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 phantasmagoricâstrange shadows dancing on a sheet.
It was as if the whole performance had been given for herâa 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.
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
monogramsâIda bristled with monogramsâshe 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
shriekedâher shriek was much admiredâand 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 THEY 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 strainâthat's
where it is; and you'll feel it still worse, you know."
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
attachableâimages 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 motherâthings 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.
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
yourselfâyou 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!"âafter 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!"