Topsy Tiddles was not anybody. She was not wrought in flesh and blood, but existed as a boat exists in fog… there, but hidden. It came with fearful ardent rushing, this idea of Small’s that she must say things, but she did not know how to. I don’t mean just talk. “Everyone with a tongue can do that,” Small told herself. “But I want to make my tongue and my heart work together.”
The tongue always gabbles away and leaves the heart stranded, because your heart is much shyer than your tongue. Small had not read a great many books. The Elder often read Dickens aloud to the children in the evenings. Small loved that, and Small had a whole shelf of Poets over the top of her bed and she loved those, mulling dreamily over the poems as she went to sleep.
Small tried to write poetry; it appealed to her more than prose. Poetry took her into a new world when she read it, but she could not write it. She could just make silly jingles to go with caricatures that she drew of people. Just stupid things that tickled a laugh out of people. She wanted to write things different to that, things that played tunes on the expressions of people’s faces, but she did not know how to begin. That was not the worst of it either.
Suppose people wrote of the puzzles and bewilderments, and suppose they got found, these worded puzzles and bewilderments and they were trodden on and laughed at—well it would hurt. Could one go on living for hurt? Small thought not. “So I’d die,” concluded Small and went on getting more and more muddled. Middle and she did not like the same things, no good discussing it with Middle. Neither did Bigger and brother Dick, who were four years too young and four years too old.
I suppose all adolescent children grow too big to contain themselves in prose, so eventually in self-protection they have to expand in poetry. All young life is poetry, frightfully serious poetry. Words would help, but where does one find the right words, because think and say are not the same. There were always grown-ups to laugh! Prose writers can say just the same things as poets, but it seems that except for good ones, their saying is not quite so right, as poetry meanings are apt to go silly. The prose writer kept within limits, wide expansive bounds maybe, but they had not the spring, the mystery of poetry.
They had just as much or more truth. Prose was alright but poetry was more uplifting, at least that was the way it seemed to Small. In the year her father gave Small The Lady of the Lake,(1) the Elder gave Bigger, Middle and Small each a diary, a big Letts(2) diary. The children were supposed to write in them every day. Bigger filled hers with religion, not her feelings towards it as much as a faithful record of goings to churchp, how much she put in the collection plate, a short resume of the sermon, the text and the names of the hymns.
Middle’s diary was a chronicle of the births, deaths, and marriages of her doll family and her cats. Small’s diary was almost empty except for repeated Monday entries: “Monday is our wash day,” she wrote, “Mary comes to do it for Mother. Mary is an Indian.” It seemed to have been the great event of Small’s life at that time, not so much the washing as the Indian. Here and there came an entry: “Father and I found a bird’s nest in the hedge… The cow found a most lovely calf in the hay stack.”
In looking through the diaries in after-years, Small’s thought was this: All I wanted to say I dare not say more, nor did Bigger or Middle, because we felt that our diaries were supervised. We would have had much to say. Things about the world, about us, and to write about them would have taught us something and helped us to identify ourselves with nature.
Our diaries were amusement for the elders. Well, Small had not gained a thing from her diary as far as wording thoughts went. She was pretty young at the time of the diaries but when she became a big girl and was thinking harder, then the desire came again to express, so she invented the fictitious “Topsy.” “I’ll give you a stupid name, so you won’t even think you are real yourself, Topsy, and if I do, I’ll remember you are not real and I won’t be so shy of speaking straight to you. I’ll write it in letters and I can think a think and come back to it again and add more thought to it because you’ve kept it there in my letter to you. I will write you a long, long letter.”
There was one great drawback to Topsy which really was not her fault. Every place we had was still supervised for tidiness. I was not afraid of Middle reading Topsy. Though she and I shared all the space in our world that was ours, we did not quite share each other’s thoughts. But Bigger and Elder snooped. They seemed to think that reading anything written by a younger sister was their duty—why you might even write a “love letter.” Quite young girls did and it was disgraceful. The Elder and Bigger stamped with both feet on love, or supposedly so. Or you might write something about them! Young girls’ correspondence certainly should be guided. It was the duty of our elders. They did it for your own sakes and sometimes they laughed and quoted your words back at you.
Small’s first device was to change a good clear but perfectly char-acterless handwriting to an unintelligible scribble which even she herself could not read. Her next protective step was to climb to the most inaccessible places and hide the old exercise book which was arithmetic sums on one side and Topsy letters on the other. Small had three chapters written. What with the long, long walk to and from school, the being kept in for arithmetic every day and the home work, there was not much time for Topsy.
So Small got up a little earlier for her. ≈ ≈ ≈ Ah, this lovely spring morning there was twenty minutes before she need leave for school! She dived into Topsy. Middle thought she was preparing her home work. Bigger came rushing by the open door, shouted, “Girls! The clock is fifteen minutes slow, hurry, hurry!” Middle seized her coat and followed Bigger, struggling with the sleeves as she went. “Topsy Tiddles!” Small groaned. No time to rush to the hay loft or the dark slope above the dairy roof. The others were already downstairs and out the doors. Small dashed into the drawing room, rammed Topsy up the chimney and followed the others to school in agony.
Aunt had just arrived from the south. It was one of our summer grey days; the afternoon turned cold. Aunt demanded a fire in the drawing room. When halfway home, rain commenced to spit. Small knew what would happen and ran all the way. It was as she thought it would be. The Elder was just putting the match. Aunt was coughing. “That chimney needs cleaning!” Small told them. “Aunt, Mother is calling you like anything, don’t you hear?” To the Elder: “Your Tom Turkey has flown the fence and is making off!” Both women hurried away. Small was on her knees before the grate. “You nasty tormenting little beast Topsy! You’re no good and now I’ve told three lies just for you, ugh!”
She rammed the Topsy book into the midst of the flames. That was the end of Topsy Tiddles.
