The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

  “Oh, arranged! What did I arrange? I was hard-pressed too. They think me made of steel and ice, a flail—I am not so. I wanted my own. Tear a mother from her child—they shall see what devils they raise.” She leaned back, her lips blue, and began to relax. “Rebecca, it comes over me again, again. That child was hard pressed. She had too much to bear. She needed her childhood,—a long blank stretch of time by the seashore, digging castles in the sand, picking up shells and stones, exploring the rock pools. How I loved that!—do not you?—better than anything else in the world. I still do. Ianthe would have loved that. … Or a piece of earth to make into a garden. Making things grow—flowers and fruit and vegetables. That would have been good too—I have done all these things myself, and been healed by them. Instead, what did I do? I put man between us—again, again! … as if that sword, that alone, had not separated us from the beginning; as if she were not wounded enough by that already! I matched them with calculations as cruel, as sterile as their own. I sent her man—his archetype—a whole world of man —to complete her desolating knowledge. I sent her that one.”

  She wiped her lips, her forehead on which the sweat stood in beads.

  Out from beneath her voice swung two long lines of figures, linked hand in hand, singing in chorus: We’ll send Paul to fetch her away, fetch her away, fetch her away. … Mournfully, gaily, forward and backward, forward and backward. Out stepped two figures. Advancing, solitary, through a great stillness, towards one another, they stopped face to face. He was in armour; she was the Greek virgin on the vase, bare-foot, bare-breasted. His arm of steel shot out, he caught her hand. One tug. … Away she flew, whirling in white through the air. The figures drew her in, obliterated her with laughter and clapping.

  “It was a terrible mistake,” said Mrs. Jardine, calm once more. “I tell you so—nobody else. She flung herself at his head. Those are the words I cannot forget. I have seen a small trapped animal fling itself straight upon the trapper. One last blind bid for liberty. … There is another thing I will tell you. I think of it often. Something that woman said. ‘I heard her knocking on his door,’ she said. ‘In the middle of the night. He opened, and I heard her tell him she was afraid to sleep alone. I heard her!’ I see her there often, knocking.”

  Silence. I told myself I supposed it might well be so, though very babyish. A girl who had never been allowed to sleep in a room by herself. …

  After a while I said:

  “Don’t you think he was kind to her—after he took her away? Paul, I mean?”

  “Oh, I should think so certainly,” said Mrs. Jardine, sharp, judicial. “He was capable of extraordinary tenderness—unlike the majority of men. But when two people unite, kindness must be mutual, or shocking things will happen. What could she give him?—that is the question. Was she capable of cherishing him? Unlikely. I cannot picture him sustaining the role of mediæval knight-champion of romance. He was not given to notions of rescue, chastity, dedication to the ideal. It must have been an extraordinary infatuation, no doubt of that. I could only hope, with all my heart, it would turn out to their advantage.

  “What did I expect, in the beginning?” she said, suddenly reverting to my question. “Not that. It was my folly, innocence, vanity if you will, that I did not see that danger. It did not occur to me that he was—packing his bag. Perhaps he did not realise it either—not consciously. But being what he was, he would, of course, choose the most distinguished, the most sensational exit. What more final than to pack my child? Really though,” she said lightly, “how odd, when you consider it! He had never been attracted by young girls. They bored him. … No. I expected that he would come back to me with news, clues—valuable to me—as a spy might come back. I had become so used to conducting a secret service—oh, with such rare, such picked agents!—you could count them on less than the fingers of one hand. I was too prone, no doubt, to view those few I trusted in that light. A mistake. Did you know that nobody can stand more than a small dose of being of service to his or her fellows? It turns their stomachs, one way or another. The moment comes when they revolt from the notion that they are in the power of another; being made use of, they call it. Then we say that they have betrayed our trust.”

  The corners of her lips turned down in a bitter smile; and she said with an irony I could not fathom, though I see now its target was her own delusion: “I thought we would talk it over together—the experience, in all its aspects, for him, for her; what might come of it for me.”

  She sighed as if almost bored, and exclaimed suddenly:

  “Dear me, how I have talked! What a listener my darling is. What do you make of it all?”

  I simpered rather feebly, and said I loved it, would she go on, please?

  “Some months passed in this suspense. Then at last a letter from him.”

  “Oh, good! What did he say?”

  “He said: Ianthe and I are in love with one another.”

  “Just as you thought!” I cried joyfully. “He was! They both were. Were you very relieved?”

  “He wrote: You will laugh cynically when I say that this is different. For me it is like a re-birth.”

  There was so much in her voice I could not understand, that I remained silent.

  “I shall marry her, he wrote, directly she feels able to consent to be my wife. Don’t come after us, will you?”

  “What? Didn’t she want to marry him? Why not?” I was confounded.

  “This letter,” said Mrs. Jardine, “filled me with the gravest alarm. So unrealistic. So idiotic. Not like him. And so unmannerly too. He could not marry her without my consent. And how, I asked myself among other things, did they propose to live?” She made a rhetorical pause, and there flashed into my mind the figure of my grandmother in a French hotel, asking Miss Sibyl the same question. “He was dependent for his income upon an allowance from a much older brother, the owner of the family estates. He was supposed to assist in the management of them and to look after the library: not an arduous career, as he pursued it. But I could not see this brother disposed to continue that allowance indefinitely with a Bless you, my dear old fellow, love is best. As for lanthe, she had nothing. Her pittance was in the hands of Connor, until I could get control of it for her, which, of course, I did later. No, I was infuriated. He was no green boy, to think bread and butter bestowed magically on lovers. As for her feeling able to consent—what nonsense did that imply?”

  “Did you write back?”

  “Yes, I wrote back. He did give me an address. I thought that possibly significant. Only care of the Post Office, some small place on the shores of the Adriatic—but still it seemed to mean that he wished to leave a thread between us in case of need. I sent some money for Ianthe. I wrote: ‘Come back to me, both of you, so soon as you wish to receive my consent to Ianthe’s marriage. You will be welcomed with love and joy.’ It was all I could do.”

  The room was getting to look sadder and sadder. Brightness began to drain away from all the surfaces. Haze, spreading from the west, advancing like a world of negativity, dissolved the sun, precipitated into the air’s lambent texture a soft, greyish sediment. Soon all the bloom and iridescence would be blotted out. No, whispered every object—No. No. In the vacant light she had a paper face, scored with criss-cross lines, thumbed here and there into shallow smudged concavities.

  “They didn’t come?” I said at last.

  “No.”

  “Write?”

  “No. Not a word. A year went by, a dragging year. I was lonely. I had nobody to speak to.”

  “Not Harry?”

  “Harry was with me. And others, of course, besides. I did not lack company. Harry did not even tell me when he sold the little mare he had bought for her to ride. Harry took it hard; it bit into him. He had built a lot on welcoming her for my sake. And for his own; he loves young people. But all that could never be discussed. He blamed me.” She drew a sighing breath,
and added rapidly: “So I was not able to tell him when one day, towards the latter half of that year, hope left me. Yes, between one day and another. My instinct, which was all I had left to trust, which I spun out incessantly towards her through the dark—my instinct turned sick. One spider’s thread lifeline. It shrivelled, rotted away. Something terrible had happened.”

  “What was it?”

  “I could not tell. There was only this void, this unconnection. All I knew was, some adverse influence had set in, I thought: it is over. Mangled. I waited on in the desert. I hope you will never need to go into that place. Day and night, the stones grind one’s heart. You search the scorching wastes for pools; but when you find them, the rats have been before you. Their swollen bodies float in them. … Then, one day at the close of the year, the oppression began. Here.” She put both hands on her body, pressing them in under her breast. “How can I describe it? The symptoms were not mine. They were part of my body, but outside it; so that I could not accept them, recognise them in order to deal with them. When you have hurt yourself, you know how all your nerves cry: Pain! Immediately you fight it with every fibre of you. You are filled with pain, and with resistance to it. But this brown suffocation is the opposite: it is a helpless subjection. A wasting out. I struggled to draw breath. I knew what it meant, I could not be mistaken. I had been in that place too, before, when as a child she had a serious illness, and I was far away the other side of the world. I knew that her life was in danger.”

  I could only gasp.

  “Many mothers have this kind of experience,” observed Mrs. Jardine, on a didactic note. “I cannot remember that it has ever been described. Curious. Possibly it is so physical that it is thought an indecent subject.” She sniffed. “You see, to have a child means that a living body has come out of one’s own. I suppose you do know that?”

  “I suppose so,” I said, embarrassed.

  “Once it is born, and the cord is cut, it is free of one’s own flesh; yet in a sense it remains for ever part of one. So when it is badly threatened one is bound to get some warning. If one is far away the warning can only take the form of this blind dull drag towards it. Once one has got there—oh, then one can recharge it with life again from one’s own; as one did before it passed out of one’s body and became separate. The birth miracle will happen over again.”

  “It didn’t happen like that for Tilly’s little boy,” I said. “She was there all the time, she never left him, and he breathed his last.”

  She looked faintly taken aback.

  “Yes,” she agreed quickly. “Poor Tilly. I had forgotten—for the moment. Yes, I had forgotten.” She seemed to meditate. “Of course it is not always so. I was indulging in a dream. What do I know of this other experience, the positive one? I have never been called to come. It was perhaps the worst feature of my separation from her, the hardest to bear, I mean—the haunting fear that death would stretch a hand for her, grasp her before I could reach her and draw her back. As I felt—I knew—I had the power to. For whatever they do, they cannot do that: they cannot cut the invisible cord.”

  I feared that the mutter was about to begin again; but to my relief she broke out of it and said with decision: “However … No suffering I have ever endured is to be compared with Tilly’s. Ianthe did not die. I waited about in this fog, dreading, hoping for a summons. But none came. For several days I did not even leave the house. Then the fog lifted. So I knew at least that the danger was past. Now, I thought to myself, now is the time to take action. I cast about in my mind; and after a while what should I light on, but this very Tilly! I must go to England, and ask Tilly to help me to find her. As soon as I had got all this clear, I was quite at peace. My instinct was whole again. I remembered what your grandmother had told me that last time: that she still sent Tilly picture postcards. Of course I had never actually forgotten it. But it had seemed to my blindness a piece of information without significance. Now I saw it for what it was: the path. That child had wanted, had needed to keep a track open back into her childhood. She wanted to have an old nurse. Tilly had helped to nurse her through that pneumonia. Now, I thought, if she is sick, in trouble, whom might she turn to?”

  “Tilly!” I said, triumphant.

  “So I went to England. Alone. Harry stayed behind.” She said this hastily, to forestall, I suppose, my customary query. “I had found out long ago, from your Aunt Sylvia, the address of Tilly’s lodgings. I went there. Oh, as I rang the bell, a wild thought came to me. This is the end of my journey, I thought. She is here.”

  “And she was?”

  “No. She was not there. Nor was Tilly. But she had been there. They had gone away together.”

  “Where to?”

  “The landlady was reticent at first; but I thawed her. The young lady had come a few months ago. A lovely young lady. She seemed to be in trouble.” Mrs. Jardine paused. “But, said the landlady, she didn’t know anything about that. Mrs. Svoboda was always one for keeping herself to herself: and she never meddled in what wasn’t her business. She understood Mrs. Svoboda had been nurse to the young lady as a child. She’d stayed some weeks in these very lodgings, and to the best of her belief she never saw no one all that time but Tilly. She’d stop in bed all morning, and then they’d take a walk out together of an afternoon. So drawn and sickly she looked and so sad with it it wrung your heart. Haunted like. But they seemed ever so thick together; and sometimes she’d hear them laughing up in her room. Mrs. Svoboda was such a one for a joke. She’d watch them from the window sometimes, going off down the street. Such a funny-matched pair they looked—the one so tall, the other such a tiny body. The young lady never wore nothing else but a long loose black cloak, which seemed a bit funny. So old like. You’d expect a young lady so high-bred from the looks of her to have a trunkful of fashions.” Mrs. Jardine paused again. “Then one day Mrs. Svoboda sprung it on her she was going off for a bit to foreign parts to visit her late husband’s people out in a place called Bo’emia. They were always on at her to come, she said, but somehow or another she’d never found the opportunity, not since her honeymoon; and that was a fair long time ago. She’d make it a proper stay while she was about it, and drop a postcard now and then to let them know how she got on. She wanted her lodgings kept, and she paid up four months in advance for the two rooms. Well, you could have knocked them all down with a feather, knowing what a one she was for London and her own little place, but there, she knew better than to waste words on the ins and outs of it. ‘Well, you have got a spirit, Mrs. Svoboda,’ was all she said. Then they packed their bags and off they went. ‘Good-bye, Mrs. Pringle,’ said the young lady, she was ever so sweet-spoken when she did speak. ‘I’ve been so comfortable in your nice homely house.’ A couple of postcards had come, lovely views, not saying much, just: ‘Having a nice time.’ She’d forwarded anything that had come, like she’d been told to. Nothing for the young lady. … I gave some plausible reason of old friendship for wishing to get in touch with her, and she gave me the address. So to that address I went.”

  Mrs. Jardine sighed, as if the memory of that long journey still fatigued her.

  “And you found them?”

  “It was a big farm house on the outskirts of a village, not far from a beautiful old town called Prague. That is the capital of Bohemia. I wonder, can you picture it? A village of coloured houses, white, pale blue, pale pink plaster, with wooden balconies filled with flowers—mostly red geraniums. So clean, so bright, so extraordinarily pretty. At the top of the village, on a little hill, a white church with a round green dome, the shape of an onion. And beyond, green hills and the pine forests. I could smell the forests as I walked down the wide village street. It was like walking into a fairy story. Flocks of geese wheeling off this way and that as I came along. So I came to the farm where Tilly’s husband was born. Jinric Svoboda. A very handsome man. They were an exceptionally handsome family—tall, splendid cheek bones, so much dignity. Ji
nric’s parents were dead now. His two brothers and his sister lived on there, with their families. Imagine pert Cockney Tilly among them all!—like a London sparrow bouncing and pecking round a team of noble cart horses. But they adored her—they thought her fascinating. She was giving them English lessons,—shouting­­­­ at them, of course, as we English always do to make it easier for poor weak-witted foreigners to understand us. They repeated words after her so painstakingly in their soft slow voices, and their faults of pronunciation caused her to cackle with laughter; and the more she laughed at them, the more they delighted in her amusement. I saw them all through the window. They were sitting round a big wooden table eating their evening meal. It was like a picture of peasants by a Flemish master—the bright, spotless wooden kitchen, the shining pots and pans, the circle of faces half lit, half shadowed. There were some children in pinafores. It was only a glimpse. I saw no one precisely. Naturally I could not press my nose to the window and stare in. I moved noiselessly and put myself out of sight in the doorway, and heard this lesson going on. The laughter. Then I heard a different kind of voice speak a word or two in English: a well-bred voice, high-pitched, not unmusical from a distance. ‘My—mother—has—blue—eyes,’ it said slowly, clearly.”

  “Ianthe!”

  “Ianthe. She was repeating it for a child, and a child’s voice lisped it after her. She went on patiently repeating simple words—my kitten, my spoon, my plate, my baby brother; and I heard Tilly say: ‘Mudder, brudder—’ark at ’im, bless ’is ’eart! Oh, ’e’ll get ’is tongue round it before any of you.’ It was a strange experience for me. I would have liked to stay there for ever listening. After a hundred years of anguish, to have arrived at last beside this well, and find her there, drinking peace with a peasant child from a white cup. …”

  Her voice faded out like sad singing. It made me want to cry.

  “And to hear her say that first of all, about blue eyes, as if she was talking about you,” I said shakily.