Jane--Our Stranger: A Novel

by Mary Borden

“But we’re serious too. There’s Ludovic as solemn as a trout. He’d be dreary if we let him be.”

“Only we don’t. Why should one worry? One can’t change anything. You must be one of us. It’s so amusing with us. You will see how amusing it is.”

So it was that they adopted me. And that night as I drove home through the moonlit streets I thought of St. Mary’s Plains with distaste and impatience.

But what I remember best of all about that evening was the sweet funny way you beamed down the table when you saw that your friends liked me. You were, you know, just a little nervous about the impression I would make on them. They were so much more brilliant than any one else that I don’t wonder. But it all went off well, bless your heart, thanks to the penetrating sweetness of your will that willed us to be pleased with one another.

There followed years of power and pleasure. Your friends made good their promise. They taught me to enjoy. Ludovic began to form my mind. Clémentine gave me the daring to use it. I learned how pleasant it was to follow one’s caprices, to indulge one’s tastes, to realize one’s dreams. Do you remember the things we did? What indeed didn’t we do, with our picture shows, our pantomimes, and our music? When we wanted to do a thing we did it. When we wanted to go to a place we went. What fun it was going off at a moment’s notice to Seville, to Constantinople, to Moscow. Some one would say—“Have you seen the Place Stanislas at Nancy by moonlight? No? But you must.” “Let’s go tomorrow,” and we went. Or—“I hear that at Grenoble there is a lady who owns a glove shop and who has in her back parlour a Manet, let us go and buy it, if it is true.” Of course we went and found it was true and bought it. Felix it was who took us all the way to Strasbourg for one night and day, to eat a pâté de foie gras and hear mass in the Cathedral.

But we were happiest of all in Paris. Paris was inexhaustible. Not a nook or cranny of interest and charm escaped us. Sometimes early in the spring mornings we would walk through silvery streets or along the quais or take the penny steamer down the Seine. We sampled every restaurant known to our gourmet Felix. We sat in icy studios at the feet of shy ogres. Even Dégas thawed to us, while rare spirits from odd corners of the earth joined us in the evenings. And increasingly the beauty of Paris was revealed to me. I cared for it intimately now, and I loved its smooth pale historic stones with a delicate sensuousness.

I was happy. I was as happy as an opium eater. I lived in a continuous mood of enjoyment that had the quality of a dream. All this was mine to behold and delight in, and I was responsible for none of it. I was passive. I was calm. The play played itself out about me, and I was in no way involved. What people did and what they didn’t do had no real significance. When Ludovic said: “A man has as much right to take life as to give it,” I thought placidly, “Perhaps so, in this world.” When he denounced property and capitalists and said we should all be poor, I thought, of course, that is so, and when he pointed out to me a woman who had killed her father because he was cross-eyed and got on her nerves, I merely looked at her with mild curiosity. He said that she was very sensitive and charming, and I believed him. It didn’t seem to matter.

And if at times it occurred to me that I was becoming callous and selfish, at others I felt that I was becoming intelligent and charitable.

Jinny was my one responsibility, a little will-o’-the-wisp creature who danced into my room of a morning to drop a kiss on my nose and dance out again. Jinny, so entrancingly pretty, so ridiculously dainty, who never soiled her hands or tore her frock or spilled her food, who said her prayers night and morning to a silver crucifix that her father had sent her from Italy, and who confessed her minute sins every Friday to a priest but never confided in her mother.

My child baffled me. There was nothing in my own childhood’s experience that threw any light on the little close mystery of her nature. She didn’t like animals, she hated romping about, she was afraid of the cold. What she liked was to be curled up on cushions in front of the fire and listen to fairy stories. Her indolence was complete, her capacity for keeping still, extraordinary in one who moved so lightly when she did move. Sometimes when I looked up from the book I was reading aloud to her, I would find her great brown eyes fixed on me with a look of uncanny wisdom. She seemed to disapprove of me. I wondered if this had anything to do with the teaching of her priestly tutors that her father had prescribed for her, or whether it sprang from a natural precocious feeling of the difference between us. We were certainly a strange couple. Even in moments of my most anguished tenderness, I could not but feel the incongruity. The idea that she was much more her father’s daughter than mine was one that I tried not to dwell on.