XI
Things had been going very badly with the Ivanoffs. Their combined resources left them poorer than either had been before. Ivanoff’s resources consisted in debts, but debts that he never was obliged to pay, because he couldn’t. His creditors, those I mean who were in the business of money-lending, became more hopeful when he married and approached Fan without delay believing of course, that being an American she was rich. Poor Fan with her few meagre thousands a year meted them out bravely enough at first, paying here and there, the minimum that was nevertheless her maximum. Ivanoff had a small rather shabby flat on the Isle St. Louis, with one big room. It could be said of it that the place had atmosphere and would attract their friends if they made the most of its Bohemian charm. So they decided to live there, thinking thus to keep down their expenses. But Fan needed many things that had been unnecessary to the existence of Ivanoff. She required cleanliness, a bathroom with a hot-water installation, cupboards to hold her clothes, a lace coverlet for her bed, and enough wood and coal to keep the place warm. Ivanoff had never realized the damp and cold; when he was cold he drank vodka or brandy. He had not been over fond of washing; he took his baths at the club or in a public bath house. Fan’s maid was a complication. There was no proper room for her. She was constantly grumbling about Fan’s discomfort and served her little mistress with grim disapproval, making continual scenes with the Prince for the way he failed to look after the Princess, and going out herself on the sly to buy things for the house that she felt were wanted. The one department in the ménage that ran well was the kitchen. Ivanoff had a gift for cooking. He could train any youngster and turn him in three months into an excellent cook. When they gave parties he would go into the kitchen, put on an apron, roll up his sleeves and cook the dinner. He did his own marketing, going out with a basket on his arm. One ate better at his table than anywhere else in Paris. He used to make a bit now and then by passing one of his cooks on to a friend. He bought his wines in out of the way corners of France, and got them cheap, and these too, he sometimes sold at a profit. Nevertheless their expenses during the first year of their marriage were more than double their income. They had many friends; a great number of Russians, French, Italians, and Spanish and a few Americans came to their suppers, that were served in the big living room. People ate reclining or squatting on cushions with little tables before them. When the tables were carried out, some as yet undiscovered artist from a distant country turned up with a violin under his arm, or Ivanoff himself with his guitar on his knees would sing the folksongs of his country, with the long window open to the moonlit river and the dimly-looming towers of Notre Dame. All this was very gay and pleasant, but they could not keep it up unless they did something to make money. For a year Fan tried to find a respectable employment for her husband, but she was met everywhere with polite, but to her, mystifying refusals. Even the antique dealers refused to employ him to buy for them. Yes, they admitted, he had an exceptional “flair,” but he had no idea of money, and if he fell in love with a piece was as likely as not, in a burst of enthusiasm, to pay the owner more than he asked. And Ivanoff himself said that he had no capacity for steady work of any kind. She would send him to interview some financier or banker; he would go and talk charmingly about all manner of things save the business in hand, and then say “You know the Princess my wife wants you to do something for me. I have come to please her, but of course you and I understand that it is no use. It wouldn’t last a month, and I might make some mistake that would anger you.” And he would come away happily, to report to Fan that there was nothing he could do in that line. She was obliged to admit him to be incorrigible. The only thing he could do to make money was play cards. He played Bridge superlatively well. If he played enough he could count on making a hundred thousand francs a year.
I believe, because Jane has insisted that it was so, that Fan was for a long time unaware of the fact that Ivanoff made a living at cards, and I know that when she discovered that his stories about rents from properties in Russia were fairy tales and that the sums he turned over to her were really his winnings at little green baize tables, that she took it very hard for a time, and made him stop playing, but how could they then pay their bills? For six months she held out and he obediently stayed away from his clubs, spent his time wandering along the quays, twanging his guitar on his sofa, and cooking the dinner, while Fan’s little wizened face grew sharper and her laugh shriller and her cough more troublesome.
The inevitable happened. She caught cold. There was no coal to heat the flat. The maid, Margot, flew at Ivanoff, in a paroxysm. Ivanoff wept and tore his hair, fell at the foot of Fan’s bed, implored her forgiveness and rushed off to the Club. One is obliged to accept the inevitable. Fan asked no questions after that. I thought that I detected a furtive look in her eyes and a note of high bravado in her gaiety, when she staggered out of bed to go about again amusing herself. I imagined that she was ashamed. I may be wrong. In any case though every one knew their circumstances, she remained enormously popular.
The strange thing was that Ivanoff could always find people to play with him. The certain knowledge that they stood to lose heavily, irresistibly attracted men to his table, rich men, of course, he only played with rich men. He couldn’t afford Bridge as a pastime. And I know for certain that he derived from it no amusement. If his victims approached that square of green baize with pleasurable shivers of excitement, it was not so with him. Winning money at cards was no more interesting to him than is the breaking of stones to an Italian labourer. He played with what seemed to most people an exaggerated pretence of boredom, but his boredom was no pretence. Ivanoff never pretended in his life. He was a child of nature, a great dark abysmal child of the Slavic race. People liked him, they couldn’t help it. He was considered rather mad and utterly undependable. He had a way of disappearing mysteriously, and of reappearing again suddenly, and he never attempted to account for these absences. “Where have you been this time Ivanoff,” some one at the club would ask him, and he would smile his wide mongolian smile that narrowed his eyes to slits making him look like a chinaman, and then a worried wistful look would come over his sallow face and he would smooth carefully his heavy black hair—“I don’t know,” he would say, “I really can’t remember,” and somehow one believed him. He drank heavily, and when he was drunk he would talk about God, and the soul of the Russian people that was a deep pure soul besotted with despair, and would say that God in His wisdom must put an end to human misery very soon. He had an extraordinary gift for languages. Indeed he had many gifts and no capacity and no ambition. It never seemed to occur to him that he ought to provide for his wife, or look after her. For the most part, between his disappearances he followed her about like a great tame bear. He had an immense respect for her. “What a head she has,” he would say. “What a head for figures, and what a will. She can make me do anything, anything, except the things for which I am incurably incapacitated. I am like wax in her hands.”
Poor Fan! If he had had a little more respect for himself and a little less for her, it would have been easier for her. He drank more and more heavily as time went on. Night after night he would come home to her drunk and lie in a stupor wherever he happened to fall. Again and again he would beg her forgiveness, throw himself at her feet, kissing them and weeping like a heart-broken child. And because she found him beautiful, and because she believed he loved her, she did, over and over again forgive him, but she was worried half out of her mind. It began to dawn on her that his card-playing wasn’t enough; that he borrowed money of everybody. She foresaw that the day would soon dawn when every one of his men friends was a creditor. It didn’t occur to her at this time that he borrowed money from women as well. Nor did it occur to her as a possible solution to cut down her expenses by changing her mode of life. She and Ivanoff, and a lot of their friends for that matter, lived on the principle that, as Montesquieu said, it was bad enough not to have money, but, if in addition one had to deprive oneself of the things one wanted, then life would be intolerable. She had married Ivanoff to be a princess and to have a good time. She was still pleased with being a princess and more determined than ever to enjoy herself. Pleasure, noisy, distracting absorbing pleasure was becoming more and more necessary to her. As her troubles thickened, her craving for excitement grew. The more she was worried the more she needed to laugh. Her life became a staccato tune of laughter and hurting throbs and petulant crescendoes of gaiety. It was a tinkling dance with a drumming accompaniment of worry, the rhythm of it moving faster and faster as her problem deepened.
And people as I say liked her. Even Claire continued to see much of her. She was considered original and very plucky. Her parties were amusing, and she herself could be trusted to make any dinner a success. Her very shrill yell of laughter came to have a definite social value. She talked with a hard gay abandon that affected people like a spray of hot salt water. Fagged and blasé spirits turned to her for refreshment. She would enter a drawing-room on the run, and call out some extravagant yet neat phrase, and every one would become perky and animated. Always she had had some amusing and extraordinary adventure five minutes before her arrival. Her taxi had dumped her into the street, or a man had tried to abduct her or she had found a bill of a thousand francs lying on the doorstep. One never questioned her veracity. Nobody cared whether these things really happened or whether she made them up for the general amusement. It was all the more to her credit if she took the trouble to invent them. And enough things did happen to her, heaven knows, dreadful things. She was always in trouble. Her health was execrable. People mentioned phthisis. She had a way of fainting in the street and waking up in strange houses from which she had miraculous escapes. Decorated by her amusing gift of description, made entertaining by her contagious laughter, her miseries and her unfortunate adventures came to be an endless source of amusement in society. Her misfortune was her social capital; she turned it all to account.
Jane alone was not amused. Jane alone took Fan’s troubles seriously as if they had been her own, and watched her with concern and tried to reason with her. But Fan didn’t want any one to reason with her and was annoyed by Jane’s anxiety. At bottom I believe, during this period of their existence, that Jane bored her. She loved her, of course, in a way, because of their childhood, she knew that she could count on her in any crisis, but she preferred talking to Philibert. When she lunched in Jane’s house, she and Philibert would sit together after lunch and scream with laughter, and then, when she was about to leave, her little face would suddenly turn grey with fatigue, and she would say to Jane’s anxious enquiry—“Yes, my dear, I’m as sick as a dog. I haven’t slept for a month. I’m living on piqûres,” and then, tearing herself out of Jane’s embrace she would go away coughing, coughing terribly all the way down the stairs. Jane gave her a good many clothes. Fan told me so herself. “My dear,” she said, “I’m not going with Jane any more to her dressmaker’s. She insists on my taking too many things, and if I don’t she’s hurt. I escaped from Chéruit’s this morning with nothing more than a chinchilla coat. What do you think of that? I shall send it back when it comes, and there’ll be a scene.” And she did send it back, and there was I suppose, what she would call a scene. Jane spoke of it too, for she had overheard. She said—“Of course I’d rather give Fan blankets and coals, but as I can’t do anything sensible for her, why shouldn’t she let me do something foolish?”
I will say for Fan that she did not sponge, neither on Jane nor on any one else. She left that part of it to Ivanoff. And again Jane insisted that she didn’t know about Ivanoff. In any case it was Ivanoff who gave Jane her opportunity, as she believed, to help Fan. He came to see her one afternoon in a high state of excitement, made her swear she would never tell Fan a word of what had passed between them, and then asked her for fifty thousand francs. He said that they would be turned out into the street if he couldn’t get the money in two days, and that every stick of their furniture would be sold. It was unnecessary for him to explain to Jane why Fan should not be told. Jane knew, at least she thought she knew, that Fan would refuse the money. So she gave Ivanoff a cheque payable to herself and endorsed it and felt happy to have been able to help them. Ivanoff had pointed out that it would be best for her not to make out a cheque in his name. This was the thin end of the wedge.
Ivanoff having been well received, came back six months later and again after that. He had from Jane all told about two hundred thousand francs during a period of two or three years, not a large sum to Jane certainly. She easily enough hid the payments from Philibert by paying the amounts out of her personal account for clothes, travelling, flowers, trinkets, and so on. Occasionally she would countermand an order for a fur coat and feel that she was making a personal sacrifice for Fan, and this added a very real element of joy to her pleasure. And there was no doubt in her mind that this money did go to help Fan. Ivanoff always had some tale of Fan’s illnesses, her doctors’ bills, her need to go to some watering place for a cure, her last unfortunate venture in the stock market. Nevertheless Jane was worried. She was worried, God help her, because she was deceiving Philibert. The subject was heavy on her mind. At times she felt she must tell Philibert all about it, but Philibert did not like Ivanoff. She was afraid to tell him for fear he should put a stop to her doing anything more in that quarter. Philibert tolerated Fan because she was amusing and helped to occupy Jane, but he would not tolerate Ivanoff, and refused to have the Russian in his house. He was unaware of the latter’s quarterly afternoon visits. This, too, Jane had been obliged to keep from him. If she told Philibert that Ivanoff had been to call and had been received, she would have to explain why. Philibert seldom showed any interest in the people she received on her day in the afternoon, but he did occasionally ask her who had been there, and suggest that one or another was really too stupid or too ugly to be welcomed under his roof. He did not wish his house to be invaded by touring Americans or by the halt, the lame and the blind, so he exercised a sort of censorship over his wife’s calling list. Ivanoff was one of the people who to Philibert were beyond the pale. Up to the night of Bianca’s supper party he had forced himself to greet the big Russian with civility when he met him in other people’s houses, but after the beastly exhibition the latter had made of himself there, he had let it be known that he did not wish to find himself again anywhere in the same room with him.
It was therefore extremely unpleasant to Philibert to learn from his butler that Jane had gone to Biarritz with the Ivanoffs. Nothing, indeed, that Jane could have done could have been so disagreeable to him. Had she planned it on purpose as a revenge, she could not have calculated better, and he believed she had done so. He had come to his senses. He had perceived during the train journey north that he had been very foolish to take such risks. It occurred to him that he had not heard from Jane for two months, and that he did not know where she was. She might have gone to America, she might be there with the intention of not coming back. She was capable of anything. The news he received on arrival was a relief that left him free to enjoy his exasperation. He was not in a desperate fix after all, it was Jane who was in a fix. She had at last given him a definite cause of complaint and had incurred his displeasure in a way that made it easy for him to act against her. If this were her way of taking a line of her own and paying him back, she had played beautifully into his hands. He took the train for Biarritz, smiling and revolving pleasantly in his heart the things he would say.
But Jane had had no ulterior motive in what she had done. She had come back to Paris at the end of September and had found Fan lying exhausted by haemorrhage in an untidy bed with a bowl of blood beside her, and Ivanoff on the floor, his head in his hands, sobbing, while Margot stormed at him for his uselessness. Jane had simply picked Fan up in her arms, and had carried her away, and Ivanoff like an unhappy dog had followed, his tail between his legs. The haemorrhage had thoroughly frightened him. It was a fortnight later that Philibert, one brilliant afternoon announced himself at the Palace Hotel Biarritz. Fan was better and Ivanoff had recovered from his terror. Philibert found the two women in an upstairs sitting-room overlooking the sea. Fan was on a couch, her little wizened face screwed into a smile of bravado under her lace bonnet, and a cigarette between her rouged lips. Jane looked the more ill of the two. Her usual glowing pallor had turned to the whitish-grey of ashes, there were purple circles under her eyes. She was looking out of the window, her hands clasped behind her head, and when Philibert entered she wheeled at the sound of his voice, and then stood silently trembling.
Fan cried out at him, gaily impertinent. “Hullo, Fifi, you didn’t come too soon, did you?”
He didn’t answer her. “Come with me,” he said to Jane briefly, and she followed him out of the room. He had passed Ivanoff below in the bar. The sight had added nothing pleasant to his humour.
What he said to her was what he had intended to say. Her wasted face made no impression in her favour, on the contrary. He read in her agitation signs of guilt and seemed to have forgotten that he had abandoned her during six months on the pretext that she loved him too much.
As for Jane, she listened to him in a silence that she tried to make natural and easy.
Telling me about it afterwards she said, “I had determined this time to give him no opportunity of laughing at me. I made scarcely a movement. Though I was trembling, I managed to sit down in a comfortable chair and cross my legs and lean back, as if he had come to tell me something pleasant.”
He expressed without preamble his displeasure at finding her in the company of the Ivanoffs. He was surprised to find that she cared for such people. She knew, that he loathed Ivanoff and considered him an unfit companion for any respectable woman. He saw no reason why his wife should make his name a by-word in the glaring publicity of such a place as Biarritz. Here she was in the centre of a dissolute set of cosmopolitan adventurers, behaving like a common woman of light character, or at least giving the impression to the world of so behaving. He presumed that the Ivanoffs were her guests and were costing her a pretty penny. That was a side issue. The Russian was a dissolute ruffian who lived not alone on his winning at cards but on women. He was a man kept by women. As for Ivanoff’s wife, she knew what her husband was up to and profitted by his earnings. Jane, with white lips interrupted him here.
“I don’t believe you,” she said quietly. And then more sharply, “You forget that Fan is my best friend.”
He sneered. “I do not forget. I am merely unable to congratulate you on your taste. As for Ivanoff’s habits I can give you precise details. There is a woman in this hotel—” Something in Jane’s face stopped him. She did not speak at once, but leaning slightly forward, one arm on the table before her, looked at him calmly and smiled. She had done a good deal of thinking during those lonely months at Joigny. Alone and unobserved she had passed through her crisis. She was no longer the same person. Day after day, tramping the country, she had passed in review the years of her marriage and had scrutinized their every content, discovering slowly their meaning. She had learned a great many things. She was beginning to understand more than she had ever dreamed existed, of complication and danger in her surroundings, and she had determined if Philibert came back to her to put up a fight for her life, she meant her life with him: for the one thing she had not yet learned was to despise him. She still blamed herself for not having made him love her. She still cared for him. But she had learned a great deal, and among other things she had found out that she was alone. There was no one for her to turn to. His family, with one possible exception, myself, she realized now disliked her.
So she met him calmly. His attack had actually been a relief to her. Her agitation had been due just simply to the marvellous fact of his having come back to her, and she read in his annoyance a proof of his not being after all as indifferent to herself as he tried to make her believe. She voiced this.
“I was not aware,” she said quietly, “that you in the least cared what I did.” Her words and her tone startled him. He looked at her quickly. It was clear to him that she was older and wiser and would be more difficult to deal with than he had supposed. A gleam shot out at her from his eyes. It met an answering gleam. In silence their wills clashed. They were both aware that a struggle had begun. It was she who, after a moment, continued—
“I do not believe what you say about Fan and Ivanoff. I know that your worst accusation is untrue. Fan is incapable of accepting such money.” She paused as if to calculate her effect and added deliberately. “As for Ivanoff, if he lives on women then I am one of them. I have lent him money myself.”
He had turned away from her, but at this he whirled round like a top, his face contorted.
“What? What do you say? You? You have given him—?”
“Yes, I have given him money on several occasions.”
Her immobility had its effect. He hung over her speechless, his lips twitching, and she continued to look at him. At last she spoke.
“What do you think I gave him money for, Philibert?”
He saw instantly his danger. Her tone conveyed it to him. If he voiced a suspicion of anything so horrible he destroyed himself for ever in her eyes. His brain worked quickly enough to save him. Marvellously and lucidly he knew she would never forgive him for suspecting her, and suddenly he knew that she could not be accused. Her virtue that had so bored him was unassailable and her pride frightened him. Whether he liked it or not there it was before him, and as if he couldn’t bear the sight of it he whirled away from her and stalked to the window, muttering peevishly something about his not knowing why or what she had been up to. But she didn’t let him off. Her voice followed him across the room.
“I gave Ivanoff money for Fan. You understand that, don’t you, Philibert. You don’t suggest for a moment anything else, do you?”
He remained with his back to her, and she remained where she was, waiting, watching his nervous hands that twisted his coat-tails, and his foot kicking the window-sill, watching her image of him shrinking, wavering, changing. At last she rose. She was afraid now, afraid of despising him, afraid to watch him any longer. She moved to the door and from her further distance spoke again.
“I have given Ivanoff in all two hundred and fifty thousand francs. If you have anything to say about my doing so, please speak now. I am waiting.”
And he, at last, found the words with which to meet her.
“I don’t believe Fan ever got a penny of it.”
At that she faltered a moment, but only a moment. Her tone when she spoke was smooth and light.
“Well, if she didn’t it’s lost.” She could take it as high as that. She gave a little shrug, just the slightest shrug. It may be that she really did strike him as almost coming up to his own standard at that moment. In any case he chose the instant for his own recovery. He had seemed not to know what to do. He had made a very painful impression. His indecision had humiliated her more than his violence. She felt ashamed for him now, and all the pent-up passion in her surged uncomfortably, hurtingly, against the shock her opinion of him had received, sending hot waves of blood pounding through her veins, that gave her a feeling of sickness. He divined something of this. It was time that he recovered himself, and his recovery was beautiful. It shows him, I maintain, an artist. He went up to her deliberately and took her hand, and looking into her eyes said—“You are astounding,” then watching his effect he added, “You are superb. I do not understand, but I admire.” And then deliberately with consummate gallantry he kissed her hand.
And poor Jane was pleased. On top of all her deep misery she was conscious of a little silvery ripple of pleasure. Though it would never be the same with her again she thought that she had won a battle, and made an impression, and with a kind of anguish of renunciation she accepted his offering. She knew now that he would never give her what she wanted, but she believed that he was prepared at last to give her something, and she was bound to allow him to do so.
They left Biarritz the next day, having agreed between them on a number of things. Jane was to inform the Ivanoffs that their rooms were retained for a fortnight longer. Philibert promised that he would never allow Ivanoff to know that he knew Jane had given him money. Jane in return agreed not to repeat the experiment and to have no further dealings with Ivanoff of any kind. She refused, however, to give up seeing Fan as she had always done.