The Rescue

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“Tremendously,” Damier assented, feeling, with a beating heart, that daylight was about to flood his mystic temple. “Is she alive?” he added.

“That I don’t know. But I saw the second chapter at close quarters. I went to Vicaud’s studio one day. They had been married only a few years; she was a mere girl even then. I never saw such wretchedness.”

“In what way?” Damier’s heart now beat with a strange self-reproach.

“Oh—not describable. It was the evident hiding of misery that one felt most, the controlled fear in her face. She was lovelier than ever, but white, wasted, her delicate hands worn with work. The place was already poverty-stricken, but clean—grimly clean; I have no doubt she scrubbed the floor herself. Four or five artists were there—clever, well-known men, but not of the best type: the kind of men who wrote brutally realistic feuilletons for papers of the baser order, who painted pictures pour épater le bourgeois; grossly materialistic, cynically skeptical of all that was not so. One felt that, though utterly alien to it by taste, she could have adapted herself, in a sense, to the best bohemianism. She was broadly intelligent; she would have recognized all that was fine, vital, inspiring in it, all that it implies of antagonism to the conformist, the bourgeois attitude. But the bohemianism of her husband and his comrades could only turn her to ice. It was strange to see her fear, and yet her strength, in these surroundings. They saw it, too; her chill gentleness, her inflexible face, cowed them, made them silly rather than vicious. Only, at that time, she had not cowed her husband; at all events, he seemed to take a pleasure in showing his mastery over her, his indifference to her attitude. He was a genius, with the face of a poet and the soul of a satyr. She had charmed him by her unusualness; he had determined to have her, to snatch her, the fine, delicate creature, from another world, as it were, and to make her part of his experience of life in very much the same sense as he would have tried a new kind of sin for the sake of its novelty. Then, too, he hoped, of course, for advancement, pecuniary and social; the disappointment of that hope must have roused the fiend in him. Of course he loved her—if one can turn the word to such base uses. What man would not have loved her? He loved her as he might have loved one of his mistresses; and I remember that on that day he dared—as perhaps he would not have dared had they been alone—to go to her before us all, fondle her cheek, and, putting his arm around her, kiss her. We all, I think, felt the ugly bravado of it, and I know that I never detested a man as I detested him at that moment. She sat motionless, expressionless. Only her eyes showed the terror of her helplessness, her despair.”

“Just heavens!” Damier exclaimed, after a silence filled for him with a bewildering aching and despair. “Why did she not leave him?”

“Well,” said Sir Henry, looking at the tip of his cigar, and crossing his knees for the greater comfort of impersonal reflection, “there was the child—they had a child, a girl; I never saw it; and there was her pride—she had been cast off by all her people; and there was his need of her. A few years after their marriage Vicaud took to absinthe, and drank himself half mad from time to time. Her conceptions of the duties of marriage, the sacredness of its bond, were, I am sure, very high; duty, pity, a hopeless loyalty, kept her to him, no doubt. What she went through no one, I suppose, can imagine.

“I saw her once again; I was in Paris for a few days—it must have been more than ten years after that first meeting. I met her leading her husband in an allée in the Bois. He was a wreck then, his talent gone, his noble face a pallid, bloated mask. He leaned on her arm, draped in his defiant black cloak. I sha’n’t forget them as they walked under the October trees. She was changed, immensely changed. Her stately head was still beautiful, but with a beauty stony, frozen, as it were. There was no longer any touch of fear or softness. When she saw me she smiled with all her own gracious courtesy—but graciousness a little exaggerated; she had become, I saw, by long opposition to the life about her, almost too ineffably the lady. She had to keep, consciously, the perfume of life.

“I walked on with them, and, perhaps as a result of my evident wish to see more of her, she asked me to go back to dinner with them. I did, realizing when I got to their apartment what it must have cost her to ask me, and what the pride must be that could do it and seem indifferent in the midst of that tawdry, poverty-stricken, vicious existence. Up flights of soiled and shabby stairs, in a mean house, to a miserable room—its bareness the best thing that could be said of it—at the top of the house, overlooking a squalid quarter of Paris. There was a harp in one corner, and Madame Vicaud, in answer to my inquiry about her music, said that she gave lessons. The young daughter was at school in England, and Vicaud’s old mother lived with them, a spiteful, suspicious-looking bourgeoise with a handsome, flinty eye. Clara Vicaud gave her all the quiet deference that she would have given her had she been her equal. She had evidently forced from the old woman—forced by no effort, but by the mere compulsion of her own unflinching courtesy—a sullen respect. Her husband looked at her, spoke to her, with an odd mingling of resentment and dependence. He would say constantly, ‘Que dis-tu, Claire?' But he talked, too, with the evident intention of putting her to shame before her English guest,—seeing how she bore it,—talked of gallant adventures, of the charms of various females of his acquaintance. She sat pale, mild, and cold. It was like seeing mud thrown at a statue of the Madonna.

“When she and I talked together after the supper—one could hardly call the meal a dinner—she did not make an apologetic reference to the ribaldry we had listened to. She did not refer, either, to any of the friends she no longer knew. We spoke chiefly of her daughter, and of books. The daughter was evidently the one ray of light in her existence; she told me about her progress at school, her cleverness, her beauty. And next to her daughter, reading and music had been her great resources. I was surprised at her scholarship, at her familiarity with German philosophy, English poetry, Russian fiction, French and English literary and social criticism; indeed, on the subjects of social problems, of human suffering and the various remedies, economic and ethical, suggested for it, her knowledge was far deeper than my own. But in all our talk there was not a note of the personal, the confidential, the regretful; she might have been sitting in an environment absolutely her own. I never saw her again after that evening. When I was in Paris some years later I went to the house, and heard that Monsieur Vicaud and his mother had both died there, and that Madame Vicaud, after nursing them through their last illnesses, had gone. I have often wondered what became of her.”

Damier asked no further questions, and the talk drifted away from the subject of Madame Vicaud and her misfortunes. But that evening he wrote to Mrs. Mostyn, and asked her if she had not yet obtained for him some news of his lady of the photograph. The photograph had for him that night a new look; it still said, “I need you,” but “I need you now. Help me.” He was convinced that she lived.