The Ballad and the Source (28 page)

“Ah, some little girrl has been taught pretty mannerrs!”

She took my hand again and gave it a squeeze. I simpered. We walked on. I said:

“Did she ever come back for them after she went away?”

“Who, dearr?”

“Ian—their mother. Did she—sort of try to get in and fetch them?”

Auntie Mack stared at me, dumbfounded at the things children think of.

“Good gracious me, no! Neverr. Oh, dearr, no.”

“I suppose he wouldn't have wanted her to have them.”

“Indeed he would not have. At least—dearr me
—!
But there was no question of it, you know. He knew that, poorr man, when—when she finally deparrted from his hearrth and home.”

“Oh, I didn't mean Mr. Thomson so much. I meant”—I nerved myself—“the other man.”

“The other
—?”

“That she went away with.”

Again our progress was arrested. She dropped my hand; she turned on me a face: an inexpressibly shocked grownup's face.

“Who told you?” she said rapidly.

“Who told me what?
”

“That she went away with—with anybody?”

“Well … Maisie.” I was embarrassed. “At least she thought so. She thought—we thought—people generally do, don't they?”

“Oh!” she gasped. “What a terrible thing! People gen
—
Oh, good gracious me,
where do
children
—
A pairrfect sink their minds are, that's what they are. Perrhaps it is not altogetherr to be wondered at. Little pitchers. … I said so more than once.
‘
It will be brought into your verry home one day,' I said to him.
‘
Then what?
'
Oh dearr! A bitterr black day it was, but a mairrcy in disguise when—” She gave the wildest gasp yet. “
‘
Mind,' he said.
‘
Never a hint so long as you live. Swear it.' I swore it on my mother's Bible, and he was satisfied. As for them, he called them to him and he said, once and for all, they would all go on loving her, but neverr speak of her together.
Never.
I don't know how he put it to them but that was what it came to. And they neverr broke their worrd to him. They were so sorry for him they'd have bit their tongues out rather than
—
They pitied the man. I saw it,—those mites. Making allowances if he flew out. Oh, it was a morrtal shame! I wonderr now, could Mrs. Jardine be right in saying a dose of the bitterr truth will do no harrm
…?”

“She thinks it does a lot of good,” I interposed.

“Ah … Well. It is out of my hands now. Let come what must.
No,”
she added with intensity, turning on me again.
“She went away with no man.”

We began to walk on.

“She just went away?”

“She just went away.”

I pondered. It made it no better, even more mysterious, more cold, more desolating. I thought, if I were Maisie I would feel even worse, thinking of my mother simply wandering away alone. In any case I would not dare to repeat to her this conversation: she might accuse me of plotting, and tear me limb from limb: I was receiving the confidences of one who had quite lost her confidence. Nor could I throw out to her the suggestion with which I had just been visited: that her mother had attacked Mr. Thomson and then bolted. I wondered if he had died with a scar on his brow. I gave up.

“And to think,” I sighed, “poor Mrs. Jardine doesn't even know where she is.”

She made another half turn towards me; checked herself, gasped, but feebly.

“Ah,” she said, nodding.

I saw the french windows open. Maisie emerged and came galloping down the terrace towards us. Mrs. Jardine and my mother appeared within the entrance.

“Come in, Miss Mackenzie, come in,” called Mrs.
Jardine,
peremptory and gracious. “Rebecca and Maisie will play together now. Come in and join us.”

“Ah,” murmured Auntie Mack, leaving me, all gratification and alacrity. “Then the bicarrb must wait.”

“Don't disappear,” called my mother, smiling. “Fifteen minutes, Rebecca, then we must be getting home.”

Running at full tilt, Maisie passed Auntie Mack without a glance and slithered to a halt by my side.

She seemed in an aimless mood. She bit her thumb and stared around her, frowning.

“We don't want to go with
them,”
she said. She narrowed her eyes at the swing, now at rest, with its occupants idly stretching themselves against the ropes. “We haven't got to stay out if we don't want to. We're not babies to be told to play in the garden. Come on in.”

We trailed up to her bedroom. She flung herself on the bed, crossed her arms under her head, and whistled up at the ceiling. I said:

“Have you decided?”

“I have decided.”

Her voice made me start. Was it an imitation of Mrs.
Jardine?
—or her own spirit speaking? It sounded brisk, harsh, matter-of-fact, self-willed. Her eyes were fixed, wide open, on a crack in the ceiling, and nothing gave her away.

“Where?”

“Oh, you wouldn't know. You're not going away to school, are you? Ever. I'm going to see two delightful schools next week; one quite near, one quite a long way away. Your mother's going to take me—it's jolly decent of her. I quite like your mother, I must say. But I have already decided.”

“I do hope you'll be coming here every holidays.”

“Oh, I don't know. I'll see.”

She turned her head sharp aside. We were silent. I watched her waggling the toes of one crossed foot. Then I glanced at her face. I thought how pretty it looked. Laid back on the white bedspread, the big hard prominent features fell into relaxed childish lines. Her eyes were two long green-glinting slits, and her thick black lashes met the high, glowing, carnation curve of her cheeks. The pose of her head on the pillow lifted her upper lip and exposed the edge of her regular teeth. Even her springy upstanding mop of hair had lost its aggressiveness and fell down in a soft tumble. I wondered if anybody else had ever had the opportunity to notice how much like a pretty girl she could look.

She squinted down at her feet and pushed off one gym shoe.

“Lying on the nice clean bedspread with your dirty shoes on!” she exclaimed. “Will I never learn the manners of a lady?”

One shoe dropped on to the floor, but she left the other on; and presently she swung herself up violently and hopped over to the dressing-table. Opening a drawer, she fumbled at the back of it and brought out a large white cardboard mount with a photograph pasted on it. She handed it to me.

It looked queer because one part of it had been cut off. It was the full-length photograph of a solid stocky bald-headed man with a heavy dark moustache and large undistinguished features. He was smiling a bit, and he wore a tail coat, light grey dress trousers, spats, and a white carnation in his buttonhole. In one hand he carried a top hat. In the crook of the other arm lay a white-gloved hand; but the arm and everything else belonging to the hand had been cut off with a blunt pair of scissors. There seemed a portion of white tent behind him.

“Is that him?” I said, terrified.

“That's him. It's the only one I could find. It's not a bit good of him.”

“He looks frightfully nice.”

“It was taken out in India. It's a wedding group. I cut the rest off.”

We heard Mrs. Jardine calling us from the bottom of the stairs.

She snatched the photograph from me and stuffed it back into the drawer.

Part Five

1

Next day came a telegram announcing that Mrs. Svoboda had passed peacefully away. We were with my mother when Mossop brought it in. She said: “Girls, poor Tilly is dead.” Then she sat on at her writing desk, holding the orange envelope, looking out of the window with an unfamiliar expression of sorrowful solemnity. We said nothing. I tested myself expectantly for tears; but there were none: not one. I tried to picture the ascent of Tilly into Heaven, the Little Feller scampering to meet her at the Golden Gates; but it seemed more like imagining a black small bird, a crow, say, giving a little croak and a flap of its wings; and, still flapping, go up, up till it faded into a black dot and vanished. There was this crow ascending, and also there was Tilly, her life-like yet already unreal figure, unostentatiously vacating the sewing-room and composing herself in her coffin.

“I must let Mrs. Jardine know,” said my mother with a sigh.

She left the room to telephone. We went out into the garden and rode round the lawn on our bicycles, and said never a word about our sad loss. But that night Jess remained longer than usual in prayer by her bedside, and I guessed that she was mentioning Tilly, and felt that my own perfunctory devotions and light-hearted spring-up from the kneeling posture showed lack of proper feeling, and made for invidious comparisons. In bed, I screwed my eyes up and said to myself: “Oh Tilly, I will always remember thee in my heart.” My voice rang hollow in my ears.

Two days later my mother put on a black coat and hat and went up for the funeral: my father was joining her in London, she said, and she had ordered two beautiful wreaths, one from us children. She gave Jess a card and told her to write on it in her best hand:
With love to dear Tilly from Jess;
and then I followed after and added
Rebecca;
and then Sylvia concluded the ceremony with a piece of tipsy printing which incurred my mother's disapproval. While I was making my signature I began to cry. That card with its message and our names affixed, so tender, so simple, so final, was pathos itself. Jess asked if Mrs. Jardine was going to the funeral, and my mother said no. Mrs. Jardine had said on the telephone that she had bidden Tilly good-bye at her bedside, and with her own hands arranged on the table a great bunch of roses, the whole late glory of her garden.

“I hope,” I said, strangled, “Tilly knew they were there.”

“I expect the scent of them came to her, anyway,” said my mother, mildly optimistic.

“Did she know Mrs. Jardine had come to say—goodbye?” I gasped out, feeling hideously hit below the belt by the word.

“No. She didn't know that.” Then she added, more to herself than to me: “At least … who can tell?”

But I thought, and think still, that if in any recess of Tilly's mysteriously shuttered being, some breath had come to her with the breath of roses of her old enemy, old love, Tilly would have peered through one last chink and made a sign. What was it that Mrs. Jardine had wanted of her, waited for? The
Word over all, beautiful as the sky
—the Reconciliation? Something, just possibly something more that Tilly had shut her lips on all these years, that might flutter forth with her last sigh? Too late now. Tilly had slipped for ever from her grasp.

I saw Mrs. Jardine once more that autumn. It was about a week after the funeral, when we went up to say good-bye to Maisie before she went off—a late new-comer—to her boarding school. Lessons had begun again for us, and to our bitter resentment an era of stricter discipline had been inaugurated. To pay us out for the general aroma of frayed moral fibre which she had sniffed on her return, Mademoiselle had persuaded my mother that it was in the interests of our health and education not to permit us to go out to tea during term-time. It interfered, she said, with her programme of conversation at the schoolroom tea-table, and with our subsequent hour of mingled entertainment and instruction with the
Biblioth
èque
Rose. So it was a dismal case of making our
adieux
and coming straight back. At least, though, we managed to leave Mademoiselle behind with her weekly migraine.

Once again we toiled up the green sheep-cropped slope, damp now and fading dun under the touch of the season, and went past the churchyard and in by the blue gate. Maisie was upstairs, helping Lucy, Mrs. Jardine's maid, with the packing. One quarter of her pile of new underwear had been apportioned to her for the sewing-on of name tapes; and she was sitting on her bed, performing this task with a huge needle and a heavy frown. We inspected her wardrobe, serviceable rather than ornamental except for one poppy-red frock for Sundays and occasions—a special present from her grandmother. I was enraptured with it, and shocked by the off-hand way she grabbed it up to show it to us, then flung it aside again. Everything now at last was stamped with radical change. That Maisie who had sat with me in the walnut tree, sharing sweets and placing in my palm the secret shape and substance of her human destiny in a miniature frame of blue velvet and brilliants—that Maisie had gone into the past, as irrecoverable as the halcyon weather in which she first appeared before me, saying: “Friend”; and which now still contains her, along with Mrs. Jardine's rings and her enamelled pansy watch and the portraits and the dahlias and the silvery rug folded at the foot of the mauve couch; and emerging and dissolving through all these, one electrifying figure over and over again, in gauzes, in wraps, in embroidered art garments, doubled sometimes with an apparition—ice-maiden, Snow Queen—white, in a blue cape, behind its shoulder. At the very centre, pinned to the season's core by that one centripetal force, is Maisie's face, framed in intricate branches and lucent in walnut leaf light.

She was not unfriendly; but between us was the sense that we had neither part nor lot in one another any more. Her past had been wrenched off from her, raw, exposed, unmentionable, and she was in the wilderness, her future the undesired inevitable unknown. Snug and sheltered, for our part, in our continuity, what could we say to her?

“Who's taking you to school?” we said.

“Oh, good Lord! I'm taking myself, thanks all the same for inquiring,” she said rudely. “Do you suppose I'd let anybody in
this
house—? Not likely! Auntie Mack feared it was her painful duty to conduct me to my fate, but I managed to pack her off to Bude yesterday. Dame Lucy here is going to be given half a crown—aren't you, Luce?—and Lucy's going to give it to the guard—mind you do, Luce!—and that kind guard's going to see I'm not kidnapped, all for two and sixpence, and he'll help me step out ever so carefully at the right station, and there—
there.
… What do you think?—a schoolmistress with a nice kind face will be waiting, and she'll say … oh, she'll say: ‘
Can
this be Maisie Thomson?
' …
And she won't be as clever as you think, either; she'll know me by this smart school
chapeau—
see? But I'll have spotted her before she spots me. You bet! It's all as simple as pie.”

She tweaked Lucy's ear, and then gave her a hug; and Lucy responded to the embrace with one of those eloquent compressed looks I had observed on the faces of the dear maids at home when one or other of us was in trouble.
‘
It's a downright shame, that's what it is, and I don't care who hears me say so,' were the unspoken words behind the look.

“Oh, and Madame Jardine says you're to go and see her for a few minutes. Only a
few
to-day. She's not quite up to snuff,” said Maisie, pronouncing her grandmother's name with a heavy pseudo-Gallic accent.

She took us along the passage, knocked, and when Mrs. Jardine from within said “Come!” (never ‘Come in') she opened the door for us and left us to go in by ourselves.

Mrs. Jardine lay on her sofa, propped on several pillows, the rug over her knees, her lips blue. She was gentle and loving; a little short of breath, she said: she had perhaps been doing too much. This must be good-bye for a while: next week they were going back to France with Cherry for the winter. She was trying to garner her strength for the journey. She told us that Malcolm and Maisie would spend their holidays on a farm in Devonshire with a former devoted parlourmaid now married to a prosperous fanner and particularly fond of young people. They would get Devonshire cream, and ponies to ride on the moor; it seemed ideal. We would all meet again in the spring, she said. She would think of us often, often, and of the strange happy summer it had been. She took a hand of each of us and kissed it. “Don't kiss me to-day, loves,” she said. “I have not a cheek fit for young lips.” She wiped the faint dew from her forehead with her little fine handkerchief. She charged us to give grateful and affectionate messages to our mother.

“She went to Tilly's funeral,” I said. “So did Daddy and Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Fred. There were some lovely wreaths.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Jardine. “That is what Tilly would have wished—that the family should see her to her last resting place.”

“And she's left all her money to Boy,” said Jess. “A whole hundred pounds! It's going to be put in the bank for him.”

Tears brimmed from Mrs. Jardine's eyes.

“That is very touching,” she said. “The savings of a lifetime. … Naturally she would have the feeling that it would crown her dignity and value to leave this solid sum in the family.”

“That's what she said to Daddy when he helped her make her will,” said Jess. “She wanted her property to remain in the family. She left Aunt Sylvia a gold watch and an amethyst brooch that Grandmamma gave her.”

We did not like to mention that we had been pierced with a sense of incredulous outrage and indignation on hearing that our infant brother had acquired a fortune overnight. Were we so much as mentioned in the will? We were not. He, Boy, sprawling at ease, without care or conscience in his perambulator, had casually tossed in the claim of male superiority and bagged the lot. Sylvia had voiced the feelings which our own years forbade, or took at least the sting from, when she bitterly remarked, the morning the news broke: “I bet I was never called Girl when
I
was a baby.”

I said:

“I've never been to a funeral.”

“Nor I,” said Mrs. Jardine. She paused; then with an access of energy: “No, no. All should be said and done before the end. They who are about to die should be heaped round with flowers and friends and words of love before the end. That is the sacred moment. When it is over—it is over. Oh, I have watched, many times watched, beside the final mystery. But afterwards?—no! I will not,
cannot
be a party to those inflated falsities, those competitive displays of public handkerchiefs, those grotesque, commercial,
vulgar
trappings, those
…”
She broke off; then went on to say with a smile: “I have thought: could but the body dissolve, simply, purely, automatically, so soon as the breath is out! Could one but watch it grow transparent, evaporate from stage to stage until there remained only. …
What
would remain? One inextinguishable spark? I wonder!” She heaved a sigh, shook her head, fell silent, her eyes dilating, fixed. “Dear me, what a wretched awkwardness it is, this problem of disposal! It will be out of my hands, no doubt. The whole thing will be botched, I must resign myself. There is no one—now—whom I could select with confidence … who would see any profound point in according me a last graceful gesture. I must be huddled off with the least possible display and trouble—as everybody else should be.”

She was talking to herself; and while Jess noiselessly examined the crystal bottles on her dressing-table, I took a last look at Ianthe's portrait. The room was partially darkened, and in the obscurity the face's pale oval was barely to be distinguished. I tried again to think of her as real, this child in a dark velvet fitted jacket and a high fur cap, looking over her shoulder, hand on hip, graceful, formal, like a lady. But all the Ianthes, represented and imagined, were equally fantasy figures.

Then we said we must be getting back, and she bade us
au revoir
till the spring and told us not to forget her. We returned to Maisie, and Maisie accompanied us as far as the blue door, and we said: “Well, good-bye”; and she answered: “Good-bye.” Then, when we had turned away and started down the hill, she called suddenly after us: “Race you to the bottom!” and came thundering full tilt past us. We swooped after her in panic ecstasy, our breath caught squealing in our chests, our legs galloping off away from our hips like demented pistons. Just as the railings began to rush on us, we collapsed in a tangle in the grass, and lay on our backs, panting, groaning and shaking with laughter. Then we got up.

“Crikey!” said Maisie. “Fancy having to sweat to the top again! Could it have been worth it?”

She made a grimace and started straight off up the slope at a steady march. When we got to the turn of the park road we looked back; at the same moment, near the churchyard gate, she also stopped. We waved to one another.

2

Next time we walked that way was on a blackberrying expedition with our father. This was an annual event. Each of us carried a walking stick with a crook handle to pull down the higher brambles, and an enamel mug to pick into. My father held the big basket: this was the ritual. We went along the road that swept round Priory Hill, past the drive gates and on, over a stile, to merge into grassy pastures set with bracken, gorse and brambles, and backed by ramparts of beech, still green, but beginning here and there to kindle. The wrought iron gates were closed. Mr. Gillman, who lived beside them in a flint and brick cottage with dormer windows and a garment of clematis and roses, was digging in his front garden, and touched his cap as we passed.

“Good-day, Gillman!” called my father, waving the basket with jovial implication.