The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

  “Did Mrs. Jardine begin to guess?” I said shakily, my heart pinched by terror and excitement.

  “No, she didn’t. I’ll swear to that. She says she always has instincts and premonitions; but this time she didn’t. She was too wrapped up in Gil, I expect. She was seeing it all through him—the effect on him—and she was just interested, like you would be if any one you loved told you a strange woman had come to visit him, and behaved very queerly.”

  “Did she—your—the woman say anything else to Gil?”

  “She asked him his name. He told her. Then she said: ‘Did you know this child while she lived?’—and he said no, and tried to change the subject, because she began to get very agitated, and to talk about having lost a baby, and to say she knew now that women should stop having babies, it was too terrible to have them, and that sort of thing. He said she had a look on her like one of those crazy women who steal children out of prams. … Sibyl lay on the sofa with her eyes very blue and wide open, and I could see that she was worked up—that she’d never rest until she’d come face to face with this spectacular person and discovered if she really had lost her baby and if so, why, how and when, and done something about her. I heard her say some words under her breath: I couldn’t catch them.”

  “I suppose Gil hadn’t guessed anything?”

  “Well, that was the queer thing I was coming to. It had never crossed his mind, of course, before, or he wouldn’t have talked about her openly like that. But, he told me afterwards, suddenly, when he heard Sibyl mutter to herself, something seemed to hit him a great slap across the forehead.”

  “It all dawned on him!”

  “Not exactly. It wasn’t a thing anybody could be expected to take in at one fell swoop. It was the sort of smack, like a revelation, that I got; and afterwards you think perhaps you’re unhinged too. He said it was hearing that mutter, it made a connection with the other one muttering. … He’d never heard Sibyl do it before. I had.”

  “I have too,” I said.

  “Anyway I did notice he suddenly pulled up short and was rather curt and silent. When Sibyl—or Tanya asked him some more questions, he merely said he’d requested her politely to go away, he was busy.”

  “Did she go?”

  “She went. He could see her walking along the bank, through the meadows, and stopping dead now and then to look at the water. He could see her a long way off in her bright skirt. Sibyl said in that lecturing way she has when she thinks she’s been a lot sharper than any one else could be—she said: ‘Did it strike you that this unfortunate woman might be contemplating doing herself a mischief?’” Maisie grinned.

  “Did she mean—?”

  “Yes. She meant just that.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said in a casual, airy way, yes rather, it had struck him forcibly. Only, he said, experience inclined him to the conclusion that people like her were too bent on planning mischief to others to consider themselves. The only thing that had bothered him was whether he ought to rush and pull her out, or let her get out on her own. He knew she’d take care to jump within sight of his window—if she did jump. … He was grand with Sibyl when she tried to come it over him. He never let her.”

  “And she didn’t—didn’t jump?”

  “No,” said Maisie, her lip and nostril stretching. “Not that time she didn’t.”

  She tilted her chair back, extended her torso, folded her arms and sank her chin into her collar. At this unbecoming angle, her face looked extraordinarily heavy, masculine, magisterial.

  “About eleven,” she went on, “Gil carried Sibyl upstairs to her room. Oh, how she did enjoy being carried by him! … Then he came down and said good-night to us and went away through the park. Harry went to bed—I suppose. … I suppose Harry goes to bed. His room’s right at the other end of the house from Sibyl’s. Tanya and I sat on on the terrace in the moonlight. Then Tanya said she couldn’t go to bed on a night like this, she was going for a walk. I knew I wasn’t invited.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she was going to Gil, of course.”

  “Oh! … they were—they’d fallen in love then?”

  “She hadn’t told me, but I’d guessed. At least I knew she was in love, from the way she couldn’t look away from him whenever she looked at him. Also I knew she’d been flitting down to the river at nights fairly frequently—because I’d seen her from my window.”

  “Did Mrs. Jardine—not mind?”

  “She hadn’t twigged, believe it or not. So much again for intuitions.” Maisie snorted; but after a pause added judicially: “But it’s quite true—in some ways she’s extraordinarily trusting and like a child—she can’t see further than her nose: though in other ways she’s such an arch-spider. You see, she thought she’d got it fixed up this time good and proper, all serene, everybody revolving round her like dancers round a maypole, without an eye or a thought to spare for anybody else. … Oh, she was so sure of Gil!”

  “You mean—sure that he loved her best?”

  “Exactly. That what she meant to him was so terrific and—different, so on some superior plane that only she could reach and he could understand, that—well, that there couldn’t be room for any other woman in his life, in spite of her age, and everything.”

  “You talk as if … she couldn’t have been …”

  “I mean, of course, that she was in love with him,” said Maisie loudly.

  “Good Lord! I didn’t know it could happen,” I said, aghast. “Why, she’s old. She might be his mother. Perhaps—surely—that’s how she felt about him: as if he was her own son?”

  “Perhaps,” said Maisie, dry, shrugging. “I haven’t any experience of what mothers are like with their sons. I dare say you know best.”

  “Oh no,” I said, abashed. “It’s only that I got a bit of a shock.”

  “Sibyl’s capable of anything,” said Maisie, mollified. “As for Gil—oh, I don’t know. I don’t understand men.”

  “How old is he?”

  “I don’t know. I never remember ages. He’s about twenty-­eight, I think.”

  Suddenly moved to confide in her my own experience of man’s enigmatic nature, I said:

  “He kissed me just now.”

  “Oh, he did, did he?” She paused. “Where?”

  “In the dining-room.”

  “Where on your face, I mean?”

  “Oh …” I touched my cheek, where the spot still seemed to burn. “There.” Her expression was cryptic, her manner clinical; and regretting my impulse, I added: “It was rather a surprise.”

  “Were you upset?”

  “N-no.”

  “Pleased?”

  “Well, not exactly. …” My regrets were now wild. “It wasn’t anything. He was thinking about the war—or something. I didn’t mind. I’d almost forgotten it till you. … Do go on about that night.”

  “I told you,” she said rather scoldingly, “he always makes people feel he’s fond of them.”

  “Yes. Do go on.”

  “Where was I when you interrupted? …” She drew a hissing breath; paused, frowned; then went on: “I watched Tanya disappear towards the river. She had a white frock on, so she was very visible. Below the terrace is a paved rose garden with a pool and a fountain in the middle of it. I thought I’d take a walk round and smell the roses. I was feeling worked up and queer, too restless to go to bed. I kept on seeing that person in the bright skirt, and wanting to see her again, and hoping I never should. I strolled around the pool, and then I went to the end and leaned up against the low sort of stone parapet at the farther edge of the terrace and had a good stare at the house. It did look a thundering great pile in the moonlight, so steep and naked, with all its long windows glittering like black ice. I looked to see if there was a light in Sibyl’s room. There wasn’t. Her room is in the middle of th
e front, on the first floor. The windows reach from floor to ceiling. They were open. Then,” said Maisie, casual, stirring and stretching softly in her chair, “I saw her.”

  “You saw her?”

  “Standing by the edge of the curtain. With a pale-coloured cloak wrapped around her. I could see her plainly.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “She was in ambush. Watching.”

  The words, the flat way in which she spoke them, made my skin crawl. I saw the apparition.

  “It gave me a turn,” went on Maisie. “Last I’d seen of her, stretched in white lace and ruffles on her sofa, stitching at her embroidery,—the portrait of a lady; then being carried off, smiling, in Gil’s arms. Next view—straight, upright, posted there, towering above us like an avenging Fury. Oh, it seemed as if she’d been there for centuries—that she was the ghost of the wicked old house, and now I understood the secret of its sinister face! I could almost see her eyes glitter.”

  “What could have happened,” I said, “in that short time?”

  “She must have spotted Tanya going through the garden,” said Maisie, “and all of a sudden put two and two together. Or maybe she had begun to get suspicious before she went upstairs. The atmosphere was certainly electric. She wouldn’t, of course, give a sign; but later on, alone in her room, she’d begin to think, and prowl. She’d have Gil on her mind, and—that strange woman. Then Tanya making off …”

  “Yes, I see,” I said, pacing the room in France with Mrs. Jardine, feeling the thread in the maze vibrate, lead on through her to me, to Tanya and the river. “Did she see you?”

  “I don’t know. She probably did, but she never stirred. I got the feeling she was looking far far beyond me, down to the river and the mill. She wasn’t thinking about me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I could only think of one thing: to get down as quick as possible to somewhere where I could keep a look-out for Tanya. I thought, if I could join her when she left Gil and come back with her, it wouldn’t look so shady. If Sibyl was still watching she’d see us reappear together, and we could say we’d been for a swim by moonlight. And get away with it. Maybe.”

  “What a good idea.”

  “So I went in a leisurely way down the steps that lead from the paved garden to the lawn. At the end of the lawn there are railings and you go through into rough meadows where the cattle and horses graze. I strolled down the lawn till I got into the shadow of the big trees at the bottom. Then I was over the railings and I ran for it. I zigzagged from tree to tree in the fields until I got to where it slopes down sharply and I knew I must be out of sight. And then—oh! I fairly pelted down till I came to the river.”

  Maisie stopped speaking. She stared into the fire and bit her thumb. I heard my own breath loud and fast as if I were running behind her, down through the steep fields to—what destination?

  She was silent for some time; then she said:

  “It all began to seem like dreaming. I wondered what on earth I could be doing there—the only person left in the world, and the world nothing but water, moon, trees and shadows; and in the middle of it all the mill house sticking up blank and flat like a great white tombstone with nothing written on it; and the only sound the weir pouring, pouring. I thought: ‘Anything might happen; and if it did, who should I be?’ I wasn’t inside myself any longer, if you see what I mean.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, thinking of my own phantasmagoric excursions by moonlight alone, over the lawn, among the garden trees at home.

  “I went into the inn garden by a little wicket gate. I went down to the landing stage and looked across. Not a sign of life. It seemed queer to think there were two human beings loving each other there, inside that mausoleum. I thought the only thing to do was to sit and wait where I couldn’t miss her when she did come out. I went and sat in the summer-house I told you about. It’s a rustic affair with white roses and jasmine climbing up the wooden pillars and tumbling over the roof. The scent was unbelievable. I sat there and began to get my breath back. I wondered which room the woman had, and whether she was asleep.”

  “Were there any lights in the inn?”

  “None. I don’t know how long I sat there. What with the moon and the weir I felt absolutely dazed. There wasn’t a breath of breeze, it was stifling. All of a sudden I felt someone was near me … and then I saw a figure steal across the grass, not ten yards from me. It went very rapidly, in a stealthy way, to the edge of the water, then stood still on the landing stage and looked across at the mill. Then it started across the bridge.”

  “Tanya?”

  “Not Tanya. I thought for a moment: Sibyl! But it wasn’t.”

  “Her?”

  “Yes. I thought: ‘This is it. What I was waiting for.’”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got up straight as if I was sleep-walking and went after her across the bridge.”

  “Did you realise for certain then who—who you were following?”

  Maisie paused, drawing her brows together, hesitating.

  “I wasn’t surprised,” she said.

  For the first time since the beginning of her narrative she turned her large luminous eyes full on me. A faint bewilderment shot through them. I saw that she confronted not my face of simple goggle-eyed expectancy, but the image that had once stunned her. In that one momentary contraction, I saw memory struggle, brace itself to deal with its too-heavy burden. Once more, and for the last time, and vanishing even as I became aware of it, the lonely face of the child Maisie, umbrageous, vulnerable, lit with the passionate effort to communicate, glowed out of our lost place in the walnut tree.

  “I wasn’t surprised,” she repeated. “It seemed as natural as meeting her in a dream; and I’d had plenty of those dreams. … There’s a kind of grove of poplar trees on the other bank close by the mill. She stopped under them—I stopped too. Then she moved out into the open, over the blinding white grass and on to the door of Gil’s house. I went after her in a hurry … and she heard me then. She whirled round on me as if I’d thumped her on the back. She stared at me. She had the moon full on her: I saw her face plain.”

  “Was she the same?” I breathed.

  “No, she wasn’t,” said Maisie. “She looked frightful.”

  “In what way frightful?”

  “Oh … all fallen in round her mouth. An expression—I can’t describe it—peevish and—glaring. Haughty. What’s the word?—autocratic. And petty, feeble as well.”

  One after another she hammered in the epithets, to my desolation.

  “I’m pretty sure,” she went on, drawing her brows together, “that’s how women in lunatic asylums look. It’s not like what you imagine, when people are really bats. They’re not vacant, or gibbering and tearing their hair. I see them looking mincing—full of airs and graces. Drawing themselves up as if they were empresses, and giving orders in furious, pompous, venomous voices. Sly … Sidling up. … Oh, and so self-important. That’s how I see them. I should very much like to know what goes on in lunatic asylums. One day I will. It would be fascinating. … The worst is, they seem so obscene. I’m sure they have a bad smell. They’re not mad all the year round, you know. Part of the time they’re as sane as any one else. Then it comes on; and they’re absolutely different from ordinary people. It’s not like managing someone in a raging temper or depression or hysterics. There’s no way to reason or argue or scold or sympathise or appeal—or show you love them. You might as well put on a smashed gramophone record and expect it to play the right notes in order. It’s their separateness which seems so—shocking.” She drew a sharp breath. “I told you I would never marry and have children—even in the unlikely event of some ass offering me the chance—and that’s the reason. There’s madness in my family. Malcolm doesn’t know, and I don’t propose to tell him. The chances are he’ll be killed, anyway, before he can s
tart to become a father.”

  “You know for certain?” I inquired, impressed by this distinguished fate.

  “For dead certain.” She uttered a brief laugh.

  “What happened next?” I said. “Did she speak? Or you?”

  “I said: ‘Don’t be frightened. It’s Maisie.’”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. It didn’t seem possible to say: ‘Hallo, Mother,’ or anything of that sort.”

  “And what did she say?”

  Maisie paused, then said with a smile:

  “She told me to go away.”

  “Didn’t she know you?”

  “She said: ‘Ah, Maisie. Yes.’ Very formal and polite and distant, as if I was a slight surprise and nuisance she’d come on by chance out walking.”

  “Oh, Maisie! …”

  “Yes, it was peculiar. Though I can’t say I was exactly hurt at the time. It was all so like a dream; and then I was too busy trying to make out what she was up to. She told me in a condescending way to run away now, like a good girl. When she said it, I suddenly remembered something.”

  “What?”

  “She’d said the very same thing once before, in that particular voice.”

  “When?”

  “I can’t get it back, when it was exactly; but I think it must have been a short time before she went away from us. I remember seeing her from the window one evening, dressed in her best, going up the street towards the town moor. I ran after her … and she told me to go back. I remember how her voice came out through her veil—smooth; and she gave me a little push. I knew Father didn’t like her to go out alone because she wasn’t well. I went back, and he was just coming into the house. I told him she’d gone out, and it acted like a squib under him. Auntie Mack was just coming downstairs from putting Cherry to bed. He let out a shout at her—she jumped as if she’d been shot—and then he went haring off down the street. I couldn’t make head or tail of it … but I’d given up trying to understand what went on in our house, it was all so mystifying. Auntie Mack told me to come along upstairs at once; and she brought us up supper later with a flaming red, choked sort of face. But that was always happening. Poor old goose. Poor Father. When I think about his life, I cannot bear it.”