What Maisie Knew | Page 5

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!"

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