IX
Claire was a person who attracted people to her in spite of herself, even those people whom she did not like. It had been so in the case of Jane. My sister charmed more often than not without wanting to do so. People in general were to her uninteresting and indiscriminate admiration annoyed her. She was constantly worried by having to snub would-be admirers who bored her. It was generally accepted in the family that she was the victim of her own charm, and we often half-laughingly commiserated with her. My mother once quite seriously said, “Cette pauvre Claire, with whom every one is in love and who cares for no one, it is really very tiring for her.”
Jane’s devotion was to her from the first unwelcome, though for a year or two she put up with it kindly enough. When Philibert asked her to help him with Jane’s education, she replied that she already had four children of her own to bring up, but she nevertheless let Jane go about with her, gave her advice about people and clothes, let her do errands for her; and in a mild way returned the girl’s demonstrations of affection, but it all bored and worried her. There was for her no pleasure in being adored by a young woman whom she found to be stupid. She did not on the whole care much for women, and often said she did not believe in their friendship. Her need of affection was abundantly supplied to her in her own family. Between her mother and her children she found all the tenderness she required; in society she asked merely to be amused. At bottom she was a confirmed cynic. Human nature appeared to her unsympathetic and pitiable. Her family represented for her a refuge from a world that disgusted her more than it interested. There was for her something ultimate and absolute in the ties of blood that gave to the members of a family, all of them mere ordinary human beings, a special precious significance for each other. If she had ever analyzed it she would have said—“But of course I know that Maman and Philibert and Blaise and Tante Marianne are no different from other people, but that does not matter, they are different for me. It’s not that I believe in my brothers as men, it’s that I believe in their relationship to me, and that, is the only thing I do believe in. Philibert may be the most selfish man in Paris; nevertheless he would not be selfish to me. That’s all, and that is enough. I don’t believe in men. I don’t believe in women. I don’t believe in myself or in love or happiness, but I believe in my family.” But of course she never did so express herself. She was not given to talking about herself.
Philibert realized from the first that Claire was necessary to his scheme, and somehow or other he prevailed upon her to exert herself on his behalf. She was constantly at his house and became its chief ornament, and one of its most potent attractions. Jane had her place, usually at the top of the staircase, but Claire’s corner was the corner people looked for. Always more quietly dressed than any one else, (and I believe that Philibert planned the contrast of Jane’s gorgeous brocades with an eye to the dramatic effect of the two women) my sister created about her an atmosphere, a hush, a kind of breathless attention. I have seen her often appear in one of those great doorways, a slim, shadowy figure, in trailing grey draperies, and stand there silently while gradually her presence made itself felt, drew all eyes to her and created a feeling among the assembled people that a new charm, a finer quality, had been conveyed to the atmosphere by her being there. Wonderful Claire, clever Philibert; they played beautifully into each other’s hands. I do not mean that they were coldly calculating in regard to each other. On the contrary, their mutual admiration gave them, each one, the warmest affectionate glow. They rejoiced each in the rare qualities of the other, and Claire, knowing that in Philibert’s house she would find men worthy of appreciating her, knowing too, that no artist could so set off her full value as her brother, seemed unlike my mother to derive a certain amount of half-cynical amusement from what went on in that mansion. It is, of course, possible that at bottom she was no more averse to lunching “dans l’intimité” with royalties than was Mrs. Carpenter. In any event, princes of royal blood paid court to her in Philibert’s salons. And Philibert was right when he placed her beside him in that house. She made it comme il faut. Her presence was to it a benediction.
It had taken three years to build Philibert’s palace, and by the time it was finished, Claire had prevailed upon her husband to move into Paris and buy there a very nice house of his own. On the whole, things had turned out for her better than any of us had expected. Six years of what he would have called I suppose conjugal bliss had tempered the ardour of my brother-in-law, who had to his wife’s immense relief begun to look elsewhere than in his home for his pleasures. Though she had never complained of her slavery and now never spoke of her freedom, we all knew what had happened and were relieved. My mother was delighted. “Enfin, he hasn’t killed her,” was her way of expressing it to me. “The poor child is prettier than ever, and she manages so as not to be talked about.” What it was that she managed I had no reason for asking. If Claire was happy, if at last she had selected some one from among her numerous admirers whom she could love and who was beautifying her life for her, then all was well. I had no fault to find with her there. My mother’s reading of the case seemed to me the true one. My mother had suffered over her daughter’s marriage, and was glad to have some one make up to her child some part of the joy of life she deserved.
All this was quite satisfactory. It never occurred to any one of us to disapprove of Claire. How could we? Why should we? Had she done anything preposterous like running away with a footman we should still have stood by her. As it was she remained one of the most admired women in Paris, and the least talked about, and her sentimental life was for us a vague rather romantic secret realm which we took for granted and respected. We never pryed into her affairs, and when one day Philibert, in my mother’s drawing room, twitted Claire with the fact that her beauty increased in proportion to her husband’s infidelities, she merely laughed shyly and said nothing, knowing well enough that we expected no explanation. The episode would certainly have passed unnoticed, if Jane’s face had not shown it to be for her a moment of quite terrible revelation. It was, I remember, on a Sunday afternoon. We had all been lunching with my mother, Philibert, Jane, Claire and I, and were sitting by the fire with our coffee cups. Philibert, with his coat-tails over his arms, standing on the hearthrug, had been quizzing me. He was in excellent spirits, having just brought off some one of his social coups—I think it was the Prince of Wales that week who had dined with him, and Philibert was particularly pleased with Claire. His little sally had been meant and received as a token of affection. Unfortunately he had forgotten Jane; or it may be that he had not forgotten her and had spoken deliberately. It is possible that he thought the time had come to carry her education a step further. He probably felt it tiresome to be always on his guard as to what he said in her presence for all the world as if she were a jeune fille. She had heard and continued to hear in the houses she frequented, enough talk of all kinds, heaven knows, to enlighten her as to the habits of our world, but for all that we had instinctively all of us in her presence been careful of what we said to each other. It was, I suppose, our tribute to her innocence, or perhaps even to our fear of her judgments. More than once I, for one, had stammered under the gaze of her candid eyes and had swallowed the words that were on the tip of my tongue. On this occasion the phrase spoken would not have struck me as dangerous. I did not look at Jane to see how she took it. I merely happened to be facing her on the sofa and couldn’t help seeing the pallor that mantelled her face like a coating of wax. It was like that, not as if she had grown pale because of the ebbing of blood from her face, but as if a kind of coating of misery and fear had visibly enveloped her in whiteness. For a moment I did not understand, and failed to connect Philibert’s words with her aspect. “But, Jane,” I exclaimed, “what is it? Are you ill?” Fiercely she motioned me to be silent, gripping my arm with her strong hand so as to hurt me, and conveying somehow without speaking, for she could not speak, that she wanted me not to attract the attention of the others. Unfortunately Philibert had taken it all in. He may have been watching for the effect of his speech. His next words and his general behaviour give colour to such a theory. He literally jumped forward toward her across the carpet.
“But, my poor child,” he cried out derisively, “don’t make up a face like that. It’s most unpleasant. Voyons, what a way to behave in your mother-in-law’s drawing-room. If I had known you were so stupid, I should have left you at home.”
Those were his words. They were uttered with animation, with an almost ferocious gaiety, and to accompany them he tweaked her playfully but not gently by the ear. I got up from my place beside her, feeling myself flush to my hair. I turned my back to get away from the sight of that cowering creature huddling back from the hand that held her.
Exaggerated? Certainly she was exaggerated. Idiotic? Perhaps so. Understand her? Of course I didn’t. It was not until long after that I began to understand her. It was enough for me at that moment to understand Philibert and perceive that never, even if she lived with him for twenty years and maintained intact the dignity of her honesty, would he respect her.
Claire had been a passive spectator of this little passage between husband and wife. A slight flush had mounted to her cheek, a flush I took to be of annoyance, for she rose a moment later with more than usual abruptness and kissed my mother good-bye, ignoring completely the other two, not so much as looking at them as she made for the door. Jane, however, was too quick for her, and wrenching herself free from Philibert, was upon her before she turned the door knob.
“Don’t go like that,” she cried, “don’t be annoyed. I know he was joking. I know he did not mean it.” She seemed to be trying to grasp Claire in her arms, to get hold of her, to cling to her. I had a confused impression of something almost like a scuffle taking place between the two women, and of Claire actually throwing her off. I may be wrong. It may have been merely the expression on Claire’s face and the tone of her voice that sent Jane backwards. I don’t know, but it was quite pitifully horrid, and again I turned away my eyes, and with my back to them heard Claire say in her coldest tone, and God knows how cold her lovely voice can be—
“Ne soyez pas grotesque, je vous en prie. Laissez-moi partir.”
I do not mean to suggest that I sympathized with Jane that afternoon, for I did not. It was all too absurdly out of proportion. She had created out of nothing, out of the blue, a scene in my mother’s drawing-room, and one had only to look at the little delicate crowded place to know that scenes were abhorrent there. I believe actually that a small table full of trinkets had been overturned in Jane’s rush for the door, and I know that a coffee-cup was broken. It was the sort of thing one simply never had conceived of. My mother’s nerves were very much upset, and when Jane turned to her after Claire had shut the door in her face, wanting to beg her pardon, Maman could only wave her hands before a twitching face and say, “No, no, my child. Don’t say any more, it is enough for today.”
After that I did not see Jane for some weeks. Neither she nor Philibert came to lunch with my mother the following Sunday, nor the Sunday after. On the third Sunday Philibert came alone and explained briefly that Jane was indisposed. He seemed preoccupied. He talked little, ate nothing, and drank a number of glasses of wine as if he were very thirsty. His lips twitched constantly, forming themselves into a kind of snarl, and he was continually jerking the ends of his moustaches. I remember thinking that he looked for all the world as if he wanted to bite some one. He had never appeared more cruel. I began to have a sickening foreboding. Claire eyed him strangely. I wondered if she had something of my feeling. How I wished she had!
It all came out after luncheon. He could not contain himself. He was beside himself with exasperation. Jane’s stupidity was too colossal. He could not put up with being loved like that any longer. She had made him a scene after the absurd affair of the other day and had asked him to swear that he would never be unfaithful to her. Here he raised his eyebrows, hunched his shoulders and threw out his hands. It was incredible how she had gone on. She had said that she had been thinking over his remark to Claire and was frightened by it, that when he had spoken so lightly of his brother-in-law’s infidelities it had come to her as a tremendous shock that such a thing was possible. An abyss had opened before her—that was her word. How could Claire go on living with a man who was unfaithful? She could not understand. What did he mean by her sister’s growing more beautiful in proportion to her husband’s infidelities? Had he meant anything, or was it only a joke? Did Claire know her husband made love to other women? She loved Claire, she thought her wonderful, but she didn’t understand. And so on and so on.
Philibert recited it all to us. His voice grew shriller and shriller. He piled up phrase after phrase in a crescendo of exasperation until he burst into a loud laugh with the words—“She talks, she talks of our marriage being made in Heaven.” He grasped his head in his hands.
Claire’s face wore a sneer.
“She professes not to know then, how it was her mother made it?” she asked.
Philibert came as it were to a halt. He looked at us all one after another. His face was of a sudden impudent, cool, smooth. He began to explain lucidly.
“Imagine to yourself, she really did not know it. She believed it was a love match. She believed it till yesterday, I mean last night, or it may be it was this morning, I don’t remember looking at the time. Anyhow, as she wouldn’t let me sleep I told her. I told her all about it.”
“I don’t believe she didn’t know,” said Claire.
He took her up quickly. “There, my dear, you are wrong, and you miss the whole meaning of her boring character.” He was enjoying himself now, was my brother, dissecting a human being was one of his favourite pastimes. In the pleasure it now afforded him to analyze Jane, he forgot for the moment his personal annoyance.
“One must remember,” he mused, “that she is a savage, with the mentality of a Huguenot minister. If you could hear her talk of the sacrament of marriage! She is of a solemnity, and her ideals, Mon Dieu! what ideals! She once said to me that her grandfather loved her grandmother at the day of his death just in the same way that he loved her on the day of her wedding. When I replied ‘How very disgusting’ she merely stared and left the room. She is always quoting her grandmother and her Aunt Patty. What a background—I ask you? St. Mary’s Plains! It would appear that in St. Mary’s Plains they always marry for love and live together in endless monotony. Faithfulness—she is in love with faithfulness; purity too, she thinks a great deal of purity. In fact she has a most unpleasant set of theories. They fill up her brain. There is no room for reality. What goes on before her eyes means nothing to her. No, Claire, you are wrong. She knew nothing of her mother’s bargaining with me for her little life. Believe it or not, it is true. She married me for myself and believed the good God sent me to her, and my revelations were a shock. Impossible she should have simulated the emotion they caused her. The finest actress in the world could not have done it. I admit that as a piece of acting it would have been a fine performance. On the stage I would have enjoyed it, but in one’s own bedroom, the conjugal bedroom—ugh! no.”
“What did she do?” asked Claire.
“She leaned up against the wall, face to the wall, I mean, flattened against it, her hands high above her head, palms on the wall, too, as if she were reaching up to the ceiling.”
“I don’t see anything wonderful in that.”
“It was a fine picture,” said Philibert. “But she stayed there too long. She stayed like that some minutes. In fact I went on talking for a long time to that image, that long back and those outstretched arms. It reminded one of a crucifixion, modern interpretation. I was not sure that she was not dying and expected her to fall backwards.”
My mother had been fussing nervously with her shawl, her sleeves, her hair, giving herself little pats and tugs and looking this way and that. Her face was drawn and working. She kept moistening her lips and saying—“Is it possible? Is it possible?” She now broke in and cried plaintively—
“But, my son, all this is terrible. I do not understand. What was it you told her?”
“I told her quite simply, mother dear, that I had married her for her money, that I had managed it all with Mrs. Carpenter before I had ever seen her; (Old Izzy is done for with Jane now, I am afraid, but that can’t be helped) that I was tired of making love to her and would be grateful if she would become less exacting.”
“Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu!” wailed my mother. “Was it necessary to do anything so definite? Couldn’t you have gradually—enfin, does one say such things?”
“No, one does not, not in a civilized world, but Jane isn’t civilized. You’ve no idea what it is with her.”
Claire had risen and wandered away to the window with her usual drifting nonchalance.
“Et après?” she asked over her shoulder. “What did she say afterwards, when you had finished?”
“She said nothing, she fell down in a swoon.”
“Backwards?”
“No, she had turned and was standing with her back to the wall and her hands against it, leaning forward and glaring, rather like a tiger, ready to spring when I had finished. But she didn’t spring. When I mentioned a certain evening before our marriage on which I had taken her to the Opera, the queer light went out of her eyes. It was like snuffing out a candle. Then she fainted. I had to call her maid. It was two hours before she came round. She faints as she does everything else, too much, too much. Quel tempérament, tout de même. You have no idea what it is to live with her—and at the same time so fastidious. Certain things she won’t put up with. Professes a horror of—of the refinements of sentiment. A prude and a passionnée. Ah, it is all too difficult. Anyhow, it is finished, thank God for that.”
At this Maman wailed out—“Finished? What do you mean, finished?”
Philibert laughed. “I only mean that she won’t bother me any more; not that she’ll leave me. Ah, no, she won’t leave me.” He ruminated; after a moment he sighed. “And I may be wrong, she may bother me after all, in a new way, in a new way. She is very obstinate. She may try to make me love her, now that she knows I don’t. It all depends on whether she hates me or not. One never can tell. And, of course, she knows nothing but what I have told you. It never occurs to her that I could be like other men. Even now she doesn’t suppose that her husband is unfaithful, and even now I imagine that fact will be of some importance to her. It is all very curious. I have told you in order to warn you. It is quite possible that she will come to you for help.”
He pulled down his cuffs, twisted his moustaches into place, looked at himself in the glass over the chimney piece, and bent over my mother, kissing the top of her head.
“Au revoir, Maman chérie. Don’t let her worry you. Just quiet her down a little. But if it tires you to see her, of course you needn’t. I only suggest it for her sake, and for us all. She will settle down. Au revoir.”
He went to Claire and spoke to her in an undertone. I saw her shake her head. “Non,” I heard her say. “Je ne peux pas. Tout cela mécœure. Elle est vraiment trop bête.” He shrugged his shoulders. For me he had no word of instruction, nor any of good-bye. From the window I watched him cross the pavement to his limousine. For a moment he stood, one patent leather foot on the step of the car, talking to his footman and arranging as he did so the white camelia in his buttonhole. His face was bland. His top-hat had a wonderful sheen. We all knew where he was going. Bianca had returned to Paris after a six months sojourn in Italy and had refused to go back to her husband. The connection for us was obvious. We had been aware for some time of the renewed intimacy of these two.
Philibert waved his gloves at me through the window of his limousine and grinned. A new light dawned on me. It had all been a comedy. He had done it on purpose. Bianca had put him up to it. If it had not been for Bianca, he would never have precipitated a crisis with Jane. All that about her affection being insufferable was nonsense. It was in his interest that his wife should adore him, and no one when left to himself could look after his own interests so well as Philibert. In quarelling with Jane he had done something from his own point of view incredibly foolish. Had Bianca not interfered he would never have done it. But what was she up to? That was the question. How should I know? Who on earth could ever tell what Bianca had hidden away in that intriguing Italian mind of hers? That she meant no good to any one, of that I was certain.
When I turned away from the window, Claire was stroking my mother’s hand. She looked at me inimically. Something in my face must have betrayed me, though I said nothing. “Don’t ask me to sympathize with Jane,” she brought out, “for I can’t. I wash my hands of the whole affair.”
My mother’s look was kinder than Claire’s. Her eyes held that proud plaintive sweetness that denied all passion, either of anger, reproach, or pity. Her face was very white and her eyelids reddened, but her remark was characteristic.
“She has her own mother to go to, and her own mother to thank if she is unhappy.”
And with that she drew me down to her with one of her beautiful gestures, and kissed me. I must have been in a highly excited and unnatural state of mind by this time, for the rare caress, so often awaited in vain, aroused in me at that moment a vague suspicion. Was she too, I remember asking myself, afraid I would try to get her to help poor Jane? If so her fears were unnecessary. Jane did not go to them. Philibert had been mistaken in thinking that she would rush to them for help. The time was to come when they would go to her, but of that later. She spoke to no one of her trouble, and neither Claire nor my mother laid eyes on her for months. We heard later that she had gone to Joigny with Geneviève, her little girl. She stayed at the Château de Sainte Clothilde all summer alone. Long afterwards I found out that she had not even so much as spoken to her own mother. Jane never reproached Mrs. Carpenter, never opened her lips on the subject to any one, until the other day when she told me everything. Poor old Izzy died the following winter, in ignorance of what her daughter thought about it all.