I didn’t have to wait long. It is all so curious, the way it worked in together. Bianca’s coming back. Why should she have come back? She was a woman of no character. I had frightened her and she had crumpled up and run away. But she hated me for humiliating her. She could never forgive me for having broken up her surface of perfection. So under the monstrous cloak of the war she had crawled back to get in my way, to trip me up, to do me in, somehow, and she had stumbled on the way to do it. She had come across Jinny.
And to a woman like Bianca, Jinny must have been like a spring in a desert, a thing of a ravishing purity and freshness. Like a woman dying of thirst, she flung herself at the child’s feet. I see it all now in retrospect. Poisoned, diseased, tired to death, addled and excited by drugs, sick of men, unutterably bored with herself, here was the one thing to appeal to Bianca, the one charm capable of distracting her from the nightmare that possessed her. It is the usual tale of such women. The cycle is completed. They all end that way. And add to her corrupt affection for the child the impetus of doing me a final and deadly hurt and you have the situation before you.
By the time I came back from the front, she was sufficiently intimate with Jinny to prevail upon the child, never to mention her name to me. I knew nothing. I was unaware that they had ever spoken to each other.
It would have been better if the family had been frank with me about their plans for marrying Jinny. It would have been better because it would have been kinder, and when you want to get round a person it is as well to try kindness. Also, it would have been more intelligent. Surely they might have understood me, by this time. How is it that they did not foresee what would happen? How is it that they did not know that if they tried to force my hand I would see red? You can persuade a savage to do almost anything, but if you frighten him, he smashes things. I was the savage. They should have known better how to deal with me.
It was foolish to plot and scheme behind my back and plan to put me in the presence of a “fait accompli.”
I can see, nevertheless, why they did it. They were afraid of me. They distrusted me. After twenty years among them, I remained for them the “foreigner.” It is painful to me now to realize this, but it was so; I had not succeeded in becoming one of them. True that during the war they had admired my work, but alas, even that service now assumed a strange aspect, for the war, it appeared, had left me very queer. I had come back with very strange ideas. Once when they were all talking of the Russian Revolution and the danger of Bolshevism spreading through Europe, I had said,
“Well, what of it?” They had looked at me aghast. “But Jane,” some one had cried, “it would be the end of civilization”; and I had, perhaps a little abruptly, brought out,
“Surely our civilization hasn’t so much to recommend it.”
They tried to laugh it off, but they were really very much worried. Aunt Clo again sent for me. “I hear you have turned socialist and are consorting with strange violent men in red ties—”
“That, dear Aunt, is nonsense. I still see Ludovic if you call him violent, and he has, at my request, presented to me some socialists. Clémentine and I are interested you know in the strange ferment of ideas that is the aftermath of the war. Frankly I find these people more alive than those of my own class, but the socialist deputies don’t really appeal to me,” and I added maliciously, “they don’t go far enough. Lenin, now, he is consistent, he has an idea—”