The Ballad and the Source (17 page)

Measured, abstract, her voice fell, weighing out syllable after syllable into the air. No drama coloured it now, no calculated effects of presentation; and the unstressed words began to build a formal elemental pattern, weaving my attention into it in a repetitive design of interrogation marks.

But she did not long sustain the impersonality of her once-upon-a-time manner. After a brief and vivid description of the beauties of Florence, she replied to a question of mine as to how the pair passed their days with a distinct lapse into dryness.

“Between doctors, collectors of art objects and priests,” she said. “It seems that Charles Herbert sought support and consolation in the bosom of the Church. The need came on him, I presume, subsequently to our separation. I detected no symptom of it during our married life. I should have said, indeed, that he was notably indifferent to the evidences of Christianity—or to religion in a more general sense.” She sniffed.

“He'd got sort of religious?” I inquired with anxious hope. For surely if I took her meaning this must mean an increase of goodness in Charles, despite apparently unfavourable omens.

A faint smile crossed her face.

“Oh yes. Undoubtedly he had. And Ianthe was his Snow-white Virgin, his dedicated Lamb, his unspotted Daughter-Bride.” She spat the words out. “Oh yes. They flourished together in a
hot bed
of sanctity.”

Her lips coarsened with their expression of nauseated contempt.

“Except,” I suggested in the ensuing silence, “
he
didn't flourish really, did he? I mean—if he was sick?”

She looked amused.

“Well, there are ways and ways of flourishing,” she said. “Sickness can put forth remarkable sprouts.” But then, as if deciding it was high time to soar again, she continued with an alteration of tone to simple gravity: “I am not mocking at religion, Rebecca. Heaven forbid that I should descend to such loathsome and imbecile vulgarity. No. … I am no bigot in agnosticism. One must have the humility and the imagination to honour all deep human experiences—not least those one has never come near to sharing. How often have I wished for the experience of faith!—of God pervading all, like the heart beating, the breath drawn in and out. But this is to be dowered with a special genius, rare as any other kind.”

“Don't you believe in God, then?” I inquired, shaken.

“I never believe nor disbelieve. I am
ignorant
of God. I know only the mystery.
That
has not faded out, at least.”

“Jess believes in God,” I said. “She knows exactly what He's like. She's told me. But I don't seem to imagine Him the same.”

I dared not admit the difficulty: the inability to rid myself of an early identification of Him with the Toby jug on the schoolroom mantelpiece—a rubicund grotesque with nut-cracker profile, falsely benign leer, and grey wig beneath a three-cornered hat.

Mrs. Jardine turned upon me a meditative glance.

“I rather doubt your ever becoming one of the faithful,” she said. “One can never tell; but I doubt it.”

There was no vestige of criticism in her voice, but I felt disappointingly classified and hastened to cover my chagrin by redirecting the weight of her judgment to its original objects.

“But Ianthe became one?”

“Oh no. Ianthe has not the temperament for God. No harmony, no discipline … no dedication. Ianthe grew up sharply brilliant, graceful, morbid, self-absorbed to a pathological degree. Given the circumstances, this was inevitable.”

“If you—if you didn't see her, how do you know she was like that?”

“Oh, I had means of discovering,” said Mrs. Jardine. Calmly she smiled into the distance. “Years of practice made me an adept in the art of seeing unseen. I stood at street corners. I strolled with the crowd in parks and gardens. I attended religious services. I was an English lady-tourist in picture galleries; a frequenter of operas, concerts, lectures. I learned where to look for my cultivated daughter. Oh yes!—I will give him his due: he devoted much care to her education. She was well read and unusually accomplished. Yes,” she said, after a pause, turning towards me, “I saw her quite often, in one place or another. At a distance, you understand, always at a distance. Fortunately I have very long sight. And in time I acquired the technique of suppressing my personality—of becoming as it were blank, neutral, dissolved into my surroundings: invisible indeed. So that I was never recognised. I have often thought what useful lessons I could give to a detective … or to a murderer.”

She smiled.

I took in her meaning at last, with all its implications; and a shiver went through me. The lady in the blue cape: the middle-­aged woman nicely dressed (but oh! she had got stout;) and in between, how many others, impressive, inconspicuous, utterly exposed and disguised, posted solitary at their selected vantage-­points, in deadly concentration?

“I watched her carefully,” continued Mrs. Jardine. “It was necessary that I should understand what material I should have to deal with. Oh, I grew to know her—through and through. I saw what she had become.”

“What?”

“A mirror-haunter.”

“What's that?”

“She had built herself a room of mirrors. She never looked out straight into the light, at objects, at other people's faces. She looked into these mirrors and saw the whole of creation as images of herself thrown back at her. On them she brooded, adoring, fearing what she saw.”

“I wonder why she did that,” I murmured, confused by the Lady of Shalott scene presented to me.

“She was afraid of the world. That is why. When people are afraid they dare not look outward for fear of getting too much hurt. They shut themselves up and look only at reflections of themselves, because these they can adapt and manipulate to their needs without interference, or wounding shocks. The world sets snares for their self-love. It betrays them. So they look in the mirrors and see only what flatters and reassures them; and so they imagine they are not betrayed.”

“Fancy you noticing all that just by watching her from far off!” I said admiringly. “I can't think how.”

“It was plain, all too plain, to the seeing eye,” said Mrs. Jardine. “And who should see clearer than I? My own flesh and blood.”

“What did she look like?”

“Tall. A long full neck,” said Mrs. Jardine dreamily, staring before her. “She carried her head … down. Drooping. Sidelong inclined, like a wilting lily. As no doubt she was pleased to see herself. His lily maid and all the rest of it, I dare say. Ach! He was always a sentimentalist, as all cruel people are.” Her eyes dilated.

“Was she pale?” I asked enthusiastically. Though pallor was, I knew, not healthy, it was a quality I much admired.

“Strikingly so.”

“Like you.” I gazed at her with a voluptuous eye.

“Yes, she inherited that from me—though in build and feature she resembled her father's family. Such a complexion can be a great beauty. It was so in my case—glorious. I had a white glow, incandescent. A great poet who loved me praised it in one of the poems he wrote for me. But she had no glow. However, her skin had its own quality: a mushroom texture, smooth and thick. Her eyes were fine—but too full. They looked dark, because the pupils were unusually large. The iris was blue and melting. She made great play with her eyes. But they took in nothing, no one. They were
bound
to herself.” Mrs. Jardine brooded. “That was disquieting enough; but there was something else. During the times when she was
not
rolling glances around, demanding to be observed and admired, her eyes did not relax: they appeared to me to remain
taut;
fixed in an inward rigidity of contemplation.” She made a brusque movement, drummed with her fingers on the pillar. “I have noticed a seed of the same thing in Cherry,” she said abruptly.

“So have I,” I said. “If you mean—staring at nothing—and Cherry's eyes look black too, don't they?—with blue round.”

“Oh, you have noticed it too, have you?” she said, throwing me a sharp glance, as if my powers of observation were this time unwelcome. “Ah well—that can be dealt with. There is time, ample time. If I live—and live I must—Cherry shall have her freedom. It cannot be an irrevocable inheritance, a congenital
…”
Her fingers tapped violently. “No. … Such symptoms are the result of criminal mishandling; the ingrowing reaction of an exceptionally egotistical nature, obstructed in its development. Physical beauty makes, of course, for an additional menace. … But I have noticed with such natures that beauty itself, of a particular type, seems as it were an external symptom. They seem to put it forth mysteriously, abnormally, as consumptives do.”

Taking the flower-basket from me, Mrs. Jardine lightly lifted and redistributed one or two dahlias.

Presently I said:

“Had she got a smiling sort of face?” And added hastily: “Or not?”

“What would you expect?” said Mrs.
Jardine,
encouraging me to make a psychological judgment.

“Not.”

“Quite right.”

“More sad?”

“Unhappy. There is a difference. Sorrow can beautify. I have seen it regenerate and purify an old coarse face. But unhappy faces are merely distressing. Faces that cannot forget themselves and flow outward freely, generously to meet their fellow beings. One is apt to see that look on adolescent faces, but it is generally accompanied by something else, which makes it exceedingly moving: some passion of anxiety and longing, as of a prisoner struggling to be free, to communicate. Some hope, some question: ‘Is it time? When will the time come? Is this the way out of the tunnel? Can you be the person who will help to set me free?
‘…
But in her face, that fitful spark, that young life gathering its forces to burst out was missing. Her mouth was a displeasing feature, although the lips were well shaped. It looked cramped, ungenerous,
repudiating.
Yes. I had to see my daughter preparing to
repudiate
life. To
un
fit herself. To be an invalid.”

“An invalid? Ill?”

Mrs. Jardine put her fingers to her forehead.

“There.”

She was silent, and so was I. It was the sign for insanity, I knew. Ianthe was a mad girl, then; was that what these accumulated hints portended? I saw her with a wreath awry on her dishevelled locks and a straggle of broken flowers in her hand, like the picture of Ophelia in my illustrated Shakespeare. Then suddenly the miniature Maisie had shown me slid before my mind's eye. So concentrated had I been on the portrait Mrs. Jardine was building up, that this image had lain dormant. But now it struck me that this phantasmagoric Italian princess, that Christmas Annual mother were one and the same person. Between these two incompatible figures, where, apart from their equal mystery and fascination, was the connection?

Almost in the moment of presenting myself with this dilemma, I found the solution. It came over me with the same huge wave of relief and pleasure that I had experienced when at the age of six, between one despairing hour of guess-work and the next, the power was granted unto me to make sums give the right answers, that obviously no person was one and indivisible—one unalterable unit—but a multiplicity; so that everything about a person might be equally true and untrue, and I need no longer be puzzled by the badness of good people, and the other way round; and so on.

Confident that from now on I should be brighter, less dumbfounded, I was emboldened to say:

“Do you think it was
really
true, what you saw—that she was like that? Or only that she looked like that to you—because—” I foundered. “Because—”

“Yes?” said Mrs.
Jardine,
expectant.

“Because you wanted—”

“Because I wanted to think so?”

“Well, not really, of course, but sort of.”

“That is a perfectly legitimate point to raise,” she pronounced judicially. “A woman in my position might well, out of the bitterness and frustration of her feelings, create distortions. She might so have made up her mind beforehand that this influence she loathed was ruining her child that she would inevitably project her will in all its falsity upon the child. But no. I cannot be deceived. I have lightning in my eyes. It strikes without warning, often to my own discomfiture, into dark places—a blinding flash. And then I
see!
Doubtless the world saw her as a charming and interesting creature in her spring-time bloom. But beneath her young roundness and smoothness she was sick. Life sick. Love sick.” She drew a sharp breath that turned into a shudder all through her frame. “I saw the invisible worm.”

She uttered the last words without emotion, but they exploded in me with a colossal reverberation. Compulsively I averted my eyes from the sky where, so it seemed, her fabulous gaze rested upon portents and monsters. Another moment, and its candid and impenetrable depths would be rent for me—me too; some dire apparition, some mythical reptile would appal my sight. I looked attentively into the loggia at some basket chairs piled with gay cretonne cushions.

After a while I said feebly:

“I wonder why she went like that.”

“That is what I had to ask myself,” said Mrs. Jardine. “What I had to discover. What canker was eating at her adolescence. I had become cut off from any effective source of information about the intimate aspects of her life. My intuitions were strong—and I had never had reason to mistrust them. But it was not till later that I ascertained certain facts, and knew that my suspicions had been all too well founded.” She paused; then in a vibrating voice burst forth: “Wretched hallucinated creatures both! Sick indeed! Criminal father! Ah, there is one corruption above all that stinks to heaven, and that is the odour of sanctified perversion. Which he died in.”