I went, instead, direct to the Hotel Crillon and sent up my card to Miss Leslie; it struck me as fortunate that I found her just returned to her rooms from a visit to Susan. It was really a calamity. I had seen her several times there, at the hospital; I liked her; and I knew that Susan had now no more devoted friend. She received me cordially, and I at once laid all the facts before her and—with an entirely sincere humbleness—asked her advice. But God, in the infinite variety of his creations, had never intended Mona Leslie to shine by reason of insight or common sense; she had other qualities! And this, too, I should easily have discerned. Why I did not, can only be explained by a sort of prostration of all my faculties, which had come upon me with the events of the night and morning just past. I was inert, body and soul; I could not think; I felt like a child in the sweep of dark forces it cannot struggle against and does not understand; in effect, I was for the time being a stricken, credulous child. Perhaps no grown man, not definitely insane, has ever touched a lower stratum of spiritual debility than I then sank to—resting there, grateful, fatuously content, as if on firm ground. In short, I was a plain and self-damned fool.
It seemed to me, I remember, during our hour's talk together, that Miss Leslie was one of the two or three wisest, most understanding, and sympathetic persons I had ever met. Sympathetic, she genuinely was; very gracious and interestingly melancholy, in her Belgian nurse's costume, with King Albert's decoration pinned to her breast. It seemed to me that she divined my thoughts before I uttered them; as perhaps she did—for to call them thoughts is to dignify vague sensations with a misleading name. Miss Leslie had had always, I am now aware, an instinctive response for vague sensations; she had always vibrated to them like a harp, thus surrounding herself with an odd, whispering music. A strange woman; not without nobility and force when the appropriate vague sensations played upon her. The sufferings of war had already wrung from her a wild, æolian masterpiece, more moving perhaps than a consciously ordered symphony. And Susan, though she had never so much as guessed at Susan, was one of her passions! Susan played on us both that day: though the mawkish music we made would have disgusted her—did disgust her in its final effects, as it has finally disgusted me.
What these effects were can be briefly told, but not briefly enough to comfort me. There is no second page of this record I should be so happy not to write.
Miss Leslie had long suspected, she told me, that Susan—like Viola's hypothetical sister—was pining in thought for a secret, unkind lover, and she at once accepted as a certainty my suggestion that so gallant a young aviator as Jimmy had been what "glorious Jane" always calls her "object."
"This must be kept from her, Mr. Hunt, at all costs—for the next few weeks, I mean! She's simply not strong enough yet, not poised enough, to bear it—with all the rest! It would be cruelty to tell her now, and might prove murderous. Oh, believe me, Mr. Hunt—I know!"
Her cocksure intensity could not fail to impress me in my present state of deadness; I listened as if to oracles. Then we conspired together.
"My lease of the villa at Mentone runs on till May," said Miss Leslie. "Susan's physically able for the journey now, I think; we must take that risk anyway. I'll get the doctors to order her down there with me, at once. She needs the change, the peace; above all—the beauty of it. She's starved for beauty, poor soul! And there's the possibility of further raids, too; she mustn't in her condition be exposed to that. When she's stronger, Mr. Hunt—after she's had a few happy weeks—then I'll tell her everything, in my own way. Women can do these things, you know; they have an instinct for the right moment, the right words."
"You are proving that now," I said. Every word she had spoken was balm to me. Everything could be put off—put off. . . . To put things off indefinitely, hide them out of sight, dodge them somehow! Why, she was voicing the one weary cry of my soul!
And so, within three days, this supreme folly was accomplished. Mona Leslie and I stole across the river in secret to little Jeanne-Marie's meagerly attended "funeral of the first class," and with Madame Guyot, Doctor Pollain, and a few casual neighbors, we followed her coffin from the vast drafty dreariness of St. Sulpice to the wintry, crowded alleys of the cemetery of Montparnasse.—That very evening Susan left with Miss Leslie for Mentone.
She was glad enough to go, she said, for a week or two. "But Ambo—what shall I say to Jimmy? Will he ever forgive me for not having been able to make friends, first, with Jeanne-Marie? And it's all your fault, dear; you must tell him that—say you've been downright cross with me about it. I wish now I hadn't listened to you; I feel perfectly well to-night; I've no business to be starting on a holiday. But I shan't stay long, Ambo. I'll be back in Paris before little Jimmy arrives; I promise you that. And here's a letter to post, dear; I've said so in it to Jeanne-Marie."