And as Madame Gigon talked on and on to the accompaniment of the distant sounds from the misty river, there swept over Ellen a consciousness, new but unmistakable, of a delicate unity running through all of life. It was bound together, somehow, in an intricate web composed of such things as love and memories, hopes and sorrows and sentiment, but it was a web without pattern, without design, a senseless, crazy and beautiful thing. She saw then that she could never exist apart, in isolation, from all these others; there were filaments which bound her even to so remote and insubstantial a creature as this blind old woman. It was the web which made her uneasy. She must be free of it, somewhere, sometime....
Criquette began to wheeze and Madame Gigon prodding him with her toe said, “Heigh-ho!... We must go to bed.... Even the dogs have begun to snore.”
38
AT the end of the week Lily returned from the south, wrapped in furs and shivering in the damp of Paris. She was a warm, sensuous creature who loved the sun and traveled north or south according to the variations in temperature. Even on the Riviera she was not content and, on the occasion of a mistral, she had been known to pack her bag and embark into Italy for Capri or Taormina where the sun was brighter and the flowers more fragrant.
She arrived early in the morning in company with the Baron, Madame Gigon’s nephew, and together they came upon Ellen, not yet fallen into the luxurious habits of the French, having breakfast alone in the dining room with Jean, who sat across the table from her plying her all the while with questions about his grandmère and about America and the Town where his mother was born. She was describing it to him....
“It is not a nice Town.... It is full of big Mills and furnaces and the soot blackens everything.... There’s nothing pretty in the Town ... nothing in the whole place half as pretty as your garden.... Your grandmother had a garden once that was as pretty as this one but it’s all dead now. The smoke killed it....”
Here Jean interrupted her to say, “I know!... I know!... Maman has a friend ... a Monsieur Schneidermann who owns Mills like that. Once when we were up north, we stopped at a town called Saarbrücken and saw the furnaces.... It was a long time ago when I was only seven ... but I remember....” He became silent and thoughtful for a time and then, looking at her wistfully, he added, “I’d like to go to that Town ... I’d like to see my grandmère.... But Maman says I can’t go ... at least until I’m grown up.... I suppose grandmère will be dead by then.... She’s an old, old woman....”
“But she’s not so old as Madame Gigon.... Think of it, Madame Gigon taught your grandmother in school when she was a young girl....”
She wanted by some means to escape from the subject of the Town. She could not, of course, tell the boy why he could never visit the Town; she could not tell him there were scores of old women who had been waiting for years just to know for certain that he existed at all. She could tell him about the smoke and filth, but she could not explain to him the nasty character of those women.
“I’m going to England to school in the autumn,” the boy said. “Maman has arranged everything.... I’ll like that better than going to school here.... Perhaps grandmère might come to visit us some time.”