I
The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was
inevitably confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware
that something had happened which must matter a good deal and
looking anxiously out for the effects of so great a cause. It was
to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than
she at first understood, but also even at first to understand
much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever
understood before. Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a story
could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken into
the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she
might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide
of a magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric--strange
shadows dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance
had been given for her--a mite of a half-scared infant in a great
dim theatre. She was in short introduced to life with a
liberality in which the selfishness of others found its account,
and there was nothing to avert the sacrifice but the modesty of
her youth.
Her first term was with her father, who spared her only in not
letting her have the wild letters addressed to her by her mother:
he confined himself to holding them up at her and shaking them,
while he showed his teeth, and then amusing her by the way he
chucked them, across the room, bang into the fire. Even at
that moment, however, she had a scared anticipation of fatigue, a
guilty sense of not rising to the occasion, feeling the charm of
the violence with which the stiff unopened envelopes, whose big
monograms--Ida bristled with monograms--she would have liked to
see, were made to whizz, like dangerous missiles, through the
air. The greatest effect of the great cause was her own greater
importance, chiefly revealed to her in the larger freedom with
which she was handled, pulled hither and thither and kissed, and
the proportionately greater niceness she was obliged to show. Her
features had somehow become prominent; they were so perpetually
nipped by the gentlemen who came to see her father and the smoke
of whose cigarettes went into her face. Some of these gentlemen
made her strike matches and light their cigarettes; others,
holding her on knees violently jolted, pinched the calves of her
legs till she shrieked--her shriek was much admired--and
reproached them with being toothpicks. The word stuck in her
mind and contributed to her feeling from this time that she was
deficient in something that would meet the general desire. She
found out what it was: it was a congenital tendency to the
production of a substance to which Moddle, her nurse, gave a
short ugly name, a name painfully associated at dinner with the
part of the joint that she didn't like. She had left behind her
the time when she had no desires to meet, none at least save
Moddle's, who, in Kensington Gardens, was always on the bench
when she came back to see if she had been playing too far.
Moddle's desire was merely that she shouldn't do that, and she
met it so easily that the only spots in that long brightness were
the moments of her wondering what would become of her if, on her
rushing back, there should be no Moddle on the bench. They still
went to the Gardens, but there was a difference even there; she
was impelled perpetually to look at the legs of other children
and ask her nurse if THEY were toothpicks. Moddle was terribly
truthful; she always said: "Oh my dear, you'll not find such
another pair as your own." It seemed to have to do with something
else that Moddle often said: "You feel the strain--that's where
it is; and you'll feel it still worse, you know."
Thus from the first Maisie not only felt it, but knew she felt
it. A part of it was the consequence of her father's telling her
he felt it too, and telling Moddle, in her presence, that she
must make a point of driving that home. She was familiar, at the
age of six, with the fact that everything had been changed on her
account, everything ordered to enable him to give himself up to
her. She was to remember always the words in which Moddle
impressed upon her that he did so give himself: "Your papa wishes
you never to forget, you know, that he has been dreadfully put
about." If the skin on Moddle's face had to Maisie the air of
being unduly, almost painfully, stretched, it never presented
that appearance so much as when she uttered, as she often had
occasion to utter, such words. The child wondered if they didn't
make it hurt more than usual; but it was only after some time
that she was able to attach to the picture of her father's
sufferings, and more particularly to her nurse's manner about
them, the meaning for which these things had waited. By the time
she had grown sharper, as the gentlemen who had criticised her
calves used to say, she found in her mind a collection of images
and echoes to which meanings were attachable--images and echoes
kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high
drawers, like games she wasn't yet big enough to play. The great
strain meanwhile was that of carrying by the right end the things
her father said about her mother--things mostly indeed that
Moddle, on a glimpse of them, as if they had been complicated
toys or difficult books, took out of her hands and put away in
the closet. A wonderful assortment of objects of this kind she
was to discover there later, all tumbled up too with the things,
shuffled into the same receptacle, that her mother had said about
her father.
She had the knowledge that on a certain occasion which every day
brought nearer her mother would be at the door to take her away,
and this would have darkened all the days if the ingenious Moddle
hadn't written on a paper in very big easy words ever so many
pleasures that she would enjoy at the other house. These promises
ranged from "a mother's fond love" to "a nice poached egg to
your tea," and took by the way the prospect of sitting up ever so
late to see the lady in question dressed, in silks and velvets
and diamonds and pearls, to go out: so that it was a real support
to Maisie, at the supreme hour, to feel how, by Moddle's
direction, the paper was thrust away in her pocket and there
clenched in her fist. The supreme hour was to furnish her with a
vivid reminiscence, that of a strange outbreak in the drawing-
room on the part of Moddle, who, in reply to something her father
had just said, cried aloud: "You ought to be perfectly ashamed of
yourself--you ought to blush, sir, for the way you go on!" The
carriage, with her mother in it, was at the door; a gentleman who
was there, who was always there, laughed out very loud; her
father, who had her in his arms, said to Moddle: "My dear woman,
I'll settle you presently!"--after which he repeated, showing his
teeth more than ever at Maisie while he hugged her, the words for
which her nurse had taken him up. Maisie was not at the moment so
fully conscious of them as of the wonder of Moddle's sudden
disrespect and crimson face; but she was able to produce them in
the course of five minutes when, in the carriage, her mother, all
kisses, ribbons, eyes, arms, strange sounds and sweet smells,
said to her: "And did your beastly papa, my precious angel, send
any message to your own loving mamma?" Then it was that she found
the words spoken by her beastly papa to be, after all, in her
little bewildered ears, from which, at her mother's appeal, they
passed, in her clear shrill voice, straight to her little
innocent lips. "He said I was to tell you, from him," she
faithfully reported, "that you're a nasty horrid pig!"
