Portrait of a Lady

THE BALLAD AND THE SOURCE--Rosamond Lehmann--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.75).

Rosamond Lehmann, one of England's most distinguished woman novelists, is the daughter of a onetime editor of Punch. She began writing in her youth, was first published at 16, then stopped for years because she could find only cliches in her work. She married a painter, bore him two children and in 1927 published Dusty Answer, a moving first novel that revealed great promise.

Her new book fulfills it. It is a character study of Mrs. Sibyl Jardine, who lived in an old house set on a round hill surrounded by beeches and birch trees. Mrs. Jardine was a mystery. She fascinated children and worried their parents. The Ballad and the Source begins when she invites her neighbors' daughters, Jess and Rebecca, to pick primroses and have tea.

When the children saw Mrs. Jardine they were enthralled. She wore a pale blue gown with wide sleeves, decorated with blue, rose and violet flowers. Her white hair was fringed, puffed and curled. She wore rubies, turquoises, diamonds and emeralds on her withered hands. When she said, "I must kiss you, because I loved your grandmother," the children reflected that no one said such things in their family. When she told them that their father was the handsomest man she had ever seen, ten-year-old Rebecca asked guilelessly, "Do you wish you had married him instead?"

Mrs. Jardine's talk wove a spell around them. Speaking in magnificent flowing sentences, she talked to them as though they were her own age, but more conservative. She spoke of her three novels: "My books are forgotten for the moment--but they will be read again." She said of her first husband: "I took the only course that could save us from a life of self-contempt and spiritual dishonor." Of her second husband, handsome, upright and slender, with trembling hands and' bushy eyebrows, Mrs. Jardine said: "He was a passionate ornithologist--that is, he knew all about birds." She ended the chapters of her conversations with such studied, melodramatic disclosures as: "I have never seen my grandchildren."

Stories Within Stories. The Ballad and the Source is Rebecca's adolescent portrait of Mrs. Jardine. It is a novel of stories within stories. The stories are suggestive, sometimes poignant. One of Mrs. Jardine's novels, it appears, was interpreted as a vindictive portrait of Rebecca's grandmother. Mrs. Jardine's leaving her first husband was apparently a noted scandal of the 1890s, complete with ruined career, resignation from the diplomatic corps, and a midnight attempt by Mrs. Jardine to kidnap their infant daughter Ianthe. When Ianthe was 18 her emancipated mother sent a lover to win her away from her conventional guardian--a plot which left the lover dead by his own hand, Ianthe out of her wits, and her illegitimate child dead.

But The Ballad and the Source is only Rebecca's story of the stories that Mrs. Jardine told her. Rebecca is never more than a spectator or a listener; her emotions are not involved in the tense scenes that filled Mrs. Jardine's life, and, too often, neither are the reader's. But the novel is masterly in its characterization of Mrs. Jardine and her world. If its emotions were at first--instead of second--hand, it might come close to greatness.

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