LXX
AT two o’clock in the house in the Rue Raynouard, Ellen came in to sit on the edge of her cousin’s bed and discuss the happenings of the day.
“I guess,” she observed, “Willie will be able to tell them a good story when he gets back to the Town. His mouth fairly hung open all the time when he was here.”
Lily smiled. “I don’t know,” she replied, braiding her heavy bronze hair. “From what he tells me, he’s in the backwater now. There are a lot of people there who have never heard of us. I suppose Willie and you and I are just back numbers so far as the Town is concerned.”
After Ellen had gone to her own room, Lily settled herself on the chaise longue and, wrapped in a peignoir of pale blue chiffon all frothy with old lace the color of ivory, she took from her desk the enameled box, opened it and read the worn clippings. The pile had grown mightily. There were a score of new clippings. The headlines had increased in size and the editorials were an inch or two longer. The man was progressing. He was denounced with a steadily increasing hatred and bitterness. It was clear that he had become a national figure, that he was a leader in the battle against the roaring furnaces.
For a long time she lay with her eyes closed ... thinking. And at last, hours after the rest of the house had grown still and dark, she sighed, replaced the clippings in the box and locked them once more into her desk. Then she settled herself to writing a letter over which she spent a long time, biting the end of the silver penholder from time to time with her firm white teeth. When at last the effort satisfied her, she placed it in an envelope and addressed it to Sister Monica in the Carmelite Convent at Lisieux. It was the hundredth letter she had written, letters in which she abased herself and begged forgiveness, letters to which there was never any reply save an unforgiving and relentless silence. It was like dropping the pale gray envelopes into a bottomless crevasse.
In the following May, Ellen went to Munich. It was the first step in a grand tour of the German cities. She would visit Salzburg, Cologne, Vienna, Leipsic. She would call upon Schönberg, Busoni, Richard Strauss, Pfitzner, von Schilling.... If the spirit moved her, she might even penetrate Russia. And certainly she would go to the festival at Weimar. All this was included in the plan she set forth to Lily. There was no schedule. She would simply progress from one place to another as her fancy dictated. She knew no German but she would learn it, as she had learned French, by living among the people. She went alone. Therefore she would have to learn the language.
The expedition was singularly characteristic of all her life. When she found that the Town was unendurable she had reversed the plan of her pioneer ancestors and turned east instead of west, to seek a new world which to her was far more strange than the rolling prairies of the west had been to her great-grandfather. When the traveling salesman, whom she used as a stepping stone, fell by the wayside and departed this life she was free to go unhindered on her own roving way, fortified by the experience of a few years of married life. She owned no fixed home. On the contrary, she moved about restlessly ... exploring, conquering, exhausting now this city, now that one. She was, it seemed, possessed of a veritable demon of restlessness, of energy, of a sharp inquiring intelligence. It was this quality, stimulated constantly by an overpowering curiosity, which sent her pioneering into the world of new music which Lily disliked so intensely. She explored those regions which musicians of a more contemplative and less restless nature dared not enter. It was as if she were possessed by a Gargantuan desire to devour all the world within a single lifetime.
Once in Paris she said to Lily, “You know, I am obsessed by a terrible sense of the shortness of life. It is impossible to know and experience all that I wish to know.”
But this was as near as she came to a contemplative philosophy. She had no time for reflection. The hours she spent with the indolent Lily inevitably fired her with a fierce and resentful unrest. It was then that she grew impatient, bad-tempered, unendurable. It was the descent of one of these black moods which drove her from the peaceful solitude of the house at Germigny upon a new voyage of exploration.