XII
One day toward the middle of the winter of that year, Claire said to me; “What has happened to Philibert? He acts as if he were in love with his wife.” It was true. We had all noticed it. I mean Claire and my mother and myself, but gradually we came to notice something else as well, namely that Philibert’s increased attentions did not seem to be making Jane happy. She was strangely preoccupied and for her, strangely languid. Her old buoyancy was gone, and with it the impression she had so often conveyed of an over-powering awkward energy. Maman need never fear now that Jane would fall on her and crush her. Claire need not worry about being pushed into corners. When Jane did join our family parties, and she came much less frequently than in the early days, she was almost always so absent-minded as to seem scarcely to realize where she was. She would come in with Philibert and the child Geneviève, kiss my mother gently on the forehead and then sink into a chair and forget us. We might now have said anything preposterous that came into our heads. She would not have noticed us. She did not listen to our talk, and when we addressed her directly would give a little start and say—“Je vous demande pardon, je n’ai pas compris.” Sometimes I caught Philibert watching her as if he too were mystified and troubled. He would drag her into the conversation. “Mais, mon amie, écoutes donc, quand on vous parle,” he would exclaim in affectionate remonstrance, and she would flush a little and make a very obvious effort to pay attention. My mother felt there was something wrong. It may have seemed to her that she was herself responsible. She may have felt a certain contrition about Jane, or she may merely have found it intolerable that any one should derive from her drawing room circle so little apparent interest. In any case she made on her part an effort and talked to Jane much more, and in a different more intimate way than she had ever done before. And, of course, when actually talking directly to Maman Jane was perfectly attentive and perfectly courteously sweet-tempered. But when my mother turned her head toward some one else, Jane, as if released from the end of some invisible string that had held her erect in her chair, would slip back and lean her cheek on her hand, and the light in her eyes would be veiled by that invisible glaze that means an inward gazing. Such are the eyes of the blind. One could at such moment have waved one’s fingers an inch from Jane’s face, and she would not have blinked, at least that was my impression.
And she was incredibly thin. Many people thought this becoming to her, but to me it was painful. I had no wish to find Jane beautiful if I felt that she was going to die, and there were days when I did feel she was, as one says, going into a decline. She had been so harmoniously big that one would never have supposed she carried much superfluous flesh, until one saw it wasting away and found her still alive, and not a hideous skeleton. Her marvellous hands and feet were now, I suppose, even more marvellous, but to me their beautiful exposed structure of lovely bones was a source of pain. Her wrists and ankles were so slim that one felt if she made a wrong movement they would snap, and her rich lustrous clothes seemed to find round her waist and bust nothing to cling to. Only her broad shoulders and narrow hips seemed to support them. One could not tell where her waist was. Sometimes under the silken fabric of her skirt one saw the shape of a sharp knee bone. Her face seemed to have grown much smaller. The cheeks hollowed in under prominent cheek-bones, and her small green eyes were sunk into her head—that was more than ever like some carved antique coin and had taken on a quite terrifying beauty; I mean that the charm of her ugliness had received its special ordained stamp, the mark that the god or imp who made it had meant it to have. She reddened her lips a little now; otherwise her face was untouched by powder or rouge. The skin was of the palest ivory colour, a close smooth dull surface, without a blemish, soft and pure and dead. There was about the texture of her skin something curious. It made one dream of a contact so cold that if a butterfly brushed against it the little living thing would fall lifeless to the ground.
And a new charm disengaged itself from her person. She seemed possessed of a hitherto-unused and undiscovered magnetism, and she dwelt with it silently, wrapped in a kind of gentle gloom that she tried now and then to throw off as one throws off a wet clinging garment. I do not want to give the impression that she was moody, for that would be untrue. She was, on the contrary, of an uncanny equanimity, and when she smiled her smile crept slowly and softly over her face and as softly faded away. There was no jerk of nerves about it. Nervous was the last word one could apply to her. She was superlatively quiet, unnaturally calm, and yet at times she looked at me like a haunted woman, a woman haunted not by a ghost but by an idea, perhaps by some profoundly disturbing knowledge.
We were increasingly troubled. We wondered if at last she had found out things about Philibert, particularly about Philibert and Bianca, and somehow the fact that we knew he was devoting himself more to Jane and less to Bianca did not console us. What indeed was it but just the most disturbing thing of all that Philibert’s new devotion to Jane produced in her no flush of responsive joy? My mother was very worried indeed, and we were affected by her anxiety. Even Claire began to watch Jane with a questioning puzzled attention. Often I found Claire’s dark eyes travelling from Jane to Philibert, from Philibert to my mother, from my mother back to Jane. And simultaneously my mother’s eyes moved from one to the other, and so did Philibert’s and so did mine. We were all looking from one to the other, watching, referring, puzzling, comparing. Jane alone looked at no one.
I should have felt this to be humorous had it not humiliated and annoyed. It seemed to me that we were slightly ridiculous at times, and at other times lacking in delicacy. The last impression irked me exceedingly. For my mother and sister to be guilty of indelicacy was strangely unpleasant, I knew they were not impelled in their new interest by affection. They did not even now care for Jane. She had become to them an enigma; that of course was something more than she had been; there was a shade of admiration now in their wondering, but no genuine feeling for her and no sympathy. Their sympathy was for Philibert, and perhaps, a little for themselves. In any case they were afraid for Philibert. They saw his great social edifice swaying. They were holding their breath. And Jane gave them no sign. Had she calculated her effect with consummate art her manner could not have been more perfectly tuned to the high fine note of suspense. And they dared not to ask her anything.
But as the weeks passed, they gave way to asking each other. In her absence they constantly talked of her. It was curious how much of their attention she took up by staying so much away. Claire and my mother could now often be heard to say—“Have you seen Jane? What is the child doing with herself? I find her looking very unwell. Has she complained to you of feeling ill?” and now and again with a sigh of reproach either my mother or Claire would say to the other—“What a pity you never won her confidence. She tells us nothing, but absolutely nothing. It’s as if she didn’t trust us.”
And Philibert seemed as much at a loss as they. He could enlighten them very little. Gradually as their nervousness made them less discreet they took to questioning him. “But what is the matter with her?” they would ask, and he would shrug his shoulders. He didn’t know. Did he think she was ill? No, she wasn’t ill, she had never been so active. Was she then unhappy? Ah, who could say? She was now and then very gay, much gayer at moments than he had ever known her. She went out constantly. She had ideas of her own about receiving. She was arranging a series of musical evenings for the audition of unpublished works of young French composers. She was multiplying her activities. Sometimes he did not see her alone for days together. And here my mother gently and timidly interrupted him. “Mais mon enfant, when she is alone with you, is she amiable, is she kind? Enfin, is she gracious?” And Philibert again, but this time with a more exaggerated movement, shrugged his shoulders—“Comme cela. I have no right to complain.”
And then quickly I saw them all look at each other and saw the same thought flit from one mind to the other and dodge away out of sight, and the spectacle of those intelligent evasive glances exasperated me.
“Yes, it’s a different story now, isn’t it?” I didn’t care for their combined shocked stare, now centred on myself, and continued to Philibert—“After all, you’ve got what you wanted, haven’t you? You remember you told her not to love you so much.”
“Blaise!” My mother’s exclamation was a check. I had a sensation of shaking myself free. “Well, isn’t it so? Weren’t you all awfully bored with her caring too much for you, and now that she doesn’t, now that she has withdrawn, is leading a life of her own, you are troubled, you wonder. How can you wonder? Isn’t it all quite simple?” But I knew that it was not so simple after all, so I stopped.
“You think then,” put in my sister gravely, “that she no longer cares for us?” Her tone made me stare in my turn. It was earnest and enquiring, and I heard Philibert to my astonishment echoing her words. “Ah, you believe she no longer cares?” And most wonderful of all my mother’s phrase. “Tell us, Blaise, what she does feel. I believe that you understand her better than we do.”
It was quite extraordinary. I had the strangest feeling for a moment of pride and power. They had all turned to me. They had all recognized simultaneously that I possessed something valuable. And for a moment I enjoyed the novel sensation. They wanted something from me, that was pleasant, but what they wanted was Jane’s secret. They believed she had confided in me, and they believed I would tell them. I felt again weary and impatient and humiliated, and I brought out the truth abruptly. “I know no more than you do what is going on in Jane’s mind, she has told me nothing.” But I saw that they did not believe me.
The room, my mother’s room, seemed to shrink visibly. It appeared very small and trivial. Its innumerable bibelots and souvenirs winked and glinted, mischievous and precious, minute tokens of delicate prejudice, obstinate and conventional and colourless. It all looked small and meaningless and pale. I could have laughed. I was important there at last. But it was a tiny place to me now. I pitied it. I felt suddenly free and alone. I thought—“Jane has told me nothing, it is true, nevertheless she trusts me,” and I felt them reading my mind and it didn’t matter. They might know for all I cared that I knew nothing, they would feel all the same that I knew Jane as they would never know her. But what they would never know was, that knowing Jane as I did, I knew many other things, wonderful things. I felt a lift, a lightening, a widening of space, a fresh rush of wind as if I was being blown upon by the breath of those wide American forests. Somewhere in my mind vistas opened. I heard the murmuring of a free wind in high branches. And all the time I saw my frail little mother in her damask chair, in her little crowded silken room, and I loved her with tenderness and compassion. An impulse seized me. I went over to her. I took her hand.
“If only you would love her,” I said, “everything would be all right.” Then I saw that I had blundered. How could I have been so stupid as to have imagined that they had been with me for that moment in those wide high spaces where I knew Jane lived? My words sounded grotesque and fatuous. I saw a shade come over my mother’s face. I heard Claire’s swish of impatient drapery. Philibert snorted. I felt myself blushing. My face tingled. I had made myself ridiculous. My mother’s hand kept me off. Its nervous clasp pushed me from her while she murmured plaintively—“Mais je l’aime bien, mais je l’aime bien.”
Claire followed me out of the room. In the little dark hall we stood close together. She had closed the door of the drawing room after her. Beyond it we heard Philibert’s high nasal voice arguing. “What do you really think, Blaise?” My sister’s voice was low and confidential. I felt her mind pressing upon me with gentle insistence.
“I don’t know.”
“But you see a great deal of her, she talks to you.”
“Yes, but not about herself.”
“Come, Blaise.”
“Not about the present, only of the past, her home over there.”
She made an impatient gesture.
“Does she never mention Philibert?”
“Never in any way that matters. How can you think—? Do you imagine then that she is vulgar?”
But Claire’s eyes, tranquil and dark with their usual mournful depths of mystery, looked at me deeply as if she had not heard.
“I am afraid,” she said, “of Bianca.”
I was startled. The idea that Claire was afraid, so afraid as to voice her fear to me in that low tone of secret confidence, seemed to make everything worse, much more miserable.
“Why?” I asked, searching her face that so often evaded me with its mockery and now was so grave and deliberate.
“She may do something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, but she’s jealous.”
“Jealous of Jane?”
“Yes, hadn’t you noticed? She follows her about?”
“Bianca follows Jane about?”
“Just that.”
I thought how strange women are, seeing things that we none of us notice. I followed Bianca, Jane and Claire in imagination, moving about Paris in smooth rapid motors, slipping in and out of crowded streets, shops, drawing-rooms, theatres, watching each other. But how could Claire see one pursuing the other with all those people round them, all the music, the waiters, the footmen, the lights scattered along dinner-tables, the obstructing tables and chairs, the endless engagements? My mind wavered, I felt dizzy. I saw each one of the three women stepping out of her car, going into her house, the door closing upon her, hiding her from the world.
I came back to Claire’s delicate face and brooding eyes.
“But why should Bianca be jealous?”
“But why not?”
“You mean she thinks Philibert is escaping her?”
“And isn’t he?”
“I don’t know.” Suddenly I felt at the end of my strength, as if I had been undergoing a great nervous strain. “How should I know anything about Philibert? You all seem to think I know what Philibert is up to.” I felt strangely exasperated. “And what, mon dieu, is there exactly between Bianca and Philibert?”
“Ah,” my sister smiled faintly, “that I cannot tell you, but whatever it is, it is enough.”
“Enough to make trouble, you mean?”
“Yes, enough to make trouble.”
“Well, if you really want my opinion, it is that Jane does not bother at all about Bianca.” And I began irritably to get into my coat. But Claire, helping me on with it, still pressed me and said over my shoulder—
“So you don’t think Jane in her turn is jealous?”
“I don’t think anything about it. What I think is that it is none of my business.” And I grabbed my hat and left her, but looking back as I went down the few steps to the outer door, I saw her looking after me with an inscrutable smile, as if she had learned something from me that she had wanted to know, and I determined to keep away from such family talks in future.
I had my theory about Jane during those days, of course, but according to Clémentine I was wrong. Clémentine thinks that Jane loves Philibert even now, even now over there in that dreary little house. I can’t believe it. But what does Clémentine mean by love, anyway? Clémentine is a Latin, the smooth willing exponent and devotee of her senses. She has known love—“elle a rencontré l’amour plusieurs fois.” If she means anything, if there’s anything in what she says about Jane, it is that Philibert still has the power to affect Jane, to make her pulse beat quicker, even now. I wonder, but I don’t want to think about it.
I believed that winter that Jane had ceased to care for Philibert, and that that was the explanation of her strangeness, that made her appear so often like a sleep-walker. I argued that to a person like Jane it would be more terrible to no longer love than to be no longer loved. There were moments when alone in my room with her image before me, I was certain that she was beginning to despise him. How could she help it I would ask myself, and be filled with an exulting bitterness. I see now what it was. I wanted her to despise him, and so believed it. But it was not so much that I fiendishly wanted Philibert to suffer, for I did not believe he would suffer. I wanted Jane to right herself. That was it. I wanted her to get loose from her bonds that seemed to me to expose her in an attitude humiliating and pitiful. I couldn’t bear to contemplate her as Philibert’s slave. It was this thought that sent me out at night to walk the streets in a fever. Ridiculous? Perhaps. But haven’t I a phrase of Jane’s sounding in my brain even now that justifies all my sickening suspicions of the past, one phrase, the only one that she ever let fall that threw any light on her relations with her husband.
It was only the other day in St. Mary’s Plains. Time had made it possible for her to speak as she did. Ten years, fifteen, had passed, but she spoke with an icy distinctness as if controlling a shudder.
“Bianca,” she said, “was jealous of that process of corruption that she called my happiness.” But this is all too painful. I must stick to the facts of my story.
Claire’s fear was all too well founded. Bianca was jealous and Bianca was going to intervene. Philibert was slipping away from her and falling in love with his stupid wife. That could not be tolerated. She stirred uneasily. Moreover Paris was beginning to take account of Jane. People were talking about her wherever one went. They argued about whether she was ugly or just the most beautiful woman in Europe. Sides were equally divided. But what did it matter whether one called it beauty or ugliness, once her appearance had made its impression upon the receptive mind of Paris? The Byzantine Madonna or the Egyptian mummy or whatever it was that she had been said to resemble had come to life. Paris recognized her as singular, and that was all that was necessary. Soon she would be the rage. Some one would set the ball rolling. Bianca saw it all quite clearly. Like a little witch bending over a boiling pot she made her preparations. It would be funny to think of if it had not come off just as she intended. The sorceress was again on the move astride her broomstick. She was chanting her incantations that were meant to bring a woman to the dust and a man to her side. But first she sent for Fan and told her all about Ivanoff and Jane and about Philibert’s interference in Biarritz. She had got the whole story from Philibert and used it now with just the effect she wished. She began lamenting the fact that she saw so little of Jane, Jane was dropping her old friends. Hadn’t Fan noticed a difference? No, Fan hadn’t. But Ivanoff—surely Jane didn’t see anything much of Ivanoff these days, not at any rate as she used to? Fan laughed. If Bianca thought Jane capable of flirting—. But Bianca meant nothing so silly. Bianca meant simply that Jane had been very foolish and that Philibert was angry with Ivanoff and wouldn’t have anything to do with him because of Jane’s foolishness. Fan at this, had grown suddenly serious. The rest was easy. It all came out. Ivanoff had had large sums of money from Jane. Philibert had found out, and Jane had made him swear to do nothing about it so that Fan should never know. This, of course had been most unfair to Ivanoff as the latter had been given no chance to clear himself with Philibert. Ivanoff might have been able to explain many things that remained obscure.
The result of this conversation was all that Bianca would wish for. Poor Fan rushed home to her dilapidated attic on the Isle St. Louis and flung it all at Ivanoff’s great sleek meek head. He had been taking money from Jane. How much money? When? Why? Where was it? How could he? How had he come to think of such a thing? Didn’t he have any sense of honour? Didn’t he have any shame? Ivanoff bowed his head. Meekly and humbly he let her rave at him until exhausted, she flung herself on the bed in a torrent of tears, and all that night he sat on the floor beside her bed, extravagantly ashamed, thinking vague dark hopeless thoughts, and now and then heaving a sigh.
It didn’t occur to him, the next day or the next or any day after that to explain anything. Probably he was unaware that Fan’s second thoughts were more poisoning and disturbing to her than the first. Ivanoff was no psychologist. If he noticed that Fan was strained and looked at him queerly, he remained passive and mute, and no light of curiosity seemed to strike down into his abysmal calm. When suddenly Fan flashed out the question—“Did you make love to her?” he merely shook his head, and when at last after a week of fidgetting she announced that she had written to Jane to tell her that they couldn’t pay the money back and that she would understand the wisdom of their not seeing each other any more, he stared vacantly, then frowned and sat down in a heap on the divan for the rest of the day. Judging by his fantastic subsequent behaviour, he must have been pondering upon the question. He probably thought—“Women are worthless cattle. Jane has told. She has given away the secret. She has hurt Fan. I am getting tired of Fan. Some day I will go away, but Jane hurt her and made her tiresome and she must be hurt too, before I go. But how? But how?” That was the difficulty. He must think of some way. And all the time he was sitting there thinking, he could hear Fan coughing and tossing in her room, and he could see her little tame chaffinches jumping about in their cage in the window. Fan was often like that, like a neat little bird flitting and hopping about, but now she was sick and ruffled and not gay and chirpy at all.