The Ballad and the Source (21 page)

“No,” she said. “He was a
man
—a man of stature. He was not concerned with womanish interferences, apportionings of desert and blame—with Sunday School prizes for merit and black marks for bad behaviour. Ah, he belonged to a richer age than ours! An Elizabethan he was, all ferment, all fire. He wanted everything. The world was his oyster. How wonderful he was!—the curiosity, the exuberance, the prodigious appetite.
…”
Her eyes swam, grew luminous with tears.

“Is he dead?” I timidly inquired.

“He is dead. He shot himself one day. Just like that. Without one message, one single scribbled line to any one. So, to account for it, his friends exercised their ingenuity in the usual ways. But when I heard,
I
knew why he had done it! His was a nature that must always challenge itself—higher, higher!—and that was the last, the ultimate challenge. He must
choose
death, not wait for it.” She spoke with rapid intensity, almost with joy; then relapsing into quietness added: “One day I will show you the poem I wrote for his epitaph. But that is all another story. This thing of his in Florence—it was one of his side lines. He hated waste, you see, fumbling, vain expense of spirit—anything on a shoddy level. Struggles with cobwebs, shadows, echoes from the cruel hollow tyrannical dead: he would tear through all these. He wanted—one might say to burst open the furtive situation. He thought … he thought I was mismanaging it. He thought my timing fatally wrong.” She faintly smiled; and again the rueful look about her brows made her personality unfamiliar. “God knows! It may have been so. One should act always from one's inner sense of rhythm. Sometimes I have asked myself:
could
that have received some damage, unknown to oneself? Could disastrous strokes have so impaired it that one's actions—movements—have become … grotesque?” She tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair. Then she poured out a cup of tea, and said, as if suddenly remembering to answer my question: “No, no. He did not want to bring her to me. That would be an absurd view. He wanted her for himself.”

I said: “Oh.”

“That was it. Quite simple.”

“Only he did say—I thought you said—about saving her?”

“Oh, what he said! My dear child, that was a joke. People who are very intimate always tease one another. Surely you know that?”

“Yes,” I agreed humbly. It struck me that she and Harry never seemed to tease one another. Perhaps they did when they were alone. “I wonder a bit, though, why he wanted her when he didn't know her, did he?”

“
Mon Dieu, cela
n'emp
ê
che pas,”
she murmured, looking amused, though not in a pleasant way. Then, agreeably: “No. He did not know her. It was
not
simple. Nothing he did was simple. But sometimes it happens that a man—a person—can want two things at once: to do something out of love for another; and at the same time to do something out of—something
against
another. Both are something he must do for
himself:
perhaps to feel free again where he has felt bound; or to prove to himself, it may be, that he is master—still has power over the other. Perhaps to make up to himself for some deep hurt. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I think so, ” I said truthfully.

“I am speaking of him and me. Possibly he may have felt my marriage had—estranged us. Not that there had ever been question of marriage between us. Oh no! That would never have done. No, when I decided to be Harry's wife, he wished me all happiness. Yet. … Who knows?” she said low, speaking her thoughts aloud. “
Le coeur a ses raisons. …
Were we blind? Were our eyes open? Both. Certainly we knew what we were doing. But, you see, we chose always to live at the tragic level. We took notable risks.
‘
I shall lay dynamite,' he said.
‘
They will all be blown up. It will be a lot of trouble—all for your sake. I tell you now, beforehand, I lay the victims at your door.'
‘
Oh, my dear boy, victims!
'
I said.
‘
It is what they are waiting for. They are desperate characters, all of them.'
‘
You will do yourself no good,' he said,
‘
in your
new life.
I suppose that does not worry you?
' ‘
Nor you,' I said.” She uttered the ghost of a malicious chuckle. “
‘
I might get a shaking myself,' he said.
‘
That would annoy you frightfully.'
‘
On the contrary,' I said.
‘
I expect you to get a lot out of it. Would I be likely to send you on an altruistic mission?
' ‘
You mean,' he said,
‘
you are prepared for
anything?
' ‘
I
want
it,' was my reply. He looked at me—a peculiar look. I have often recalled it since.
… ‘
Very well,' he said.
‘
We will see what we will see.' That was the last time we were together.”

A faint wind began to agitate the listening room, breathing upon us through the open pane the first premonitory chill of autumn. She got up and closed
the
window, then stood in the embrasure, drumming with her fingers on the windowpane.

“Yes—yes—yes,” she muttered.

I writhed in my chair, pierced by a chilling thought. Could Mrs. Jardine be—not quite right in the head?
…
And I alone with her?

There was an old woman in the village, Mad Mary the children called her, shouting it at her through the hedges, then running away with hoots and squawks. She lived alone in a filthy tumbledown cottage at the top of the village, and kept a lot of birds in cages. Sometimes one saw her padding up and down in front of her house with one or two perched upon her shoulder, wearing a long loose ragged burberry, smeared and stained with bird-droppings. Her feet were wrapped up in newspaper tied with scraps of knotted string; and a sort of skirt of sacking and paper crazily stitched together protruded in front and behind from the coat's gaps. Stabbing at the earth with a stick, impaling straws and scraps of refuse, round and round she went, talking to herself in a low vibrant monotone broken with shouts and chuckles. Sometimes she counted rapidly, running up the scale on an urgent mounting cry; sometimes she uttered a sort of humming snatch of tuneless song: exile as solitary, as absolute upon her patch of earth as any castaway adrift upon a raft in boundless wastes of ocean, never to be picked up, reunited with humanity.

Isabel liked to walk that way. She would stop for a good look through the starved and broken hedge while I clutched her hand, half loth, half enthralled. Once I heard her mutter: “Yes. Yes. Yes;” and she struck the earth with her stick.

“Pore soul, she's harmless,” said Isabel placidly. “It's only her daft fancies. She was done wrong to by her plighted true-love and it turned her brains. All in her bridal white she was, at the altar by his side, and when the parson come to just cause or impediment, up rears a veiled woman at the back and speaks out she was his lawful wedded wife. At least that's the tale. If so, it was a good long time ago. But it stands to reason a shock like that would turn a person funny. It seems as if she couldn't get no rest, like, with what's working in her.”

Frequently after these expeditions Isabel would render
The Mistletoe Bough
with strident fervour while she washed up the tea things.

All this returned now to cause me anxiety: that threefold affirmation, that tranced monologue.
…?

She continued to stand at the window, watching the still sun-brimmed but now faintly troubled garden. All in a moment, it seemed, the first crack had run up the golden lustre bowl. The weather was going to change. As if a veil had been soundlessly rent, the transfixed archaic presences upon the lawn shook off their legend. They were two fine old trees, no more no less, subject to time, triumphantly, grievingly preparing to resist, to accept through all the intricacies of their giant organisms, one more ineluctable decay and death.

“I am not happy about that copper beech,” she said quietly. “Nor is Gillman. He thinks the roots may have penetrated to something deadly. If so, it is not a tragedy I can face with equanimity.”

I said, with relief, that it would be an awful shame.

She came and sat down again, and started to sip her tea.

“Ah well,” she remarked, “ as it turned out, nobody did themselves any good that time.”

“Didn't they—didn't he and Ianthe make friends?”

“Oh, dear me, no,” she said, with mild thoughtfulness. “Nobody made friends. Everybody lost a friend that time.”

“Everybody?”

“First came this note from Mrs. Connor, as I told you. Then, a day or two later, a long letter from him, very much in his manner, describing his reception. Deliciously amusing. Then about a week later, another letter, dashed off hurriedly. It was somewhat cryptic.
‘
The plot thickens,'
he said. He wrote jestingly of one of two futures yawning before Ianthe—the nunnery or the—” She broke off. “He saw her daily, she confided in him, so he said. Perhaps I would be interested to know what foundations her father had laid for her purity and peace of mind. He described them.
‘
I
incline to think,'
he said,
‘
there is more to come out with regard to
le
beau C. She wears a vacant look and turns the conversation when his name crops up. But give me time:
all will be made clear. She is a terrible girl,'
he said.
‘
I would prefer to make love to Mrs. C.
—
but that there is a touch in her which that heroine lacks. She absorbs me. I would like to be damned by her, and saved by Mrs. C. But Mrs. C. won't save me. Not she.'”

“
I wonder what he meant.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Oh, it was his usual vein—making sport of himself, playing with allusions. … It did not disturb me. Or scarcely. Apart, I mean, from those revelations.
They
were a facer.”

“It was just his joke?”

She disregarded this.

“A few weeks passed. Blank. Then came two lines.”

“From him?”

“From him.”

“What did he say?”

“He said:
‘
It is all coming along admirably, just as you planned. I am getting a lot out of it. Everybody is.'”

“
I do rather wonder what
that
meant,” I ventured obstinately but uncertainly.

“I wondered too. Ah, then I
did
wonder! I was prepared, of course. Wherever that man went, he was bound to start something. There was some force he generated which made for—the full orchestra. Sometimes I have thought—it has kept coming over me—that letter—the fact that he wrote
at all
—meant:
Come.
An appeal. … Perhaps.” She began to seem confused again. “It would have been characteristic of him to put it in this way. I should have known. There had been other times between us. … However. … Be that as it may, I made the wrong decision. For once. I should have gone to Florence. I did not go—against my instinct. Scrupulousness restrained me. I waited. I told myself: Whatever happens—
whatever
happens, he is to be trusted—on our level. I was right—as I see it—as I shall always see it.
The drop of anguish
—it burns me now, but what of that? There was
nothing
ignoble in the design. Call it playing fast and loose if you will—that is just a phrase the petty-cautious use against the fiery ones, the risk-takers—But what possibilities—glorious!
The
tried intent of such a truth as I have meant. Such
a truth!
He
meant it too. How often has my life pointed those words for me! But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation. One can present people with their opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.”

Floundering in all this, I began to feel, as I ate my way on through scones into sponge cake, how unequal I was proving to my own opportunities. I was not going to be told—or maybe I had been told, and had not taken in a word of it. Perhaps it had been the same with Ianthe and Mrs. Connor; perhaps their chances of illumination, of bettering themselves, had been presented to them in so rare a way that they had not even noticed them. But I was wrong about Mrs. Connor.

Almost I could have prayed, now, for the cup of honour to be taken from me and transferred to some more worthy recipient. But I must not give up—I must see it through.

“I wrote another note to Mrs. Connor,” she said presently. “I asked merely after Ianthe's health and well-being. A few bare
lines.
Of course I knew by then that there was a rumpus going on.”

“A rumpus?”

“He had told me, hadn't he, more or less plainly, that he had fallen in love with the girl?”

“Oh!
…
Of course he had. And her with him?”

“Ah.” She meditated, as if about to discuss a debated historical point. “Who can say? Not I. She must have had—a
movement
towards him. A movement of some violence. That is the way with such natures under urgent pressure. There is no organic growth or gradual unfolding. Passive, opaque, self-contained­­­­, unimpressible as cats; then a convulsion, a leap—half panic, half craving … and cold, yes, cold in its rapacity. Then it is over. They drop away, furtive, secret, before they are cornered. They can neither sustain emotion nor face the consequences­­­­ of their own actions. Poor Ianthe. Trapped! By the time I got to Florence it was too late. The die was cast.”