The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

I followed her down the herbaceous border. She strolled and stopped, examining, casting busy speculative glances about among her plants, as though her mind were on them, and what she had been saying mere background accompaniment to practical horticulture. But I saw the electric storm passing through her, shaking her.

  I said, timidly:

  “I knew your name was Sibyl Anstey.”

  “Ah, did you?” she said briskly. “It was my maiden name. Also my stage name, and the name with which I signed my books. When I was younger, I was a very well-known writer. I wrote three novels, and then I stopped. I had said what I had to say: I made room for others. My books are forgotten for the moment—but they will be read again. I suppose your father told you?”

  “No. It was Tilly.”

  “Who?” She stood still, looking at me in a startled way.

  “Tilly. You know—Grandma’s old maid.”

  “Yes, yes, I know.”

  “As a matter of fact, she told me a few days ago. She’s been staying with us.”

  “I thought she was dead.” She took a deep breath and walked slowly on again. “Staying with you. Tilly. Well! …” She seemed agitated.

  Once more I gave an account of our relations with Tilly, and concluded by saying:

  “Mummy says she doesn’t think she’s going to live very long now.”

  “I must go to her,” said Mrs. Jardine. “As soon as possible. This is most extraordinary. I sent her a letter a few years ago. It was returned to me. On the back of it some uneducated hand had printed: Address not known. It is to be feared as Mrs. Svoboda as passed away.”

  “Who ever could have done that?” I said, appalled.

  “I think I can guess.” Mrs. Jardine uttered a brief chuckle. “How foolish of me not to guess at the time! Well! … I must go to her. As soon as possible. Your mother will give me her address. What a little dea ex machina you are proving, love. To think that this might have been left all unresolved, a cruel discord … as I thought indeed it had been. It was a stroke on the heart for me. Well … I can see her once more. Seven years—yes, it must be— since our last meeting. How time gallops!” Her eyes widened to embrace an unseen horizon. “So Tilly spoke of me to you.”

  “Yes. Well—a bit. Maisie remembered her too, you see, so I told her about us being friends. She did just remember Maisie; but she’s forgotten about most things, except, and this is so funny, what happened a long time ago.”

  “Ah, so she remembered Maisie,” said Mrs. Jardine meditatively.

  “She calls you Miss Sibyl,” I said, hoping to make her smile.

  She did smile; but the tears, which came so simply and with so much beauty, brimmed over and slipped down her cheeks.

  “Oh, Til!” she murmured. “Tiny carapaced beetle on the stalk of life. Still living. … What tenacity! I think it probable that she was the only human being Ianthe ever cared for. A grain of genuine feeling. I will not dignify it with the name of a disinterested love.” She sniffed. “Ianthe was born with a face like a flower, but she has no heart.”

  Struck forcibly by this declaration. I could think of nothing to say but:

  “Tilly told me she looked after her, sometimes, when she was a little girl.”

  “And afterwards,” remarked Mrs. Jardine. “Yes. She looked after her well.”

  “Oh no,” I said, anxious to clear the situation. “After she went abroad, to Italy, I think, she never saw her any more. She said so. Except that one time with Maisie and Malcolm in the hotel. And she doesn’t seem to remember much about that.”

  “Possibly,” said Mrs. Jardine in the same dry tone, “possibly she remembers more than she discloses. Tilly is a very cunning woman. Some old people, you know, are deaf, and not so deaf: as it suits them.”

  Tilly’s face and manner, vacant, sullen, rose up before me under a different light to dismay me.

  “Her memory is bad,” I insisted. “Sometimes she doesn’t remember our names and muddles us up. And she really seems to forget Boy is born at all. When she saw Isabel wheeling him in the garden a little while ago she asked her who he belonged to.”

  Mrs. Jardine chuckled.

  “Belonged to, indeed! From what you tell me of that one he would not lightly overlook such affronts to personal dignity.”

  “I never knew she was cunning,” I said tentatively.

  Once more in this caressing garden as in Tilly’s familiar room, intimations of desolation brushed me, made me shiver. The worm was under the leaf. “Cunning” echoed in the same land as “ruin,” “treachery,” “fall.”

  Mrs. Jardine, pausing at the end of the herbaceous border, mused. For the first time in her actual presence the sense pierced me directly: that she was wicked. A split second’s surmise. But when next moment I looked up at her, there was her profile lifted beautifully above me, serene and reassuring as a symbol in stone.

  “When we are children,” she said, “we do not see the people close to us as themselves—only as our need for them, our habit of them. When something happens to make us realise that they have an enormous life going on apart from us, we feel rather resentful. Perhaps rather frightened. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said truthfully.

  “It is the mystery that frightens us. Once the mystery is explained, quite simply and straightforwardly, we can digest it; and then we feel satisfied, confident again. Children have very strong stomachs. What they cannot deal with they will spit out again; and no harm done. There is always a way of making a puzzle comprehensible. It is sheer idiocy,” she vehemently declared, “criminal idiocy to blinker children, to refuse a decent explanation, or to explain falsely, to pack facts in cotton wool, or smear them with treacle … or with mud. That is what is amiss with your friend Maisie. She has been alternately starved and sickened by a repellent diet.” She paused for breath; then rattled on briskly: “The same diabolical policy was practised upon Ianthe. With the inevitable disastrous results. I was powerless.”

  She had been declaiming out into the garden as if to an invisible audience ranged along the wall: but now she turned to me and, fixing me with her brilliant eyes, said:

  “My dear Rebecca, I will always answer, truthfully, any question you care to put to me. Truth is my foible. But what you ask me and what I reply is a matter between us alone. I will respect your confidence and you must respect mine. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, appalled.

  “You want to know, do you not, why I called Tilly a cunning woman. But you did not like to put the question directly?”

  I nodded, swallowed, uneasy about the strength of my stomach.

  “It would be wrong of me to make such an assertion without giving you my reasons.”

  But she still paused; and I felt rather than saw the ague shaking her. I knew the great question that I wished to ask, the question that summed up all: “Why do you tremble?”—could neither be asked nor answered.

  When she spoke at last, her words, from their unexpectedness, came as a profound shock.

  “Did Tilly never tell you about a journey she made to Bohemia?”

  “No. I knew her husband came from there when he was a boy. She told me that. And he brought a cuckoo clock with him. But I don’t think she’s ever been there, because when I said I wished we had one just like it, a cuckoo clock, I mean, she said I’d have to go there one day and find one for myself, it was too far for her. Are you sure she went?”

  “Oh yes. All that way—right into the very heart of Europe.”

  “When was it?”

  “Nearly twenty years ago.”

  “Before Grandma died?”

  “Not long after. Your grandmother died young, you know. Comparatively young.”

  “Did she go alone?”

  “She went with Ianthe.”

  “Why?”

  “Ianthe call
ed upon her for help. She was in great trouble.”

  “What was the matter?”

  “She was going to have a child. She was eighteen. She was quite alone. She asked Tilly to help her.”

  Mrs. Jardine’s voice was quiet, conversational. She walked on slowly to the white wooden bench beneath the wall, at the end of the border, and there seated herself, motioning to me to come beside her. She sat bolt upright, with her cloak folded around her; and I noticed how queer her little feet looked in their flat-heeled paste-buckled shoes, planted squarely side by side. I had seen old nurses and cottage women sit like this, solidly, their knees a little spread.

  “We will not sit here for long,” she said. “There is a chill in the air. Are you quite warm? At your age one is always warm. Let us enjoy these beauties for ten minutes. I am extremely fortunate in Gillman. He has real sensibility. An artist. See how he has dealt with the masses of the Michaelmas daisies.”

  I looked down the feathery perspective, its many-coloured birds’-breast plumage softly burning in the rich sun of summer’s end, and tried vainly to summon a conception of taciturn, grey-whiskered Mr. Gillman dealing with masses.

  “Do you mean—was it Maisie she was going to have?”

  “Oh dear me, no. If it had been, it would make Maisie nineteen years old, would it not?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” I agreed, totally adrift among mathematical and biological calculations. “Then—she had another baby before Maisie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maisie never told me.”

  “I presume that she has never been told.”

  “Where … What happened to it?”

  “He died. He was denied his life. My eldest grandson.”

  The bitter woe in her voice alarmed me. I put out a timid hand and laid it on her lap, and she took it up and held it in hers, beneath her cloak.

  “These things are for your ears alone,” she said quietly. “Lock them up in you. Such extravagances are not fit for common eyes and ears.”

  Half dreading the weight of what was to come, I said, to prepare myself, to delay the moment of impact:

  “Does anybody else know?”

  “No one knows the true facts.”

  “Not Harry?”

  “Oh Harry, yes. Yes. He knows. We have not spoken of it for many a long year.”

  “Grandma you’d have told, if she hadn’t died?”

  Her pause disturbed me; her answers had been coming so pat.

  “Circumstances,” she said at last, “separated Laura and myself. A tragedy for me. For her too I dare to think—I know—a deep sorrow. If there had been no—no gap in our intimacy, who knows how much of all these disasters could have been avoided …? Do you know what goes to make a tragedy? The pitting of one individual of stature against the forces of society. Society is cruel and powerful. The one stands no chance against its combined hostilities. But sometimes a kind of spiritual victory is snatched from that defeat. Then the tragedy is completed. … Yes. Love proposed. Man disposed between Laura and myself. As to your question,” she added crisply, as if suddenly recalling the terms of our pact: “The answer cannot be a simple yes. Iƒ she had been alive, all that happened—the whole course of events—would have run a different course. Tilly would not have been able to hatch her fatal plot alone—your grandmother would have had to be consulted. She—she with all her sense and sensibility—would have taken control. She would have found me, called me—ME! … I know she would—I know it. She would not have left me at the mercy of a conspiracy between a vulgar, vengeful old woman and an ignorant, corrupted, desperate girl. I should have been there. I should have won back Ianthe. He—he would have been saved!”

  Fiercely riding the climbing crest of her passion, suddenly she broke, collapsed. Bowed double, plunging her face into her hands, she burst into sobs. Dry, labouring gasps tore her body. She rocked herself back and forth in primitive female lamentation.

  It was all over in a minute or two. She sat up and straightened her shoulders, and through ashen lips drew in one long, deep, steady breath.

  “It was Tilly’s revenge,” she said in a weak, calm voice. “She should have called me. She would not.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “she didn’t know how to get hold of you—how to find you.”

  “Oh yes, she did.” Mrs. Jardine smiled disdainfully. “Yes, yes, she did. I came to see your grandmother when she lay dying. All was understood; all was made beautiful again between us. There was only love. We did not say much to one another, but every word was truth, and holy. When I left her I knew that I should never see her again. So did she. I wrote down my address and put it in her hand. She said she would give it to Tilly, and enjoin upon Tilly to call me if the need arose. We envisaged circumstances in which, perhaps, tidings of change in Ianthe’s life might reach Tilly before me. We knew they still corresponded now and then. That is so extraordinary. I have never been able …” She broke off; then murmured vaguely, as if speaking to herself: “That I should have envisaged it so clearly then … yet later, when the time came. … However …” She went on now in her former grave, simple manner: “The dying can make promises too. Your grandmother promised me that. It was my first great—oh, huge!—consolation for many a long day. You see, she trusted Tilly. But Tilly hated me so much that she betrayed even her.”

  I said with false innocence:

  “Tilly hated you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she told me,” I said, “nobody could help loving you when you were—when she first knew you; you were so beautiful and you—and everybody loved you.”

  She took up my hand again and kissed my fingers.

  “Ah, Rebecca!” she said, smiling. “You are one who will be too lavish with the sweet oils of life. It is your grandmother over again. Beware! It must be cemented, this honey nature, with something firm; an essence of the experiencing, time-resisting­­­­ mind. Yes, Tilly loved me once. Later, it was no longer so.”

  “Why not?”

  “She thought … Most mistakenly, she conceived the suspicion that I had injured your grandmother. We will not go into that now. Sow ignorant doubts at random on these harsh natures and you crop flints and thorns. Their hearts are choked, choked with stony loyalties, with lacerating malice. After long years of waiting, she was granted the opportunity to strike me down. She took it. Who is to blame her?”

  Stretching an arm above her head, Mrs. Jardine plucked a sprig from the late-flowering creamy rambler profuse on the wall behind us. She divided it and gave me half, and held hers to her nose, inhaling the fragrance.

  “What did she do?” I asked, sniffing at my bit in a perfunctory way.

  “You must know,” said Mrs. Jardine calmly, “that I left Ianthe’s father when she was a very young child. Our marriage had become a wretched affair—without tenderness or communion. There remained nothing but convention to keep us together. Convention is another name for the habits of society. When a habit is bad it should be broken. A bad marriage is the most detrimental, most vicious of habits—and one of the most difficult for a man or a woman to break. Society sees to that. It is very powerful, and people are mostly weak, and fear its judgment. Do you follow me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I don’t know all the words, but still—”

  “Tell me which you want explained.”

  “Oh no,” I said hastily. “Please not. I like hearing the ones I don’t know. I mean, I do understand them, even when I don’t.”

  The importance of the unknown words she used, the excitement of apprehending their meanings, the fact that she never diluted her language to fit the infirmity of my understanding—all these things formed a major part of my joy in her company.

  “I am not weak and not afraid.” She stopped, and then said: “In those days I was not afraid. I judged others by my own standards, and trusted in their good faith. When I l
eft the man I had married I took the only course that could save us from a life of self-contempt and spiritual dishonour.” She drew in a hissing breath, and continued rapidly: “Unfortunately he was a man not sensible to such considerations. He had once been capable of nobility, or naturally I would not have married him; but his spirit had petrified. The sole concern of that man had grown to be his position in the eyes of the world. I took a step which destroyed his prestige as a man of property. I was his property: he had lost it. Therefore he would destroy me.”

  I stole a glance at her. Her nostrils were dilated, her expression dramatic but composed. Her words came so smoothly, with such precision of timing, it was impossible not to feel that she was presenting a part she had rehearsed a hundred times. I experienced a curious moment of disabused vision, and thought I saw myself not as uniquely privileged, selected after a lifetime to receive her secrets, but as one of a long shadowy series of confidential audiences, all gazing, listening, as spellbound, as gratified as I.

  “He was a man,” she went on, “in whom violent and strangled jealousies took the place of heart. A creature incapable of disinterested love. Yes, yes.” Her eyes flicked. “I pity any being delivered over to Charles Herbert’s passions.”

  “Didn’t he love Ianthe?”

  “Love her!” Her mouth stretched disdainfully. “Oh, he loved her so devotedly he must make a prisoner of her, deny her the light of day and the fresh springs of freedom. He must cut her from her natural roots. Not enough that she should grow up outrageously deprived of a mother. No! She must be taught to link the name of mother with all that is the enemy of truth and goodness.”

  “He—he taught her to think you were horrid?”

  “He did.”

  “How beastly of him!” I cast my eyes down and inquired: “Couldn’t you take her with you, then, when you went away?”

  “He refused me that.”

  “Her own mother!”

  She nodded.

  I felt Tilly’s revelations, and consequently my duplicity, weighting my tongue; but if her suspicions had been aroused or were kindled by the disingenuous manner which accompanied my next inquiry, she passed them over.