WHAT MAISIE KNEW
HENRY JAMES
The litigation seemed interminable and had in fact been
complicated; but by the decision on the appeal the judgement of
the divorce-court was confirmed as to the assignment of the
child. The father, who, though bespattered from head to foot, had
made good his case, was, in pursuance of this triumph, appointed
to keep her: it was not so much that the mother's character had
been more absolutely damaged as that the brilliancy of a lady's
complexion (and this lady's, in court, was immensely remarked)
might be more regarded as showing the spots. Attached, however,
to the second pronouncement was a condition that detracted, for
Beale Farange, from its sweetness--an order that he should refund
to his late wife the twenty-six hundred pounds put down by her,
as it was called, some three years before, in the interest of the
child's maintenance and precisely on a proved understanding that
he would take no proceedings: a sum of which he had had the
administration and of which he could render not the least
account. The obligation thus attributed to her adversary was no
small balm to Ida's resentment; it drew a part of the sting from
her defeat and compelled Mr. Farange perceptibly to lower his
crest. He was unable to produce the money or to raise it in any
way; so that after a squabble scarcely less public and scarcely
more decent than the original shock of battle his only issue from
his predicament was a compromise proposed by his legal advisers
and finally accepted by hers.
His debt was by this arrangement remitted to him and the little
girl disposed of in a manner worthy of the judgement-seat of
Solomon. She was divided in two and the portions tossed
impartially to the disputants. They would take her, in rotation,
for six months at a time; she would spend half the year with
each. This was odd justice in the eyes of those who still blinked
in the fierce light projected from the tribunal--a light in which
neither parent figured in the least as a happy example to youth
and innocence. What was to have been expected on the evidence was
the nomination, in loco parentis, of some proper third person,
some respectable or at least some presentable friend. Apparently,
however, the circle of the Faranges had been scanned in vain for
any such ornament; so that the only solution finally meeting all
the difficulties was, save that of sending Maisie to a Home, the
partition of the tutelary office in the manner I have mentioned.
There were more reasons for her parents to agree to it than there
had ever been for them to agree to anything; and they now
prepared with her help to enjoy the distinction that waits upon
vulgarity sufficiently attested. Their rupture had resounded, and
after being perfectly insignificant together they would be
decidedly striking apart. Had they not produced an impression
that warranted people in looking for appeals in the newspapers
for the rescue of the little one--reverberation, amid a
vociferous public, of the idea that some movement should be
started or some benevolent person should come forward? A good
lady came indeed a step or two: she was distantly related to Mrs.
Farange, to whom she proposed that, having children and nurseries
wound up and going, she should be allowed to take home the bone
of contention and, by working it into her system, relieve at
least one of the parents. This would make every time, for Maisie,
after her inevitable six months with Beale, much more of a
change.
"More of a change?" Ida cried. "Won't it be enough of a change
for her to come from that low brute to the person in the world
who detests him most?"
"No, because you detest him so much that you'll always talk to
her about him. You'll keep him before her by perpetually abusing
him."
Mrs. Farange stared. "Pray, then, am I to do nothing to
counteract his villainous abuse of ME?"
The good lady, for a moment, made no reply: her silence was a
grim judgement of the whole point of view. "Poor little monkey!"
she at last exclaimed; and the words were an epitaph for the tomb
of Maisie's childhood. She was abandoned to her fate. What was
clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to
either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready
vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which
biting acids could be mixed. They had wanted her not for any good
they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her
unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve their anger and
seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been alike crippled
by the heavy hand of justice, which in the last resort met on
neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it,
everything. If each was only to get half this seemed to concede
that neither was so base as the other pretended, or, to put it
differently, offered them both as bad indeed, since they were
only as good as each other. The mother had wished to prevent the
father from, as she said, "so much as looking" at the child; the
father's plea was that the mother's lightest touch was "simply
contamination." These were the opposed principles in which Maisie
was to be educated--she was to fit them together as she might.
Nothing could have been more touching at first than her failure
to suspect the ordeal that awaited her little unspotted soul.
There were persons horrified to think what those in charge of it
would combine to try to make of it: no one could conceive in
advance that they would be able to make nothing ill. This was a
society in which for the most part people were occupied only with
chatter, but the disunited couple had at last grounds for
expecting a time of high activity. They girded their loins, they
felt as if the quarrel had only begun. They felt indeed more
married than ever, inasmuch as what marriage had mainly suggested
to them was the unbroken opportunity to quarrel. There had been
"sides" before, and there were sides as much as ever; for the
sider too the prospect opened out, taking the pleasant form of a
superabundance of matter for desultory conversation. The many
friends of the Faranges drew together to differ about them;
contradiction grew young again over teacups and cigars. Everybody
was always assuring everybody of something very shocking, and
nobody would have been jolly if nobody had been outrageous. The
pair appeared to have a social attraction which failed merely as
regards each other: it was indeed a great deal to be able to say
for Ida that no one but Beale desired her blood, and for Beale
that if he should ever have his eyes scratched out it would be
only by his wife. It was generally felt, to begin with, that they
were awfully good-looking--they had really not been analysed to a
deeper residuum. They made up together for instance some twelve
feet three of stature, and nothing was more discussed than the
apportionment of this quantity. The sole flaw in Ida's beauty was
a length and reach of arm conducive perhaps to her having so
often beaten her ex-husband at billiards, a game in which she
showed a superiority largely accountable, as she maintained, for
the resentment finding expression in his physical violence.
Billiards was her great accomplishment and the distinction her
name always first produced the mention of. Notwithstanding some
very long lines everything about her that might have been large
and that in many women profited by the licence was, with a single
exception, admired and cited for its smallness. The exception was
her eyes, which might have been of mere regulation size, but
which overstepped the modesty of nature; her mouth, on the other
hand, was barely perceptible, and odds were freely taken as to
the measurement of her waist. She was a person who, when she was
out and she was always out--produced everywhere a sense of having
been seen often, the sense indeed of a kind of abuse of
visibility, so that it would have been, in the usual places
rather vulgar to wonder at her. Strangers only did that; but
they, to the amusement of the familiar, did it very much: it was
an inevitable way of betraying an alien habit. Like her husband
she carried clothes, carried them as a train carries passengers:
people had been known to compare their taste and dispute about
the accommodation they gave these articles, though inclining on
the whole to the commendation of Ida as less overcrowded,
especially with jewellery and flowers. Beale Farange had natural
decorations, a kind of costume in his vast fair beard, burnished
like a gold breastplate, and in the eternal glitter of the teeth
that his long moustache had been trained not to hide and that
gave him, in every possible situation, the look of the joy of
life. He had been destined in his youth for diplomacy and
momentarily attached, without a salary, to a legation which
enabled him often to say "In MY time in the East": but
contemporary history had somehow had no use for him, had hurried
past him and left him in perpetual Piccadilly. Every one knew
what he had only twenty-five hundred. Poor Ida, who had run
through everything, had now nothing but her carriage and her
paralysed uncle. This old brute as he was called, was supposed to
have a lot put away. The child was provided for, thanks to a
crafty godmother, a defunct aunt of Beale's, who had left her
something in such a manner that the parents could appropriate
only the income.
