The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

  “Oh!”

  “Yes. Tanya had managed to get away herself by pretending she was going up to the dressmaker in the village for a fitting. I said I couldn’t possibly leave Gil to cope, as things were turning out now. We paced despairingly back to them, absolutely stumped. No sooner had we reached the table than—”

  Maisie stopped dead, as if suddenly choked.

  “What?” I murmured, in fearful trepidation.

  She sketched a curious gesture, holding up her hands.

  “She did like this—Mother—to Tanya. She held her hands up and said plaintively: ‘Oh please, would you see to my hands? They do hurt me.’ And she began to pull at the bandages and tear them off. Tanya was awfully good. She said at once in a bright way: ‘I expect you’d like them bathed again. We’ll go and do that in a few minutes. Just for now, let me do them up again a bit looser. I expect the bandages were too tight, and made you uncomfortable.’ And she did them up again very deftly, talking like a kind practical trained nurse.

  “Mother fastened vampirish eyes on her and said: ‘You’ll look after me, won’t you? I know you’re kind. You’ve got such a good face.’ Then,” said Maisie in a light voice, “she looked at me over her shoulder, an awful vindictive look, and she said: ‘That girl is very cruel. I’ve been in such terrible pain and she wouldn’t do anything for me. Send her away.’”

  I looked down, down at the kitchen floor. The blood-tide of shame, mounting into my head, seemed about to burst me open, or sink me beneath the tiles.

  “Perhaps you don’t know,” said Maisie, “that when people go mental they nearly always turn against their nearest and—their nearest relations. It’s one of the first signs.”

  “Oh yes, of course,” I said, with huge relief, raising my head after all. “I’ve heard that.”

  “Oh, you have. I hadn’t at the time. If I had, I might not have been such a fool. As it was, it rather took the wind out of my sails. Gil put his arm into mine and led me a little way off and said: ‘Darling Maisie, you must go. You can’t do anything here just now. Go at once; and tell Sibyl as best as you can. She’ll come immediately with you, I expect. I’d like to spare you this, but you see that I must stay here.’ I said I supposed the shock might kill her, but he said no, it wouldn’t. He said he and Tanya would take Mother back to the mill and try to plug some pills into her that the doctor had left. He expected the doctor quite soon anyway. So I left them and started back for the house.”

  In some inexpressible way, Maisie expressed in her voice the dragging, beaten, yet urgent way she had forced her feet, one step after another, up the long slope, through the gardens, up the terrace steps, up into Mrs. Jardine’s house.

  “Sibyl was in the hall. Dressed to go out, with her big white straw garden hat on, and a blue veil over it, tied under her chin. Remarkable sight. She said: ‘Ah, Maisie. You appear very much à propos. I have ordered the pony carriage, and my intention was to ask Blaise to drive me down to the river.’ Blaise was a nice groom they had. ‘But now you have come you will perhaps do me the great kindness of accompanying me in his stead. I do not feel altogether equal to taking the reins myself. …” So there she was, all prepared, with her nose lifted as if she could smell the battle from afar. As I knew she would be.”

  “And then,” I said, putting my head down into my hands and closing my eyes, “you told her.”

  “No,” said Maisie. “I didn’t tell her.”

  After a moment I looked up at her. She was staring fixedly at nothing, her face expressionless.

  I repeated:

  “You didn’t tell her.”

  “I said: ‘All right, I’m ready. Is the trap round?’ She’d got this old-fashioned trap with yellow wheels she used to drive round the lanes in, with an adorable pony. It was a pretty little comical turn-out. She said Tanya had gone to the village, and I said: ‘Oh yes. For her fitting.’ And we set off. … I loved driving that trap. It’s a long winding way down by the road. We scarcely spoke. Once she gave me a piercing look and said: ‘You are flushed. Have you a fever?’ I said of course I hadn’t. She said: ‘You are accustomed, I know, to going hatless, but the sun is unusually powerful. To succumb to a heat-stroke, even for a few days, would interfere with your pleasures, so it would be sensible, would it not, to take a few elementary precautions?’ I said I was all right. The word ‘pleasures’ struck me as amusing.”

  Silence.

  “Well, what could I have said?” burst out Maisie, savage. “What? What? … ‘Oh, I nearly forgot to mention, Sibyl, you’ll find Ianthe down there with Gil and Tanya. And by the way, she’s mad.’”

  I shook my head despairingly.

  “Break it to her gently, I suppose you’d say. ‘Sibyl dear, I must prepare you for a great shock. We’ve been deceiving you, but it was entirely out of consideration for you. Now we’re in a proper fix; we need your invaluable assistance. It’s a little matter of an asylum for someone you used to know slightly.’ I suppose that’s how you’d have put it?”

  I was dumb.

  “O-o-o-oh!” she cried out—a long exhalation of breath like a groan of mingled misery and exasperation, loud, then dying away. Then: “No,” she said, in a normal voice, “I’d have known how to do it. I should have said … Never mind what I’d have said. I didn’t say it. I didn’t care any more what happened­­­­, you see. I thought: ‘Let them all blow up.’ There wasn’t any point any more in trying to keep things going, or bursting myself to find a way out. … Seeing that she’d turned against me, I mean. … ”

  “Yes, I do see,” I said, sympathetic. “I’d have felt the same. Even—even though—” Maisie’s eyes turned on me, sharpening ominously, and I began to flounder—“I might have realised she didn’t mean what she said.”

  “The point is,” she said witheringly, “if you’d felt the same you’d have been a fool, like I was: more than that: a criminal idiot. I put myself and my wretched hurt feelings first, see?—so I decided to take it out on her—on Sibyl. I deliberately decided to let it all go to blazes. And as long as I live, I shall never forgive myself. Because with a million to one odds against her, she behaved well. I don’t like people to behave better than me when things are ticklish. Especially her.” She stopped, sniffed, shrugged; then added: “But that’s a mere trifle. The thing that goes on—scorching me is —is a different matter altogether.”

  Her voice dragged. She added with an effort: “If I’d—prepared­­­­ her, the final—thing that happened—needn’t have happened. Perhaps.”

  “What was it?” I said, making my voice as flat and impersonal as possible.

  “We drove down, on that glorious sunny afternoon. I drove into the back yard of the inn and took the pony out of the shafts and tied him up in the shade of a lovely big chestnut tree. I asked her if she wouldn’t like to go in and rest for a bit, but she said she preferred to get her business over first, and have a word with the Meuniers afterwards; and she went marching through the garden, over the bridge, with me in tow. You know how she flashes her eyes round, noticing details, awfully brisk and busy—picking out one rose in the hedge and admiring it, spotting a microscopic wild flower, or an almost invisible bird, and naming it—to teach you. Well, that was going on, all as usual. The worst choked-up bits of the stream were just beyond the mill house. She strolled along, deciding how much must be cut, and demonstrating how she was going to show Pierre the proper way to do it, with a bill-hook bound on to a pole—just so. … You can imagine it … Well, there isn’t much more to tell.”

  Silence.

  “You came to the mill?” I said.

  “We came to the mill. I know I began to be very voluble and loud—in case there was any noise going on, to drown it. She looked at me rather surprised. Gil was standing in the open doorway—he’d seen us coming, I suppose. … I can see her now, going towards him smiling a great triumphant smile to think how unexpected and h
ow welcome she would be, and how he was standing there all joyful to receive her. She went towards him with her head lifted, feeling extra beautiful in the shadow of her big hat. He stood there and watched her. He looked very grave and intent. When she came near he put out his hands and took hers and drew her in, and said in a low voice: ‘Darling, how are you? It was good that you could come at once. The doctor is here, waiting to consult you. He thinks it would be advisable—’ And then he stopped short, or she interrupted, I don’t know which. Anyway, she might have been mowing him down with that sickle, the way her voice cut, saying:

  ‘What are you talking about?’ And her eyes opened, opened on him, icy, like wild crystals. And I said to Gil: ‘I haven’t told her.’ Then there was the sound of voices in the next room, a wailing one and a deep one. She said: ‘Whose are those voices?’ She listened, her eyes darting round the room as if— Then she said: ‘Ianthe!’”

  “Called it out, you mean?” I gasped.

  “No. Just announced it. And she drew herself up and shut her lips in a long line and marched to the door. Gil put his hand on her arm to intercept her, but she said, like a knife still: ‘Move, please.’ And she turned the knob to fling the door open; and it was locked. She said to Gil: ‘Kindly unlock this door.’ He had the key in his pocket. He said, rapping it out like orders: ‘Wait. There have to be explanations. Don’t go in.’ But she didn’t even look at him. She looked … oh, as if she was going to charge the door down with her forehead, as if her eyes were boring through it; and she repeated very loud and clear: ‘Unlock this door.’ Then there was a shriek from the other side: ‘Who is there?’ And she cried out, in such a voice!—I can’t describe it: ‘Do not be afraid, Ianthe! I am coming to you.’ There was absolute silence the other side. And then Gil gave up and put the key in the lock and opened the door.”

  Maisie’s voice had sunk to a thrumming monotone, the pitch and tone, almost, of a person speaking in a trance. Her eyes too looked asleep between half-lowered lids, but she went steadily on, without a tremor, through my heavy breathing.

  “Everything happened so quickly. It can’t have been more than a few minutes from beginning to end. I don’t remember what it all looked like. I saw them all, I suppose—but I didn’t see them. I’ve got the impression there was Mother reared up by the bed … or on the bed … high, high as the ceiling, with her hair like black snakes; and struck to stone. And Tanya and the doctor holding on to her, one on each side; and Sibyl advancing towards her. Then there was, God! such a scream, one long scream, and she seemed to swoop through the air and out of the window. And Gil swooped after her. He gave a great spring … I’m sure … and a roar: ‘Stay where you are!’—catching Sibyl by the shoulder and whirling her aside as he sprang past her. I looked out of the window and saw figures running fast along the river bank—and then the willow trees hid them. Sibyl and I were alone. I turned away from the window. We went back into the studio and she shut the door. She said: ‘We will just wait quietly together.’ We put our arms round each other. The silence seemed enormous.”

  In the kitchen, too, as Maisie’s voice ceased, the silence grew huge wings of pity, grief and terror.

  “Sibyl only said one other thing. … She said: ‘I heard that scream long ago.’ I don’t know what she could have meant.”

  I remembered another door, the farmhouse door in Bohemia, set between Mrs. Jardine’s listening ear and the unconscious eyes of Ianthe, postponing by years the scream that she would give. But I was dumb.

  “She jumped,” said Maisie, “where the little islands are, round the bend—into the thick of the water lilies. Of course it’s not deep there in summer. It must have been more like jumping into a marsh; but the mud and the tangling stalks and the jungle of that ribbon weed mixed up with them might have pulled her down, I suppose, if she’d struggled to get out. And of course she would have. Nobody, mad or sane, would let themselves sink down and choke by inches in mud and muck. Nothing romantic about it—not like Ophelia.”

  “Did—did a lot of people come?”

  “No. That was luck. It was the hottest hour of that burning afternoon. There was nobody about. All the prudent French inhabitants were taking siestas behind closed shutters. Looking out of the window was like looking into a painted landscape, a backcloth of meadows, with a river winding through it, and trees in the wings. Then these figures scuttling silently across the empty stage: not real at all. At least, that’s how I see it when I think about it. Or rather, I don’t think about it—I see it. But I’m not even sure if I did look out, or if I saw anything at all. The only other things I remember for certain are … oh! such a smell of river mud coming into the place. … I could smell it through the very walls—I can smell it now. … And low voices. Someone came through the open door and spoke to Sibyl—Gil, I suppose—I didn’t look. By that time I was past anything—I just kept my hands over my face. The mud smell suddenly got much stronger. He must have been covered in it. I heard her say in a voice of stone: ‘Is she safe?’ I suppose he nodded. Then she said, to tell the doctor that if anything was wanted from the house it would be fetched without delay. She said: ‘I shall remain where I am. No doubt there are urgent family matters to be settled.’ Then she told him, if Tanya was available, to send her in at once. And Tanya came; and she gave her icy instructions: to go back immediately to the house, and to take me with her; and to say nothing to Harry. So we went away.”

  “And left Mrs. Jardine there?”

  “Yes. Sitting bolt upright on a chair, beside the figure of the child.”

  “She didn’t say anything to you?”

  “Yes. She said: ‘Have courage, Maisie.’”

  After a moment, Maisie got up and riddled the ashes in the grate and put another shovelful of coal on. Then she wandered about the kitchen in an aimless way, shifting things on the table, and with a flick of her finger setting the mistletoe swinging on its string. It seemed that she had finished all she had to tell me.

  “And that was how it all ended,” I said, in a false tone of satisfied curiosity.

  “That was how it all ended.” The swing of the bough fanned the drift of pheasant’s feathers, and one or two small downy ones floated up into the air. She caught one and let it go again and blew it upwards towards the ceiling. Between puffs at it she brought out jerkily: “Tanya and I left the next afternoon. We crossed over to England by the night boat. It was nine days before war broke out.”

  “And you didn’t see Ianthe—your mother again?” “No, no. Dear me, no. She was taken straight off to a—most excellent—most comfortable—Mental Home. The last word in up-to-date treatment and equipment. She’s still there. Two years. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  She stopped blowing and watched the feather describe a wavering downward arc and sway to the floor. She sighed.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said, “that I’ve never been able to go and see her; because in between times she’s quite herself and reads and draws and plays the piano and does basket work or something; and I expect she’d be rather pleased to see me and have a chat. It would be a change for her. I shall go after the war—if she’s alive. Her health’s deteriorating, so they tell me. She wasn’t ever strong. I don’t expect she’ll live much longer.”

  “I suppose you saw Mrs. Jardine and—and everything was all right before you left?”

  “Yes, I saw her. What happened that night, down at the mill, I don’t know. Late, long after I’d gone to bed, I heard the pony trap come up the drive and stop; and then someone drove off again towards the stables. It must have been Pierre, I think, bringing her back; because it seems Gil went with the doctor, when Mother was taken off. I’d been a bit worried about the pony. Then presently my door opened; and it was Sibyl. She didn’t come in. I pretended to be asleep, I could not. … She stood and listened for a few minutes, and then she went away. Next morning Tanya was summoned, for a brief interview.”

  “I
wonder what it was about.”

  “I wonder!” Maisie uttered a bark of laughter. “Tanya’s never been quite the same since. She takes things very hard; she doesn’t bob up again like I do after a biff on the crumpet. The long and the short of it was, Tanya was dismissed for treachery.”

  “Treachery,” I repeated.

  “And for not being a lady.”

  “Why wasn’t she a lady?” I said, puzzled.

  “My good girl,” said Maisie, raising pained eyebrows at me, “must I explain? Tanya had had the extraordinary vulgarity to fall in love, on the sly, under a real lady’s sacred roof, with a piece of a lady’s sacred property.”

  “Oh, I see,” said I dubiously, struggling to resist this attack upon my conviction of Mrs. Jardine’s perfect justness and magnanimity.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of moral taste?” said Maisie, severe. “If you don’t see how unseemly it was, what an abuse of hospitality it was, and of confidence, and all that, you also must be lacking in the instincts of a lady. Indeed, I often fear you are.”

  “Do you think Tanya told her she’d asked Gil to marry her?”

  “Of course she did. She spilt the whole bag of beans at the very start. She still hadn’t got it into her feeble head, in spite of what Gil had told her, that they were rivals.”

  “Rivals in love,” I said weakly, clutching at a familiar phrase.

  “Exactly. You’ve got it. So the subject of marriage didn’t go down very well.”

  “Why not?” I persisted, feeling, not for the first time, in my extremity that more would be gained than lost if, by hammering nails into my coffin, I let in a chink of light. “Mrs. Jardine couldn’t possibly have wanted to marry him, could she?”