“Why not?”
“Well, because—because, of course, she couldn’t. She was married already.”
“So she was! And Tanya wasn’t.”
“And then—what I said before. She’d be much too old.”
“Well done, well done! You do stick to your points. And Tanya wasn’t too old. She was young, young! She was free to marry him and young enough to marry him. Now do you see why it was unforgivable?”
I was near to tears; and after a painful silence Maisie said gently:
“I know how you feel about Sibyl. Tanya felt the same: that she was a person you could always tell the truth to, and she’d understand. That’s why she sank down under it so. She could hardly crawl. It was appalling to see a person so horrified—at herself, at everything. You see, Sibyl managed to put it across her that by bringing marriage into it—suggesting to Gil that they should get married—she’d done something really outrageous. Like a housemaid, she said, howling to be made an honest woman of. It was perhaps natural, she said, that Gil should be attracted by her. But marriage!—Gil would be simply disgusted by her—if he wasn’t simply laughing at her. She told her some things about men, as from a woman of the world, that upset her horribly; she’s very innocent. And some things about Gil—his views on women, making it sound as if she knew everything about him, and they were in a kind of plot together, and Tanya outside, an utter fool and object of their mockery and contempt. You’ve got to take into account,” added Maisie judicially again, “how unspeakable the shock had been for Sibyl. She must have been absolutely terror-stricken. The shock about Mother didn’t go nearly so deep. Once she grasped it, she could see all round it at once and deal with it on the spot; and she was magnificent. It didn’t have a lot of loose ends about, and it didn’t humiliate her, like the other thing.”
“Gil humiliated her too,” I said. “It was just as much his fault, wasn’t it? Why wasn’t she angry with him? Or was she?”
“Oh, Gil would have to be allowed to do what he wanted. He’s too precious to her, she’d never dare risk blaming him, however much he betrayed her and hurt her. She’d know if she made a fuss to him, he’d up and leave her. So Tanya had to be sent packing quickly instead. I was a good excuse: I had to be removed at once from painful associations, and Tanya must go with me to look after me.”
I thought it all over, gloomy. It seemed so very awkward, so raw all round. Nobody had been in the slightest degree comfortable.
“She went on being nice to you?” I said finally, snatching at a straw.
“I went down after lunch to say good-bye to the Meuniers,” said Maisie. “I wanted to see Gil really, for lots of reasons. But when I got down, I found Sibyl there, sitting in the summer-house, all by herself. She told me Gil was still away, he’d gone to make some arrangements for her. I think it was true. But she had posted herself there to keep watch. I don’t know quite what was in her mind: perhaps to see that Tanya or I didn’t try to get in to the mill and leave a note. Perhaps … I sometimes think … to guard Cherry … I don’t know … to cast out all the wickedness by just concentrating with all her might, willing quietness to come back again, and everything to be as it was before. You know how queer she seems when she’s alone. She said: ‘We will say our good-byes now, Maisie. I have come away to rest here quietly until the evening. This mysteriously beautiful spot takes away my agitation. Write and inform me of your safe arrival in Devonshire. You will be much in my thoughts. Good-bye, Maisie.’ And I said: ‘Good-bye, Sibyl’; and I went away and left her there, staring, staring over, like I told you, at the mill. I looked at it too, for the last time. More than ever, I thought, it looked like a house that—that couldn’t be lived in. It had put on one of its expressions; but what it was, I was as far as ever from being able to make out. Only, it looked perfectly strange to me—unfamiliar; and I knew it had spat us all out—that Gil’s time there was nearly over. … When I think of it now, you know, I feel that something was always wrong with the whole place. Why was it so suffocating down there? Something’s sucked all the air out. And the shape of the landscape just on that bend—the trees, the weir, the islands, the way the mill-house sits and broods in the middle of it. … What’s wrong? Ninety-nine times you look at it, and you think it’s your dream of a riverside resort. The hundredth time it suddenly strikes you there’s—a distortion on it; very, very slight: like a smile that you suddenly look at again and realise isn’t a smile at all but a leer. It’s a mad place, that’s what it is,” declared Maisie, with an air of having solved a mystery. “No wonder everything happened. It was made for it.”
I shivered; and as I stared into the barred grate, a square of landscape slipped in a flash before my eyes, and was gone again. Luridly dark and brilliant, unreal, like a slide on a magic lantern, it glared at me. As it vanished, the slide tipped crooked, the landscape gave a shudder; the tiny white block in the middle grimaced at me.
“That was the last of it,” said Maisie, with a yawn. “I went back to help Tanya pack her trunk. But Harry had been helping her. There was nothing to do.”
My fevered imagination created another vision: Harry bending purple-necked over a trunk, folding and packing Tanya’s clothes with shaky hands: a shockingly inappropriate occupation for him.
“At least,” said Maisie, “he hadn’t been able to help much. He’d just been hanging about. He drove us to the station and gave us each heaps of money for the journey and bought us some chocolate. He never said a word. I thought Tanya was going to faint dead away. She never spoke either. Her heart was broken. I do believe she suffered more, she was more damaged, in her spirit, than any one; which was unfair. There was Gil, and there were the skeletons tumbling out on her without any warning from our family cupboard. Between the two she was made mincemeat of.”
“Didn’t Harry. … Do you think Harry had been trying to comfort her?”
“Yes, he had. But he couldn’t. You see, nothing could be brought out into the open between them. They had to be dumb to one another. I didn’t care for it myself—the thought of leaving him alone with Sibyl again. But it was a mere flea-bite compared with what Tanya felt. She thought she’d let him down so infernally. However, as I told her, Harry’s used to disappointments; and he’d never, never blame her. … No, it was worst for Tanya by far. It wasn’t only the torture about Gil: it was losing her home. She’d had to grow up from a baby without one, and then at last she’d found one. She loved them both dearly, and got used to feeling secure with them—feeling she’d got a family and a background; and now she was banished. She was an orphan again.”
It was very sad, I knew. I sighed; but this time my springs of feeling, overtaxed, refused to flow. I contemplated Tanya’s state without one drop of sympathy.
“She got into a very morbid frame of mind,” said Maisie, rubbing her eyes. “I had an awful time with her. She got to feel that her loving Gil had somehow caused the whole crash, Mother and all, and she must spend the rest of her life in a condemned cell. She got this job teaching music at my school—that would be expiation enough, I should think, for any crime—and she spent all her holidays with us, wherever we were, and for a year I never saw her smile. She went about like an automaton, looking grey. Gil wrote to her, I know, but she wrote back that she could never see him again. I discovered her howling that night, so I wrote to him too. He didn’t answer. But one evening next summer, when we were in Devonshire, somebody came to the door of the farm; and it was Gil. He was a Tommy. He was just going abroad. He spent seven days with us. And by the end of that time she had quite a healthy colour and was making jokes. So I knew he’d made a good start anyway, destroying her principles. And by the end of his next leave, they agreed to marry each other. So much for principles. Ah well …” Maisie yawned again with violence. “The human race must go on, I suppose, in all its wicked wantonness, or where would it be?… Now I’m going to break the last six eggs and make an omelette. And
you can go and bear the tidings to those athletes. They’ll be getting muscle bound. Do you notice it’s three a.m.?”
Bemused, I followed her to the table and stood by her side, watching her smartly crack egg-shells against the lip of a basin and pour into it their contents.
“Did Mrs. Jardine write to you after you left?” I said.
“Oh yes. She wrote me a long friendly letter about this and that—the war, you know, and the pony and the farm. Oh yes, she writes to me regularly—taking an interest in my school activities, you know, and telling me all about the hospital.”
“Not a word about—anything?”
“Once. She wrote me one letter about Mother. A good one. After that not a syllable.”
“I do wonder how Gil got on with her after you and Tanya had gone.”
“Oh, very well indeed. She was superb—he told me so—about the whole business of Mother.”
“Didn’t they have a—a row at all about Tanya?”
“I expect so. But it wouldn’t matter. They understood one another all right. Perhaps, but for the war, he’d be there still. Yet,” said Maisie, holding the fork high and letting the beaten egg mixture drip from it, “I wonder. … He’d say it was the war, he must go, and she mustn’t try to keep him—not that she would try to anyway, she’s a smashing patriot—but deep down in him it would start gnawing at him that he must get away from her: she’d done him out of something he’d wanted. And war or no war, it would grow to be the one thing he had to have. Yes. That’s how it would be.”
My head was whizzing round, hectically active but at the same time hopelessly confused. I could not begin to follow this. There was one more point of importance to elucidate before the opportunity irrevocably vanished. Maisie had resumed the character of preoccupied cook; my chance was slipping. What could it be? I fixed my eyes on the ceiling. The mistletoe began to whirl round like a Catherine wheel. What, what could it be? Suddenly in the dead centre of the giddy bough I pounced on and pinned it.
“By the way,” I said, “what did she do when she left you—before she went into the convent?”
“Oh …” said Maisie, examining a frying-pan with a frown. “Let me see. I got it out of Auntie Mack afterwards. But she would put it all so delicately and go off sideways with such wild wing-flaps, I never quite made head or tail of it. Auntie Mack’s gone right down to the bottom of the class, of course, with Sibyl. Expelled, in fact. More treachery. It’s an awful knock for the poor old goose. You can’t play that game for ever: one more line, and you suddenly see you’ve had to make a noose; another, and you’ve hung yourself. Let me see. … Yes. Mother got queerer and queerer. Father couldn’t always be rushing off up and down the town after her to prevent her—talking to strangers. He got so that he’d go tearing out of school in the middle of a class; and they began to think he was nuts. The doctors thought if she got right away from us all, and never saw Father again, she might calm down. She couldn’t stand married life, you see, and being a mother. These friends I told you about offered to take her in and look after her. So she was removed abroad in charge of some sort of mental nurse; and for about a year she was much better. They travelled about in Europe, and she enjoyed that. She loved the sun and the beautiful places and the lack of responsibility. But then she suddenly got much worse. And they had to put her inside. In Germany it was, somewhere in the south.”
“That was when the postcards stopped coming, I suppose.”
“The postcards. … Good Lord, fancy your remembering! Yes, it must have been then that the postcards stopped coming.” Maisie yawned again. “She stayed in about a year, and then she seemed to be cured and she came out. I don’t know what she did after that, till the religion came on …”
At this moment, Jess and Malcolm came smiling, flushed into the kitchen. Maisie cooked the omelette, and we ate it with rapturous acclamations; and Malcolm and Maisie drank more beer, and chaffed each other a lot; and we were all very merry.
Then we all went to bed. Jess told me as we undressed in our double bedroom that she had had a very nice time. They had danced for a good while, and then played halma; and then Malcolm had taught her to play picquet. And then they had danced a little more. She’d been a bit bored now and then, but only a tiny bit: and he had turned out frightfully nice, with a frightfully good sense of humour. He had asked her to write to him; and she had promised to knit him a Balaclava helmet. She asked me if I hadn’t been bored sitting the whole of the evening in the kitchen, and I said no, not at all.
We got into our chilly soft beds, side by side, among the rose cretonnes, old mahogany, old prints of Mrs. Jardine’s spare room, and I buried my head in the pillow and resisted her watchful questioning presence. It was the first night I had ever stayed away from home without my parents, and I felt unsafe and homesick, as if I were drifting helpless outside with the black night, in the dead hush after a raging storm. One moment I was awake, listening to the silence. When next I became conscious it was ten o’clock in the morning, and Jess was saying in an anxious scolding voice that we must get up immediately, everybody would have finished breakfast long ago.
It was the day before Christmas, and the car was coming for us at eleven-thirty. We had to help our mother to dress the Christmas tree for the village school children in the afternoon. When we got downstairs with our suitcases packed, we found, to our surprise, that Malcolm, fresh and cheerful as ever, was the only person in the dining-room. He rang the bell and Mrs. Gillman’s daughter Doris brought in plates of porridge for us. Her expression was reticent. We both felt particularly well and brisk, and ate a large breakfast.
The rain had stopped, and outside shone a luminous greenish humid day of the kind that comes so often in December: a day with blackbirds in it, and silvered lichen on mauve apple boughs, and snowdrops stirring in the mould.
Then it was nearly time to go, and I said would Maisie be down soon. He laughed and said: “Not if I know her,” and suggested that I should go and rouse up the old girl.
It seemed impossible to leave without saying good-bye to her; so I went upstairs and knocked on her door. There was no answer. Noiselessly I turned the handle and looked in. She was lying on her back, flushed, deep asleep, her hair on end all over the pillow, both arms in blue striped flannel pyjamas sleeves behind her head. I said very low: “Maisie, I’m going now. Good-bye”; but she did not stir. There was nothing for it but to shut the door and go downstairs again.
9
Malcolm must have gone out to the front early in the New Year, for letters from France came to Jess in a regular flow all through the winter and into early spring. She kept them carefully in a drawer, and answered them. He said he was sending her a photograph of himself that he had had taken before he left England. He hoped she didn’t mind. Would she please send him one of her? The photograph arrived. He had signed it: Yours ever, Malcolm. She added it to the modest gallery of naval and military cousins and friends’ brothers upon the schoolroom mantelpiece. In default of a studio portrait, she sent him a smiling snapshot of herself with the dogs; and she knitted him the Balaclava helmet. He told her it was the greatest treasure he possessed, and that every time he put it on, which was every single day, he thought of her. Things were fairly quiet, he said, where he was—not too bad except for the foul weather. He was very snug in his dug-out, and he was with the most marvellous lot of chaps you could ever hope to find. He was expecting leave soon, and wished awfully, as things had turned out, that he could get over the Channel; but Grannie was expecting him and he couldn’t disappoint her. Next leave after this he’d spend at the Priory for dead certain, and we must have another party: lots more parties. His love broke, almost imperceptibly, out of a shy schoolboy phrase, the hint of a hope, a wish, here and there; a tiny cross, that seemed like an apology, after his signature.
In the spring he was killed. We read his name in the Casualty Lists. Jess cried a little, strictly in private, a
nd tied his letters all together with a white ribbon. His photograph remained upon the mantelpiece, not very like anybody in particular: mass-produced photograph of a dead English subaltern, blond innocent mask, faintly smiling and staring from beneath the peak of a uniform cap. Since he was, so far, the only one to be killed, it did not seem suitable to leave him without distinction in the gallery; and after a bit she took him away and put him with his letters; and the mantelpiece was eased of an embarrassing burden of awe and pathos.
We wrote to Maisie. Many weeks later she answered; a few lines only, inarticulate, of pity for poor old Malcolm. My mother wrote to Mrs. Jardine; the reply came promptly. There was nothing unusual about it; hundreds of people in Europe were writing and receiving such letters every day. Mrs. Jardine took her place without ostentation among the bereaved, mourning with the same pride and tenderness, the same poignant but not savage questioning, the same resignation as everybody else. She was deeply thankful, she said, to have had that glimpse of him; to have seen for herself the fine character Malcolm had carved out for himself out of the unpromising material handed down to him. He had justified all her belief in him. “In fact” she wrote, “I may say that he became, within his own range, a perfect character. He was so fond of your girls—particularly, perhaps, of dear Jess. He spoke to me of her with an admiration which could not have failed to touch you. Would that he could have had the profitable happiness of seeing her for longer. Alas! It is these boys cut off before their loves, falling transparent, blank, like abstract figures falling—it is they who break my heart.”
In the autumn of that same year came another letter from Mrs. Jardine, to tell us that Harry was dead. Walking by the river in the November fog, he had contracted a chill. In two days he was dead of pneumonia. He had put up no fight at all, said Mrs. Jardine. For thirty-six hours on end she had sat by his bedside. Nothing, not a word, had passed his lips, save of punctilious thanks to the nurse for her attentions. Harry had not wished to resist death. “He died,” wrote Mrs. Jardine, “with his hand in mine.” She was arranging for the eventual sale of the whole of the French property. It had painful associations for her now; and in any case she had been left far less well off than she had expected. Harry had in his will made various legacies and bequests which had come to her as a surprise. The Priory was hers for her lifetime. She hoped to return there as soon as the war was over, and to end her days there. Afterwards it would pass to Maisie, and to Maisie’s children.
The Ballad and the Source Page 35