don't want to go!”

My sister gave me an impatient shake. Mrs. Crane ahemmed.

WE WERE SCRUBBED
hard, and buttoned into our starchiest. Mrs. Crane took one of Alice's hands and one of mine into a firm black kid grip and marched us to the gate. While she opened the gate, she let go of Alice's hand but doubled her grip on mine. Her eyes were like brown chocolate drops, hot and rich in colour when she looked at Alice, but when she looked at me they went cold and stale-looking.

We were hoisted up to the back seat of the dogcart. Father's splendid carpet bag with red roses on its sides and the great brass lock, was put under our feet to keep them from dangling. The bag was full of clean frocks and handkerchiefs and hairbrushes.

Mrs. Crane climbed up in front beside Mr. Crane. His seat was half a storey higher than hers. Mr. Crane cracked his whip and the yellow wheels spun furiously. Our house got smaller and smaller, then the road twisted and it was gone altogether. The world felt enormous.

WE CROSSED TWO
bridges. Mud flats were under one and the gas works were under the other—they both smelt horrid. The horse's
hooves made a deafening clatter on the bridges, and then they pounded steadily on and on over the hard road. When at last we came to the Crane's house, it seemed as if we must have gone all around the world, and then somehow got there hind-before. You passed the Crane's back gate first, and then you came to the front gate. The front door was on the back of the house. The house faced the water, which looked like a river, but was really the sea and salt. You went down the hill to the house and up the hill to the stable; everything was backwards to what it was at home and made you feel like Mother's egg-timer turned over.

Mrs. Crane had three little girls. The two younger were the same age as Alice and I.

The three little Cranes ran out of the house when they heard us come. They kissed Mama politely and, falling on Papa, hugged him like bears.

A man came to lead the horse away. The little Cranes were all busy guessing what was in the parcels that came from under the seat of the dogcart, but the receding clop! clop! of the horse's hooves, hammered desolation into the souls of Alice and me.

The Cranes' hall was big and warm and dark, except for the glow from a large heater, which pulled out shiny things like the noses of a lot of guns hanging in a rack on the wall and the fire irons and the stair rods. It picked out the brass lock of Father's bag and the poor glassy eyes of stuffed bear and wolves and owls and deer. Helen saw me looking at them as we went upstairs and said, “My papa shot all those.”

“What for?”

Helen stared at me. “What for? Doesn't your papa go in for sport?”

“What is sport, Helen?”

Helen considered. “Why it's—killing things just for fun, not because you are hungry, chasing things with dogs and shooting them.”

“My father does not do that.”

“My papa is a crack shot,” boasted Helen.

Alice and I had a grown-up bedroom. One window looked over the water and had a window-seat. The other window looked into a little pine wood. There was a pair of beautiful blue china candlesticks on the mantelpiece.

We children had nursery tea. Mrs. Crane had Grace the biggest girl pour tea and Grace was snobbish. After tea we went into the drawing-room.

MRS. CRANE'S DRAWING-ROOM
was a most beautiful room. There was a big three-cornered piano in it, two sofas and a lot of lazy chairs for lolling in. At home only Father and Mother sat in easy chairs: they did not think it was good for little girls to sit on any kind but straight up-and-down chairs of wood or cane. Mrs. Crane's lazy chairs were fat and soft and were dressed up in shiny stuff with rosebuds sprinkled all over it. But bowls of real roses everywhere made the cloth ones look foolish and growing ones poking their pink faces into the open windows were best of all and smelled lovely. A bright little fire burned in the grate and kept the little sea breeze from being too cold and the breeze kept the fire from being too hot. In front of the fire was a big fur rug; a brown-and-white dog was sprawled out upon it.

When we five little girls trooped into the drawing-room, I thought that the dog was the only creature in the room. Then I saw the top of Mr. Crane's head and his slippers sticking out above and below a mound of newspapers in an easy chair on one side of
the fire. On the other side the fire lit up Mrs. Crane's hands folded in her lap. Her face was hidden behind a beaded drape hanging from a brass rod which shaded her eyes from the fire-light. One hand lifted and patted a stool at her knee—this Helen went and sat on. Mrs. Crane's lap was deep and should have been splendid to sit in, but her little girls never sat there. Helen said it was because Mama's heart was weak and I said, “But Helen, I thought big things were always strong?”

Helen did not know what I meant, because of course she had not heard those ladies discussing her mother's heart and so she did not know what I knew about it.

Mrs. Crane told “Gracie dear,” to play one of her “pieces” on the piano. She always added dear to her children's names as if it was a part of them.

Mary Crane and our Alice were shy little girls. They sat on the sofa with their dolls in their laps. Their eyes stared like the dolls' eyes. Mrs. Crane would not allow dolls to be dressed or undressed in the drawing-room; she said it was not nice. I sat on the edge of a chair till it tipped, then I found myself in the very best place in all the room—right down on the fur rug beside the dog. When I put my head down on his side, he thumped his tail and a lovely live quiver ran through his whole body. I had meant to fight off sleep because of that strange bed upstairs, but the fire was warm and the dog comforting … I couldn't think whose far-off voice it was saying, “Come to bed, children,” or whose hand it was shaking me.

THE COLD UPSTAIRS
woke us up. Mrs. Crane looked black and tall standing by the mantelpiece lighting the blue candles. The big room ran away into dark corners. The bed was turned down and
our nighties were ready, but we did not seem to know what to do next unless it was to cry. Mrs. Crane did not seem to know what to do either, so she said, “Perhaps you little girls would like to come into my little girls' room while they undress?” So we sat on their ottoman and watched. They brushed themselves a great deal—their hair and nails and teeth. They folded their clothes and said their prayers into Mrs. Crane's front, then stepped into bed very politely. Mrs. Crane told them to lie on their right sides, keep their mouths shut and breathe through their noses, then she threw the windows up wide. The wind rushed in, sputtered the candle and swept between Mrs. Crane's kisses and the children's foreheads. Then she blew the candle gently as if she was trying to teach the wind manners.

Back in our room, Mrs. Crane said something about “undoing buttons.” I backed up to Alice very quickly and she told Mrs. Crane that we could undo each other.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Crane, “I'll come back and put out the candle presently.”