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."