The dusk had deepened, and Mary's head drooped in meditation upon those old times. Had the move to Paris been a success? Or was not her enjoyment of life here an illusion caused by the stimulus of the war? Had her activity, her ceaseless activity during these last six years, in which her hair had grown white, been genuine or artificial? She had seen so many women pretending—not wilfully, but mesmerized into supposing that they really desired to be useful—yes, so many women pretending an activity that was only another aspect of a woman's lust for what was the fashion. Had her Red Cross work been anything more than that? Yet, after all, did the motive matter if the action was good and useful? Questions these that were unanswerable, questions that would never be asked if she were not suffering from the reaction. Thanks to the war her move to Paris had been a success, a great success. She might have found it hard otherwise to have passed these last years. When in 1913, bored with the big empty house, she decided to give up Woodworth Lodge, her imagination had seized upon Paris as the place to live, because she was already beginning to exist only in the past. That meant old age. Youth lives in the future; middle-age stagnates in the present; old age lives again, but alas, in the past, lives with only the ghost of its former life, always in the past. Her first year in Paris had been occupied in furnishing the house and preparing it to be a suitable place in which she might for the rest of her time here sit by the fire and dream of the past. Then the war had happened, and for a few years she had felt so much younger, but now, when it was finished, so much older than the years spent by the war justified her in feeling. She had made many friends. Indeed, she had never possessed so many as now. But these friendships formed late in life had little value. Friendship needed the future. There must exist in any friendship worth having a kind of physical exultation. She was fonder of this little cat than of all her Paris friends, much fonder. Pierrette was young. Youth! Youth! It was not that she longed to be young again herself. That would be foolish and indeed an undignified repining; but to be surrounded by youth, that was surely a legitimate desire.
"And it's that of which fate has robbed me," she sighed aloud.
Pierrette wagged her tail. The sound of her friend's voice was so pleasant to hear, and the silken knee was so delicate a resting-place for a royal cat. This soft-spoken human being deserved a little attention. Her hands were tactful. Not like Célestine's hands. Célestine was the maid who had taken the place of Adèle, dead before her mistress returned to Paris, a move which would have given Adèle so much pleasure. Pierrette did not care for Célestine, who was always lifting her off delightful nests of lace and silk. Célestine, in Pierrette's opinion, had the hands of a butcher rather than of a lady's maid. The thought of Célestine gave her a fisson, and she yawned in disgust.
Mary held Pierrette so that the cat's equilibrium should not be disturbed while she leaned over to ring the bell. It was morbid to sit here in the twilight thinking about youth. But when François had arranged to his satisfaction the folds of the brocaded curtains and when he had turned on the lights and left the room in a radiancy of rose, Mary could not think about what she called practical things, which meant the séance she had arranged for to-night. Her headache was gone; but the shadows of the past which had crept out of their lurking-places in the twilight were still in the salon, not visible indeed, but all the more hauntingly insistent because they were not visible. The room seemed vaster and lonelier now that every corner of it was illuminated. Mary felt infinitely small and utterly deserted. It was only the company of the small cat which kept her from getting up and hurrying away in panic. "Le demon du midi," she found herself repeating. What specter begotten of gloom and shadow could outlive the horror that existed in a desert of light? Her nerves were upset. Perhaps she was indulging too frequently in these spiritualistic experiments. But what else was there to do? If she were to renounce all activity, she would just sit shriveling slowly before the fire. After all, sixty was not such a great age. One would have to be at least seventy before one really considered oneself old. And probably even at seventy one would find that seventy was by no means the great age it had formerly seemed. Even eighty? Grandmamma had been eighty when she died. She had looked very old; but had she really felt old? Did anybody ever really feel old? What seemed so bad about the arrangement of human life was the amount of time wasted at the beginning and the end. The first ten years, for example, what were they worth? Mary was watering her nasturtiums in that abandoned room of the warehouse in Paternoster Row. "Old stock!" She could hear the very tones of Mr. Fawcus' voice. And the sunlight on the golden cross of St. Paul's. It flashed upon her inner eye more vividly than all the sunlight of the last twenty years put together. A sudden pity seized her for the two old people who had fostered her and from whom she had been so abruptly snatched. She saw Mr. Fawcus with his big bandana handkerchief wiping away the tears and waving his farewell from Dover Quay. How little she had understood what it cost them to lose her! How gayly she had set out for Paris! She ought when she was older to have visited them. It was wrong of her grandmother to forbid all intercourse. Suppose she should be given the guardianship of Geoffrey's little daughter, should she try to keep her away from her mother? Mary tried to think that she would not, although it was hard to be charitable about Geoffrey's wife. When he was killed early in 1915, it surely ought not to have been impossible for his wife to forgive. She had written to her so anxiously. Perhaps it had been a mistake to inclose another check. A woman like that might have supposed that she was trying to buy her. Still, to send back the check torn in half, that surely was not justifiable after so many years. She had not suggested that the little girl should be handed over to herself entirely. She had only asked for a few months every year. Would Geoffrey really have wished that his mother should be debarred from helping her granddaughter? Had it really been Geoffrey replying the other evening through the medium of la planchette? Mary must go to her grandmother. Nobody except herself knew anything about Geoffrey's little girl, and she herself had certainly not guided the pencil. It was all very well for skeptics to say that one guided the pencil unconsciously. Anything could be explained by auto-suggestion; but it was not reasonable to explain the inexplicable by something every bit as inexplicable. If it was auto-suggestion, why had she never succeeded in getting a communication from Richard's spirit. If ever anybody desired with all her heart and soul to speak with one dead, she desired to speak with Richard. Yet he was silent. With all the will she had to believe that he would come to her out of that immense world of death, she had never received any message that could possibly be ascribed to him. How hard she had often tried to twist those unintelligible scrawls into words of hope and assurance from Richard! If auto-suggestion could have done it, surely auto-suggestion would have done it. All theories about the world of spirits were no doubt inadequate; but it seemed natural to suppose that year by year the dead moved farther and farther away from the earth, and therefore that Richard was already beyond her reach. Geoffrey, on the other hand, died comparatively a short time ago. Moreover, without being ridiculous one might imagine that the number of people killed every day during the war would produce—— Mary paused. She could not help feeling that the picture of a crowded railway junction which her ideas of the confines of eternity implied was rather absurd. Perhaps the Sicilian crystal-gazer would throw some light upon the problem this evening. She would make a great effort to put out of her mind the notion of being given the guardianship of Geoffrey's little girl. She would concentrate upon something entirely different. Pierre for instance. He too had been killed out in West Africa early in the war. It was the end he would have chosen for himself. It was a fine death for a man over sixty to be killed in action, a fine death for the boy who fifty years ago had followed the drum-taps along that white road of France. It had given her a thrill of pride to read of his career since he and she parted forty years ago. He was one of those who had helped to prepare his country for the effort she had to make to save herself from the ancient enemy. Thus had they written of him who had loved herself as well as his country forty years ago. Such a little time ago really. If she shut her eyes and thought for a moment, she could reconjure every moment of that last meeting in the drawing-room of the King's Gate house.
"I wonder what you would have thought of Mac?" she asked, stroking Pierrette, who accepted the caress with a purr that showed how far she was from grasping the insult of such a question.
"Mac was a dog, you know. And you don't much care for dogs, do you, my dear?"
Pierrette continued to purr when Mary patted her, laughing.
"Conceited little cat!"
And then once more her consciousness was flooded with the apprehension of how much Pierrette meant to her. Those fragile paws soft as flower-buds with thorns for the unwary, that foolish tail not much bigger than a small cigar and of the same color, and most of all those big blue eyes indifferent as chalcedony, supercilious as a prince of Siam, and for a ball of wool sent rolling across the floor wild as a leopard that waits to spring upon a sheep, how much they represented in her lonely existence.