What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York: Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897)/Chapter 2
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 that they fiercely kept 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 when 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 it was accomplished in the depth 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 altogether new. If, accordingly, as she grew older, her parents in turn, in her presence, announced 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 alterations 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 recognize something that her nurse called "the important letter haitch." Miss Overmore, however hungry, never disappeared; this marked her somehow as a being more exalted, and the character was confirmed by a prettiness that Maisie supposed to be extraordinary. Mrs. Farange had said that she was 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 say in 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 that 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 who 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 am 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 unmistakable language of a pair of eyes of deep dark gray. "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 gentleman 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 had not 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 that you're a person to whom I can appeal to help me 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.