The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

  She stretched a long, luxurious stretch, arms above her head, and looked at me cloudily, a little shy.

  “If you want to know what he looked like,” she said, “he looked more handsome than anybody I’ve ever seen. And if you want to know what I felt like I felt more happy than I’d ever felt in my life, or ever expect to feel again. I dare say that sounds batty to you.”

  “No,” I said truthfully. “Not a bit.”

  “I thought: ‘I’m not alone with this thing any more. Somehow, it’s all going to come out straight.’ I saw he was thinking about it with all his mind; and nothing else mattered. You may not believe it, but I forgot the whole staggering terribleness of the night; at least, it seemed to melt softly away. I’d got through it; and he was with me. I felt like those birds, opening out all their throats to the light.” She paused. “Of course,” she added, “it was only one moment in the whole thing. I dare say it was simply reaction. But it seemed real at the time; in fact, it still does. I’ve never forgotten it. One can’t just say feelings are all rot because they don’t last—or don’t come to anything.”

  “They didn’t come to anything?” I said, mournful; receiving through some sixth sense whose function was to apprehend the intangible sad rejoicing forms of love, a vision of Gil and Maisie in that dawn; and in the same moment, feeling it blown upon by the sterile breath of mortality.

  “Of course not,” she said, a little sharp and scornful. “Nothing came out straight. Everything got worse.” She stopped; then suddenly sat up straight and said with loud emphasis: “But I made a vow then … a solemn vow … that if ever there was anything I could do for him, ever, in all our lives, to show my gratitude at finding a person like him—equal to everything—I’d do it. And that’s true anyway.”

  Presently I broke in upon her brooding to say timidly:

  “Did the doctor come?”

  “He came. I don’t know how long it was before he did turn up. It seemed ages; but in another way far sooner than I wanted. He came on horseback. He did all his rounds on horseback, which was rather nice. I wonder if he still does. … He’s a little old freak with gimlet eyes behind very strong steel-rimmed spectacles and a dirty straggly grey beard and a voice like a rasp. He’s got an enormous head and tiny little legs and a paunch in between like a pumpkin. He’s frightfully clever, and cynical—my word! He never seemed to give a damn what happened to human beings, but cure their contemptible bodies he could and would, because that was his job. When we heard him arrive, Gil asked me to go away: he thought the fewer people about the better while he explained what had happened. He wanted to keep me out of it as much as possible, for fear of awkwardness with Sibyl. She was his favourite patient. He was always popping in to see her, and they’d grate and rattle away about literature and philosophy for hours on end, and say afterwards that each was the most remarkable intelligence the other one had ever met. Gil promised me to keep the secret if he could—of who Mother was, I mean. I don’t know what he did say. I went and made some coffee in the kitchen and Tanya turned up while I was making it. She’d run all the way back, and she was dead beat. I could hear voices in the bedroom, Gil’s and the doctor’s, and then her voice breaking out; getting worked up again. I heard her shriek out: ‘The Heads! The Heads!’ She sounded in the most extreme state of horror; but I forced myself not to go in. Then she started gabbling in French to the doctor, crying out over and over again: ‘Attendez, Monsieur, attendez que je vous explique.’ But I couldn’t hear what she did explique, if anything. After a bit she stopped. Tanya, who’d been sitting hunched up taut in her chair, not blocking her ears with all her might, let out a great long breath of relief and said that whatever the doctor had put into her must have started to work. We listened. And there was nothing more. It was nearly seven o’clock before he went away. We stayed in the kitchen, and Gil came in, and we all drank coffee. He told us he’d asked the doctor to call at the inn and make some story for Madame Meunier: that she was an old patient of his from Paris who’d had a breakdown and come down here to be under his care and get the benefit of country air. Unfortunately she’d over-estimated her strength and gone out for an early morning walk and been taken with faintness just by Gil’s door and called to him for help. Gil had been rather alarmed and come on his motor-bike—he had one—and knocked him up, etcetera, etcetera. She was resting now and would stay where she was until he called again. We had to say something, because they’d have presumably made a hullabaloo when they found her room empty; and Rosette, their girl, always came in in the middle of the morning to clean and sweep for him. I said: ‘What about the window?’ He said: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll fix it in no time.’ And he did. When I came back later, I found he’d taken out the broken pane and found another one in an outhouse somewhere, and fitted it in. He can do anything with his hands. Then he told us to go straight back to the house and get some sleep if we could, and not come again till the afternoon. Then we’d decide what to do. He said she was heavily drugged and wouldn’t stir for hours. I went in and had one more peep at her. She might have been dead. … And I wish she had been. Her face looked … it looked as if it had ashes and cobwebs on it. I told him I was awfully sorry I’d pushed him. Then we went back. On the way, I asked Tanya if she loved Gil very much. She said yes. That night she’d asked him to marry her.”

  “She’d asked him?”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “Oh well. … What did he say?”

  “He’d said no. He’d explained something to her, she said, that she didn’t know.”

  “What was it, I wonder?”

  “She didn’t say. Something about Sibyl, I guessed.”

  “Oh.” Nameless vistas opened on me, lurid, obscured with vapours; closed again. I turned from them. “Was she sad?”

  “I didn’t ask. She said he’d told her he loved her too. But she saw she’d been silly, it wouldn’t do. That’s all she said. She was quite calm.”

  “It was nice that he said he loved her too.”

  “Very nice.”

  “Did you get back without Mrs. Jardine knowing?”

  “I couldn’t say. There was nobody about on the way to our rooms. I went to bed and I slept till ten. When I woke up, I heard Tanya practising scales. For a moment I thought it was all a dream.”

  She got up, crossed the room and opened a cupboard.

  “What about a cup of chocolate?” she said. “I found some—the real stuff. And there’s plenty of milk. Do you want some? Or do you want to go to bed?”

  I said yes to the first query, a passionate no to the second.

  “I only asked,” she said, “because you look somewhat bemused. It’s long past your bedtime.”

  I watched her make a rich mixture in a saucepan and pour it into two breakfast cups.

  “Twice the quantities stated on the label is always my motto,” she said.

  It was inexpressibly delicious. When we had sipped about half, I said:

  “Could you go on?”

  “Yes,” she said, as if in faintly ironic meditation. “We’d better go on to the end, now we’re fortified. … I hung about the house, and tried to read a book. It was roasting hot. Sibyl didn’t emerge from her room, and I didn’t go in to see her. I got more and more restless. About five I told Tanya I must go down. She said I must go and see Sibyl before I went: that although she was being quite ordinary on the surface, she seemed—as if she was bubbling up underneath. So I went. She was lying on her long couch, propped up; she looked an icy blue colour, her eyes very bright. I said I was off to the river, and if it got late, I hoped she wouldn’t mind if I stayed and got supper off Madame Meunier. I did do that sometimes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said: ‘Ah yes. Thank you, my child, I like to know your plans. I have your word, have I not, that you will give me no cause for anxiety in the matter of those water lilies?’” Maisie chuckled. “You
know the way she talks.”

  “You do imitate her marvellously,” I said.

  “I promised; and she said: ‘I cannot think why, I have those plants inextricably in my mind these last few days.’ Then she gave me a ravishing smile and told me to go along: it would give her pleasure to think of me refreshing my limbs in the cool shady water. Just as I got to the door, she said: ‘Should you see Gil, tell him I expect him as we arranged. I shall just stay quietly where I am till he comes to carry me down.’”

  “Oh!”

  “Yes. I asked her if there wasn’t anything I could do for her. I suppose it was guilt that made me feel—sort of affectionate. She said no, just the message to Gil. So I went. I arrived in a bath of sweat to find Gil working as usual in the studio. He said she was very drowsy. The doctor had been again, and shot some more stuff into her, and said it was absolutely essential that she shouldn’t be moved till her nervous system had had a complete rest. ‘How long?’ I said. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What are we to do?’ I said. He said he didn’t know—yet. He told me to prepare myself and be sensible. It was a hundred to one she would have to go into—a place, to be cured. He said our duty was to try to discover where she’d been, who’d been responsible for her during these years. He asked how much I knew. I said: only that she’d been in a convent somewhere. He said that was all he knew too. I asked him if he thought she’d been in a—place before, and he said undoubtedly she had been. I asked if she’d given him that document with it all written down. He said, oh yes, she’d given it to him all right but he was afraid it wasn’t very helpful.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it was all gibberish. Interesting, he said, rather than informative. Poor Mother, think of her scribbling away at it for hours. He said the doctor had taken it away to study. I asked him if she’d mentioned to him a plot to get her shut up. He said yes, he’d had all that; and it meant she had been shut up. He said the only person to hand who could presumably give us information was Sibyl. I said Sibyl must not be told. He said: ‘She may have to be.’ I gave him her message, and he said: ‘Then she smells a rat already.’ I said I thought she certainly did, but I wasn’t sure what sort: I rather suspected it was about him and Tanya. His eyebrows went up and he whistled. I really began to be awfully desperate. I saw what a fix we were in. He’d still got the door between the two rooms locked, so I went round and looked at her through the half-closed shutters. She still lay for dead, flat on her back. She had her poor bandaged hands folded on her chest. I forgot to tell you the doctor had had to put stitches in one cut, down the palm. Then I came back and sat on the step with Gil. I asked him why he kept that door locked; and he said to prevent her at all costs from getting into the studio, because … because he said the statues and heads were more than she could stand.”

  “You mean … An inspiration flashed upon me: ‘Did she think they were alive?’”

  “Not exactly. I don’t know how to explain to make you understand. She seemed to think—they were hiding things that were alive. People, I mean. That he was a terrible—sort of witch doctor who was making stone masks over living people’s faces—and setting them up round the room—like cursed things—to work evil. Something like that.” She drew a heavy breath, and added slowly: “A circle of evil round the child in the middle. She thought there was a live child cased up in the marble.”

  “Cherry?” I breathed.

  She nodded.

  “It was when she came the first time, to ask the way to the Post Office, that the—the germ got planted in her.”

  “I haven’t quite understood what made her come at all, the first time. Had she seen the statues through the window?”

  “No.” Maisie’s lip and nostril stretched in a way that made me think of Mrs. Jardine. “She’d seen Gil come into the inn that morning for lunch; and he caught her fancy. At least that’s what he gave me to understand in a modest way. She came to visit him with the enterprising notion of making advances to him. She suggested coming in at once, tout de suite, to live with him, I gathered. She made no bones about it at all.”

  “How awful!” I exclaimed, deeply shocked.

  “Oh, do you think so?” said Maisie, sharp, raising her eyebrows like Mrs. Jardine, as if surprised. “Why?”

  Stung this time to defend myself, I said obstinately:

  “It doesn’t generally happen that way round, that I do know. I’m certain the gentleman usually does the asking.”

  “Well, I don’t know much about it,” she said mildly.

  “In fact, till you told me about Tanya, I didn’t know the—the lady ever did.”

  It struck me that that made two proposals to Gil in one day: surely a phenomenon. I did not say so.

  “Heavens, my good girl, that was absolutely different,” she said, still agreeable. “No. I did feel rather upset, as a matter of fact, when he told me. But he explained to me it was just part of her not being normal. I began to piece things together then.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Things I remembered.” Her manner was abrupt, and I knew better than to press her. After a pause she went on: “At first, he said, she was just rather scatter-brained and embarrassing. But he dealt with her all right, and she dropped all that quite suddenly, and began to ask about his work in an intelligent way. She always had very good taste. She’d been brought up to know a lot about art. Then I suppose something went snap for good in her head: probably from the shock when he told her—you know, when he said the name Charity Mary Thomson. He said she looked scared then, and vacant; and then put out her hand like I told you and touched the figure; and then muttered something. He said he was pretty certain, when he got rid of her, that she’d be back again. He thought it was just a nuisance he might have to cope with until it flashed on him, up at Sibyl’s, who she probably was; and then he was appalled. He explained to me that after she had left him her mind must have gradually got everything more and more mixed up: him and the statue and Cherry and the heads. She mixed it all with terrible experiences, he said, that she couldn’t face remembering and kept deep down in her, corked up. And the cork blew out. Do you understand?”

  “Like it does in dreams?”

  “I suppose so—yes. Everything turned into something else; so she was quite lost. He said … you see, in one’s mind an object can never be just itself: it connects up with other things that remind you of it for some reason, things you’ve seen or remembered, sometimes from years and years ago when you were a child. For instance, whenever I come into a dark room at night and see firelight flickering, I think of being ill in bed when I was little.”

  “Oh yes! Me too.”

  “Watching the patterns it made on the night nursery ceiling. So that, in a way, I’m in this dark room and back in the night nursery, both at the same time. I’m split. And if I’d been very unhappy or frightened in the night nursery, it would come over me again, although I was standing calmly years and years later in a different room, and had forgotten, perhaps, the reason for my fright or sadness. But because I’m sane it would be only for a minute, and I’d know what was happening and could sort out the links and brush it all aside. But when people go off their rockers, all the links get jumbled up or break altogether. Then they get real, complete delusions. Probably we’d never find out, he said, why that room of his should be the last straw for her. But I can see, can’t you, that if you were barmy, a room full of cold, silent, absolutely still stone figures and casts and heads would be terrifying? It would be like the Chamber of Horrors. You’d think they were all threatening—or mocking—or keeping some ghastly secret behind their mouths and eyes.”

  Maisie’s eyes dilated, her voice sank low, vibrating. A sympathetic dew broke out on me.

  “That’s why she screamed out: ‘The heads!’” I said faintly.

  She nodded.

  “And there was Cherry in the middle of it, quite changed and
turned to stone, or covered up with stone. But it was Cherry, because he’d said so, and she’d got that into her head. When she came back in the middle of the night, it was to get Cherry.”

  I let out a groaning breath.

  “Is that what he said?”

  She nodded.

  “That document I caught her with was really meant as a sort of blind—an excuse for getting in. And to—sort of propitiate this terrifically powerful person she thought he was. Partly a kind of—counter-magic to him, partly an absolutely water-tight justification, so she thought, of what she was going to do. At least that’s how he explained it to me, but it was difficult to follow, and I can’t make it a bit clear. I believe now she was only pretending to be quiet and go to sleep when I left her in the inn. Mad people are very cunning. Anyway, I felt—simply­­­­ terrible when he told me she’d come for Cherry. He said that figure I told you about in the group, the bowed down, shrouded, mother or death one behind the child, seemed to be the chief trouble. She thought it was—was holding Cherry prisoner, like under a deadly spell; and the reason why it was so terrible and so powerful was that its face was hidden. She was transfixed by terror of it. As if it was something too ghastly to show itself. She kept clutching him and pointing at it and panting out: ‘There! There!’ And then she looked wildly over her shoulder—and she saw it again, on the stand.”

  “How do you mean?” I cried, aghast.

  “That head of Sibyl covered with a cloth that she’d asked him about. She thought it was the same Horror again, pretending not to be there, stuck up there to watch itself—to watch Cherry. … I can’t explain. I suppose two of it made it doubly bad: if there were two of it, there might be hundreds of it, popping up wherever she looked. She was gibbering with fear. So he thought the best thing to do was to go in a very quiet, ordinary way and take the cloth off, to prove to her it was nothing but a harmless bit of clay modelling. So he did. He went and lifted the cloth off and showed her the face.”