The Ballad and the Source (33 page)

“No! Keep her out.”

“You can't. She's here,” said Gil. “I want her at my wedding. She's the high priestess of—” some word I could not catch. “I hear her prophesy behind the curtains. Now I know I shan't be killed, and Tanya and I will have ten superhuman children.”

“This is Harry's house,” insisted Maisie. “And when he's allowed to die, it'll be
hers
for her life; and when she dies, if ever, it'll be Malcolm's. Malcolm had a letter from him the other day to say so. Fancy Harry taking up the pen! He has a very pretty gentlemanly writing, only shaky and out of practice. This is
Harry's
party. He'll be so glad when he knows all about it. How can we let him know? We can't write and tell him.”

“Why not?” said Malcolm.

“There's no way to put it,” said Maisie, incoherent. “He wouldn't be able. You daren't. It would be like—trying to get a message into—into a locked-up, barred, bolted house you couldn't even be sure was inhabited any more. … You can't do any sort of—ordinary thing with Harry—or even any polite letter-­writing sort of thing.
…”
I thought she was going to burst into angry tears.

“You're cracked,” said Malcolm. “Of course we must write to him. He's a great stickler for politeness. He's got very old-fashioned ideas about manners.”

“This isn't quite like an ordinary thing,” remarked Gil.

“There you are! “said Maisie. “He might be frightfully upset. How do you know? He might be shocked. He's had enough.”

“My good girl,” said Malcolm, “you're tight. Give over being so damned theatrical. Harry's a frightfully decent, generous old chap, who's had the misfortune to drink himself pickled. Do stop going on.”

“Misfortune!” cried Maisie, going on. “How dare you interfere with—judge what he's—he's seen fit to do? Look at his life! It adds up to nothing, nothing, nothing. She's taken away everything from him. Why is it allowed? What, what,
what
can his life mean?”

“I don't know why it's allowed,” said Gil. “But I should say it means a lot.” He looked down at the table, his fingers closed on the stem of his wineglass. I noticed his big, clear-looking hands, the flexibility and precision in the fingers, the long spatulate thumb. His face in composure looked suddenly noble and authoritative.

“Oh, you do, do you?” snapped Maisie. She stared aggressively at Gil, but he went on looking down, contemplative. Her face became forlorn, and she muttered: “Well …
what?”

“He's not corrupted,” said Gil, speaking with care and deliberation. He narrowed his eyes as if scrutinising his own statement in the wine-glass. “He still knows what's what.”

“A fat lot that helps him. What use is it to a person to know what's what so well they can't stand it and have to drink themselves unconscious?”

“He's not in the least unconscious,” said Gil, shifting his glass very accurately. “He's as raw as a child.”

“Well, then!”

“So it doesn't matter.”

Maisie made a violent strangled exclamation in her throat.

“It's a tragedy,” said Gil. “It's not a disgrace. No doubt there's not much comfort for him in that reflection. … You never know though. … But what his life means is a distinct consolation.”

Everybody was silent.

“Well, I wish somebody would tell him so,” said Maisie. She blew her nose fiercely.
“Somebody
might have the decency to tell him he's—he's appreciated.”

“Nobody had better try,” said Gil. “I'd scarcely go so far as to say he was hoping against hope for a pat on the back. No one was less interested in rewards, I should say.”

“Everybody would like to be happy,” said Maisie, still indignant.

“You can't make Harry happy,” said Gil mildly. “All you can do for him, humanly speaking, is—to do nothing. He accepts what's happened to him—in his own way. He doesn't compound with it. I doubt though if he'd thank anybody who made it clear that they understood his point of view or sympathised with it.”

“Oh, this is all above my head,” burst out Maisie “Compounding and all that! You're just talking brainy talk—turning people into—into specimens.
Real
people have to have
something,
or they couldn't live.”

“He's got
her,”
said Gil, quiet.

Maisie uttered an explosive snort.

“She's not corrupted either,” observed Tanya. She had a light, soft, colourless voice.

“I call it corrupted,” said Maisie, “to talk that sickening stuff about him. Blowing him up into a sort of Book of Golden Deeds. And all that wifeliness. She's always jawing about what a wonderful soldier he was. What she
doesn't
mention is why—the real reason—why he had to leave the army. I suppose she thinks we're taken in.”

“I don't suppose,” said Gil, “she thinks anybody's taken in. It's simply a convention she's built up which she chooses that the world should observe. She's made it as artificial as possible; and she sticks to it through thick and thin. I admire her for it.”

“She needn't say anything at all. It would be much more—dignified.”

“Oh, she's not interested in dignity. Besides, she always has to speak, as you know. And on this subject it would be a real necessity. The more he ruined the performance, the more blatantly she'd have to put it over. It has to be kept going.”

“Why does it have to?”

“Because she needs him.”

“I suppose you think that's a good reason for—squeezing the life blood out of him.”

“Nonsense. He's very much alive, as I said before.”

“Well, for—doing what she's done to him.”

“Not necessarily a good reason,” said Gil, smiling. “But reason enough. Which is as much as you can expect of the reasons why people stay together.”

He lifted the wine glass and tilted its contents back and forth. The more the argument developed, the more heated the expostulations, the quieter and more level grew his voice.

“You stay with people because you're fond of them,” she said. “And can do something for them—do good to them. If you find you can't, you hop it. Or if you don't you're a swine.”

Seizing the opportunity for comic relief, everybody laughed.

“All right, laugh your heads off,” said Maisie presently, without rancour. “You wait. I don't know about doing good—but I intend to have it written on my tombstone: Here lies a person who never needed anybody, so she never did anybody
any harm.”
She looked at Gil and Tanya and grinned. “Though I suppose it's untactful to say such a thing at your wedding feast.”

“You get everything mixed,” said Gil. “The word in question is
‘
need' not
‘
love.' They're not always identical as you may possibly discover for yourself one day.”

“Possibly I may,” she said rudely.

“It's frequently all wrong when people need one another, but it doesn't prevent it. In this particular case I don't believe it's all wrong. It's the proof of her … of how magnificent she is.”

“Oh, good Lord! It would be.”

“From anybody else in the world,” continued Gil in his muted voice, narrowing his eyes at the glass he still held up as if gauging the wine's level, “she gets back—
immeasurable
reflections of herself. It's not deliberate, so it's pointless to moralise about it: it's some property of her nature:—some principle. Like yeast. She throws out all she has—her beauty, her gifts, her power over people—and objects—and events; and it works. Each time she tries it out, it works like magic. Up come all these disturbing, magnetised self-images. There's one person, one alone, it doesn't work with, and that's Harry. Nothing comes back to her. And she knows it: she doesn't deceive herself. And she stays with him—
inevitably
she stays with him. He's her resting-place. If that doesn't justify her claim to care for truth.
…”

I said loudly:

“Yes, she does care for truth! I know she does!”—and heard my own voice like an explosion in the room. Everybody looked at me in astonishment, and nobody smiled or said anything; and willing myself obliterated through the floor boards, I bent to grope for an imaginary handkerchief. When I raised my congested head, Maisie was muttering:

“She cares for money.” But she said it half-heartedly.

“It's perfectly all right,” said Gil, “the way she cares for it. She understands its value. She knows about poverty. It isn't contemptible, the kind and degree of importance she attaches to money.”

“Oh well,” said Maisie, with a shrug and an impatient sigh. “You know her better than I do, I suppose.” She stared at him, nibbling her thumb. “Do you think he hates her?”

“No.”

“Loves her?”

“I don't know anything about Harry's feelings,” said Gil shortly.

“That's something to be thankful for,” murmured Maisie, half to herself; then giving her chair a violent heave backwards, she added: “Anyway, we won't drink their healths, thank you very much. Not at this party.”

“You're right,” said Gil. “It wouldn't be quite the thing.”

Maisie got up, saying:

“Now I'm going to fetch the pudding. Kindly pour some brandy into that ladle and heat it on the candles while I'm away.”

I think this is the conversation that I heard. I could never be sure. I know that after it the circle soon warmed up again and expanded in frivolity, leaving me out of it, eating Christmas pudding.

7

As time went on I grew more and more sad, uneasy, suspect in Mrs. Jardine's house. I could not get rid of a vision of her, high on the watch tower of a castle in France, directing upon us searchlight eyes over wastes of winter dark and ocean. Her glittering face blazed in the firmament, savage, distraught, unearthly: Enchantress Queen in an antique ballad of revenge.

To brighten the drawing-room, pots of chrysanthemums had been brought in from the greenhouse, and set in stands and bowls; the fire burned uproariously, the piano stood open; but there was something dreadfully wrong. The sterile drained feeling of a room just emerged from sheeted vacancy had not been dispersed; and the dove girl on the blue tub looked dispossessed, mournful as the portrait of a girl who is dead and forgotten. All round me I felt locked untenanted rooms pressing in like icebergs around a liner's lit saloon. We roasted chestnuts and played a rude verse game which made us laugh a lot. I remember Tanya sitting at the grand piano, lightly swaying in her plumage while she played; but what she played I do not know, except that it was something formal, classical,—Bach perhaps—and that she played with authority; and that within the abstract pattern which the music's shape drew round the room, everything lost its separateness and fell temporarily into harmony. Purged of dubious designs the interlopers were simple listeners, innocently devoted, in a quiet interior. At the centre, the white fluid form, stripped of all ambiguities, all stock romantic suggestions, was a colourless vessel from which poured only its essential pure content. While the music lasted Mrs. Jardine sat in our midst, welcoming her guests on her own level: glad without reservations that we should assemble in her house for this æsthetic experience.

Then everything broke up again. Malcolm suggested dancing. He rolled back the rugs and put a record on his husky portable gramophone, and I sat with Maisie while he danced with Jess, and Gil with Tanya. Then, more in the spirit of a courteous host, I felt, than from any promptings of personal desire, Malcolm invited me to dance. We went round and round in a somewhat hit or miss fashion, and he talked volubly, excitably, and I see now that he was rather drunk. Then he went back with alacrity to Jess, and as I stood against the wall, under the dove girl's portrait, Gil suddenly came and put an arm round me, and danced me off. I was startled and flustered; but it was a waltz tune, and though I was ignorant of up-to-date steps, I could waltz with confidence; and in the firm clasp of his arm, held close against the wall of his chest, I felt a sense of whirling, keyed-up safety and exhilaration. After a while he said he was thirsty, and I accompanied him to the dining-room, where he mixed himself a whisky and soda, and I cooled my dry throat with a glass of water. He looked round the room, at the cream-panelled walls, the curtains of magenta brocade, at Harry's eighteenth-century ancestors, in uniforms, in hunting coats, with the long, heavy-jowled faces, wine-skinned, prosperous, of the period; and with a narrow, elegant, snow-bosomed, taper-fingered satin wife apiece; and all with those full-bodied eyes, gross yet alert—eyes without questions—which the world made then. He looked at it all and shook his head, and said rapidly, blurring his syllables:

“What do you make of it all?”

I made nothing of it. Quite out of my depth, terrified lest this remark should be the cryptic prelude to a discussion on sculpture, I took a breath and plunged.

“I love Mrs.
Jardine,”
I said.

“So do I.”

I said that I was very glad.

“How are you feeling?” he said. “Are you all right? I wonder if it's suitable, your being here. There are some desperate characters loose in this house, you know.”

“Oh!” I said, startled by an echo. “Somebody else said that.”

“Said what?”

“
‘
Desperate characters.' Not in this house, I don't mean. It made me remember. Somebody Mrs. Jardine knew
…”
I hesitated­­­­: had not those confidences been for my ears alone” “… That she told me about.”

“Ah,” he said, smiling. “That would be Paul.”

“Yes, it was,” I said, relieved. “I thought she'd probably told you about him.”