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I am no fatalist. I do not believe that the good God has ordered to be written down in a book what all the millions of little souls on the earth are to be doing this day a year hence. He, no doubt, in his wisdom has a general idea of such coming events as famines, earthquakes, wars and pestilences, but man must remain full of surprises for his Maker; his activities are incalculable, and tiny circumstances, the effect of his minute will, have a way of spoiling the fine large trend of the great cumulative power of the past that we call fate. It is true that such characters as Bianca and Philibert have about them the quality of the inevitable. Certainly, as compared to Jane, they were not free people. They were the children of an old and elaborate civilization, and impelled by obscure impulses that they themselves never recognized and that had their source in some dim dark poisonous pocket of the past.
Bianca, more than any women I have ever known, seemed fated to be what she was and to do as she did. She appears to me now as I remember her as the little white slave of the powers of darkness. But she liked her darkness. She dipped into it deeper and deeper. She sank of her own will and because of her own morbid and insatiable curiosity.
But Jane was free. One had only to be in her presence to feel it. No morbid complexes in her, one would have said. Compared to her we were like so many pigmies in chains, and Bianca beside Jane was like a ghost or a woman walking in her sleep. Of course Bianca hated Jane. I don’t believe in their friendship. As it was, I found it disgusting of Philibert to let Jane go about with Bianca. And Bianca must have been pretending to care for Jane out of perversity. Their natures were as antipathetic as their looks were opposed. Bianca with her little snow-white vicious face, so white that it showed pale bluish lights and shadows, her eccentric emaciated elegance of body, her enormous blue eyes fringed by their thick eyelashes that were like bushes and that she plastered with black till they stuck together: Jane, magnificent young animal, strong child amazon, towering shyly above us, looking down on us with her serious wistful gaze, holding out her marvellous hands to Bianca, suspicious of nothing, wanting to be friends—Jane insists that they cared for each other—I can’t admit it. Of course Bianca hated her, and the fact that until she saw Jane’s hands she had seen no others so beautiful as her own made it no easier for Jane, for Bianca may have been a priestess of the occult powers of darkness, she was as well a vain and envious young woman. A cat, Fan Ivanoff called her simply.
On the other hand I believe that if Paris had not mixed itself up in the long duel between these two women it might have ended less tragically, at any rate less tragically for Jane. Had they lived in London or Moscow or New York it would have been different. They would not have been so conspicuous. The vast and impersonal life of a great community would have absorbed them. But Paris held them close and watched them. It held them for twenty years. If they went away for a time they always came back and met face to face and could not get away from each other, for Paris is small and Paris is more personal than any city in the world. It is a spoiled beauty, excessively interested in personalities. I speak now of Paris, the lovely capricious creature that has existed for centuries, that has kept the special quality of its bland sparkling beauty through invasions, revolutions and massacres, and is still elegant under the dominion of the most bourgeois of governments. I speak of the Paris that seems to me to possess a soul, the soul of an immortal yet mortal woman, seductive pliable, submissive and indestructible. Do I sound fantastic? I have communed with my city for years, at night and in the morning and at mid-day. I have been a lonely man wandering through its streets and it has confided to me its secrets. Most often at night, when all the little people that inhabit its houses are asleep, I have listened, and like a sigh breathing up from its silvery bosom, I have heard its voice and understood its whispered confidences that carry a lament for days that are gone and are full of the tales of its many amours. Ah, my worldly-wise beauty, mistress of a hemisphere, what you do not know of men is indeed not worth knowing. And still they come, covetous, lustful, enamoured. What crimes have they not committed, what birthrights not denied, what fortunes not wasted, what fatherlands not repudiated, to win your favour?
It was this Paris that took part in the affair of Jane and Bianca. Why not? How could it have done otherwise? It has always been attracted by intrigue. It has a taste for drama. I repeat it dotes on personality; any personality that is striking, that catches its attention. The type matters little. Having long ago substituted taste for morals it has no ethical prejudices. It does not dislike a bandit; it adores a farceur such as Philibert. It delights in demagogues and artists and men of intelligence whether they are criminals or saints. Once in a hundred years, like a woman surfeited with pleasure and sensation, it will respect a person of character.
Bianca and Philibert were true children of Paris. They were its spoiled and petted darlings and they knew this and laid store by it. At bottom it was Paris that Philibert was continually making love to. He had a quite inordinate liking for his city, a jealous proprietory affection. I believe that had he been exiled from it, he would have died, and I believe that his desire to curry favour with it was the motive of most of his actions. It was for Paris that he gave his wonderful parties and concocted his fanciful amusements. He treated it literally as if it were his mistress. He cajoled, he flattered, he bullied, he caressed, and he spent on it millions, Jane’s millions. It was not merely an ordinary vanity that impelled him. He saw himself as the benevolent despot of Paris, its favourite lover and its protector. To add to its brilliance he enticed to it princes and celebrities from every country of Europe. Europe was to him nothing more than a field to be exploited for the amusement of Paris. He would have beheld every city in Germany, Austria, Russia or Italy razed to the ground without a twinge of regret or horror, but when in 1914 the Germans were marching on Paris, then he was like a man possessed. I can remember him, white to the lips, rushing in from Army Headquarters to see the Archbishop. He had had long before any one else the idea of piling sandbags round Notre Dame to protect the stained glass windows. He was like a maniac.
As for Bianca, she was unique and Paris wore her like a jewel. The fact that she was half Italian seemed strangely enough not to mitigate against her, though her mother, the wonderful bacchante who had become in memory a legendary figure, had found it at first none too easy to please, according to Aunt Clothilde. The Venetian had been a woman of quick passions and child-like humours. She was remembered for her many love affairs, the garlands of bright flowers she wore in her hair, and the habit she had of sticking pins into little wax effigies of people she wished would die. An impulsive, playful, improvident creature, with the beauty of a peasant and the naïveté of a child. She had died when Bianca was a child of six, died of home-sickness so they said, for her beloved Italy. I don’t know, I imagine that François her husband had something to answer for there. It was said that he had found a wax effigy of himself in her room, containing no less than three hundred pins, and had laughed delightedly. He was a cynical devil. Aunt Clo says that he used to lock up his wife in their dismal château in Provence and keep her on bread and water for days at a time. In any case he did not lock up Bianca, nor did Bianca seem to have inherited any of her mother’s aptitude for getting into scrapes. One could not easily detect in her the Italian strain, one only noticed that she was a little different from French women, with a different timbre of voice and an occasional mannerism evocative of something foreign, something lazy and sly and mysterious, and if she had inherited secret affinities with that warm romantic southern country of intrigue and superstition, she kept them hidden, together with all manner of other things, strange things, violent obsessions, curious tastes, dark obscure desires, and knowledge of a dangerous kind. She chose to appear at this time, I allude to the period covering the first years of Jane’s marriage to Philibert, as merely the supreme expression of the elegant world of Paris.
It is curious to watch the rise and fall of women in society. Women loom on the horizon; suddenly for no apparent reason. A gold mine, a rubber plantation, a motor-industry, suddenly looms into prominence. It takes the fancy, it is advertised, it becomes popular, people buy shares in it, the shares go higher and higher, the rush to buy becomes a scramble, and then perhaps a fraud is discovered, there is a collapse, and a large number of people find they have been expensively fooled. So it is in society. Women loom on the horizon; suddenly for no apparent reason they take the popular fancy. Comparatively plain women or women we have all known for years and have considered insignificant, become all at once conspicuous and important. Some one calls her, the plain woman, a beauty. Some one else repeats it. People become curious. They look at her with a new interest. A number of men who were before indifferent to her charms begin to pay her marked attention. The boom begins. Every one agrees that they have heretofore been mistaken. Her nose is not a snub nose. She is a beauty. It is whispered that so-and-so is très emballé. She is the success of the season. And after, when her day is over, she still retains something, once having been acclaimed a beauty she remains a beauty. Only the men who dubbed her nose Grecian look at it now with the same indifference that it inspired when they called it “snub.” They have been engaged in a little flurry in the social stock market. They do not admit having been fooled, but being inveterate gamblers they turn their attention elsewhere. The boom of the gold-mine is over, they go in for rubber. The men, i. e. the gamblers, are always the same in these affairs; it is the women who come and go.
Bianca was not one of these. She was no shooting star in the social heaven, she was a fixture, the little central shining constellation in a firmament of lesser planets. As a child she had been an institution. Strangers were taken to the Bois to look at the beautiful little girl, who, all in white, white fur coat and white gaiters, and followed by a white pom, walked there with her governess. She never sought the favour of Paris. She laid her will upon it and it submitted. As she grew older she made few women friends and tolerated no rivals. She was nice to old men and old ladies, people like my mother adored her, but most young women were afraid of her. Jane was an exception. Jane loved her. The two as I say used to go about together. The intimacy was shocking to me—I loathed Philibert for allowing it.
Jane had no suspicions. Her confidence in Philibert was such as to make us as a family quite nervous. What would she do, we asked ourselves, when she found out? Paris took little account of Jane. After the first flurry of excitement over her wedding, it lost sight of her. She disappeared behind Philibert. Curious how such a little man could hide from view a woman so much bigger than himself. It was a case of perspective. He stood in the foreground. To the more distant public she was invisible; to those who came nearer she appeared as nothing more interesting than a large fine piece of furniture. Philibert sometimes in moments of good humour alluded to her as his Byzantine Madonna.
I should defeat my own object in telling this story if I did not do Philibert justice. Yet how do him justice? If he were a centipede or a rare species of bird my task would be easier. But he lived on the earth in the guise of a human being, and he was not quite a human being. And it is difficult to be just to a brother such as Philibert. He always loathed the sight of me. I don’t blame him for that. I loathe the sight of myself. I am an ugly object. But Philibert found it amusing to hate me and to make me constantly aware of my deformity. My twisted frame seemed to produce in him a kind of itching frenzy, to tickle him to dreadful laughter, to irritate him to nervous cruelty. And I was unfortunately never able to grow a thick enough skin to protect me from him.
I suppose that I have always been jealous of Philibert. I loved life, but it pushed me aside. I wanted it, I wanted it in all its fulness, but it was Philibert who had it. And my incapacity to taste so many of its pleasures has only made me regard it with a closer, more wistful attention. I was like a ragamuffin in the street with his nose plastered against the pastry-cook’s window, a ragamuffin who dreamed that his pockets were full of gold, but who always found that the bright coins he jingled so lovingly in his fingers were not accepted over the counter. After repeated rebuffs, I gave up trying to get anything, but I could not take my eyes from the feast and so, even in my childhood, I resorted to the fiction of considering myself an invisible spectator of other people’s doings, and I helped along this little game by sitting as much as possible in dark corners or behind the kindly screen of some large piece of furniture such as the schoolroom piano. All that I asked of the world that so prodigiously attracted my interest was that it should not notice me, and thus leave me free to notice it, and I came at last to feel when some one out of kindness or cruelty dragged me out of my corner, a sense of outrage. So it was when Philibert, taking me by my collar, exposed me to kicks and to laughter. So it was years later when Jane, taking me by the hand, exposed me to the responsibilities of a friendship that demanded action. I used to dodge Philibert when I could. I would have avoided Jane’s confidence had I been able. Philibert’s tormenting in no way involved me. I could just let him kick and was when he finished as free as before to subside into my corner; with Jane it was different. Jane involved me in everything.
And now that I am obliged to think of my own personal relation to Jane, I have as I do so, a feeling of pain that is like the throbbing of some old hurt or the recurrence of an illness. Jane was magnificent and healthy and whole. She was half a head taller than I. I am cursed with a visualizing mind. As I set myself to the business of remembering her life, I see her constantly moving before my eyes, visibly acting out her drama, and I see myself, a wizened little man looking up at her from a distance. I have an acute sense of an opportunity lost for ever, of precious time wasted. For years I refused to sympathize with her as her friend. For years I would not talk to her because I was afraid she would complain to me of my family. How little I knew her!
Slowly she imposed herself. Like a woman coming towards me in a fog, I saw her grow more clear and more definite, until at last I recognized her for what she was.
Was I merely in love with her? Was it that? Was that all? If so she never suspected it. If so I did not recognize the feeling. It is, of course, the accusation my brother brought against me. He spoke of my criminal passion for his wife. It is very curious. The cleverest men are sometimes very obtuse. Philibert’s intelligence was of the kind that made it impossible for him to understand simple things.
In love with Jane? I find that I have no idea what the phrase means and cannot apply it. It is as if I were trying to fit a little paper pattern to a cloud floating off there in the heaven. My tenderness for Jane does remind me a little of a cloud. It has changed so often in shape and hue. At times it has seemed to me a little white floating thing of celestial brightness, at others it has enveloped me in darkness and always it has been intangible, vague, unlinked to the earth.
And yet, even to me, she did seem at first very queer. It seemed to me that she was really too different to be innocent of all desire to make trouble. She often annoyed me by remaining so silent when any one else would have burst out with a flood of protest, and by going pale as death when a moderate flush ought to have expressed a sufficient sense of disturbance. The excessive emotional restraint evidenced by those sudden mute pallors of hers used to worry me with their exaggeration. I understood how this sort of thing, displeased my mother. I can remember moments when I expected to see her bound across the room and go crushing through the mirror, so tense was her physical stillness. Claire used to look at her then with lifted eyebrows and turn away with a nervous shrug of impatient disdain. I felt with Claire. I understood this sort of thing little better than she did. We were accustomed to people whose gestures were used to enhance the fine finished meaning of spoken phrases, not to dumb creatures whose eyes and quivering nostrils and long strong contracted fingers betrayed them in drawing rooms. I, caught up in the fine web of my family’s prejudices, had found myself from the midst of those delicate meshes seeing her as they saw her, as some gorgeous dangerous animal who was tearing the very fabric of their system to pieces with its many gyrations. As I say, I doubted her innocence. I suppose like every one else in the family I was affected by the glare Mrs. Carpenter’s obvious ambition threw over her. It didn’t seem to me possible that Jane had married Philibert simply and solely because he fascinated her. Not that I didn’t know Philibert to be capable of fascinating any one he wanted to, but because such fascinations had never seemed to me to contain in themselves any basis for marriage. The truth involved too great a stretch for my imagination. I had to find it out gradually. It necessitated too, the admission on my part that for Jane the name of Joigny counted for absolutely nothing. I couldn’t be supposed to know that Jane didn’t care a straw about marrying our family, when her mother so obviously laid great store by her doing so.
But I started to explain Philibert, and suddenly it comes to me; I believe that at the bottom of everything he did was the controlling impulse of his hatred of life. Undeniably he despised humanity. It exasperated him to tears. Its stupidity put him in a nervous frenzy. He was animated by a kind of rage of mockery. Everything that humanity cherished was to him anathema. He had been born with a distaste for all that men as a rule called goodness, and was nervously impelled towards that which they called evil. And yet the evil he courted didn’t do him any harm. I mean that it didn’t wear him out or spoil his digestion or stupefy his intelligence. On the contrary it agreed with him. He had begun to taste of life with the palate of a worn out old man. The good bread and butter and milk of the sweetness of life was repulsive to him and disagreed with him. He could live to be a hundred on a moral diet that would have killed in a week a child of nature. Sophistication can go no further. His equipment was complete, and he had, I suppose, no choice. His nature was imposed on him at birth. His punishment was that he lived alone in a world that bored him to extinction.
Seriously, he appears to me now, as I think of him, as a man living under a curse. I believe him to have been haunted by a sense of unreality. To get in contact with something and feel it up against him, that was one of the objects that obscurely impelled him. His extravagances of conduct were efforts to arrive at the primitive sensation of being alive. He did not know this. He only knew that he hated everything sooner or later. He was conscious merely of an irritating desire for sensation and amusement. His fear was that he would run through all pleasure before he died and find nothing left for him to do. It may have occurred to him at times that the world minus human interest did not provide endless sources of amusement. The things one could do to distract oneself were not after all so very many. Even vice has alas, its limitations, and it was not as if he were really in himself vicious. He had an absolute incapacity for forming habits good or bad. Could he have saddled himself with one or two the problem would have been simpler. Could he have become a drunkard how many hours would have been accounted for! If women had only had an indisputable power over him, what a relief to let himself go. But no. He was the victim of no malady and no craving. Drink as he might, his head remained excruciatingly clear, debauch himself as much as he would, he remained master of his passions, and day after day, year after year, he was obliged to plan what he would do with himself.
He found in the world only one kindred spirit. Bianca was the one creature on earth who was a match for him. She was more, and he knew it; she was in his own line his superior. Many people have been astonished at Philibert’s liaison with Bianca. They have considered the intimacy of these two people strange. I believe that Philibert’s feeling for Bianca was as simple as the feeling of a good man for a good woman, and as inevitable as if he and she were the only two white people in a world of black men. I believe that Philibert turned to Bianca in despair and clung to her out of loneliness. He and she were alone on the earth, as alone as if they had been gods condemned to live among men. She was his mate, moulded in the marvellous infernal mould that suited him. Voilà tout.
But she was a more refined instrument than he was. She filtered experience through a finer sieve. She had a steadier hand. Hers was the great advantage of being able to wait for her amusement and her effects. She was economical of her material. Philibert was afraid of running through the whole of experience and exhausting too soon the resources of life. Bianca was not afraid of anything, not even of being bored. She meted out pleasure with deliberation. She calculated her capital with fine precision, she measured the future with a centimetre rule, and poured out sensation into a spoon, sipping it slowly.
Philibert was a spendthrift. Bianca was as close as a peasant woman. And on the whole Philibert was honest. He did not try to deceive the world. He was too impatient and despised it too much. When he fooled it he did so openly and if people found him out he laughed. But Bianca was deep as a well and as secretive as death. What Philibert was so he appeared, but no one knew what Bianca was.
During the summer that Jane spent alone at Joigny with her child, Philibert and Bianca saw a great deal of each other. Bianca had musical evenings that summer, in her garden, and little midnight suppers that were quite another variety of gathering. Philibert never drank too much at these suppers, neither did Bianca; as much cannot be said of some of the others, if Philibert’s own account of these graceful orgies was true. It was at one of them that poor Fan Ivanoff’s husband threw a glass of champagne in her face, cutting her cheek. Neither Fan nor her wretched Russian were asked again. Bianca did not like that sort of thing.
Jane has told me that she did not go to America that summer because she hoped that Philibert would come to her at Joigny. She had found it impossible after the first shock of his revelations to believe that they were true. She told herself that he had been carried away by one of his fine frenzies of talk and had said things he had not meant. It was incredible to her that he should really mean that he cared nothing for her. He had, to her mind, given her during those years of marriage too many proofs to the contrary. Thinking it over alone she came to the conclusion that there was some mystery here that only time would make clear to her, and she therefore determined to wait. For a month, for two months, for three, she believed he would come and if not explain, at least put things on some decent footing, but he did not come for the simple reason that Bianca wouldn’t let him.
One has only to stop a moment and remember what he had at stake to realize the extent of Bianca’s power over him. He was entirely dependent on Jane for money. There was no settlement of any kind and he had none of his own. With her enormous income pouring through his hands, he had not a penny to show if she left him, and when people accused him later, as some did, of having put aside a portion of that revenue for himself they were wrong. His code of ethics, morals, what you will, his idea anyway, of what was permitted and what was not, allowed him to spend all her income and even run into debt; but not keep any of it for the future. It did not shock him in the least to spend Jane’s dollars on his various mistresses but it would have disgusted him to find any of these coins sticking to his palms. As long as he poured them out he was satisfied with himself; had he hoarded it he would have been ashamed.
In any case he knew the risk he ran, for he understood Jane, and knew that the fear of scandal would not keep her if she once decided to break with him. Nor could he have diminished the magnitude of the catastrophe that this would mean. His sensational reign had only begun, but it had already become vital to his happiness—I use the word happiness, for lack of another. He had done great things, but nothing as yet to compare with what he intended to do. The fame of his entertainments had already reached the different capitals of Europe, he had seen to that, but this was mere advertisement, preparatory work necessary to the realization of his ultimate purpose. He was in the position of a company promoter who had sent out his circulars and gathered in a certain amount of capital, but had not yet founded his business, and was still far from holding the monopoly he aimed at. He was certain of success but he must have time. If his plans miscarried now he would be his own swindler.
Jane, he realized perfectly, felt little interest in his schemes. It was one of the grudges he had against her. Her attitude from the first had been galling in its simplicity. When on the eve of their marriage he had proposed to her building a house, she had suggested that perhaps one of the beautiful old ones already existing in Paris might do, but on his insisting that none could compare with the image he had in his mind, she had given in with a sweetness and promptness that had taken his breath away. It is characteristic of him, in this connection, that though he wanted his own way and intended to get it, his pleasure in doing so would have been very much greater had she made it more difficult. Her pliability seemed to him stupid and when she merely said, looking over the plans he proudly spread out before her, some weeks later, “It’s dreadfully big, but if you like it I shall,” he came near to gnashing his teeth. It was equally galling to him neither to impress her nor to anger her, but he was obliged to contain himself, for after all, as he put it to Claire, he couldn’t go and tear the thing up just to spite himself. She would calmly have put the bits in the waste-paper basket.
When it came to arranging the house she had said—“I want one room at the top for my own. No one is to go there. I shall arrange it myself,” and the rest she left to him. I believe he never entered that room and never knew what she had done to it. If he thought about it at all, he doubtless thought she had arranged it as a chapel. He probably imagined an altar and candles and photographs of the dead. Jane never told him about it. Some obscure instinct of mistrust must have been at the bottom of her shyness. She had furnished it quite simply like a room in the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains. Her Aunt Patty had sent her a rocking chair, an old mahogany dresser, the window curtains from her old room, and some of her special belongings that she had left behind when she came away. It was the strangest room at the top of that mansion. I remember well the day Jane took me to it. She had come in from some function and was looking more worldly than usual. I remember gazing beyond her outstretched silken arm with its jade bracelets into what seemed to me the most pathetic of sanctuaries. The window curtains were of faded cretonne. The worn rocking chair had a knitted antimacassar. Two battered rag dolls sat on an old spindle-legged dresser against the wall. A spirit dwelt there that I did not know.
But I am wandering away from my subject. What I started to say was that Philibert’s life hung by the thread of Jane’s belief in him and he knew it. If he thought that thread was an iron cable then that fatuous belief alone might explain his putting such a strain upon it, but I don’t believe it was so. However far he thought he could try Jane, there was no sense in doing so, and he wouldn’t have done so had he followed the dictates of his own wisdom. It would have been so easy to have gone for a week to Joigny. Two days would have sufficed. A three hours’ journey in the train, two days away from Bianca, and Jane would have been reassured and his own future secure. So he would have reasoned it out had he been left alone, but Bianca did not leave him alone.
Her motive was quite simply to make mischief. She wanted Jane to suffer. She loved Philibert but she wanted him to suffer as well. There was nothing more in it than that. The most subtle people have sometimes the simplest purposes. Bianca’s subtlety often consisted in doing very ordinary things in a way that made them appear extraordinary. Her cleverness in this instance lay in the fact that Philibert did not suspect her motive. It is even doubtful whether he knew that it was she who prevented his going. Certainly she never did anything so stupid as to tell him not to go. It was rather the other way round. If they discussed it at all it was Bianca who urged upon him the advisability of his doing his duty as a husband. I can imagine her lying back on her divan with her lovely little spindly arms over her head and saying with a yawn, that really he was too negligent of his wife. His wife adored him. She was ready to fall into his arms. She was probably very sulky now, but once he appeared she would welcome him with all the ardour she was saving up during her villégiature. I can see Bianca looking at Philibert through half-closed eyes, while she touched up for him a portrait of Jane calculated to make him shudder.
Bianca herself was going yachting in the Mediterranean. She wanted to be hot, to soak in enough sunlight to keep her warm for next winter. They were to laze about the Grecian islands. G—— the historian was to be one of the party. While she was giving her body a prolonged Turkish Bath and taking a course in Greek history, he would be free to bring in the cows with Jane. No, he couldn’t come with her, it would be too compromising for him. American women began divorce proceedings on the least provocation.
And Philibert, of course, did go on that yacht to the Grecian isles, but to judge from his humour when he returned, he did not get out of the trip what he had expected. Bianca having lured him out there seemed to forget that he had come at her invitation. She left the party at the first opportunity and went off inland on a donkey, and didn’t come back, merely sent a message for her maid and her boxes to meet her at Athens.
Nor did Philibert find Jane waiting for him in Paris as he had expected, nor any message from her. It was the butler who informed him that Madame had gone to Biarritz with the Prince and Princess Ivanoff, and it was to Biarritz that Philibert was obliged to go to fetch her home.