The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

  “I understand Sibyl better nowadays,” she said, drawing a deep breath. “After Cherry, everything boiled up to a head. Do you know what I decided? To murder her for Cherry dying. I thought. … I thought I was being commanded to clean the world of such wickedness. Yes, I did, really. I’d got it all planned. Tanya turned up to be my friend in the nick of time. I suppose if you’re not meant to be a murderer something does always turn up to stop the deed being done. Tanya took away my madness. Would you believe it, I began to pity the old girl; and you can’t kill someone you pity.” She reflected on this, and added: “At least, I couldn’t. About Cherry. … It pretty well broke her into pieces. You wouldn’t have known her. I didn’t see her till months after, but she hadn’t begun to recover. She could only just breathe, and every breath hurt. What’s that line about drawing breath in this harsh world with pain. … It seemed like that. I didn’t know suffering, unhappiness I mean, could be like that. She explained it to me. She said if you’re a mother and your child dies, you have to—you go on and on trying to give birth to a dead child. Oh, I shall never have one, thank God! She wasn’t Cherry’s mother, of course, but I didn’t point that out. She did obviously have the flesh and blood feeling so strongly that it being one generation removed wasn’t making any difference. It seemed to—even something up that somebody should feel like that for Cherry … although, as things turned out, it was all such devilish waste.”

  A hard shadow fell across her face. After a moment or two she glanced at me and went on:

  “What do you think she said? She said she’d known I’d blame her, and want to. … I said yes, but I didn’t feel it any more. And as soon as we’d said that to each other, I stopped hating her for good and all. It was a shock! It made me feel quite weak in the stomach. I suppose it was awfully crass of me not to have realised that if you have a—very violent feeling about someone there are times when you might feel its exact opposite. And that’s when the harm

  is done.” Pacing up and down the red-tiled floor, she drew a deep breath. “You know how I always felt about her. It was war to the knife. She was my enemy. Well then—in a twinkling I had a different sort of surge inside me. I wanted to show her—”

  “You didn’t hate her?” I suggested, nervous.

  “Yes. Do something fatuous, like—oh, I don’t know! I couldn’t trust myself any more. I thought to myself: this won’t do. You’ve got to know where you are with people; and if you hate them, you can’t know. Or—or if you love them—in a violent sort of way. It’s all the same somehow. Did you know that?”

  I said no.

  “Well, I do, because—I know. And I know things that make me sure of it.”

  “What things?”

  She hesitated, then said brusquely:

  “We must go to the others.”

  Quickly I said:

  “When did you start to call her Sibyl?”

  “That time. She asked me to. Also she talked to me a bit about my mother—truthfully for once: I mean, as much as one person can see the truth. For the one and only time.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Oh … not much.” Evasive, she turned away and began to undo her apron. “We were both in the mood when we could say things, I suppose. Sort of—released.” She flung the apron on to the table among the feathers. “Oh … she told me something I asked her. And a bit about my mother’s girlhood—how she was brought up, and what it had done to her. It sounded quite convincing. And I told her—but only a very little—about what it was like after she went away. It was all right, because she didn’t try to sympathise; and she wasn’t out for sympathy herself or—making excuses. It was just saying. After that we didn’t talk any more. I didn’t want to … because I was determined not to let anything go too far. Perhaps she was too. She knows a lot when she’s at her best. When she’s not on the prowl, she can be grand. Come on. We’ll have to clean up later. God knows how.”

  “How do you mean, on the prowl?” I asked, following her out of the kitchen.

  With sudden, startling loudness, Maisie said in the passage: “Plotting to get something she wants. Stalking. In ambush. Then—pounce! In with the claws.”

  We came into the dining-room. Logs burned in the grate, the table was laid for six, above the glass and silver four white china cherubs held up long newly-lit candles. The connecting door into the drawing-room stood open, and beyond it I saw Jess, Malcolm, and two unknown figures standing by Mrs. Jardine’s fire.

  “Who is here?” I whispered, touching Maisie’s elbow with a delaying hand.

  “Gil and Tanya are here, of course. Didn’t Malcolm explain? You know who I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re married. They were married in London this morning. We went up to be witnesses. He’s back from France on ten days’ leave.”

  “I see. … Does Mrs. Jardine know?”

  “I don’t know what she knows or doesn’t know, I’m sure,” said Maisie sharply, stopping to shift the candlesticks a little. “We can ask who we like here. They’re our friends. Anyway, this is Harry’s house, not hers, and Harry’ll be delighted.” Then as if in further justification, she added: “Besides, Gil will probably be killed, so what’s the odds?”

  We went on into the drawing-room, and, in a dream, I was introduced to a man not very tall, in uniform, with a big head and face, and a lot of rough hair and massive shoulders; and to a young woman in fancy dress.

  6

  Jess and I were totally unused to anything in the nature of social occasions; but whereas Jess appeared to swim into parties as into her natural element, pleasurably anticipating them beforehand, immediately expanding in unselfconscious ease and gaiety to meet and mingle with them, I disintegrated altogether in the face of any call upon my communal instincts, and was aware only of a whirling, a burning, an alternate dryness and icy clamminess now within me, now about me. Through this combined maze, I beheld the company, my plate and its contents, and all the other objects of the dinner table in a nickering surrealist film sequence.

  My reverence for art was intense if incoherent; and here I was, I told myself, for the first time in the presence of a genius. Mrs. Jardine had pre-illumined him with the divine fire. This was enough to make him appear ten times life-size; but, in addition, he was magnified in the candlelight by the effulgence of romance. A genius with his musician-bride; a bride with her bridegroom-genius. They towered and swelled, yet seemed a long way off, portentous as Easter Island effigies discerned through a telescope from the bridge of a storm-tossed vessel.

  He did look like an idol. It seemed so then, and later I was sure of it. His eyelids were cut out under his forehead with a striking appearance of plastic symmetry, and the lower part of his face was a massive mask, the lips modelled on it, full, even, with a wide-cut prominent outline: anonymous lips in low relief. His hair sprang up and back from his brow in thick feathery brown wings, and his skin was a uniform pale brown. The eyes themselves were dark, long in shape. They seemed to slip and glance and slide in his head like two fishes flashing and turning their white undersides. I thought him ugly, terrifying. I could not take my eyes off him.

  She wore a dress of stiff white silk flaring round the ankles into wavy rows of pleated flouncing, with an overskirt of white gauzy stuff, swept up to pile all its puffed fullness into the back, and caught here and there among its folds with bunches of blue and white buds. When she moved, it was a swan moving, and the sound she made was of stirred rushes. She had dressed her hair high on top of her head, with one or two curls tapering down her neck: it was dark fine hair and it would not stay in place; and this soft untidiness and the thin long neck and immature bony breast and shoulders framed by the low-cut bodice gave her a delicately amateurish, touching appearance.

  What did Tanya look like? I never found out. At the time she was a great disappointment, because she did not conform in the least to my tuppence-
coloured conception of a lovely bride. I thought her, indeed, a very plain kind of person. But now recalling her, I suspect that she had the equivalent of beauty, something wild, cool, lucent and subtle; like one of those January twilights that contain, for an hour, all the throats and buds of spring. Her face was long, serious, pale, with slow-moving­­­­ grey eyes, slightly prominent, and a forehead whose clear square was underlined by heavy straight black eyebrows. She had a mole on her cheek, and her upper lip slightly overhung the under one. The mouth was sensuous, full: it looked vulnerable; and when she smiled she looked extremely amused and mournful, and she showed a space of gum above her irregular teeth. In her period dress, she looked, I see now, like a minor but important character in a distinguished film or play, a type chosen by a sensitive director with an eye for poetic truth. Because of this there was something not quite right, not quite like life. She was the young schoolmistress; or the niece, the protégée in the country house, about to emerge from half light and be loved, about to throw off the shrouding hood of dependence and virginity and walk out acknowledged, radiant, into experience. Only there is something unsensational, irreparable, about to go wrong: it is clear from the casting. She was awkward and graceful; nervous and serene; dull, interesting. She had not a young face, nor a face that one could imagine ageing. She had, I now think, a vocational, a dedicated personality, within whose contradictions she was positive, intact; but all the same she was an orphan of the world, and the unity she expressed would never serve her to find her place—or seek it either.

  Gil, Malcolm and Maisie talked and laughed hilariously, and she joined in the laughter in a subdued but wholehearted way, and now and then said something quiet which made them double up with amusement. It all seemed in an idiom to which I had no clue, and the jokes were private ones.

  There was champagne, and they kept drinking healths. Jess and I had a glass each and were inhibited from accepting more. We took sips and swallowed wryly, almost choked by the tingling in our throats and noses. After half a glass I felt queer. The room started to whizz round, and once when my intention was to prop my elbow nonchalantly on the table, I failed to do so, and was jerked forward with a startling sense of disturbance in my centre of gravity. My cheeks began to scorch. I heard Malcolm say something about Grannie and Harry, and Maisie cried loudly:

  “No! Keep her out.”

  “You can’t. She’s here,” said Gil. “I want her at my wedding. She’s the high priestess of—” some word I could not catch. “I hear her prophesy behind the curtains. Now I know I shan’t be killed, and Tanya and I will have ten superhuman children.”

  “This is Harry’s house,” insisted Maisie. “And when he’s allowed to die, it’ll be hers for her life; and when she dies, if ever, it’ll be Malcolm’s. Malcolm had a letter from him the other day to say so. Fancy Harry taking up the pen! He has a very pretty gentlemanly writing, only shaky and out of practice. This is Harry’s party. He’ll be so glad when he knows all about it. How can we let him know? We can’t write and tell him.”

  “Why not?” said Malcolm.

  “There’s no way to put it,” said Maisie, incoherent. “He wouldn’t be able. You daren’t. It would be like—trying to get a message into—into a locked-up, barred, bolted house you couldn’t even be sure was inhabited any more. … You can’t do any sort of—ordinary thing with Harry—or even any polite letter-­writing sort of thing. …” I thought she was going to burst into angry tears.

  “You’re cracked,” said Malcolm. “Of course we must write to him. He’s a great stickler for politeness. He’s got very old-fashioned ideas about manners.”

  “This isn’t quite like an ordinary thing,” remarked Gil.

  “There you are! “said Maisie. “He might be frightfully upset. How do you know? He might be shocked. He’s had enough.”

  “My good girl,” said Malcolm, “you’re tight. Give over being so damned theatrical. Harry’s a frightfully decent, generous old chap, who’s had the misfortune to drink himself pickled. Do stop going on.”

  “Misfortune!” cried Maisie, going on. “How dare you interfere with—judge what he’s—he’s seen fit to do? Look at his life! It adds up to nothing, nothing, nothing. She’s taken away everything from him. Why is it allowed? What, what, what can his life mean?”

  “I don’t know why it’s allowed,” said Gil. “But I should say it means a lot.” He looked down at the table, his fingers closed on the stem of his wineglass. I noticed his big, clear-looking hands, the flexibility and precision in the fingers, the long spatulate thumb. His face in composure looked suddenly noble and authoritative.

  “Oh, you do, do you?” snapped Maisie. She stared aggressively at Gil, but he went on looking down, contemplative. Her face became forlorn, and she muttered: “Well … what?”

  “He’s not corrupted,” said Gil, speaking with care and deliberation. He narrowed his eyes as if scrutinising his own statement in the wine-glass. “He still knows what’s what.”

  “A fat lot that helps him. What use is it to a person to know what’s what so well they can’t stand it and have to drink themselves unconscious?”

  “He’s not in the least unconscious,” said Gil, shifting his glass very accurately. “He’s as raw as a child.”

  “Well, then!”

  “So it doesn’t matter.”

  Maisie made a violent strangled exclamation in her throat.

  “It’s a tragedy,” said Gil. “It’s not a disgrace. No doubt there’s not much comfort for him in that reflection. … You never know though. … But what his life means is a distinct consolation.”

  Everybody was silent.

  “Well, I wish somebody would tell him so,” said Maisie. She blew her nose fiercely. “Somebody might have the decency to tell him he’s—he’s appreciated.”

  “Nobody had better try,” said Gil. “I’d scarcely go so far as to say he was hoping against hope for a pat on the back. No one was less interested in rewards, I should say.”

  “Everybody would like to be happy,” said Maisie, still indignant.

  “You can’t make Harry happy,” said Gil mildly. “All you can do for him, humanly speaking, is—to do nothing. He accepts what’s happened to him—in his own way. He doesn’t compound with it. I doubt though if he’d thank anybody who made it clear that they understood his point of view or sympathised with it.”

  “Oh, this is all above my head,” burst out Maisie “Compounding and all that! You’re just talking brainy talk—turning people into—into specimens. Real people have to have something, or they couldn’t live.”

  “He’s got her,” said Gil, quiet.

  Maisie uttered an explosive snort.

  “She’s not corrupted either,” observed Tanya. She had a light, soft, colourless voice.

  “I call it corrupted,” said Maisie, “to talk that sickening stuff about him. Blowing him up into a sort of Book of Golden Deeds. And all that wifeliness. She’s always jawing about what a wonderful soldier he was. What she doesn’t mention is why—the real reason—why he had to leave the army. I suppose she thinks we’re taken in.”

  “I don’t suppose,” said Gil, “she thinks anybody’s taken in. It’s simply a convention she’s built up which she chooses that the world should observe. She’s made it as artificial as possible; and she sticks to it through thick and thin. I admire her for it.”

  “She needn’t say anything at all. It would be much more—dignified.”

  “Oh, she’s not interested in dignity. Besides, she always has to speak, as you know. And on this subject it would be a real necessity. The more he ruined the performance, the more blatantly she’d have to put it over. It has to be kept going.”

  “Why does it have to?”

  “Because she needs him.”

  “I suppose you think that’s a good reason for—squeezing the life blood out of him.”

 
“Nonsense. He’s very much alive, as I said before.”

  “Well, for—doing what she’s done to him.”

  “Not necessarily a good reason,” said Gil, smiling. “But reason enough. Which is as much as you can expect of the reasons why people stay together.”

  He lifted the wine glass and tilted its contents back and forth. The more the argument developed, the more heated the expostulations, the quieter and more level grew his voice.

  “You stay with people because you’re fond of them,” she said. “And can do something for them—do good to them. If you find you can’t, you hop it. Or if you don’t you’re a swine.”

  Seizing the opportunity for comic relief, everybody laughed.

  “All right, laugh your heads off,” said Maisie presently, without rancour. “You wait. I don’t know about doing good—but I intend to have it written on my tombstone: Here lies a person who never needed anybody, so she never did anybody any harm.” She looked at Gil and Tanya and grinned. “Though I suppose it’s untactful to say such a thing at your wedding feast.”

  “You get everything mixed,” said Gil. “The word in question is ‘need’ not ‘love.’ They’re not always identical as you may possibly discover for yourself one day.”

  “Possibly I may,” she said rudely.

  “It’s frequently all wrong when people need one another, but it doesn’t prevent it. In this particular case I don’t believe it’s all wrong. It’s the proof of her … of how magnificent she is.”

  “Oh, good Lord! It would be.”

  “From anybody else in the world,” continued Gil in his muted voice, narrowing his eyes at the glass he still held up as if gauging the wine’s level, “she gets back—immeasurable reflections of herself. It’s not deliberate, so it’s pointless to moralise about it: it’s some property of her nature:—some principle. Like yeast. She throws out all she has—her beauty, her gifts, her power over people—and objects—and events; and it works. Each time she tries it out, it works like magic. Up come all these disturbing, magnetised self-images. There’s one person, one alone, it doesn’t work with, and that’s Harry. Nothing comes back to her. And she knows it: she doesn’t deceive herself. And she stays with him—inevitably she stays with him. He’s her resting-place. If that doesn’t justify her claim to care for truth. …”