<p> <SPAN name="1"></SPAN></p>
<p> </p>
<h3>I<br/> </h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>they</i> 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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!"</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />
1 of 2
2 of 2
Previous
Next
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.