The Ballad and the Source Read online

  A curious figure formed part of our early lives. Her name was Tilly. For many years our grandmother’s maid, she had been, subsequently to her death, distributed among various members of the family in the capacity of sewing maid, housekeeper or temporary nurse. She was a diminutive Cockney, just not a dwarf, cased always from head to foot in glossy black, with a little lace-bordered black silk apron, jet ornaments and a cornelian brooch. When she took the air, she wore a waist-length cape called a dolman, and a midget bonnet tied under the chin with broad black satin strings. Her reality belonged entirely to the Dickens world. She had a large pendulous face with caramel eyes on stalks, a long comedian’s upper lip and chin, and on her bulging forehead a lump the size of a thrush’s egg, which she concealed by arranging over it one circular varnished curl drawn down from her black “transformation.” The effect of this was disturbing, as if a form of animal life—a snail or something—grew parasitically upon her brow. I could never take my eyes off it. Twice widowed before the age of thirty, she had married first one Mr. Pringle, to whom in the course of interminable reminiscences she never once referred; next a handsome and romantic Bohemian cabinet-maker, by whom she had had one son, known to us as the Little Feller. He had been all brains and no stamina, his little spine grew crooked, and she lost him at the age of six. She was now in her eightieth year, and had retired to lodgings in Camden Town, and from thence emerged twice yearly to pay us long sewing visits. She sat in a room at the top of the house, making loose covers, manipulating my mother’s furs, exquisitely darning the linen and entertaining us with pink and mauve fondants and conversation.

  She was a true Cockney, all sharpness, materialism, irony and repartee. She was also a consummate actress and mimic. In a trembling croak she sang us snatches of old music-hall airs; and she danced for us, holding her skirts with quirked fingers, sedately rotating on invisible feet, round and round and round, and dropping a low curtsey at the end. The remarks she threw off impressed us forcibly. She said: “I wouldn’t marry a undertaker—not if ’is ’air was ’ung with diamonds.” She told us that if a person looked a lady in her dressing-gown, then a lady she was. Our grandmother had been an outstanding example of this truth. I studied myself long before the mirror in my red woollen dressing-gown, considering whether the same could be said of me. She said I had her voice, and Jess her clever fingers with a needle, and Sylvia her joking ways. None of our more agreeable qualities could derive from anybody but Grandma. Not that she had ever been a beauty; we pressed her for this, but she was firm; no, never a beauty, not even pretty: it was the ways she had—the loving way, the quick way, that way of flying out; and she would drop her stitching and chuckle at some recollection of the wit, the stinging tongue. She was on her death bed, so weak they thought her gone past rousing, the nurse did something to displease her: up she sat, “as fierce as a maggot,” to protest. Yes, our grandmother came all round us in the upstairs room, beside the cutting-out table and the sewing machine, through the smell of furs and camphor and new chintzes: passionate spirit, loving and loved; modest, self-confident; sheltered, sharply independent; despotic matriarch, young girl pliant and caressing; fragility, energy with a core like the crack and sting of a whip.

  It was this, this last that had left our house, and perhaps most similar houses at that period. There were no words for it, of course, and the sense of it came only intermittently. Looking back now, one might express it by saying there seemed disillusionments lurking, unformulated doubts about overcoming difficulties; a defeat somewhere, a failure of the vital impulse.

  Now here we were, emerged into this garden to confront this ageing lady who had loved our grandmother, stepping up out of the dead and gone to have our faces searched for clues. We knew we were linked back, as we were with Tilly, to the rich past. The fiery particle snapped in her eyes and in her voice, white, wrinkled, exhausted-looking as she was. Her lips were pale, bluish, but their outline was unblurred, sharply rising and dipping, meeting clear at the outer edges, neither slack, nor sour, nor frightened as many mouths of women grow. There was something about her lips and about her whole face—something dramatic, a sensuality so noble and generous it made her look austere, almost saint-like. Experience had signed her face with a secret, a promise whose meaning people would still watch, still desire to explore and to possess.

  We followed her across the lawn into the house.

  She showed us to the bathroom, shook rose geranium essence into the water for us, and left us to wash our hands. Then we hurried along the passage to join her in her bedroom. It was a long low spacious room, with white panelled walls and curtains of swathed and frilled white muslin, and a small four-poster bed with delicate columns of fluted mahogany and hangings of white Italian brocade embroidered in blue and gold. In front of the pretty fireplace stood a couch upholstered in mauve watered silk, with a rug of soft silvery fur folded at the foot of it; and over the mantelpiece hung the portrait of a little girl with long brown hair, very queerly dressed in a dark velvet jacket, and on her head a high fur cap. She sat half turned away, looking at us over her shoulder, hand on hip; her face was narrow, with big dark eyes.

  “That is my daughter,” said Mrs. Jardine.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Ianthe.” She gave the portrait a dwelling look. “Yes … I bought that picture some years ago. It was being sold at auction, I discovered. No doubt it would have been destroyed, but that it had a market value—being the work of a well-known painter.”

  Her eyes gave a flick. That was the first time I noticed this peculiarity of her eyes: as if they twitched far back, behind the pupil, then dilated in a long blank stare. There was something inhuman about the trick: it made her eyes look fierce and incandescent.

  “I suppose she’s probably grown up now?” I suggested, not knowing what to make of her last speech.

  “Yes, quite grown up. She has children of her own.”

  “Your grandchildren, then! What are their names?”

  “Maisie, Malcolm and Charity. Not names I should have chosen.” She drummed with her fingers on the mantelpiece, still staring at the portrait, but not as if she saw it.

  Jess, who was stroking the rug, said:

  “Do you rest on this sofa?”

  “Every afternoon.”

  “With the blinds down?”

  “No, I do not pull down the blinds. I look out at the garden. I love it so much from here: it frames itself so beautifully in this big window.”

  Our eyes followed hers, and saw through the sash window that reached from floor to ceiling the stretch of lawn and two magnificent trees—a giant copper beech, now budding, and near it a silver birch, the tallest I have ever seen. They were as glorious, as different, as brother-and-sisterly as the sun and the moon. In the background rose the old brick wall that edged the garden, and spring flowers—primulas, daffodils, narcissi, crown imperials—massed in the herbaceous borders.

  “And when you get tired of looking at the view you can look at the picture,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “Yes, I look at them alternately. And so the time goes very pleasantly by.”

  “Why were they called those names, do you think?”

  “I understand,” said Mrs. Jardine, with marked brevity, “that they were named for various defunct members of their father’s family.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Malcolm is thirteen and Maisie is—let me see—she must be twelve. That makes them rather older than you two. The other little girl is a good deal younger.” She looked at us attentively, and said in the brusque, electrifying way we were to know so well: “I have never seen my grandchildren.”

  We were dumb, shocked by the impact of what we recognised to be an important confidence. We waited, acutely aware of the trickiness involved in any attempt to follow on from this. What she had said, it was clear that she had said deliberately; we guessed it had been
said to our grandmother’s grandchildren. To crown all, we began to receive a curious impression: we were about to enter into some sort of conspiracy with Mrs. Jardine. We watched her, responsive as any instrument she had ever in her life fingered and drawn the heart from, to play the part she had appointed.

  “Then you don’t know if they’re nice or not?” said Jess finally.

  “I wonder very much,” she said meditatively. “I often ask myself.” She went over to the mirror, took out her turquoise hat-pins and removed her hat, glancing at herself sidelong, as women do who think they have lost their beauty: repudiating a complete reflection. “I wonder what we should find to say to one another.” She dusted her face all over with powder, took from a drawer a scarf of sky-blue gauze and wound it round her throat, pushed her hair up and added: “I think I shall see them soon. I think they are coming to stay with me. Then you must come to tea and make friends: at least, if they are nice, as I hope.”

  Mademoiselle now appeared with an air of modest good breeding from the bathroom, where we had been bidden to leave her, and told us not to fatigue Madame with our chatter.

  “Come down now,” said Mrs. Jardine, stretching a hand out to each of us and drawing us close. “Tea will be ready. You are going to meet Harry now. You will like Harry. Everybody loves him. But he is a little shy.”

  3

  A tall man with a red face and thin grey hair was standing in front of the drawing-room fire, looking out of the window.

  “Oh, Harry,” said Mrs. Jardine, “these are Edward’s girls—my sweet Laura’s grandchildren. Is not this a happy day for me?”

  His eyes turned from the window and came down upon us rapidly yet with reluctance. His lips which were long and thin gave a twitch, the travesty of a smile, but he did not say anything; and the rest of his face was quite unsmiling. Almost immediately his gaze returned to the long pane.

  He did not have a trace of any of the different kinds of manner—patronage, embarrassment, amusement, dislike, comradeliness—whereby grown-ups signalise their consciousness of meeting children; but we were prepared, and knew it was his shyness. Slender, upright, with military shoulders and a faultlessly-­cut, new-looking tweed suit, he had, as he stood on his own hearth, the most curious look of having no connection with his surroundings. He seemed absolutely exposed. Under crooked bushy grey eyebrows, the whites of his sad butcher-blue eyes were bloodshot; they looked as if they might brim over with tears any moment. Children find a naturalness in eccentric social behaviour; and though his isolation gave him dignity, he did not disconcert us.

  April sun struck brilliantly off many pale surfaces of chintz, wood and mirror, and when Mrs. Jardine with her puffy cloud of white hair and her blue gauze, sat down by the window to the tea-table, she looked half-spectral, dissolved in silvery spring light.

  Tea was on the plain side, tasty but not lavish, with little home-baked scones and queen cakes and shortbread biscuits. It was memorable for a delicacy of intoxicating flavour, called guava jelly, which we had never before tasted. Mademoiselle bade us speak French, since so remarkable an opportunity had been offered to us of profiting by Madame’s knowledge of the language; but Mrs. Jardine begged for us with such tact, praising our accents but explaining that the Major was not so proficient a linguist as herself that Mademoiselle yielded gracefully, with apologies. We thought that possibly at this point the Major winked very slightly at us, but we were not sure. Little spasms and tremors, easy to mistake for winks, continually crossed his face. Certainly he took no other notice of us, and the meal passed without a word from his lips. Mrs. Jardine talked energetically, in French, to Mademoiselle, in English to us. She talked about the house they had somewhere in France, and said we must come and stay there one day. The word she used was château, which we understood to mean castle, and we asked how soon we could come. She did not put us off with a vagueness and an indulgent laugh, which would have proved to us that the invitation was a false one, but said with seriousness that she was sorry she could suggest no definite date at present. This was Harry’s old home, where he had lived as a boy, and they had only just been able to come back to it after years, and Harry loved it very much and wanted to enjoy it for as long as possible before the English winter should force them abroad again. Nowadays, she said, she was like our grandmother: she could not be well in a damp foggy climate. Harry could, of course, he was very strong and healthy, but he never let her travel without him. We were glad to think he loved and cared for her so tenderly, but troubled because his enjoyment of his old home was not more manifest. She spoke for him, she spoke about him: he remained to all appearances unconscious. Their eyes never met. Another thing I noticed was that she filled his teacup scarcely half-way up and leaned across the table to set it down beside his plate. I realised why when I observed how his hand shook when he lifted and drank from it. The tea rocked wildly, but he did not spill it.

  Presently the door began to rattle, then opened to let in an enormous cat, orange tabby. It posed in the doorway, glared with tawny eyes, then went streaking, tail up, stiff-legged, to his side. He lifted it on to his lap, folding it in his arms and bending his head to murmur inaudibly to it. Mrs. Jardine poured milk into a saucer, placed it before him on the table and continued her conversation. The cat sat on his lap and stooped its neck to drink. We left our seats and came round his knee, awestruck, to stroke the fabulous creature.

  “What’s its name?”

  “Peregrine,” we understood him to say. Then he did give us a rapid look, as if wondering whether he could trust us, and added: “He opens the door himself.”

  His voice startled us. It was so light and flat it seemed not to issue from his throat, but out of the air, out of nothing. Sometimes in dreams voices speak suddenly like this, empty ventriloquist voices making trivial statements whose tremendous meaning appals us.

  “Will you make him do it again?”

  “He won’t do it again, there’s no reason for it,” he said rather snappishly. “He doesn’t fool about—he plans his life. He opened the door because he wanted his milk. If I put him outside now and shut the door in his face, he’d sulk and I shouldn’t see him again to-night.”

  This was the longest consecutive speech I ever heard Harry make. He got up, and as he did so the cat leaped up on to his shoulder; and thus in silence they left the table and went out, closing the door behind them.

  In this room there were two portraits to look at. One was a large, full-length portrait of a fair girl of about seventeen, dressed in white muslin with a blue sash tied round her small waist, and roses in her low bodice. Her arms were round and bare, and she sat with her hands loosely clasped in her lap on what looked like a blue glazed earthenware barrel decorated with a pattern of dolphins. Behind were tall trees; and there were some doves on the grass round her blue-shod feet. White, serious, piercingly beautiful, blue, full eyes staring out with fanatical directness, she was recognisably Mrs. Jardine. As I gazed, the hopeless wish to grow up to look and dress exactly like that caused me a wave of almost nausea.

  The other portrait hung in an oval frame over the mantelpiece, and showed the head and shoulders of a wonderful young man in full dress military uniform. He had poetic, delicate features, a fair moustache and a wistful expression.

  “That is Harry when he was a young man,” said Mrs. Jardine. “Harry was the handsomest man in London, and the best dressed. He was the handsomest man I ever saw, except perhaps your father.”

  “He’s changed rather, hasn’t he?” I said in a tactful way.

  “People change as they get older. They get more firmness, more character in their faces—if they are good people. For instance,” said Mrs. Jardine rapidly, in a matter-of-fact way, “Harry had an almost girlish beauty as a boy. As he grew older, and became such a brilliant soldier and led such a hard-working­­­­, responsible life, the quality of his looks changed. All the strength and manliness in him came out.”


  “I didn’t know he was a soldier,” I said.

  “Of course,” said Jess. “What d’you suppose Major means?”

  “Well, he is a retired soldier,” said Mrs. Jardine, stroking Jess’s hair affectionately. “He had a terrible fall from his horse, and then his health broke down, and he had to give up the Army. It was a great grief to him.”

  I pondered, realising for the first time that it was the strength and manliness coming out in men that gave them purplish faces with broken veins. Yet my father was not red at all. Possibly it worked both ways: one could start highly coloured and grow paler, and the cause would be the same.

  As if reading my thoughts, Mrs. Jardine said:

  “I dare say your father has changed a great deal from when I knew him. But I am sure he must still be a very fine-looking man.”

  “Oh yes,” I said; and preoccupied as I was at this time with the problem of marriage, I added: “If he was the very handsomest man you knew, do you wish you had married him instead?”

  “Mais voyons donc, Rebecca,” interrupted Mademoiselle sharply. But Mrs. Jardine smiled and said:

  “Well—it would have been delightful, of course. But the question never arose.”

  “I suppose he never asked you?”

  “No, never. Apart from anything else, I was too old. As you know, men generally prefer to marry women younger than themselves. I am about half-way between him and your grandmother in age.”

  “So you could be friends with them both?”

  “It was your grandmother who was my darling friend. Of course I was very fond of your father, but he was often away, at school, then at Cambridge, and I never saw him much.” She paused, and added: “And then I lost sight of him altogether.” She drummed with her fingers on the back of a chair, tapping out a brisk tune, then announced abruptly: “I was frightened of your father.”