II
It is very difficult for me to recall my state of mind during the days that followed Philibert’s going off with her.
I’ve an idea that I was in a kind of stupor, not much noticing anything. I must have given orders that no one was to be admitted, for I learned afterwards that Claire and your mother both called, and a number of other relatives. I think I remained in my room for a day or two lying on the bed with my clothes on and refusing to open the door to my maid. It was Jinny who roused me. The servants were frightened. The nurse brought her down and she pounded on the door with her little fists till I opened it, but when she saw me she gave a shriek and ran away from me and hid in her nurse’s petticoats. That brought me to my senses, my child’s fear and the servants’ faces. I had a bath and something to eat. They brought me my letters obsequiously, and with furtive curiosity. I could hear the servants hanging about whispering. I imagined them talking, talking, endlessly talking it over downstairs. They were strangers to me, Philibert’s servants, servants of that great, horrible house that I disliked. I had no reason to stay there now. Nothing kept me—I would go home to St. Mary’s Plains.
I started a letter to my Aunt Patience, what was I to say to her? “My husband has run away with another woman. He never loved me. My mother married me to him for her own purposes. Now that she is dead there is no more reason to go on with this horrible farce. I am coming home.” Something of that kind? No, I couldn’t. I stared at the words I had written—“My dearest Aunt Patty.” I seemed to see her sitting off there, at the end of that great distance, adjusting her spectacles, opening my letter with expectant fingers. I saw the shabby room, the sunlight on the worn carpet, the littered writing desk, the piles of books, the stuffed birds in their glass cases. I saw my aunt an old woman, facing old age alone, with equanimity, following year after year the pursuit of knowledge, not afraid of time, not oppressed by solitude, going up to bed night after night in the empty house and kneeling down in her flannel dressing-gown beside her narrow white counterpane to pray to God, and remembering me always, never forgetting me, never leaving me alone.
Once she had said, “When you’re in a hole, Jane, and don’t know what to do, you can always do the thing you hate doing most and you’ll probably not be far wrong.”
Looking out of the window I became aware of Paris and I thought of those words. Paris! There it was streaming by, to the races. Was it aware of what had happened to me? I wondered. Did people know that Bianca and Philibert had run away together like a couple of actors, like a pair of quite common people? I imagined society agog with the scandal. I saw them gloating pitying. I heard women saying—“Cette pauvre femme, elle était vraiment trop bête.” It seemed to me that every one in the street must be looking up at my windows with curiosity and derision. They were invading my privacy, pulling off from me the last decent covering of my dignity. Well, why sit there and bear it? Why suffer public humiliation? My eyes fell on my engagement book. I observed that Philibert and I were due for dinner that night at your Aunt Clothilde’s. I rang for my maid and told her to telephone Madame la Duchesse and say that although Monsieur, having been called out of town, would not be able to present himself at her dinner, I would come with pleasure, as had been arranged. My face in the glass seemed much as usual. I had done all my weeping with you, my poor Blaise, three nights before. Having made up my mind to go out I now experienced a certain relief. The coiffeur was summoned and the manicurist. Aunt Clo’s dinners were very special affairs, so I chose a nice dress, white, and put on an extra rope of pearls. As you know, my appearance created something of a sensation. I saw that at once. They had thought me already dead and buried, and were gossiping as I suspected, over my remains. My business for the moment was to show them that I was alive.
Ah, but how dreary and trivial it all seems now. Why? Why? What earthly difference did it make what they said or thought? But I am telling you about it, just as it was. I wanted, I needed desperately at that moment, the sense of my own dignity. It was all I had left. So I went out to that dinner party and defended it.
Aunt Clo was nice. She was pleased with me and put me opposite her. It was a vatican dinner, semi-political. I had, I remember, the Italian Ambassador on my right and the Foreign Minister on my left. Your aunt was between the Archbishop and the Duc de B—— recently arrived from Rome. The talk was brilliant, I believe. I heard it in a daze, but managed to keep my end up somehow. Clémentine was there, at her best, in wonderful form. She must have known all about Philibert, for she came up to me after dinner and said—“Blaise de Joigny is my great friend. You must come to see me. We have much in common.” Our friendship dates from that night.
But when I reached home I felt more tired than I had thought it possible to be. I went up to the nursery. Jinny was asleep in her cot, hugging a white woolly dog. I knelt beside her and sent out my spirit in search of God, but I did not find Him. I could not pray. I heard my baby’s breathing, blissful, trustful breathing. I knelt listening. She was so small and sweet. Above her was an immense blackness. She made now and then happy little sounds in her sleep, and lying there so still I saw her moving on and on, invisibly, into the future to the ticking of the nursery clock, carried along as she lay there on the current of life, life that was an enormous dupery, an ugliness and a lie.
The days passed, separate and distinct, moving in a procession, each one to be watched and endured separately, moving by their own volition, taking no account of me, having nothing to do with me, answerable to some mysterious power that started each one rolling like a bead dropped from the end of a string, and in each one, as in a crystal, I saw the pageant of Paris revolving, but I was outside, drifting in empty space.
The longing to get away from it all was unbearable. I would go—I would go—I must go—Patience Forbes was the only person in the world who could help me—and yet I went on working out my idea that took me about among people, and you, dear Blaise, went with me. Your attitude was of a delicacy rare even in your world of delicate adjustments and sympathies. You understood, you constituted yourself my escort. Do you remember those days, how we went from one place to another, luncheons, dinners, private views, official receptions, and how we tacitly agreed on just the amount we were bound to do for our purpose? I scarcely realized at the time all that it meant for you to do this, and how the family would resent your attitude. I know now that they never quite trusted you after this. As I remember we talked nothing over and did not, I think, mention Philibert save once, when I asked you if you knew where he was. You did know, of course. Every one knew, I suppose, except myself. They had been seen, those two, boarding the Simplon express. They were in Venice, you told me, I had wanted to know for convenience. Having adopted a line, it seemed best to follow it consistently. One was to assume that my husband had gone away for a holiday. I was there to make his excuses to suffering hostesses deprived of his society. The note to be struck was light and commonplace, as if his absence were like any other of his many past absences. The pretence deceived no one, but then the consistent lying made for decency. I was marking time. It was particularly difficult because I was not acting in accord with my nature. Had I been natural at that time I should have been horrible; I should have smashed things. But I was not behaving like myself. I see now what it was; I was behaving like one of you, behaving as Claire, for instance, would have behaved in my place. I was adopting your methods and your standards. Not to give myself away, not to let any one suspect what I was feeling and thinking, not to make a false step, not to make above all a public fuss, that seems to have been my idea. To preserve appearances as beautifully as possible, that was what you and I were working at, as we trailed drearily round from one place to another saying suave things with smooth faces.
And there was another influence working on me, even more subtle and far more pervasive. You will smile, perhaps, when I tell you that my quiet behaviour came from looking every day across the Place de la Concorde to the austere and reserved façade of the Madeleine, or across a silver distance of pale houses to the far alabaster pinnacle of the Sacré Coeur high above the city, but it was so. Paris exercises upon its inhabitants a fine discipline of taste. Those who love it change unconsciously. The long, wide, symmetrical avenues, the formal gardens, with their slim fountains, single waving sprays of crystal water, the calm façades of long rows of narrow, uniform houses, palest yellow in sunlight, pearl white towards evening, these things have an effect upon one’s manners that is imperceptible and profound. They spelt to me harmony and restraint and Plato’s idea of beauty. My high falsity was at the best only less futile than a good, noisy bout of hysterics. What comforted me in these hours of doubt was that I knew you were no more certain than I. You did not represent your family. You were neither a go-between nor a spy nor a jailor, you were a friend. Positively I believe there were moments when you wanted me to break out, break away, throw caution and carefulness to the winds. Sometimes there was so much compassion in your face that I almost cried out to you not to care so much. I wanted to warn you that it was only for the moment that I was keeping my head up, that I wouldn’t be able and didn’t intend to go on with it indefinitely and that the thought behind all my smooth social words was; “He has gone for ever. Soon I’ll be free to say so.”
I did really believe Philibert had left me for good. It never occurred to me that he would ever come back, and that belief was in a way my refuge. I was rid of them both; Bianca, I told myself, would be satisfied now and would leave me alone. She would carry on her mischief elsewhere, not in my life. My life was, I believed, my own, separated for always from hers and from Philibert.
Then one day Fan turned up. She came in jauntily, her head in the air, as if nothing had happened. She looked very smart, her hat set at a rakish angle, her short, pleated skirt flippant above her neat ankles. From across the room she called out “Well,—Jane, we’ve married a nice pair of men. Here’s Philibert’s skipped and I’ve had to send Ivanoff packing. He’d taken to beating me, I’m black and blue all over. Some people like it—I don’t.” She gave me a peck on the cheek. “Poor old Jane, you’re taking it hard, I suppose.” She turned back the sleeve of her dress. Her arm had welts on it. “You should see my back.” I shuddered, but at sight of my emotion she twitched away from me with a nervous laugh. “Between my Slav and your Frenchman I don’t know that there’s much to choose. God, if it were only an occasional beating I shouldn’t mind.” She did a waltz step across the room, twirled round on her tiny feet, lit a cigarette standing on tiptoe, and collapsed into a chair in a spasm of coughing.
“I had it out with Ivanoff, my dear, about you, and I know all about it—just the exact sums you gave him for me, bless your baby heart, and everything. At first I doubted you. I was a fool. I’m sorry. Unfortunately I found out other things. There are other women in the world who don’t love me at all, but who pay for my shoes. Do you hear? Do you get what I mean? I find I’ve been paying my bills with their money. What do you say to that? I ask you simply. And we’re on the streets now—at least he’s gone—I’m staying with Madeleine de Greux, and the bailiffs have got our furniture.” And she went off into a wild scream of laughter. It was incredibly painful. She sat there as neat and smart as a pin. Her small cocked hat on one side of her head, her pretty little legs crossed, one high-heeled patent leather slipper dangling in the air, the other tapping the floor, she puffed smoke through her little tilted nose and looked at me desperately out of her hard, level eyes, while she yelled with laughter just as if some one were tickling her till she screamed with pain.
I went to my desk and got out my cheque book. “Let’s pay off the furniture first,” I said as prosaically as I could, but she jumped up irritably.
“God! Jane, what a fool you are. Put that cheque book away. Do you think I’d touch another penny of yours? There—don’t be hurt. Of course I would if I needed it, but what good will money do? I can’t go and hunt out Ivo’s mistresses and pay them back, can I? Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!—I did like him. Men are devils. Even now I’m worried about him. I imagine him locked up somewhere or dead drunk in the gutter lying out in the dark—whereas he’s probably at Monte having a high old time. By the way, your French family is in a great state about you. Claire says their position as regards you is very delicate. I suppose it is. They don’t know whether to come here or to leave you alone. They wonder what you’re going to do. They’re frightfully cut up about Fifi, and they’re afraid you’ll do something final like getting a divorce.”
“Well, my dear, that’s just what I do think of doing.”
“I see.” She ruminated, chewing her cigarette that had gone out. “They’ll never forgive you if you do.”
“I suppose not, but I don’t see that that matters.”
“Oh, but it does. They’re so perfectly charming. They’d make Paris impossible for you.”
“That sounds charming, I must say.”
“Don’t be stupid, Jane. You know what I mean. You know how clever they are. They’re the most attractive people on earth. But if you set them against you, the whole clan, you’ll find life here very different.”
“I don’t propose to live here.”
“Where then?”
“In St. Mary’s Plains.”
“Heaven help you, my poor misguided lamb.”
“I’m homesick,” I persisted obstinately.
“Of course, for the moment, because you’re unhappy.”
“No, not only because I’m unhappy. I like the Grey House. I belong there. It’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s real, it’s the place I know best in the world.”
“Nonsense. It’s a dingy little shanty.”
“You can call it names if you like. I don’t care what you say. I’m going back there.”
“For good?”
“I don’t know—perhaps.”
“Well, you won’t stay, so you’d better not risk it.”
“Risk what?”
“Having to eat humble pie and come back to be forgiven.”
It was my turn to get up with a fling of exasperation and walk about. She followed me with her bright, piercing gaze.
“Think a little, Jane. Use your brains, if you can. Think of the difference between your life here and your life at home in that Godforsaken hole of St. Mary’s Plains. Look at this room. Look out of the window and remember. Don’t I remember? Wooden sidewalks with weeds growing between the boards, boys playing marbles in the street, women hanging out their washing in backyards, Sunday clothes, oh, those best Sunday clothes, revival meetings, Moody and Sankey in tents on the lake shore, picnics, bicycle rides, dances at the Country Club, freckled youths kissing you on the verandah, great news—Ethel Barrymore is coming in her new play that’s been running a year in New York. Excursions on the lake, fifty cents a round trip and soft drinks, sarsaparilla, ginger ale, buggy rides, shopping down town, talking to old women—cats who gossip about somebody’s new red silk petticoat, too flighty, indecent. All going to church and shouting ‘Hallaleluja’ and eating blueberry pie afterwards till their mouths are all black inside.”
“Well,” I said. She wriggled about as if sitting on pins.
“You want to give up Paris, this house, your position here, for that? You’ve got Europe at your feet. You’ve only got to sit tight and every one in Paris will be on your side. Fifi will come back and be as good as gold. You’ll be able to do what you like with him after this.”
I stopped her.
“So you think I’d take Philibert back?”
“Yes, I do. We all do.”
“And begin again living together, after this?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t find it appalling even to think of—?”
“No, merely a little uncomfortable to begin with.”
“You take my breath away.”
She eyed me calmly. “My dear Jane, don’t be the high tragedian. All marriages are like that. How many women do we know, do you suppose, whose husbands haven’t had little vacations—?”
“If you don’t mind we won’t talk about it. Other women’s marriages are nothing to me.”
She shrugged her shoulders and lit another cigarette, and for a time we were silent. I looked at her. She seemed to me terrible, hard as nails and more cynical than any one, and yet she was my friend. Nothing, I knew then as I watched her, nothing that she could say or do would alter that fact. She belonged to me. What she felt would always affect me. In some absurd way I was responsible for her. Our childhood and its meagre austere background, with all that she repudiated, held us together.
Presently she began again. “Now listen to me, Jane. Philibert may be a brute, but he’s done a lot for you. He has given you a very great position. You were rich but he knew how to make your money tell. There’s not a house in the world like yours. I don’t mean only the furniture. Your parties are beyond everything. You’re more recherchée than any woman in Paris. You can pick and choose from all the great people of the world, the men with brains. Lord! how you could amuse yourself if you wanted to. I only wish I had your chance. Do you think I’d let my husband’s infidelity spoil my life? I’d be no such fool. I might not like it, but I’d make up my mind to forget it. Well, here you are and you want to go back and crawl into that little hole in a prairie and stifle there.”
“Yes, I do.”
“But the people there—” she almost screamed.
“I don’t know about the people. They may not be what you call amusing, but they’re at any rate natural, common or garden human beings, and anyhow if there weren’t another soul there’s Aunt Patty; she’s the finest woman in the world, and I adore her.”
Fan looked at me in amazement.
“I’d die!” she gasped on a long, wailing breath. We were again silent, then, while the image of Aunt Patience took shape before us, gaunt, with her big bones showing under her limp, black clothes, worn, strong, knotted hands, crooked humourous face, weather-beaten like a peasant’s, straggling thin, grey hair. And suddenly I saw her as she appeared to Fan, a shabby old maid in frumpy clothes, talking with a nasal twang, saying things like Mark Twain, worshipping Huxley and Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, a child woman of stern moral principles, unaware of the existence of such life as ours, displeased and angry at our doings, hurt deeply by our words and our laughter. I imagined her in Paris, stalking down the Rue de la Paix like a pilgrim from the Caucasus, a figure of grotesque grandeur disturbing the merry frivolous traffic, sublime, terrible spectre of stark simplicity, utterly out of her element in our world. And I was angry with Fan for evoking such an image. I turned away from it in distress, ashamed.
“You’ve already gone too far,” she said impishly. “You can’t get back. You’re spoiled for your Aunt Patience.”
“We’ll see,” I muttered. My suspicions were suddenly roused by a look in her little squirrel face.
“You’ve been talking to Claire,” I said.
“Well, what if I have?”
“She sent you.”
“Yes, she did; but I was coming, anyway.”
“I don’t believe you. You hate my being unhappy, you were worried, but you’d have avoided coming if you could. The fact that we’ve always been friends and that you can’t help it is a nuisance to you. Well, tell me, what is Claire’s point of view?”
“She thinks in some measure that it’s your fault. She says Fifi has behaved very badly, but that if you’d been clever he wouldn’t have done anything sensational, anything to make a scandal.”
“I see.”
“She’s very unhappy about it all. She says it’s making her mother ill. She says that if it were not for her mother it would not matter so much, but that if you divorce Philibert it will kill her.”
“Why doesn’t Claire come herself and tell me all this?”
“She doesn’t dare. She says you don’t like her.”
“That, my dear, is funny. I’ve adored her for years and she’s consistently snubbed me.”
“Well, anyway, you’re so different, she feels you wouldn’t understand. You see, she puts up with a good deal herself.”
“I know. Perhaps I understand more than she thinks I do.”
“She’s very unhappy in her marriage, too, but she doesn’t make a fuss about it. She doesn’t expect the impossible.”
“Whereas I do?”
“Well, yes. Between you and me and the lamp-post I think you do.”
“I only ask to be allowed to save Geneviève from a fate like my own.”
“Oh, my dear, if you think they’ll let you have Geneviève—”
“What do you mean?”
“A man always has rights over his child in this country, whatever the facts against him.”
“You suggest that the law wouldn’t give me my own child?”
“It wouldn’t, not the French law.”
“Well, we’ll see about that, too.”
“Jane, you’re terrible.”
“Am I?”
“Yes, you frighten me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What shall I say to them?”
“To whom?”
“Claire, Madame de Joigny, your Aunt Clothilde, all of them.”
“Say nothing. Why should you serve them? Why should you side with them against me? Weren’t you mine years before you ever saw one of them? What’s become of our friendship? What’s become of your loyalty? You’ve sold yourself, you’re not what you used to be, you’d do anything now for a pleasant life. Because they’re attractive and have attractive manners and make pretty speeches you’d do anything for them. What good does it all do you? You’re ill, you’re worn to a frazzle, your husband has been dragging you down, down, into a darkness, queer, unimaginable, shameful, and you can’t get loose. You just dance about in the blackness. Your feet stick in the mud. Having a good time somehow, anything for a good time. Coughing yourself to pieces, raging fever on you, your heart sick with distrust, restless, evasive, evading issues, you go on dancing, laughing, having a good time. Why don’t you pull yourself together? Why won’t you let me help you? I love you. I love you much better than Claire does. If your husband were put in prison what would Claire do, do you think?”
But Fan had grown deadly pale. I stopped, horrified. She was leaning against the mantelpiece, spitting into her handkerchief: there was blood on it.
That evening when I had taken her back to Madeleine de Greux’s—for she refused to stay with me—and we had put her to bed, she clung to me weakly. Her eyes closed. “It’s all true, what you said, Jane,” she gasped, “but I can’t help it, I can’t stop. If I stopped amusing myself I’d die.”
“But, my darling, let me get you well first, let me take you somewhere.”
“Perhaps, later,” she whispered, “if you don’t go to America. Perhaps we might try Switzerland, but not where there are sick people.” She shuddered. “I hate sickness so, and unhappiness. It’s so ugly. Being gay is beautiful. It makes things look beautiful. Ivanoff is a devil, but you’ll admit he was beautiful. I like attractive brutes better than clumsy saints. So do you, that’s why you married Philibert, just because he was so attractive. No one could be so attractive when he tried. Admit it, he gave you wonderful hours, you know he did. Wasn’t that something? What’s the use of being good if you’re deadly dull? Good men aren’t our kind, my dear. They’d bore us to death. Philibert made you happy for a time, wonderfully, because he knew how. What more do you want? Don’t be a fool. Take it all as it comes. Make an arrangement with him—you owe him something. I’ll be all right in a day or so. Let me know what you decide. Americans are hipped on their ideals. All that’s no use. French people know what’s what. Claire would love you if you gave her a chance. They are all ready to be fond of you, and they’re delicious people. Don’t be a fool. There, leave me now. We were idiots to quarrel. You have a nasty temper, my poor Jane, and your heart’s too big for this world. You’ll come an awful cropper if you’re not careful.”