The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

  “It’s too simple for her to believe,” he burst out. “It’s so ordinary she wouldn’t accept it. I’ve changed. It’s the war. I’ve been out there. It’s regrettable, but all human dealings except the most elementary have become impossible to me. I don’t want anything on any—pitched-up level. It’s too difficult, too exposed. Furthermore, it’s nothing; so when I try to contemplate it, I get frightened. I tell myself I’m a plain ordinary chap with ordinary wants … and then I feel safer. I don’t know why I tell you this, you postwar girl, because you can’t understand it; and when your time comes, after the war … oh, my goodness, after the war! … you’ll have other fish to fry, all of you.”

  I felt very miserable. But there seemed nothing now to lose, and breaking a last lance for Mrs. Jardine, I said with weak firmness:

  “Even if I can’t understand … I know she could.”

  “I’ve got lazy,” he said lightly. “I can’t write long letters any more.”

  I looked at him again, and thought him hideous, repellent.

  Hating him, I hated myself, I hated men. I wanted to get away from him, I wanted to stay with him and quarrel, say something outrageous.

  “I wonder,” I began, “why you did come here, if—” But I could not go on.

  “Oh, that’s quite natural, isn’t it?” he said, not taking up my tone, but replying as if it were a natural point to raise. “Tanya and I are both quite homeless, rootless, in England. These two, Maisie and Malcolm, are our closest friends. We wanted to be all together: there might not be future opportunities, you know. And it was such an opportunity, with Malcolm and myself both getting leave. Besides, it’s not much catch honeymooning in an English hotel in winter in the middle of a war.”

  “No. I see.”

  “I was curious to see what it was like: an Englishcountry house. I’ve never been inside one.” He paused. “I only know her French life. I wanted to see—how she would be here. She said so often: My English home. She does feel part of what’s traditional.” He looked round the room again. “She longed to be back. But I can’t find her here—it’s one of her delusions … one of her affirmations, I should say. No doubt she knows she doesn’t live any where.”

  “You wouldn’t think that,” I said, “if she was here.” I gulped. “I keep on thinking about her not being in her room. Upstairs.”

  He said slowly:

  “I know about that. There’s nothing there.”

  The cold-sounding muted drawl in his voice struck me with fear.

  “There’s a portrait of Ianthe there,” I said. “When she was a little girl.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s a remarkably fine portrait,” he said, in the manner of a critic.

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is—is the room empty?”

  “The furniture’s all there.”

  “She used to love to lie and look out of the window.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. That’s what she does. There’s nothing in the rooms.”

  “Well,” I said, giving up, “I believe she’ll be glad you’ve been here—when she knows.”

  “Oh, she’ll know. She’ll see it as a ritualistic act. The Black Mass … or the Purification.”

  He poured himself out another whisky, and drank it off. There was now a great distance between us again. My sense of being drowned, dissolved in a magnetic tide towards him, my revulsion of loathing, had equally vanished. I watched him dispassionately, noting his physical characteristics, feeling full of knowledge of him yet empty of emotion about him. In later life the faculty for pure immediacy of awareness is lost. It takes longer than half an hour, more than a kiss on the cheek, a touch of finger tips to absorb the entire experience of being lovers and to emerge at the other end. At fourteen, even the no kiss, the no touch, is enough.

  I told myself how different newly-married people were from what I had imagined.

  “Does Tanya like it here?” I said.

  I thought it was about time that he went back to her: I was not stopping him.

  “Oh, Tanya …” he said. “Tanya has come here to execute a commission for Harry. The child, Cherry: something of hers, or to do with her, that was left here, that he wanted sent to him, or secretly destroyed—I don’t know which. She promised him to do it.”

  I had a vision of her in her bridal dress, peering, hunting through the soaking shrubbery—at this moment?—for what? The match-boxes? … But at this moment the door was flung open, Maisie appeared, and beyond her I saw Tanya’s white form sitting peacefully on the sofa.

  A guilty conscience led me to imagine that Maisie glanced sharply from Gil to me and back again.

  “Hallo, Maisie,” said Gil in a mild voice. “We were just talking about you.”

  “Were you indeed?” she said loudly. “What were you saying?”

  “I was just telling your friend Rebecca to beware of you.”

  “He wasn’t,” I urged, in shocked dismay.

  “Quite right,” said Maisie. “I was just telling your wife Tanya the same thing. Come on, Rebecca. The party’s over for you. You must be taken to the kitchen and sacrificed.”

  “I’m not sacrificed,” I said eagerly. “I’d rather help you wash up than anything.”

  She passed Gil without another look, and I followed her to the kitchen.

  8

  She surveyed the table and shook her head.

  “We’ll leave all that,” she said. “What does one do with feathers? God knows. Mrs. Gillman might like them to make litlee pelisses for Doris. We’ll just deal with the bare essentials.”

  We went from kitchen to dining-room to kitchen, to scullery, piling plates, glasses, knives, forks, spoons, bowls, saucepans on to trays and stacking them on the scullery table. Then she hurled on the taps full cock, filled the sink to the brim, flung in soda, rolled up her sleeves, and started to plunge in everything pell-mell.

  “I’ll wash, you dry,” she said. “My hands are more toil-worn than yours. How do you manage to keep your nails clean? Mine always look as if they’d been used for knocking into coffins.”

  The taps dripped, the dish-cloth swirled the water round, the things in the sink made various cool domestic noises of clinking and clashing. I looked at her muscular arms, her brilliant bony cheek, her energetic hair glittering under the light, and felt a glowing sense of comfort, and of attraction to her. I hoped to be able to stay with her alone till bedtime.

  She said suddenly:

  “What do you propose to do when you grow up?”

  I admitted that my hope was to marry and to be an author.

  “Menial tasks are what I really love,” she said. “This sort of revolting job, and shovelling coke into boilers, and chopping wood. I’d be quite content to do it for my living, but I agree with everybody, it would be a waste of my abilities and education. I intend to be a doctor. Have you a prejudice against women doctors?”

  “I don’t think so.” I considered the project, impressed. Then a disadvantage struck me. “But what about—what about the blood?” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, you didn’t use to like it much. And I suppose a doctor’s bound to come across it?”

  “Oh, I’ve got over that,” she said grimly. She paused, nodded her head with vigour. “And I don’t mind foul smells; and I doubt if dissecting corpses will turn me up.”

  “Oh then, I think you’d make a wonderful doctor,” I said ardently, wishing to express my sense of the vitality and confidence she radiated.

  “I come from a line of professional women on the maternal side. My mother taught in a school once—she covered herself with academic distinction, though it’s a ludicrous idea if you could see her now. And look at the old girl. If she’s to be believed she’s the world’s greatest loss to the stage, and her novel
s are sheer genius. Actually she has got brains; but of course she was just a dilettante. I bet her books are trash. Have you read any of them?”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t seem to have them in our library. I believe one of them was about my grandmother and made her rather upset.”

  “Oh, indeed! That’s interesting.” She cocked an eyebrow at the saucepan she was scraping. “So that was the trouble.”

  “I think only one of the troubles,” I said, with scrupulous intention.

  “I must cast a glance over that one of these days. I expect it’s got a certain verve and aplomb. It must be somewhere in the bookshelves here. I’ll let you borrow it if I find it.”

  A complex of fears and loyalties caused me an inward resistance to this offer; but I thanked her politely.

  “Why did you say,” I said, turning away to stack a pile of dry plates, “a ludicrous idea?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “About your mother. If you could see her now, you said.”

  “Oh, that. Because her present condition is such that the idea of her ever swotting for exams or earning her living or leading any kind of normal life is—well, more than ludicrous.”

  “How do you know,” I said, striving to make my voice as off-hand as hers, “for so certain?”

  “From having seen her, of course. How do you suppose?”

  “Oh, you’ve seen her,” I said, conversational.

  “I’ve seen her.”

  “When was it?”

  “July, 1914. In France.” Her nostrils dilated, her mouth turned down in a sardonic smile. “How often I’d imagined it! Hmm. It all turned out quite different.”

  “So you saw her,” I repeated.

  “I’d had measles at school, and the doctor sent me off before the end of term to convalesce. If it hadn’t been for those measles I’d have missed everything.”

  “Malcolm wasn’t there?”

  “No, thank God. He’d have been shocked into pulp. I’ve never told him I saw her.” She turned on me sharply. “Mind you don’t.”

  “Of course not.”

  “He thinks she retired into a convent and never came out. That’s quite a respectable end to imagine for one’s mother, I suppose.” She chuckled.

  “She didn’t really retire to one at all?”

  “Oh yes. She did. She went in. And she came out again.”

  “I wonder what made her go in.”

  “She got fed up with living in the world, I suppose. It was some kind of sisterhood in France. She got ill and they nursed her there, and then she stayed.”

  “I didn’t realise she was religious. Was that why she—why she left you? Did she want to go into a convent so much that she left you?”

  “No,” said Maisie, “that’s not why she left. The religious business didn’t come on till some time after.”

  “I see.”

  I waited. The moment hovered, passed. Maisie fell to scrubbing another saucepan, and I said:

  “I wonder why she came out again.”

  “Oh, she never could stick to anything for long.” She scrubbed away; then added: “She got remorse about us. She had to see us again.”

  “Did she come to get you?” I said, feeling my wrist go weak as I wiped a glass. “I mean, all to start living—having a home together again?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. I think she just wanted. … God knows … to have a look at us, perhaps. She couldn’t have known what she meant to do.” She gathered up a bunch of knives and forks out of the now opaque swamp-coloured water and flung them on the draining board. “That’s the lot.” She seized another cloth and casting, I thought, a pointed glance at the painstaking tempo of my labours, set to vigorously to help me dispose of what remained.

  “Come on, polish them off quick,” she said, “and we’ll go and put our feet up on the kitchen fender and eat walnuts. Unless you want to go back and dance or something. I don’t mind dancing with you, if you don’t. I’m always gent at the Saturday night revels at school, and I give the dear girls a rousing time in spite of obvious handicaps.”

  “I’d much rather sit by the kitchen fire with you,” I said. “I don’t think we’re awfully wanted in there. At least, I’m not.”

  “I dare say Gil and Tanya will have gone to bed,” she said with simplicity. “I made a glorious bridal fire in their bedroom. I hope your mother won’t object to Jess being left alone with Malcolm. He’s very gentlemanly and backward. I may be wrong, one never knows with one’s brother, but I don’t think his intentions go beyond fox-trotting for hours with the girls he’s keen on. I hope Jess won’t get bored. He is a good dancer.”

  “Jess is good too,” I said, writing them off with satisfaction. “She adores it.”

  We went back to the kitchen. She plucked a basket of walnuts out of the wreckage on the table and drew two wooden chairs up to the glowing range. We sat down with our feet on the low steel fender. She hitched her navy-blue serge skirt up above her knees and leaned forward, cracking nuts together between her palms and staring into the fire.

  “What do you think of Gil?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, hedging. “I’ve never met any one like him.”

  “I should jolly well think you haven’t. He’s higher class than most people by a long chalk. I’ll tell you something. He’s the only man I could ever—be a fool about—ever. And as I haven’t­­­­ been, thank God I know I shall never be—about any one.”

  Incautious, I inquired:

  “Did he and Tanya fall in love at first sight?”

  “Oh … !” She sounded exasperated. “No. Yes. No. I don’t know. It wasn’t like all that rot—holding hands in the firelight and engagement rings and … You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I would,” I said abashed, aggrieved.

  “Well, there’s no real reason why you should,” she conceded. “He’s got different ideas about behaving from most people. It’s his philosophy that’s different.”

  I felt that a philosophy of life was precisely what I was fitted to understand, and said that my conversation with him had made it clear that his was different.

  “Tanya loves him simply terrifically,” said Maisie, abrupt. I was relieved by this positive view of what had appeared to me dubious.

  “And Gil too, I suppose,” I said. “He loves her like that too?”

  “They’re not a bit suited to one another,” she went on, frowning fiercely into the fire. “Except that they’re both so unordinary. … She knows she’ll only share a bit of his life: she thinks she doesn’t mind. She’s got her music, of course. … But it won’t balance out what he’s going to keep to himself. He’s completely independent—what’s the word?—self-sufficient; and she’s not.”

  “A—a heartless sort of man, do you mean?”

  “No, I don’t. He’s awfully affectionate and gentle and kind. He makes people feel he’s very fond of them; but if anybody, anybody seemed to be getting to interfere with his work, they’d go—and he’d be all right. What I mean is, his work comes first. But she’s different: perhaps women always are. If things go wrong with people for her, she’s done for. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “Would you say he was very fond of her?” I persisted, returning to the attack on a more temperate level.

  “Of course he is. He dotes on her. If you can’t see that much, you’re blind.” She began juggling with three walnuts, throwing them up alternately and catching them in one hand. “His idea is,” she said, “that very few people would be capable of appreciating her. He can, so he’s going to look after her. … Oh, well. What’s the good of looking ahead, at a time like this? If they can comfort each other for a few days, it’s something.” She stopped juggling, and threw me a glance. “What did he talk about to you?”

  “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.”