The Ballad and the Source Page 4

  “Cherry would like that,” said Cherry, looking hypnotized.

  Maisie began in a choked voice:

  “Father doesn’t—”

  “Oh yes, yes, yes,” interrupted Mrs. Jardine quickly, coldly. “Your father does not approve of beauty. He would like it to be wiped off the face of the earth. The fatal gift of beauty: the unpardonable. …” Once again, she was trembling all over. “You tire me rather, Maisie. I must go in. Where is Harry? One of you go and find him, please, to carry me in.”

  “He’s just coming out of the house, Grannie,” said Malcolm. “He’s coming.”

  “Ah, I knew he would! He said he would come for me at four, and four it is exactly. Look.” She held up to Cherry the tiny watch she wore, like a pendant, on a long pearl-studded chain. Its back was a pansy, enamelled in rich blues and purples, outlined in minute diamonds. “This is the watch he gave me when I married him. I wear it always. It has never lost or gained a minute.” Her eyes swept the whole silent group of us, and she said triumphantly: “Harry has never broken his word—never. To me, or to any one. Malcolm, do you know what a gentleman is? One who never, by act or word, wounds a fellow creature. One who is incapable of unkindness. This may sound trite—perhaps you do not yet know how rare a quality kindness is. The world is choked with cruel people and their victims. I have met very, very few gentlemen and gentlewomen in my life: none like Harry.”

  Again she wiped the dew of sweat from her forehead, and then lay perfectly still, as if making a strong effort to compose herself. The Major came towards us, stalking lightly, in a suit of biscuit-coloured shantung, a Panama hat bound with Leander ribbon upon his head. Presently she remarked in a weak voice, the suppressed excitability and bitterness all gone out of it:

  “Myself I hate ugliness. Particularly ugly manners.”

  When Harry reached her side, she gave him, as if to a stranger whom she designed to fascinate, her long mysterious upward-pointing smile, and said softly:

  “I am ready to go in, Harry.”

  His eyes which looked always so unfocused on any visible object did, I suppose, take in her exhausted appearance, for he said rapidly:

  “I told you you weren’t fit to come out.”

  He took no notice of any of us.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed gaily, “but I had to see Laura’s darlings. I had to be there when they met these. That was understood. You promised me. Now there they all are together, just off for their picnic. And so I will come in and rest; as I promised you.”

  Thus declaring to him, to us, that the whole thing had gone off successfully, delightfully, just as she had planned it, she raised her arms to put them round his neck and be lifted.

  “Is he going to carry you?” said Cherry.

  “Yes. He carried me out and now he is going to carry me in.”

  “Cherry would like to be carried.” She yearned up at him. “A ride on your shoulders. Like Dadda used to, only now he doesn’t.”

  “Harry will give you a ride on his shoulders later.”

  “When will he?”

  “Ask him.”

  She clasped his wrist with both hands, and swung on it, twisting and sidling.

  “When will you? Now?”

  “Not now.”

  He looked down at her, not smiling, but with the faintest shade of inquiry and watchfulness, as if wondering whether a kitten could possibly be playing with his hand. She went on squirming, perfectly at ease, feline, sure of herself and of him.

  “When I come back from my picnic? Before I go to bed?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Oh! I shall be so high up! As high—as high as the trees,” she cried wildly, throwing herself back from his arm. “You’ll run with me, gallop and run, gallop and run till I call out stop Stop!”

  “Indeed,” said the Major. The ghost of a laugh came out of his throat. Then he shook her off gently and stooped, his small, neat, sparsely covered head brushing his wife’s white curls, the blood suffusing neck, face, scalp as he gathered her up and straightened himself again. He puffed a bit as he held her.

  “No featherweight,” she said, smiling down at us. “Au revoir, my loves and doves. Enjoy yourselves. Mary has packed peaches in a separate basket.”

  He started off with her across the lawn, and we looked after them; and as the distance between us widened they grew more and more strange and romantic. His figure was so slight, graceful and upright, he looked from the back like a tall young man carrying his white bride into his house. As I watched, a queer feeling came over me, hard to describe, though unforgotten: one of those intimations, or premonitions, which visit children, of a whole range of complex personal emotions, far ahead of their present capacity, alien to their experience, yet recognised in a prophetic flash as theirs to come. What love would be like. … Was that it? It rose up and vanished, a featureless phantom, infinitely unfamiliar, irreconcilable with the homely shapes of love I knew.

  Mrs. Jardine had been carried off the field, but the day was hers: no doubt of that. We were all disconcerted and unhappy—all but Cherry, who was obviously impervious to moral conflicts; concealing beneath a cool elastic surface an agate core of egocentric desires, and intent on the consolidation of her gains. I was aware without being told that the commotion in the lime alley had been a round—doubtless not the first—in the fight of Maisie for Cherry’s soul. Cherry had been threatened, coaxed, exhorted to remember something or other. … No use. However, ferociously, perseveringly, she was hauled away out of the enemy’s sphere of influence, she would flip back into it like an eel, over and over again. Mrs. Jardine had got her, and Maisie had lost her.

  Since the last outburst, Maisie had remained silent, as if nonplussed, hanging her head. She must be telling herself she would never give in, never; but at the same time she looked so lonely, I guessed an enormous dismay behind her resolution. That solitary defiant look of the about-to-be-defeated I knew well: both Jess in conflict with Mademoiselle and Sylvia in conflict with Nurse were not infrequently lit by its sombre halo. It set them apart from me, and across the gulf I yearned to them with mingled shame, distress and admiration. I could never stand up to anger, and must compound with the oppressor and be smiled at, rather than bear the flaming placard: I am a naughty girl. I had never been naughty in my life.

  Now that Mrs. Jardine had gone, the electrifying meanings with which her presence always charged the air began to dissolve. The arrows of her words fell harmlessly out of the copper beech on to the grass around us, and we kicked them aside and drew together, an ordinary group of children going for a picnic. The job in hand was to make friends. It was always done as soon as the grown-ups went away, and we had no more than the usual qualms about doing it. We looked at one another with tentative smiles. Maisie nibbled her thumb.

  She was a rough-surfaced, vivid, broad girl with a long back and short legs with bulging hairy calves. Her skin was dark and freckled, the colour was brilliant in her lips and over her prominent cheek bones. She had short hair, immensely thick, springy and coarse; it looked as if no hairbrush had ever been through it. She had an altogether uncared-for plebeian appearance, as of a girl scrubbed perfunctorily with inferior soap and put into cast-off charity clothes. Her features were too bold and bony, but her eyes were magnificent—large, wide open, in colour that clear green which is found sometimes with very dark hair. I thought her extremely attractive.

  Malcolm was a plain boy with a weak, untidy, amiable face, large teeth that needed both cleaning and straightening, and the same rough skin as his sister, only his was fairish and pinkish. His hair jagged down over his forehead and stuck up in spikes in the crown.

  “You are an ass, Mais,” he said.

  “Well, I won’t be bossed by her,” she said gruffly. “Other people can be if they like.”

  “Oh, go and boil your head. Who wants to boss anybody? They’ve got to do somethi
ng with us, haven’t they? Perhaps they don’t like it any more than you do.”

  “They may not like it, but they want it. At least, she does. She wants to keep us here. Besides, you know what Father said.”

  “What?”

  “I was to look after Cherry.”

  “Oh, well …”

  “And you know what else he said.”

  “Oh well. … No, I don’t, as a matter of fact.” He took a couple of marbles from his pocket and juggled with them aimlessly. “All I can say is, I simply fail to see the point of spoiling everything for everybody. This is a ripping place, and they’re being jolly decent to us. She’s getting fed up with you, though, and we’ll probably be packed off. Then where’ll we go?”

  She jerked her head and looked away, flushing and blinking hard. I thought she was blinking back tears. There was a silence; then Jess said:

  “Don’t you like staying here?”

  Instead of answering, Maisie made a pounce on Cherry who had seated herself in one of the basket chairs and was rocking herself monotonously to and fro, and sucking two fingers. She whisked her to her feet by one arm and shook her.

  “For goodness’ sake,” she cried furiously, “stop sucking your fingers! Since you’ve been here you’ve started all your ghastly babyish tricks again. I don’t know what to do with you.”

  Cherry set up a wail, and Malcolm told her to shut up; and Maisie, after standing a moment with the same nonplussed look, turned her back on her and said to Jess:

  “We have to be here because Father had to send us away. He’s in hospital. He’s got cancer of the throat.”

  Malcolm shuffled his feet and looked away, as if something acutely embarrassing had been said.

  “We would have gone away with Auntie Mack,” continued Maisie, “but she couldn’t have us. So we’ve to stay here till he’s better. Then we shall go home.”

  I said:

  “How soon will he be better?”

  “We don’t know for certain. We’ve got to wait for the treatment to work. He’s having treatment.”

  “Does his throat hurt?”

  Maisie paused, then said stiffly:

  “He doesn’t have any more pain, because when it starts they give him something to stop it.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Malcolm. “Let’s go if we’re going.” He flung a pebble with all his might and watched it spin up and away out of sight. “Over the roof,” he said. “Cheers for M. B. Thomson.”

  “Rot,” said Maisie. “Nowhere near. Here, give us one. Bet I chuck farther than you.”

  “Bet you sixpence you don’t. You’ll slam it straight into her bedroom window and knock her out cold.”

  She giggled.

  “I wouldn’t. Still, over the wall if you funk the roof. Go on, you first.”

  He threw; then she threw. This time he muffed it, and his pebble hit the wall and fell in the herbaceous border. Hers went sailing over, still on the upward arc as it crested the wall. She threw like a boy, powerfully, free from the shoulder. Grinning, she held out her hand.

  He turned to us and said politely:

  “Have a shot?”

  We said we couldn’t. He smacked Maisie’s hand down and said:

  “Haven’t got it on me.”

  “Skunk, you haven’t got it at all. What happened to that tip from Harry?”

  “Spent it, my good woman. Whose stomach benefited, may I inquire?”

  “Yours.”

  “And yours.”

  “One tuppenny nut milk bar. Greedy hog.”

  “I wonder if he’s good for another small donation.” He looked meditatively towards the house; then, as if a doubt about gratitude and good taste had come over him, added: “It was jolly decent of him really. I wonder why we have to call him Harry. Seems all wrong to call a rum, dignified old bird like him by his Christian name.”

  “I don’t think he’d notice if we called him Wee MacGregor,” said Maisie. “I don’t think he notices anything. She goes on all day: Harry likes this, Harry does that, Harry thinks the other—”

  “And he never opens his trap.”

  Planted feet wide apart on her muscular legs, she directed towards the house a prolonged intent stare; and under fringes of jasmine and climbing roses, the house stared back with all its eyes. All houses, even suburban brick and stucco villas, fade on such an afternoon as this into the outermost veils of the sun’s antiquity; and the long gabled time-burnished house of Major and Mrs. Jardine, lapped in that violently dreaming light, its blood-orange roof scattered with white somnolent pigeons, looked inexpressibly old, mysterious, burdened with human lives and deaths. We might have been standing in the heart of the old gardens of the sun.

  “It’s not a bad house,” said Maisie; and then: “Anyway, she can’t go on about what she did here when she was a little girl.”

  “Who can’t go on about who?” said Malcolm.

  “Her … about Mother. Because she didn’t ever come here.”

  “Of course not,” said Malcolm abruptly.

  “I bet she’d kid us she did if she could.”

  “Come on,” said Malcolm, “for the Lord’s sake, if we’re going. I’m famished.”

  Maisie turned to Cherry, then flung out her arms and enveloped her in them with tender roughness.

  “There’s a ducky old Cherry Pie,” she said. “Come to Mais. We’re not cross-patches to each other, are we?”

  They hugged.

  “Is her real name Cherry?” asked Jess.

  “I’m Charity Mary Thomson.”

  “After our other grannie,” said Maisie. “Our proper one, but she’s dead now. She called herself Cherry when she was little, so we all got into the habit. It’s a silly sort of name, really.”

  “For a prize silly,” said Malcolm. “I call her raspberry pip.”

  Cherry rushed at him head down and butted him. He swung her up and she pummelled at his chest, and he turned her head over heels on to the grass where she lay kicking, squealing and giggling. Her curly hair tumbled back all round her head and she looked wildly pretty and wanton.

  We witnessed all this with fascination, delighting in the evidences of family feeling. The way brother and sisters treated one another reminded me of E. Nesbit’s books: astringent chaff, home truths, sterling loyalty.

  I wondered if one of the upper windows hid Mrs. Jardine lying on her mauve couch, watching us.

  We started for the picnic.

  5

  So our friendship with the Thomsons began. Summer wore away and they still stayed on, and we saw each other almost every day. Our time was chiefly devoted to strenuous physical recreation—climbing, somersaulting, jumping, turning cartwheels, riding bicycles. My passion for tree-climbing was equalled if not surpassed by Maisie’s; it was the basis of what burst rapidly into a close and emotional relationship. I never knew a girl exercise herself as she did: when she was not ranging over walls and among branches, or pedalling furiously round the paths, she would fall upon and wrestle with me. She was several years my senior, and much heavier, and she generally got me down, but I could climb higher and with more agility.

  The garden was given over to physical displays. Sometimes Harry would emerge from the study where he spent hours alone with his cat, and watch us all competing in the long and the high jump. He seemed to enjoy doing this: he seemed to concentrate on it, and sometimes raised the rope himself with an unsteady hand. He, or rather Mrs. Jardine in his name, had presented all three of them with magnificent bicycles, and we brought our rather inferior ones and played follow my leader for hours on end, whirling in and out of the alleys, toiling, nose on handle bars, up banks and steps, tottering and colliding among the intricacies of the shrubbery. Maisie liked best to lead, but Malcolm was the best leader. He had an offhand slick virtuosity on the wheel which none of us could
approach; his balancing feats would not have shamed a music-hall trick cyclist. Maisie took a world of pains, but she was clumsy. Beetroot-coloured, her hair soaked with perspiration, she laboured grimly in his wake. Jess and I had more style but less stamina and frailer nerves: this made the standard of our performances capricious. Cherry began by tagging along with us, and we were patient with her, though she spoilt the games because she had not yet learnt to dismount unaided; but soon she dropped out of her own accord, and sought the more appreciative society of the domestic staff. She had pretty ways, old-fashioned ways, and became the pet of the kitchen, where she made little jam tarts and showed off and prattled about herself in the third person to her heart’s content. She formed the habit, too, of trotting into Harry’s study and climbing on to his lap. There she would lie against his shoulder, sucking her fingers, her dopey eyes staring, unfocused, unblinking, through half-lowered lids. Obviously she was building him up into a powerful and comforting father-figure, and she clung rapaciously to his male touch. Once during a game of hide and seek, while I was in concealment in the rosemary bush under his window, I overheard her say—in the manner of one sending up coyly, dubiously, a trial balloon— that she was going to call him Daddy. I heard him murmur a word or two of dissent. “Then Grandpa …?” “No. Harry.” She uttered a formal deprecating little laugh, and exclaimed: “Fancy me saying Grandpa! Oh dear, what a silly I am! You’re not nearly old enough for that, are you? You’re a young, young Harry. … You’re more like a sort of Uncle Harry really, aren’t you, I suppose?” He uttered a brief chuckle. “Miss,” he said. “Miss Puss.” It was very odd to hear him laugh: it was as if he didn’t know how to do it, and was practising. But she did make him laugh. He began to love her tenderly. When she was playing with the rest of us in the garden, he would appear suddenly in our midst, just to see that she was getting on all right—not being left out or left behind. Sometimes one discerned his figure haunting one long window after another, as if watching her from different angles. He had always been so freakish, so apparently aimless in his comings and goings, it was at first difficult to realise that he was now guided by one definite motive—to watch over her.