The Ballad and the Source (34 page)

He was silent; and feeling much more at ease, I went on:

“It was awful that he died, wasn't it? I think she still misses him dreadfully.”

He looked at me, reflective.

“Did she talk much to you about him?”

“Quite a lot. And about other things that had happened to her. The story of her life, you know.”

“How old might you have been at the time?”

“Well, I suppose … about ten.” He was silent, smiling to himself in a way that I could not interpret; and I added timidly: “Has she told
you
the story of her life?”

This made him laugh.

“You are so incredibly—” His voice sounded affectionate, unpatronising. He stopped. “Well, it must have been a treat for her, telling you.”

“It was a treat for me, listening,” I assured him. “Nobody had ever talked to me like that before. … Or ever has since.”

“I suppose not,” he said, serious.

I felt more and more happy. Here was a genius, and I could converse with him in perfect freedom.

“Of course it made me feel very important, hearing it,” I said. “It was mostly things people would think children oughtn't to hear. But that was only part of the excitement. We had an old sewing maid who used to tell me stories too—real ones, about my grandmother, and the old days. She acted them, and went on for hours, and I simply adored them. But Mrs. Jardine's were different. It was … oh! it was like hearing something
so true
it made everything else I knew—or that I'd been taught—seem like—boring feeble pretences. That's why, when you said at dinner that she cared for truth, I knew how right you were.”

Head bent, he seemed still to be engaged upon reflections of his own, and to be only half attentive. Yet the idea of intimacy between us persisted intoxicatingly in my mind, and I continued:

“I know Maisie thinks she tells lies. But Maisie was brought up to think so. She can't quite see straight about her.”

“And you do,” he said. It seemed more a statement than an inquiry.

“Well, I suppose it's what you were saying at dinner: perhaps nobody can? Only she did so understand everything!” I cried, carried away by nostalgic enthusiasm. “And if she didn't, she never pretended to, or said she knew best: she asked us to explain, and listened to us. She was only sharp, a bit, if she suspected I was saying what I thought I
ought
to say. She wanted me to—well, to care for truth, like her.”

He nodded quickly, in an absent way, as if he were intent upon recalling or reconstructing some private conception.

“She would,” he said. “She pursues truth with passionate, avid curiosity. She sees the possibility of it in the most unlikely places. She hunts it down. Testing herself … experimenting with the design, the reflection that comes back to her, over and over again. Building up the proof, once and for all. She's not sure, you see. She hasn't much confidence.”

This last remark puzzled me so much that I could only assume that the word confidence must have another grownup meaning, beyond my understanding. I was silent; and he said, turning the dark glinting weight of his eyes on me:

“You must have been an interesting experiment for her.”

I said, a little uncomfortable:

“You do see, don't you, how good she is for children? Not—
not
a bad influence? It wasn't only me, and my sister Jess too, but Maisie and Malcolm and Cherry. She was wonderful to us all. Only, worse luck, Maisie had to hate her. Sometimes, you know, I could see why Maisie—and other people—called her wicked. Anybody very—strong must seem so sometimes. People are afraid of them.”

“And you weren't,” he said in the same uninterrogative manner.

“Oh no!” I exclaimed. “How could I be? As if she could possibly have done me any harm. She loved me.” This sounded conceited, and I qualified it. “It was mostly because she'd loved my grandmother very much. She lived with her when she was a girl. Then there was a quarrel and they parted, and she didn't see her again till she was on her death bed, and they made it up. I think she felt about us that we were—like part of my grandmother she'd got back again; and that was a comfort to her because she'd gone on missing her so much. She—she wanted to tell me things she hadn't been able to tell Grandmamma.”

“Ah,” he said, smiling at me again with simple affection, “I think she would feel able to tell you things she would never have told your grandmamma.”

“But they were true, I'm sure,” I said anxiously. “Surely even at that age one knows when a person's pretending?”

“Oh yes, yes, they were true,” he said.

“It's nice to have someone to talk to about her,” I said, encouraged. “Somebody who understands. It feels so queer being back here—without her.”

“Yes, it does feel queer.” He glanced round the room, frowning slightly. Then his eyes widened, resting blankly on a portrait opposite. He looked suddenly stricken with depression; I heard him give a heavy suppressed sigh.

“If I'm killed,” he said, “and if she talks to you about me after I'm killed—bringing the story of her life up to date, you know—don't believe her if she tells you it was a solution on a low level to take Tanya; or a treachery; or even a fatal
mistake.”

“I'm sure she won't,” I said, startled.

“She might well,” he said. “She would see it so.”

Silence hung between us. I broke it by saying in faltering tones:

“Why
…?
You don't think it's—any of those things, do you?”

“No,” he said shortly, but not in the knuckle-rapping way I had half feared. He brooded. “I've married Tanya because I meant to,” he said.

“Well, she'll understand that,” I said feebly, feeling inadequate.

He shook his head and said with a brief smile:

“It was understood that I was not the marrying type.”

“She won't blame you,” I said eagerly, struck by a recollection. “She never says anything is a person's
fault.
She tries to see what made them do it—why they had to. She didn't blame Paul when … all that—you know. She saw why. Even though it went against her.”

He turned his head aside sharply, as if shaking off painful thoughts.

“Yes,” he said in that muted voice. “She does like to see meanings. The harder they are, the more she embraces them. … Well, that's the only legacy I can bequeath her. The meaning.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Didn't she want you to get married?” I said timidly.

“No.”

“Not—not even to Tanya?” I added, disingenuous.

“Particularly not to Tanya.”

He seemed despondent; and wishing to cheer him up, I said:

“Well, one thing I know—” But I stopped.

“What do you know?” he said in a soft, teasing way. It was too late to draw back, and with a violent blush I concluded:

“She'll be terribly glad if—when—if perhaps you have a baby. She's so very keen—she loves people to have babies.”

“Ah,” he said, smiling faintly. “Doesn't she? She ought to have had a dozen. It's what she was made for. It's all been wrong for her. She'd have been happy and glorious. … Yes,” he said, “yes. I hope I do have a child.”

At these words, an extraordinary churning sense of emotion rushed through me. I gazed up at him, and my head swam, and I thought he was wonderful, proud, like a king. His head was turned away, bowed, engrossed, and above his eyes, just between the brows, I fancied a kind of knot of glowing intensity, a radiation; and yet the whole head had, like Mrs. Jardine's, the repose of a statue. Poignantly, I thought of Mrs.
Jardine,
and saw how they would be—should be—together. I could not bear to think of her deprived of him. I saw the place they would both be able to inhabit, like an almost unpopulated land of immense, of supernatural vistas, where one might be lost; where at any moment some resplendent monster might burst out of the jungle to confront their untroubled gaze.

“It's the war that makes one want it so urgently,” he said. “There's no time to wait for a son: everything has to be crammed in. If I live, I shall take him back to Africa and bring him up there.”

It was only Gil and Mrs. Jardine that I could see, setting out for darkest Africa and carrying the baby: not Tanya at all.

“I wish I was back there now,” he said. “In the place where I was born.”

“You will go,” I said, my heart thumping to suffocate me. “After the war.” I thought with a fearful pang: He will go back to Africa and I shall never see him again.

He repeated:

“If I live, I will.” He added, hunching his shoulders: “Or if I'm not altogether ossified, or wrenched out of shape, or broken up along with the rest of my generation.”

Perturbed by the bitterness in his voice, anxious to deflect his thoughts towards myself, I said:

“I hope I shall marry and have children one day.”

He turned towards me, giving me his full attention, searching my face. The swimming sensation came over me again.

“Yes, you will,” he said. “It goes without saying.” Suddenly he put his arms round me, bent his head and laid his cheek to mine. “You make me feel homesick,” he said.

“Why?” I whispered, through the humming and whirling of Mrs. Jardine's dining-room.

“You remind me of the girls that were round me in the place I lived in when I was a boy.”

“In Africa?”

“Yes. Dark and
…”
He stopped. I could feel his heart-beats, even and strong, against my shoulder.

“Native girls, you mean?”

“Native girls. Are you offended?”

“Of course not.”

“I know you're a well-brought-up, well-educated English girl,” he said. “But all the same, you seem so nice and dark.”

“I don't know what I am,” I said, strangled. I put up both my hands and clutched his lapels.

He kissed me, his curious lips pressing hard, terrifying on my cheek. Appalled, giddy, I hid my head and went on clutching his coat; while fragmentary moral principles, practices, precepts, protests shot through my skull and exploded there in fruitless chaos.

But then, while I began to despair of disengaging myself without hurting his feelings and at the same time vainly asked myself what a girl should say, do, to retrieve a well-nigh hopeless position, he let go of me with the utmost simplicity. There seemed, after all, no situation.

“Remember,” he said, quite as if he had never kissed me, “if the opportunity arises, tell her:
Reconciliation.
It's the great word of her life. She knows what she—we—did to Tanya. She'll take it in.”

“Couldn't you tell her yourself?” I suggested, nervous again of wading out of my depth. “Write to her, I mean? I'm sure she'd rather.”

He thought a minute; then said, raising his eyebrows:

“
‘
My dearest Sibyl,—A line to let you know I'm married to Tanya, and spending my honeymoon beneath your roof.
…?
'”

“Well, perhaps,” I said, “you needn't put it quite like that, if you think she'll be so upset.”

“I expect you're right,” he said in a hard voice. “I needn't put it quite like that. I could say that, of course, it will make no difference: what's marriage, anyway?—a mere convention. And that it's always been understood that no amount of women in my life could alter our relationship. Oh, and that it is she, she only, who taught me the meaning of love—made me equal, at last, to assuming the responsibility of a permanent tie. This knowledge, and my undying gratitude will, I know, be her sufficient reward and consolation. On my marriage night I am thinking of her more tenderly than ever. That's the sort of thing that's said on these awkward occasions, I believe. … No, I won't do it. I won't write her that sort of letter.”

“No,” I agreed, depressed. “She wouldn't like a letter like that.”

“It's too simple for her to believe,” he burst out. “It's so ordinary she wouldn't accept it.
I've
changed.
It's the war. I've been out there. It's regrettable, but all human dealings except the most elementary have become impossible to me. I don't want anything on any—pitched-up level. It's too difficult, too exposed. Furthermore, it's
nothing;
so when I try to contemplate it, I get frightened. I tell myself I'm a plain ordinary chap with ordinary wants … and then I feel safer. I don't know why I tell you this, you postwar girl, because you can't understand it; and when
your
time comes, after the war … oh, my goodness, after the war!
…
you'll have other fish to fry, all of you.”

I felt very miserable. But there seemed nothing now to lose, and breaking a last lance for Mrs.
Jardine,
I said with weak firmness:

“Even if I can't understand … I know she could.”

“I've got lazy,” he said lightly. “I can't write long letters any more.”

I looked at him again, and thought him hideous, repellent.

Hating him, I hated myself, I hated men. I wanted to get away from him, I wanted to stay with him and quarrel, say something outrageous.

“I wonder,” I began, “why you did come here, if—” But I could not go on.

“Oh, that's quite natural, isn't it?” he said, not taking up my tone, but replying as if it were a natural point to raise. “Tanya and I are both quite homeless, rootless, in England. These two, Maisie and Malcolm, are our closest friends. We wanted to be all together: there might not be future opportunities, you know. And it was
such
an opportunity, with Malcolm and myself both getting leave. Besides, it's not much catch honeymooning in an English hotel in winter in the middle of a war.”