What Maisie Knew
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James
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Title: What Maisie Knew
Author: Henry James
Release Date: March 12, 2003 [eBook
#7118]
[Most recently updated and HTML version added: November 9,
2005]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT BookishMall.com EBOOK WHAT
MAISIE KNEW***
E-text prepared by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA
and revised by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.
HTML version prepared by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.
WHAT MAISIE KNEW
by
Henry James
CONTENTS
The litigation seemed interminable and had in fact been
complicated; but by the decision on the appeal the judgement of the
divorce-court was confirmed as to the assignment of the child. The
father, who, though bespattered from head to foot, had made good
his case, was, in pursuance of this triumph, appointed to keep her:
it was not so much that the mother's character had been more
absolutely damaged as that the brilliancy of a lady's complexion
(and this lady's, in court, was immensely remarked) might be more
regarded as showing the spots. Attached, however, to the second
pronouncement was a condition that detracted, for Beale Farange,
from its sweetness—an order that he should refund to his late wife
the twenty-six hundred pounds put down by her, as it was called,
some three years before, in the interest of the child's maintenance
and precisely on a proved understanding that he would take no
proceedings: a sum of which he had had the administration and of
which he could render not the least account. The obligation thus
attributed to her adversary was no small balm to Ida's resentment;
it drew a part of the sting from her defeat and compelled Mr.
Farange perceptibly to lower his crest. He was unable to produce
the money or to raise it in any way; so that after a squabble
scarcely less public and scarcely more decent than the original
shock of battle his only issue from his predicament was a
compromise proposed by his legal advisers and finally accepted by
hers.
His debt was by this arrangement remitted to him and the little
girl disposed of in a manner worthy of the judgement-seat of
Solomon. She was divided in two and the portions tossed impartially
to the disputants. They would take her, in rotation, for six months
at a time; she would spend half the year with each. This was odd
justice in the eyes of those who still blinked in the fierce light
projected from the tribunal—a light in which neither parent figured
in the least as a happy example to youth and innocence. What was to
have been expected on the evidence was the nomination, in loco
parentis, of some proper third person, some respectable or at
least some presentable friend. Apparently, however, the circle of
the Faranges had been scanned in vain for any such ornament; so
that the only solution finally meeting all the difficulties was,
save that of sending Maisie to a Home, the partition of the
tutelary office in the manner I have mentioned. There were more
reasons for her parents to agree to it than there had ever been for
them to agree to anything; and they now prepared with her help to
enjoy the distinction that waits upon vulgarity sufficiently
attested. Their rupture had resounded, and after being perfectly
insignificant together they would be decidedly striking apart. Had
they not produced an impression that warranted people in looking
for appeals in the newspapers for the rescue of the little
one—reverberation, amid a vociferous public, of the idea that some
movement should be started or some benevolent person should come
forward? A good lady came indeed a step or two: she was distantly
related to Mrs. Farange, to whom she proposed that, having children
and nurseries wound up and going, she should be allowed to take
home the bone of contention and, by working it into her system,
relieve at least one of the parents. This would make every time,
for Maisie, after her inevitable six months with Beale, much more
of a change.
"More of a change?" Ida cried. "Won't it be enough of a change
for her to come from that low brute to the person in the world who
detests him most?"
"No, because you detest him so much that you'll always talk to
her about him. You'll keep him before her by perpetually abusing
him."
Mrs. Farange stared. "Pray, then, am I to do nothing to
counteract his villainous abuse of me?"
The good lady, for a moment, made no reply: her silence was a
grim judgement of the whole point of view. "Poor little monkey!"
she at last exclaimed; and the words were an epitaph for the tomb
of Maisie's childhood. She was abandoned to her fate. What was
clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to either
parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for
bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could
be mixed. They had wanted her not for any good they could do her,
but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each
other. She should serve their anger and seal their revenge, for
husband and wife had been alike crippled by the heavy hand of
justice, which in the last resort met on neither side their
indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything. If each was
only to get half this seemed to concede that neither was so base as
the other pretended, or, to put it differently, offered them both
as bad indeed, since they were only as good as each other. The
mother had wished to prevent the father from, as she said, "so much
as looking" at the child; the father's plea was that the mother's
lightest touch was "simply contamination." These were the opposed
principles in which Maisie was to be educated—she was to fit them
together as she might. Nothing could have been more touching at
first than her failure to suspect the ordeal that awaited her
little unspotted soul.
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