Read Online The Ballad and the Source by Rosamond Lehmann - Free Book Online

over the face of a statue. She looked at me, smiling; her smile lit by her tears had a wild and tragic gutter. She whispered: “I knew it would be so;” and kissed me. She put her finger to her lips, and we went out, tiptoeing past the open door, downstairs again.
    The stronger Maisie’s feelings for me grew, the weaker became her grasp on Cherry. I satisfied her violent and jealous sense of ownership. She began to relax. Her scrubbed, harsh, mongrel look disappeared, her face filled out and glowed like a poppy. At rarer and rarer intervals did she pounce on her sister and try to snatch her from the bonfire. For one thing it was into Harry’s hands rather than into Mrs. Jardine’s that Cherry had fallen; and Harry presented no sort of target for desperate acts of will and duty. Assuming no authority, exercising none by word or deed, he took away her weapons. If she shared nothing else with her mother’s mother, she had in common with her an outstanding positiveness of nature. Their feet rang on concrete, their fare was solid. But Harry was a world extinct. Appearing and vanishing in room and garden, haunting the window, he seemed to be proclaiming: “I am nothing;” and this sole assertion, made with singular delicacy and weight, made a cloak, vaporous but impenetrably enshrouding, to throw over Cherry.
    One day, instead of locking herself into the bathroom with Cherry to supervise her evening bath, Maisie simply stayed out in the garden with me. “Ask Lucy to bath you,” she said.
    That was the end.
    6
    Maisie was the first woman friend I ever had. There were plenty of girls, then, and afterwards, with whom I played games and exchanged confidences, but my relationship with Maisie was so far removed from the waist-entwined, I’ve got a secret, giggle and whisper it, cross your heart you won’t tell level that I think of it now as adult. It was she whose steadfast passion and disillusionment, laid bare so firmly, so without obliquity or reserve, first planted deep within the feathery shifting webs and folds of my consciousness that seed which grows a shape too huge, too complex ever to see in outline, clear and whole: the monster, human experience.
    We sat in the fork of the walnut tree, and she said:
    â€œYou know, I loathed you when I first saw you. I thought you were going to be the most ghastly beast.”
    â€œOh … why?” I felt hurt.
    â€œShe would go on and on about you …”
    â€œWhat did she say?”
    â€œWell, saying your Grannie had been godmother to my mother and how she hoped this what d’you call it—generation—would be friends again, and all that sort of muck.”
    I reflected. It seemed a venal offence, but to Maisie it had appeared a sinister plot. She added:
    â€œAnd now you’re my best friend.” She picked up my hand and gripped it in hers, which was tanned, freckled, bony, and said: “Promise something.”
    â€œI promise. What?”
    â€œYou’ll be my best friend.”
    I considered one or two others among my circle who had qualifications for this title, but decided to grade them down, and replied without hesitation:
    â€œYes. All right.”
    We sat silent for a few moments, holding hands. I was conscious of the flattery, from a girl older than myself. I see now that her life had split her, so that part of her was unusually childish and part had taken the rigid form of premature maturity. After a while she said:
    â€œShe’s given up talking about my mother—I wasn’t going to have any of that. Malcolm can let her feed him up with it if he likes, but I won’t. Besides, I promised Father …”
    â€œWhat did you promise him?”
    â€œThat I’d never … that I’d never, never listen to her.”
    The words burst forth with explosive violence. She stared out into the garden. The leafy, sun-saturated shade we sat in brought out a burning green light