The Ballad and the Source (36 page)

“I hesitated.

“Well, mostly about Mrs.
Jardine.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” She flung her head back, threw a walnut high in the air, and caught it with a click in her mouth. “Bet you can't do that,” she said.

I tried, and I could not, and we spent a few frivolous moments in further competition.

“Don't break your teeth,” she said. “What would your mother say if you came back with your front set smashed?”

“Was Mrs. Jardine awfully fond of Gil?” I inquired, when the game had lost its savour and we had returned to peeling and crunching the crisp, milky, convoluted kernels.

“She was mad about him,” said Maisie solemnly. “I dare say she thought she'd got him fixed there for ever. But for the war he might have been—for a bit longer. It was rather hard luck on her. He was incredibly satisfactory for her—he's everything that excites her. She could make him up to be a mysterious, unique person that only she could understand. He came from such a long way away and had such an extraordinary beginning. She could swell him up into … I don't know … a sort of god.”

“Where did he come from?”

“From somewhere in the very middle of Africa. His father was a Norwegian missionary, and his mother is a Highland Scottish woman. She went out to Africa when she was twenty-­one to teach natives in a mission school, and got married to his father. They lived far away from white people in a wooden house they built themselves, and they were absolutely poor, and worked like slaves to keep alive. Gil was brought up with black boys and girls, Zulus. He was their only child. His father's dead now, but his mother still lives there and keeps a store. You can imagine how impressed Sibyl was. It's the kind of life she admires. She'd have liked to live it. I don't blame her: so would I. How I wonder what his mother's like. … I've seen snapshots of them. She looks like a little withered working woman, with a knob of thin white hair, very thin and bony, worn out looking—but very energetic too. His father looks like an Old Testament prophet, a giant with a great beard. Amazing.” She brooded, chin on palm.

“Did he like living with the Zulus?”

“He adored it. He loves them. He says the tribe he lived among are good and fine and very civilised. He thinks what white people have done to them is awful: taken away their land and shoved them in the mines and made them lose their human pride, he says … made them sad. He fairly boils when people call them niggers and talk as if they were only fit to be knocked about and treated like animals, or worse.”

As I listened, I felt more and more stirred. Ever since one childhood summer spent on my maternal grandmother's farm in the White Mountains of New England, I had known that I loved coloured people. She had a negro cook called Nathan who taught me to play the zither, and on one occasion during the long hours I spent in the kitchen gazing at the plum-dark spheroids that composed his face, the dazzling split of carved ivory that made his smile, at his round astrakhan cap of hair, at his dusky coral palms rolling the dough, had lingeringly given back my gaze and softly drawled that there was music in those eyes. This was the sort of approach to which I responded as the pin to the magnet, and ever since, I had dreamed confusedly of a race whose life still sprang unbroken from archaic roots in darkness and sunlight and exposed itself in eternally simple, incorruptible forms of music and movement.

“When he was a little boy,” said Maisie, “he used to model animals and figures in mud or clay. The Zulus taught him. He did that before he learned to read and write. When he got older he was sent away to school in Johannesburg, and some rich man or woman, I don't know which, saw some sculpture he did and got interested in him, and gave him enough money to leave Africa and go to Paris to study. He was only eighteen, but he'd done so much, so many different things already, according to what he's told us … He wasn't a schoolboy, he was a man.” She mused again; then said: “That thing he did for Cherry, the memorial—it's not her. It doesn't look like her, I mean. It's a very queer piece of work. It's a group of two figures.” She put both her hands to her forehead, pushing at it with her fingers till it was all lumps and furrows. Under it, her eyes contracted, tense with the effort to give me the image. “One's sitting, all weighed downward and stiff and heavy-looking, all shrouded close, its head bowed forward and this sort of shroud covering its face. You can see the moulding of its face and body under the drapery, but it's not like a human man or woman. It's—it's just a
being.
Its thighs are spread apart, and it looks—done for, somehow, like a broken open shell or husk. And this other figure, which is a child, is rising up between its knees—stretched up, naked, with it might be a smile on its face, and its eyes shut. It's not a bit what nurses call a bonny child: thin, with a
sad
sort of body. It's got a broad, listening sort of face … or waiting. … Oh, I can't describe it. It's not an English child—not a child of any country, I shouldn't think. It's more like an
idea
of a child, if you see what I mean. Do you?”

“Yes,” I said, following her with dumbfounded attention.

“It gave me a shock when I saw it first. I thought it was hideous. I felt awful about it; I told Sibyl it was a monstrosity. But when she'd talked to me about it, and told me to empty out all my second-hand notions of what statues
ought
to look like, I began to see the point. And after a bit, whenever I saw it I took it in more. And I can't forget it. … He certainly is a queer sculptor, but I suppose he's a pretty good one. Sibyl would be likely to know.”

I said:

“Did your mother see it?”

“She saw it,” said Maisie, short. Silence. “Just imagine,” she said. “Till she came out of that place she didn't know Cherry was dead.”

“Good gracious!” I said, inadequate.

“She wrote to Auntie Mack for news of us, and Auntie Mack had to tell her. Poor old thing, she's always had all the unrewarding jobs. I saw her afterwards. She said she'd always known it would happen—that Mother would turn up again some day and present her with a problem beyond the fathoming of human reason. It was her fate, she said.”

Maisie chuckled, and I felt bound to do likewise.

“What on earth did she mean?” I asked.

“Oh, whether to reveal our whereabouts to Mother, or conceal it. And whether to tell Sibyl Mother was on our tracks or keep it under her hat. You see she had a pact with Sibyl, it seems, to keep her posted. Oh dearr, dearr, dearr, she was pairfectly distraught.”

We laughed more and more.

“What did she do?”

“She took it to God.” Maisie caught my eye and we doubled up with mirth: we were no longer children. “And God advised her to tell Mother the truth, and to make a vow of secrecy with Mother not to breathe a word to Sibyl. So there she was, with a double noose and plenty of rope to hang herself. She wrote off a letter to Mother, saying where we were and breaking it to her that there was no more Cherry. After all as she said, she felt most strongly that Mother had given us birth and had a right to the information. On the other hand there was this sacred pact with Mrs. Jarrdine. And yet
again
there was Mother telling her on her life not to sneak to Sibyl. Oh dearr, dearr, dearr!
…
She showed me Mother's letter. It was perfectly sensible and to the point.” Maisie stopped short, oddly.

“So,” I said, after a pause for nut-cracking, “she turned up?”

“Talk of midsummer madness!” exclaimed Maisie suddenly, tilting herself back with such violence that her chair legs yelped on the floor. “When I think about it now
I
feel as if the war started then—all roaring armies marching against one another and land mines bursting under everybody. When the real war started and every one else was in a state of chaos, it seemed to me a mere rumble on the horizon. Everything had happened for me.”

She clasped her hands behind her head and stared absently at her legs, flexing and unflexing the muscles of her calves.

“Maisie, what did happen?”

She said slowly—and I knew she had begun at last:

“Do you know what this place in France is like? It's very exciting; not like anywhere else. The house itself is a great high plain block built of white stone. It looks somehow ominous, with dozens of long dark windows flat on its face. It's perched up so high, and it's a landmark for miles. It's all very stony and solid, outside and in. It's called The Tower of the Doves. There's a big round stone dove house in the courtyard. It's very old and it's got a lot of local history attached to it. Sibyl knows it all, of course: I don't. She's made it perfect, I must say: she does know how to furnish houses. All round the park is a high wall. The church is the other side of the wall, with a graveyard. … A French graveyard has to be seen to be believed. And there's a glorious old farmhouse and some barns as well. The grounds go down and down in a long steep slope to the valley, and there's a little river there, and a weir, and an inn, and boathouses, and an old white mill where they don't mill any more. Harry owns it all. Oh, that river! Parts of it are so matted up with water lilies you can hardly get a boat through. People row up and down in ridiculous little flat-bottomed boats like water beetles. On Sundays French chaps come out from the town and spend the day fishing for tiddlers. They don't throw
one
back. They're all taken home in the evening and made into a fry. Their wives tippet about on the bank in high heels, crooning sillinesses to naked-looking dyspeptic little pinky-white dogs with black blotches on them and rolls of fat in their necks. And they peep into the chaps' fishing jars and flute out: “O, Georges, regardes-donc! Quels amours
de
petits
poissons!
” They do sound asses. But they're all so cheerful and polite and pleased with themselves you can't help feeling drawn to them. When the chaps call out to the women their voices come out so ringing from their chests. … They sound so—so full up with life.”

This picture of French society impressed me vividly. It was not what I had been led to expect from my studies; yet it could not have been invented. I saw the French now as a connubial nation of aquatic holiday-makers, sonorously hauling up minnows and piping on flutes to unresponsive lapdogs.

“There's this ripping inn,” went on Maisie, “with a garden on the water front and a roofed-in sort of summer-house by the landing stage where you can have meals and read or write. Sometimes Sibyl and Harry, or just Sibyl, went down in the evenings and had supper there with Gil and sat by the river till it was dark. A couple called
Meunier
who were once her cook and butler run the inn, and they adore her, of course. They're both jolly decent.”

“Where was it Gil lived?” I asked.

“Gil lived in the mill, on the other side of the river. You go across by a narrow plank bridge. She'd opened part of the old roof and put in glass for his studio. It was an enormous high room with whacking great oak beams and pillars in it. Oh, the whole of that place was thrilling—I never hope to see a better. Only,” she added slowly, “it was sinister. There never seemed enough air there, down by the river, though you could see the tops of the poplars and willows waving about, and hear the breeze in them. It was so close, with all the trees, it seemed to weigh you down. And the sound of the weir closed you in and made you dizzy. And all those tangling lilies and river weeds. … And the mist ghosting up … and the mill opposite looming at you with a blank white face. … I suppose it's my imagination, but … You know the look of a photograph of a house where
something's happened
—how it looks different—it has a special secret expression, as if it had been built on purpose for that terrible thing to happen? That's how I think of the mill now. … The inn garden was lit with coloured lights strung in loops along the landing stage and all through the willows. It was so pretty and musical comedy. To think it's all still there!—but no lights in the garden, I suppose; and the inn and the mill are used for convalescent annexes in summer. I wonder if Sibyl still goes down to sit by the river. … Oh, Rebecca … I can't help thinking of her there. You know how she sits bolt upright with her head and shoulders wrapped up in pale gauzy stuff, as still as a stone statue. That's my last memory of her, sitting in the place she always sat, staring, staring across at the mill. She said: ‘Good-bye, Maisie,' and then nothing more, and I left her alone there and went back to the house; and then Tanya and I went to the station to catch the train for Paris.”

“Why was she staring at the mill?” I asked, frightened.

“Because,” said Maisie, unclasping her hands from behind her head and letting them fall loose in her lap, “that's where everything happened.”

I drew my chair a little nearer to the fire. Both of us leaned forward so that our bowed heads almost touched.

“I used to go down to bathe,” she said, “and stay for lunch sometimes at the inn with Madame
Meunier.
One morning, about eleven, I went down as usual and had a swim. I used to sit on top of the sort of stone parapet where the weir went over into the pool. It was lovely. I liked letting my legs go with the turn-over of the water till they almost began to feel dissolved, as if they were pouring over the edge too. It's the most extraordinary sensation—your legs curving downwards and waving in the water as if they weren't attached to you. I specially enjoyed it, because my legs are my heaviest cross. We won't dwell on that. It was slippery enough to be exciting too, from green weed that grew on the stone—brilliant electric green as if it was lit up from inside. Then I used to slip down and let myself go under into the plunge of the weir and come up again farther along with the drift of the current, and float—float into the calm stream again. Of course it was only a little tame weir, but gosh! it was heaven.”