II
In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a
child's mind the past, on each occasion, became for her as
indistinct as the future: she surrendered herself to the actual
with a good faith that might have been touching to either parent.
Crudely as they had calculated they were at first justified by
the event: she was the little feathered shuttlecock they could
fiercely keep flying between them. The evil they had the gift of
thinking or pretending to think of each other they poured into
her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle,
and each of them had doubtless the best conscience in the world
as to the duty of teaching her the stern truth that should be her
safeguard against the other. She was at the age for which all
stories are true and all conceptions are stories. The actual was
the absolute, the present alone was vivid. The objurgation for
instance launched in the carriage by her mother after she had at
her father's bidding punctually performed was a missive that
dropped into her memory with the dry rattle of a letter falling
into a pillar-box. Like the letter it was, as part of the
contents of a well-stuffed post-bag, delivered in due course at
the right address. In the presence of these overflowings, after
they had continued for a couple of years, the associates of
either party sometimes felt that something should be done for
what they called "the real good, don't you know?" of the child.
The only thing done, however, in general, took place when it was
sighingly remarked that she fortunately wasn't all the year round
where she happened to be at the awkward moment, and that,
furthermore, either from extreme cunning or from extreme
stupidity, she appeared not to take things in.
The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents,
corresponded with a great date in her small still life: the
complete vision, private but final, of the strange office she
filled. It was literally a moral revolution and accomplished in
the depths of her nature. The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves
began to move their arms and legs; old forms and phrases began to
have a sense that frightened her. She had a new feeling, the
feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea
of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment. She puzzled
out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she
had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult, and that
everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so.
Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be
employed no longer. She would forget everything, she would repeat
nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of
her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a
pleasure new and keen. When therefore, as she grew older, her
parents in turn announced before her that she had grown shockingly
dull, it was not from any real contraction of her little stream of
life. She spoiled their fun, but she practically added to her own.
She saw more and more; she saw too much. It was Miss Overmore,
her first governess, who on a momentous occasion had sown the
seeds of secrecy; sown them not by anything she said, but by a
mere roll of those fine eyes which Maisie already admired.
Moddle had become at this time, after alternations of residence
of which the child had no clear record, an image faintly embalmed
in the remembrance of hungry disappearances from the nursery
and distressful lapses in the alphabet, sad embarrassments,
in particular, when invited to recognise something her nurse
described as "the important letter haitch." Miss Overmore,
however hungry, never disappeared: this marked her somehow as of
higher rank, and the character was confirmed by a prettiness that
Maisie supposed to be extraordinary. Mrs. Farange had described her
as almost too pretty, and some one had asked what that mattered
so long as Beale wasn't there. "Beale or no Beale," Maisie had
heard her mother reply, "I take her because she's a lady and yet
awfully poor. Rather nice people, but there are seven sisters
at home. What do people mean?"
Maisie didn't know what people meant, but she knew very soon all
the names of all the sisters; she could say them off better than
she could say the multiplication-table. She privately wondered
moreover, though she never asked, about the awful poverty, of
which her companion also never spoke. Food at any rate came up by
mysterious laws; Miss Overmore never, like Moddle, had on an
apron, and when she ate she held her fork with her little finger
curled out. The child, who watched her at many moments, watched
her particularly at that one. "I think you're lovely," she often
said to her; even mamma, who was lovely too, had not such a
pretty way with the fork. Maisie associated this showier presence
with her now being "big," knowing of course that nursery-
governesses were only for little girls who were not, as she said,
"really" little. She vaguely knew, further, somehow, that the
future was still bigger than she, and that a part of what made it
so was the number of governesses lurking in it and ready to dart
out. Everything that had happened when she was really little was
dormant, everything but the positive certitude, bequeathed from
afar by Moddle, that the natural way for a child to have her
parents was separate and successive, like her mutton and her
pudding or her bath and her nap.
"DOES he know he lies?"--that was what she had vivaciously asked
Miss Overmore on the occasion which was so suddenly to lead to a
change in her life.
"Does he know--" Miss Overmore stared; she had a stocking pulled
over her hand and was pricking at it with a needle which she
poised in the act. Her task was homely, but her movement, like
all her movements, graceful.
"Why papa."
"That he 'lies'?"
"That's what mamma says I'm to tell him--'that he lies and he
knows he lies.'" Miss Overmore turned very red, though she
laughed out till her head fell back; then she pricked again at
her muffled hand so hard that Maisie wondered how she could
bear it. "AM I to tell him?" the child went on. It was then that
her companion addressed her in the unmistakeable language of a
pair of eyes of deep dark grey. "I can't say No," they replied as
distinctly as possible; "I can't say No, because I'm afraid of
your mamma, don't you see? Yet how can I say Yes after your papa
has been so kind to me, talking to me so long the other day,
smiling and flashing his beautiful teeth at me the time we met
him in the Park, the time when, rejoicing at the sight of us, he
left the gentlemen he was with and turned and walked with us,
stayed with us for half an hour?" Somehow in the light of Miss
Overmore's lovely eyes that incident came back to Maisie with a
charm it hadn't had at the time, and this in spite of the fact
that after it was over her governess had never but once alluded
to it. On their way home, when papa had quitted them, she had
expressed the hope that the child wouldn't mention it to mamma.
Maisie liked her so, and had so the charmed sense of being liked
by her, that she accepted this remark as settling the matter and
wonderingly conformed to it. The wonder now lived again, lived in
the recollection of what papa had said to Miss Overmore: "I've
only to look at you to see you're a person I can appeal to for
help to save my daughter." Maisie's ignorance of what she was to
be saved from didn't diminish the pleasure of the thought that
Miss Overmore was saving her. It seemed to make them cling
together as in some wild game of "going round."
