The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

  “Yes. Did that strike you? It struck me too.”

  “Did you go in?”

  “No, no. I could not break in. It came to me suddenly as I stood there that if she were to see me unexpectedly she would—” Mrs. Jardine stopped dead; then said calmly: “I heard the scream that she would give. I slipped away, skirting the wall and, took a field path back to the inn. I asked for a room, and then I had a delicious supper.”

  “What did you have?”

  “A kind of junket called yoghourt, with brown sugar; we should be a healthier nation if it formed part of our diet; and brown bread and butter and coffee; good coffee. Then I wrote a note and asked the landlord’s little daughter to take it to Tilly for me.”

  “In English, did you ask?”

  “Of course not. How could she have understood me? In German, her mother tongue, which I speak perfectly.”

  “Tell me what you said.”

  She told me; and added rather severely:

  “I hope your mother will see to it that you are taught to speak it properly.”

  “Oh yes. She says we’re to have a German governess next summer holidays,” I said, depressed. “So then what happened?”

  “I went and sat at a little table under an apple tree in the inn garden, and waited.”

  “And Tilly came?”

  “She came.”

  “Was she pleased to see you?”

  Mrs. Jardine smiled.

  “No. She was not. There she sat, a most singular sight, in her bonnet, and—what was it called, that cape thing she always wore. …”

  “Her dolman?”

  “Ah yes, her dolman. Does she still wear it?”

  “Oh yes. Always.”

  “She does!” Mrs. Jardine chuckled, sighed. “Oh, Tilly is a unique experiment of Nature’s. We shall not look upon her like again. There she sat, clasping her reticule—I remembered that from twenty years ago—looking fixedly into the apple boughs. She would not look at me. Excessively dignified she was. Seeing as I’d put it how I had in my note, she said, she’d felt it no more than her duty to come along. What had I to say to her?”

  “How had you put it?”

  “In the name of one whom we both loved, I said, who on her death bed promised you to me in case of my need, and enjoined on you this promise, come immediately.”

  I nodded, deeply stirred.

  “‘What I want, Tilly,’ I said, ‘is the information you owe me.’ She didn’t know what I was driving at—information, was her answer. Since it seemed I’d ferreted it out somehow that Ianthe was with her, all she could say was Ianthe had turned up at her front door one day, as was very natural, her being in England again and considering the old days. It wasn’t her business, she said, whether I knew Ianthe’s whereabouts or not. She wasn’t to suppose I troubled myself much, not from the way Ianthe spoke. Not that Ianthe ever mentioned me at all. What was the harm, she’d like to know, in her paying a visit to her own husband’s people that were always asking her, and Ianthe coming along too, seeing she was looking peaky, like she needed a holiday, and there was nobody seemed to trouble themselves about her, and remembering how fond Madam had used to be of her as a little thing, and sorry for her too to be deserted like. Oh, a rigmarole! and her eyes popping at the apples; and rather impertinent. Yes, I must say, her whole attitude was one of impertinence. ‘Enough of this, Tilly,’ I said. ‘Answer me plainly. Is the baby living?’ She looked at me then.” Mrs. Jardine drew in a long loud breath. “Her face mottled like old blotting paper. Whatever in the world was I insinuating? Baby? … Then I will frighten you, I thought. So I did.”

  The rap in Mrs. Jardine’s voice, sudden, icy, made me jump.

  “I threatened her with the law. In no uncertain terms I threatened her. It did not take me long to break her down. She broke into hysterical weeping. I sat by her and held her hand. Such a warm sweet starry night was coming down. There were other people sitting out in front of the inn, drinking their evening beer. Somebody had a violin. He played it very sweetly—old German airs. After a while they called good-night to one another and began to go home. We were alone. Tilly began to grow calm. ‘Oh, Miss Sibyl!’ … she sighed out at last. So then I knew we could speak to one another.”

  “Was she more polite then?”

  “Much more. ‘The baby died?’ I said. I knew it, of course, by that time. Until I saw her, I had been nursing a mad hope that all was well. It was hearing her voice in that kitchen, so calm and contented. Listening, I had thought: perhaps she has just fed him and put him in a wooden cradle. A foolish piece of self-deception. She was contented because she had become a child again among children, without responsibilities, protected.”

  “The baby was dead?”

  “The baby was dead. A boy. Born dead. So she assured me.”

  The controlled intensity not only of these sentences but also of the pauses between them appalled me far more than her former outburst of tears.

  “Born dead?”

  “A month ago. Never brought to birth.” Mrs. Jardine’s eyes, her whole face, dilated for a moment as if about to explode. “The whole story came out bit by bit. How Ianthe had arrived one day, without a word of warning, having travelled alone from Italy. Had asked Tilly to take her in, hide her and help her. She was like a trapped thing, said Tilly. Half out of her wits. Saying she’d do away with herself, acting so queer sometimes—suspicious-like­­­­—making­­­ out there was somebody after her. Gasping fits and that. Other times she didn’t seem to take in nothing. ‘She’d

  chatter like a child.’” Mrs. Jardine drummed sharply with her fingers. “Hysteria, I dare say. … But it is true that an actual seed of mental instability will germinate at these times. In any case her behaviour, her actions appear to have been those of one—at least temporarily unhinged. All Tilly could elicit from her—or rather, all Tilly told me—was that Ianthe had been happy for a time in her new life—”

  “Her life after she ran away with Paul?”

  “Yes. Had intended—that seems to have been the way she put it—had intended to be happy. Then, after a time, had been overtaken by a mounting horror of him—had turned against him with such an uncontrollably violent repugnance. … She went on how she hated men,’ said Tilly. ‘Hated and loathed them.’ So one fine day,” said Mrs. Jardine briskly, “it seems that she was seized by an over-mastering desire to—attack him.”

  “What? Hit him?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, then nodded.

  “Badly? To hurt him?”

  “I do not know what happened. I heard that when he died—he died far away, alone, in a hotel bedroom—he had on his forehead, above one temple, a terrible scar. He had no scar upon his beautiful brow in the days when we were together. I understood then. …” Her voice trembled. “I understood why he had never let me look upon his face again.” Then rapidly: “Yes, we will assume she wanted to hurt him badly. Or let us not put it in so crude a way. Let us say an impulse seized her; that there came the bursting point of a complexity of hideous fears and pressures. I can well imagine … I can remember …” She drew another labouring breath. “Aghast she fled from him, leaving in her panic and confusion no trace behind her. If Tilly is to be believed, she did not appear to realise her condition. So possibly—I think certainly—she had not informed him.” Another hard breath. “When she did realise, that a child was on the way, I mean, it seems that she became frantic.”

  “She didn’t want to have a baby?”

  “She did not want to. No doubt Tilly did her best for her,” said Mrs. Jardine, dry as gunpowder—I could not think why. “I did not inquire. Time went on. Tilly devised a desperate plan. She would take her abroad to this obscure far-away village where nobody would recognise or follow her. There the child would be born. Beyond that she had not looked. If the worst came to the worst, she thought, the child could remain there. T
hey would bring him up as their own. I would not have objected to that. It would have been a good life, a happy wholesome life; perhaps the wisest solution in the circumstances. If she had seen where her first duty lay—to inform me—I would have given that scheme my blessing and furthered it with all my powers. But Ianthe, she said, had pledged her with threats and prayers to secrecy regarding me; and she considered that enough. Enough indeed! I should say so. No need, when you place the long-sought weapon in a person’s hands, to beg her to strike home with it. … Yet it was a difficult situation for Tilly; I am the first to admit it. … So this journey was undertaken. She had enough money—your grandmother had left her a little annuity, as perhaps you know—Ianthe had what I had sent her. It is some comfort at least to remember that. So off they went. Ianthe grew calmer there at once, she said. They made her welcome, cherished her, and asked no questions. Ah, they must have been good people. I think of them daily with love and blessings. ‘She never seemed to worry no more about nothing,’ said Tilly. ‘She left the worrying to me.’ So she had this time of healthy, peaceful, vegetable existence—all as it should be. ‘But,’ said Tilly, ‘not even near the end she didn’t seem to take it in what was coming. She wouldn’t talk about it nor make its little clothes nor nothing. She just took little walks and played with the other children and ate hearty.’ This sister-in-law was the village midwife: that is, the woman who looks after poor mothers when their babies are born. Then it came to Ianthe’s time. Everything went very badly, as badly as possible. Ianthe nearly died.”

  “Like you guessed?”

  “Yes. They saved her life. They could not save the child. A fine big boy. … ‘If I had been there,’ I said to Tilly, ‘he would have been saved.’ ‘It was better so,’ said Tilly. ‘She didn’t want him.’ ‘I wanted him,’ I said. ‘He was mine.’ I said no more. What use? It was all too late. That beautiful child had been denied his life. Paul’s child. He would have been glorious.”

  “What a shame.” I wiped my eyes on the back of my hand.

  “All this was a month ago. Ianthe, with the vitality of youth, had made a rapid recovery. She had never spoken of her baby, never shed a tear for him, or asked for any token—not even one word of description—by which to remember him. ‘It seemed unnatural,’ said Tilly.”

  I decided that Mrs. Jardine was quite right: Ianthe was a very horrid girl.

  “It was clear that Ianthe wished to cast off the whole experience, force it to be undone and erased altogether. She had reverted, in appearance at least, to her former state of blank child-like contentedness. She liked to sit in the kitchen where there was talk and bustle going on. She would not be alone. She slept in Tilly’s room. ‘Very well, now, Tilly,’ I said at last. ‘All we have left now to discuss is the future. What is to be done with Ianthe? Is she to remain here for the present? Or for the rest of her life? Or what?’ Tilly said it was a funnv coincidence I should mention that. It was only that very morning she’d brought the conversation round to that very self-same topic. For her part, she was sick and tired of the place. She wanted to get back to London and have her own things round her and hear people talk civilised. She never was one for the country—and as for foreign country, the very look of them pine forests turned her up—nasty great black creepy things.”

  “Oh, that’s just like her!” I exclaimed appreciatively. “I can just hear her say it. She hates everywhere except London, she always says.”

  “In fact,” said Mrs. Jardine, with a sniff, “she had decided by now that my turning up when I did was a blessing in disguise. She’d told Ianthe straight it was time she pulled herself together and thought what she was going to do to get on with her life. What was over was over. They’d had a lot of kindness showed them and paid their way and now they must think about getting along back. They were a good-hearted lot here, but ignorant!—you’d never credit. Why, they’d never been to the seaside nor seen a street of proper high-class shops or so much as put their noses inside a music-hall, believe it or not.”

  These impressions of Tilly’s style, breaking recurrently into the classical form of her narrative, were accompanied by an uncanny facial transformation. It was as if the ghost pattern of Tilly’s features kept intruding, diffusing Tilly’s alien spirit through her own mask of flesh. Since then I have noticed young children’s faces alter, in this way after they have been staring for some time in total unselfconsciousness at someone. She had “got” Tilly to the life, at some deeper level than mere imitation.

  “Did Ianthe want to stay on with them?”

  “Ianthe had taken it a bit on the queer side at first—turning her head aside sharp and staring out at nothing. But she wasn’t going to stand no more nonsense from her, she’d humoured her long enough. After a bit she’d talked her round. ‘Another week, then I’m off back to London,’ she’d said. ‘And you’re coming along with me. But not to settle in them lodgings with me and droop and drift in and out like the Pantomime Fairy Queen, and be looked at old-fashioned and insinuendos put out you’re hard put to it to answer back to. For one thing, I got myself to think of. I got my own life to lead. At my time of life it gets on your nerves tagging someone else around when you want a bit of peace and quiet at last on your own. For another, it wouldn’t be right. You’re getting a big girl now. Are you going where it’s only right you should—back to your own mother and tell her the truth of what’s been going on or are you not?”

  “Oh, she did say that!” I exclaimed, triumphant. “You see, she hadn’t forgotten you.”

  “That was Tilly’s version of the conversation,” replied Mrs. Jardine with dryness. “The monologue, rather. She rendered it with fine dramatic fervour. ‘What’s more,’ it seems she said, ‘to the best of my belief your mother can have the law on you. She’s your lawful guardian till you come of age. And a nice figure I’d cut in the courts, had up for aiding and abetting you and harbouring you against her wishes. You’d best go back, you know, and make a clean breast of it and ask her to forgive and help you live it down.”

  Mrs. Jardine leaned back in her chair and let out a long deep chuckle. She shook her head and sighed as if contemplating Tilly with helpless relish and amusement. Not seeing the joke, I smiled politely and said:

  “And what did Ianthe say?”

  “Oh, Ianthe said she’d rather be seen dead in a ditch than on my doorstep,” said Mrs. Jardine lightly. “She created so Tilly wouldn’t answer for the consequences if she did happen to set eyes on me, face to face, and got it in her head I’d come after her. When pressed by Tilly for constructive proposals, she had confessed to a determination to earn her own living and be independent. ‘Very well, Tilly,’ I said. ‘That is perfectly sensible on Ianthe’s part. Most right and proper. Now how does she propose to implement her determination? How is she going to set about it?’”

  “How was she?”

  “It came out that Ianthe cherished a passion for the higher education. She wished to fit herself for an academic career. She’d got it in her head, said Tilly, she’d like to go to one of them new-fangled Cambridge colleges for women.”

  “Oh,” I said dubiously. It seemed a come-down—eccentric without being romantic; dismal.

  “She had a pedantic bent, inherited from her father. But it was from me that she derived the wish to strike out on her own, to use her intelligence to make something of her life. I was glad. To me personally it was not a sympathetic idea, but that was immaterial. I was relieved—proud—glad. I thought: the girl has something sound in her. ‘Very well, Tilly,’ I said. ‘Teaching is one of the most honourable of professions. I am glad to say that there is increasing scope in it for educated women. I shall make it my business to inquire into every practical means of furthering her wishes.’”

  “Did Tilly thank you very much?”

  “Oh, dear me, no! She was outraged. Ianthe, a lady by birth and breeding, to lower herself so, and I abet her! Ianthe make herself a figur
e of fun, aping what should be for gentlemen only, and then turn schoolmarm or governess. Nothing else Ianthe had done or undergone appeared to have outraged her moral sense: this did. She had only repeated it, she gave me to understand, to show me how sorely Ianthe stood in need of moral guidance. There was no point in wasting breath. I gave her my orders. ‘You will take Ianthe back to England in a week’s time,’ I said. ‘Expect to hear from me in London shortly; and when you do, come at once to receive my instructions.’ Then I closed the interview and bade her good-night. Next day I returned to England.”

  “Didn’t you see Ianthe?”

  “No, I did not. I had no wish to see Ianthe. None, none.” She drew that hissing breath. “Then I busied myself with necessary inquiries and interviews. Finally I arranged for Ianthe to enter the family of a university coach. He was a schoolmaster, retired on grounds of ill-health, with a decent wife and a large family. The mistress of Girton College, that is the first college for women to be founded in Cambridge, recommended him to me. She was a remarkable woman. I have the most impressive recollections of my interview with her. Then I paid him a visit, and said and arranged what was necessary. Then I summoned Tilly and gave her my instructions. First she was to take Ianthe to the doctor I had selected, to see that her health was properly re-established. So soon as I had received his report, which was perfectly satisfactory, I conveyed, through Tilly, a letter to Ianthe, containing in the briefest and most businesslike terms my offer. She was to prepare herself for her examinations and enter College as soon as possible. Her fees would be paid and she would receive in addition a small but sufficient allowance for herself. Her vacations should be spent—not with me if she chose otherwise, but under my indirect supervision and control. That is, I should insist on being kept informed of her whereabouts and plans. It was made plain to her that my only remaining wish with regard to her was to help her to attain an honourable independence.”

  Mrs. Jardine’s energy was beginning to peter out. She spoke in a weak, light, rapid way; the voice of one hurrying to reach a bare conclusion before her forces should be altogether spent.