“Not more than ten days—I should think,” I said avoiding her strange eager eyes.
The next day she was very tired, she asked if there were letters but only looked at the envelopes, saying—“They don’t care a damn whether I live or die,” and the next day and the next, she asked again for letters only to fling them aside.
In the evening she said, “I’m a beast, Jane—and a fool. Why did we write for those hats? I know I can’t wear them, but I’ve always wanted to order hats like that, half a dozen at a time without thinking what they cost. You won’t mind paying, I know—and I don’t mind now. I’ve been a beast about you, Jane, I used to envy you so many things.”
“What for instance—?”
“Well, your ermine coat with the hundreds of little black tails, the sable cape, and your jade necklace, and your pearls. I always adored pearls. I believe I could have sold my soul for pearls like yours at one time. Funny, isn’t it? Lucky no one ever offered me any—no one ever did you know. I wasn’t the kind to have ropes of pearls given me for the asking. If I had only been beautiful, Jane—I would have gone to the dogs sure as fate, but oh, I’d have had a good time. As it is, I don’t seem to have had much fun, now that I think of it. My past is like a dingy deep pocket with a hole in it somewhere. I’ve been dropping trinkets into it all my life, and now I find it’s empty, just an empty dark pocket—that’s my past.” She gave her old shrill laugh. “It’s damn funny isn’t it, Jane—life, I mean. We go on, hoping, hoping, looking forward, looking for something, thinking always there’s something nice ahead for us, being cheated all the time, never admitting it, never giving in, always expecting—fooling ourselves, being fooled—up to the very end. What makes us like that? What keeps us going? Who invents the string of lies we believe in?”
She lay propped up on pillows, her head sunk between her pointed shoulders, her knees sharp as pegs pushing up the bed-clothes, and her skinny hands like birds’ claws picked at the lace on her sleeve.
“Happiness—Jane? I was happy once, you know. It made me good, at least I thought so. I felt good. I tried to be good. Everything dropped away; it was like moulting. I came out a plucked chicken, no fine feathers left. What was the use? I was too far gone I suppose, when it came—” She stared up at me, her cheek bones flushed, her wide nostrils, great black holes in her small face, palpitating. “Love came—now death—and I’m not good enough for that either. What’s death to me? Nothing. I can’t rise to meet it. I want some new hats. That’s all I can think about, all I can bear to think about. My death Jane, like my life, is empty. I fill up the emptiness with things, little things.” She held her two hands against her side as if the emptiness were there, hurting her. “Jane,” she said suddenly, “I wonder—” Her eyes widened, and in them I saw the shadow of the great terror that gets us all in the end. She stared, her dreadful gaping nostrils dilating, her mouth open, her hands out in front of her, pushing against the air. Then suddenly she laughed. “No, no, damn it all, let’s be frivolous up to the end. It’s as good a way as another of seeing the business through.”
She died the end of July, with all her new hats strewn round the room and a piece of wonderful lace in her hands. “Lovely, lovely lace, isn’t it, Jane?” she had said a minute before, and then there was a tearing sound in her chest and the scarlet blood flowing from her mouth, and one choking cry as I sprang to her side.
“Jane—Jane—I’m going now and I’ve not seen him. Jane, tell him, tell Micky I hoped—” Her eyes were agonized. The blood choked her. She couldn’t speak, but I saw in her eyes what she meant—terribly I saw—how she had believed up to the end that Micky would come back to her.
It was Ivanoff who came and Ivanoff, great hulking shameful pitiable creature who wept over her poor lonely coffin. We brought her back to Paris, Ivanoff and I, and buried her in Père-Lachaise one rainy afternoon and then he disappeared again for the last time.