Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
‘Maud
, don’t be so pompous and blasphemous!’
‘He’s cast himself out of
my
sight,’ the child inexorably went on. ‘This has shown what he is. I have done my best; I have never not treated him as my father. I did my duty to him, and now you see. I’ve done all in my power to set him up as ruler over his own house, even when it’s been your house, Cousin Antonia. His word ought to have been law, so I have very often obeyed him. If I’m to have a father, I don’t choose to have a father who’s not thought of highly, at any rate by me. I’ve been to a lot of trouble, honouring him. But in spite of all, there he went about, this last day or two, looking small. Why should I put up with that?’
‘Nonsense; he’s not a small man—nothing makes him look it.’
‘He’s looked like nothing,’ the pitiless Maud pronounced.
Antonia marvelled: ‘How you do come to conclusions!’
‘Yes, Cousin Antonia, I do.’
‘And
act on them—really one could admire you!’
‘Father did not,’ Maud said, with a curling lip.
‘He didn’t know, I expect, as well as you and I do, what you were up to.’
‘What do you know I was up to?’ asked the child, showing, for the second time in this interview, a flicker of speculation
as to Antonia.
‘A purge, perhaps?’
‘I don’t know what’s come over this place,’ Maud stated. ‘However, the Lord did, so in despair He showed me what I had better do.’
‘And did the Lord suggest your sticking up your father for ten shillings?’
‘No, I thought of that,’ said Maud, not turning a hair.
‘Your motives were a bit mixed, didn’t it strike you?’
‘I’d been to a good deal of trouble, Cousin Antonia.’
‘Spying on Jane? Yes, I suppose you had. Well, I can only say what I said before—you might have found
me
good for a pound!’
‘I dare say,’ agreed Maud, in a voice for the moment abstracted, for she was rubbing spittle, on the remote chance of its still being possible to avert blood-poisoning, into the rawer parts of her grazed knee. ‘But I was considering what was right or wrong. It was merely that I also needed ten shillings.’
‘If it comes to that, they
were,
as you say, my letters.’
Maud stretched her frock till it once more covered her knee, then pointed out: ‘They were father’s thorn in the flesh.’
‘And were altogether doing no good, you thought?’
‘That’s for you to say, Cousin Antonia. You were the one who knew Cousin Guy.’
‘So it’s generally thought, Maud. Generally thought.’ Tilting her head back against the bed-head, Antonia closed her eyes, having for far too long had a view of this room and all in it, including Maud.
The nature of the outrage this afternoon became clear enough—rather clearer, perhaps, than one wished it to. To invite or allow any more from Maud would be to get in irretrievably deep with the Old Testament. Antonia, so many of whose days here, or indeed in these days almost anywhere, went by in a haze of suspended notice,, was struck, and the more because so suddenly, by the obstinacy and, give her her due, patience with which Maud had gone on giving Fred a build-up. The child’s requiring life to be patriarchal was not, now that one thought of it, so surprising; but one never had thought of it—why should one? Maud and Fred, indeed, were the last two persons one in any way connected with one another. Maud as a character had to be re-assessed—she was a bandit not out of contempt for law but out of contempt for its missingness from Montefort: she in fact was the purest authoritarian. She had put into power, one might say forced into being, a father-figure: this had collapsed on top of her in the Horse Field. Wrath need not necessarily have ill become Fred; if anything, anger became a father. But he had made an exhibition of himself— the last thing she ever wanted to see. He had been human, and she could not forgive him.
To such of his offences as were indictable—tooth-gnashing, cursing, manhandling of his child—she had lost no time in drawing the Lord’s attention: action (she had not a doubt of that) would shortly be taken in proper quarters. But she was still brooding, and brooding probably over what (she felt) she felt more keenly than could the Lord—her father’s letting of her down. He had affronted, totally, her ideas for and her idea of him. Mania had burst out. He had misjudged her attitude, misconstrued her motives, gone so far as to call her a little-so-and-so. In the course of attempting to twist her arm off he had blunderingly trodden upon her toe—and it had been that gross, blind inadvertence which most enraged her. For his true crime was, having lost his head.
The outrage, of course, had been two-sided. What Fred had actually done to Maud’ was nothing to what he’d fancied she did to him. What the child had really been up to, one never would know; possibly she only half knew herself. But he imagined he knew; that was enough. If he’d felt baited, then in effect he was so. Seemingly she had taunted him with the letters—it was their, not her power to torment over which Antonia had to ponder. So that was really the size of it, to him? How much had been dragged up, out of how many years? She rubbed at her forehead, fearing to know.
Reopening her eyes, Antonia found herself in the course of being regarded by Maud strangely; from, as it were, some new cosmic standpoint. This differed in an uneasy way from the child’s more usual brief scrutinies in having evidently been going on for some time; nor, though caught in the act, did Maud now desist—the regard, which first had had the advantage of Antonia’s minutes of abeyance, seemed to claim the right to continue, noted or not. Gladly though the other would have ignored it, it was not in her to do so for very long.—’What are you sitting looking at me like that for?’
‘I was thinking.’
‘And why, pray?’
‘Mother says you were why I was born.’
Antonia was stunned: she only so far recovered as to give a choking tug at her pearls.
‘Yes; she says you could never leave well alone.’
I should have considered it, more, Fate.’
‘She says you always fall back on Fate sooner than face what you have done.’
‘Good God, Maud.’
Maud gave a token frown.
‘I mean to say, what next?—We’re the instruments of each other’s destinies right enough, but absolutely I won’t agree that I caused you. Perfectly evidently you had to be—what the world had done to deserve you, one can’t say. What has the world done to deserve most things?’
‘Sinned,’ Maud said, not without satisfaction.
Antonia rolled off the bed, made for the wardrobe, tore off her shirt and began to hunt for a fresh one, head-and-shoulders into the hanging garments’ insufferable redolence of herself. Backing out again, dragging something tartan, she demanded: ‘And when do you and your mother have these chats?’
‘When she’s upset, sometimes.’
Antonia stormed: ‘You should take no notice of people when they’re upset.’
‘I don’t, chiefly.’
‘And never quote them!’
‘You and I upset her, Cousin Antonia.’
‘We’ve nothing else in common: you’d better go! I said, “for a minute”, and that’s up.—Parading about psalm-singing outside my window! That was the plan—to move in on me, I suppose?’
Maud said: ‘I only wondered,’ in the tone of one who no longer does. She got off her chair with an air of accomplished purpose, seemed about to consider leaving the room, but instead took one or two steps to a point from which she could verify what was on the bedside table. She remarked a degree more matily: ‘Oh, you read the Bible.’ Antonia, fumblingly buttoning the new shirt, resented this in furious silence. ‘If you’re not going downstairs,’ she declared finally, ‘I am.’
‘Or we both could,’ said Maud.
‘No, I don’t think so.—In your case, oughtn’t it to be teatime?’
‘It has been teatime. No tea. Nobody’s anywhere.’
‘How fast your curse is taking effect!’
Silence: Antonia could not but turn round. Maud, now in touch with the bedside things, was puffing ash off the bottle of sleeping pills, the better to read what was on the label. She handled the bottle: pink capsules, gone down in number, delinquent within it skidded and slid.—
‘Leave those alone!’—
Not so much reprobation as sheer unmovedness was in the child’s face, as after a moment, she complied. ‘So,’ she seemed to remark, ‘you are on the run …’ It
was
a child’s face, tense over the bones with skin, a high look of candour about the forehead, awakeness widening the eye-sockets. Singularity, the unsludged clearness of a coin fresh from the mint and not to be struck again, and that sort of intentness hard not to identify with a sort of purity appeared in it; and among other attributes of the gaze was fearlessness, only not more attractive because it was so complete and, one might feel, justified. Nothing, or almost nothing, made Maud not young, not a child throughout. Only, one missed in regard to her some natural sensation within oneself— some fond perturbedness or anxiety. In general one feels on behalf of children the enemy menace of the future: love cannot hope to go with them all the way, care cannot prevent what may be to come. The younger the head, the dearer the child, the more we are given to apprehend the militating against it of ruthless forces. Children are our vulnerability: what may or may not be the striking power of years to be? Few are children for whom one feels no concern: Maud happened, however, to be one of them. Solicitude, in this case, went into reverse—what might the future not have to fear from her?
Her unmistakable content was moral force: how could she elect to wield it? She was Judgment, to which we must all be brought. She opened the cover of the Bible, twisted her head to read what was written inside, meditated upon that, let the cover fall. ‘Cousin Antonia?’
‘That’s enough,’ warned the other, rapidly starting for the door.
‘Was
Cousin Guy a good man?’
Antonia had got to the threshold: she snatched at the doorhandle, making sure it would turn, before casting back her negligent-sounding answer: ‘I couldn’t tell you.’
‘Or don’t you know?’
But Antonia had fled the room, left the field to Maud. A minute later, anybody watching Montefort from the fields might have seen the child waving out of the window, making a summoning signal to Gay David, who waited below. Antonia meanwhile was at the stairhead—hand on the shaking rail or shaking hand on the rail, she did not know which. It was true what Maud said: though it had long been tea time, emptiness reigned throughout the historic house—all was suspended, except the question. Antonia, beginning to go downstairs, was met by the arid breath of outdoors—the door, standing as it had stood last night, open, let the afternoon’s bright shadows into the hall. One by one, across the view through the doorway, cattle were in a listless file proceeding towards the river woods: this, as the one movement, she stood intently watching from the foot of the stairs, where she had herself come to a stop.
It was the bottom of a well, this bottom of the stairs—she looked round to notice with what she shared it. Not yet quite aired out of the place was the reek of last midnight’s burned-out lamp; dishevelment of horse-cloths upon the chair marked where Jane had sat, either found or lost. On the gothic ledge of the hat-stand lodged the prayer-book, deposited on Maud’s way through; and, next the prayer-book, a packet of letters tied with white ribbon. Antonia, picking the packet up, no more than glanced at the writing: she could now calculate what had been the movement of at least one man. Fred must have come in, put them here, gone out again—not knowing what else on earth to do with them.
It was Peregrine, this time, who drove the Daimler. He had got it in at the gates, and was at a crawl proceeding along the avenue, which led, so far as his eye saw, only to desertion and further mountains, when Jane stepped out from behind a tree. They might have been meeting by appointment. He gave a nod and pulled up the car—the scene was sorrowfully sunny with a yellow evening, haunted in ranks by beeches gone, down one by one in gale after gale year after year. Nothing was to tell him that the disaster had not been all at a blow, yesterday—for indeed something bereft was in the quietness of the air but that moss greened over the stumps, sunken, brambles had filled the out-rooted hollows, and saplings, some of them at a height, already ventured into existence in the gaps between the surviving boles. Wide apart, shadows like trees fallen barricaded what was left of the avenue; and Jane’s pink dress, tattered by light-and-shade, itself looked to him like a fragment—he had had no idea she was so poor. He leaned across, opened the passenger door and said: ‘Hop in. Vesta wants to speak to you.’
‘You left the gates open.’
‘So?’ asked Peregrine, glancing back.
‘Cattle.’
‘Well, we’ll be going out again. Can’t turn here, though—if I go on, what happens?’
‘Our house.’
‘Turn there, then,’ said Peregrine, unconcerned. ‘Let’s get going, shall we?’
I’m not coming,’ she told him, nicely enough.
‘You’re not doing anything,’ Peregrine pointed out. ‘And don’t make difficulties, there’s a good girl: this is something special.’
‘Something about last night?’ she quickly asked—so betrayingly quickly that she had to do something to buy him off: she therefore slid into the seat beside him, making a point of not caring whether he answered, which he did not. They went on to make the loop-turn over the overgrown gravel, tyres broadly crushing the white clover: at Montefort’s door, open, and rows of windows he was courteous enough to glance; she also doing so—like a stranger. ‘Nobody about,’ he remarked to her, ‘that is, apparently.’ ‘No,’ she contradicted, ‘my cousin was in the hall.’ ‘Saw us, then?’ ‘No, she was looking at something else.’ They tailed away again down the avenue.