Jane--Our Stranger: A Novel

by Mary Borden

I couldn’t argue with him. I couldn’t tell him what I really felt and feared, or explain to him how I hated for Jinny, all the things that I now accepted for myself, for he was one of those things, the principle one; I had accepted him. I had even grown to understand him, and if it hadn’t been for Jinny, I felt that we might become friends. His extravagances, his cynicism, his fondness for women were things that I now took for granted. They no longer bothered me. For me, he would do now, I no longer asked anything of him, but for Jinny he wasn’t half good enough. As a father to my child, I found him impossible.

One often hears of estranged couples being brought together by their love for a child. With Philibert and myself, it was the contrary. We were both jealous of Jinny. We were afraid, each one, that she loved the other best, and our nervousness on this point acted to keep us in each other’s company while it made friendship impossible. Neither of us liked to leave the other alone with her for any length of time. I had stayed with Fan for three months and had come back to find Jinny hanging on her father’s every word, and to find what I imagined was a coldness between her and myself. This may have been my imagination, or it may have been true; I don’t know, but I suspected Philibert of working to alienate her from me, and he suspected me of the same thing. If I suggested taking Jinny to Ste. Clothilde for a fortnight, he either found a way of keeping us in Paris or accompanied us, and if Philibert wanted for some reason to go away, to London or Berlin or Biarritz, he was haunted by the idea that in his absence I might steal a march on him with Jinny, so really bothered I mean, that nine times out of ten, he would give up going unless I went with him. The result was that we were more constantly together than we had been since the first year of our marriage.

Looking back now to that winter of 1913-14 I see it as a season of delirium, of fever, of madness. Paris glows there, at the eve of war, in a lurid blaze of brilliance, its people giddy, intoxicated, dancing over the quaking surface of a civilization that was cracking under them. A period in the history of the human race was drawing to a close. The old earth was rushing towards the greatest calamity of our time, carrying with it swarming continents that in a few months were to seethe and smoke like beds of boiling lava—and the people of the earth as if aware that the days of pleasure were numbered, were possessed by a frenzy. I say the people of the earth, but I mean of course, the rich, the idle, the foolish, the so-called fortunate who make up society and of whom Philibert and I were the most idle, the most foolish, as we were perhaps the richest.

That winter marked the height of our folly and of our worldly brilliance, and for me it marked at the same time the deepest depth of futility and cowardice.

Philibert and I were like two runaway horses harnessed together, and running blindly, with the smart showy vehicle of our empty life rattling and lurching behind us, and poor little Jinny inside it.

His extravagance that winter was colossal. I did not try to restrain it. He felt the inertia of old age coming on him, and was having a last desperate fling: I felt sorry for him. His parties were fantastic. He bought the servants’ under-linen at Doucet’s; I only laughed when he told me. Money? Why not spend it! The more he spent, the less would be left for Jinny, and that, I argued, was all to the good. If only he could manage to run through the whole lot, then Jinny and I would be free. Dinner succeeded dinner, dance followed dance. We received half Europe and were entertained in a dozen capitals. London, Brussels, Rome, Madrid, we took them all in. It was very different from my picnic trips with you and Clémentine when we travelled second-class, carried paper bags of sandwiches and had literary adventures in old book shops with ancient scholars in skull-caps and spectacles. Philibert and I travelled in Rolls Royces or in private trains. We had maids and valets and couriers to smooth away every discomfort and every bit of unexpectedness. Philibert never missed his morning bath and massage, his Swede, too, travelled with us.

It was not very interesting. One glass of champagne is like another. Royal palaces are as alike as cabbages. Everywhere we met the same people and did the same things. We danced, we gambled, we gossiped, we ate and drank and changed our clothes, and I was often bored, and often gloomy. Too much brilliance has the effect of darkness.

In my dismal moods I told myself that I hated it, but probably I didn’t. No doubt it had become necessary to me to be surrounded by a crowd of flatterers. We are all fools—And I had no precise idea of myself. Even at night, when I was alone, and when I should have been stripped naked to my soul in the dark, I was still wrapped about to my own eyes, in the flattering disguises of the world’s adulation.

In Jinny’s eyes alone did I seem to see myself as I really was. I trembled as I looked into them.

I wonder if all women are afraid of their children? Perhaps not, the woman who has the love of her husband and a clear conscience and a sure hope of heaven. I had none of these things, and I was afraid. I had staked everything on Jinny, but my conscience was not clear about her. Instead of a hope of heaven, I had the hope of her happiness and yet I knew that I was not doing what was necessary to realize it. What I was doing was, when one thought it out, futile and ridiculous. I was wasting my life to save hers; because of her, I had been involved in this endless round of futility and I was behaving as if I believed that if I were wretched enough, she would be happy.