Jane--Our Stranger: A Novel

by Mary Borden

I must take Jinny away in the morning, but what good would that do in the end? Bianca would follow us sooner or later to Paris. Jinny would be sure to see her. I had a ridiculous picture of Bianca pursuing us from place to place, lying in wait for Jinny—laying infernal schemes. I remembered what I had recently heard of her strange habits, her vicious tastes, of the effect she had had on certain women. I saw her, a restless, haunted damned soul, the slave of infernal passions, a prowl in the world, hunting for victims, growing more implacable as she grew old.

I dressed for dinner. Jinny sent word she would dine in bed. On the way to the lift, I saw Bianca go into her room. She looked back at me over her shoulder, half smiling but with a curious look in her eyes. Was it fear? Was it regret? I thought for a long time of that look, I thought of it all evening sitting in my high window, listening to the interminable boom of the waves. Her presence, near, under the same roof was intolerable, like a dreadful smell, or an excruciating nagging sound. I was feeling again, even now, through my terror for Jinny, and in spite of my sickened sense of the woman’s decay, the impact of her personality. She existed there beyond my door, special, vivid, intense, and I began to feel her decrepitude as a reproach, her ruin as a responsibility. Moment by moment I felt her, exerting on me a horrible pressure. There had been in her dreary face, an appeal, a claim, a despair that laid on me a weight. In her eyes, there had been, memory. It was that that haunted me. Somehow, actually, her eyes had reflected the past and had dragged my mind back, afar back to the days when we had been friends. I remembered everything. In their deep burning blue light that was like a lamp lighted inside a corpse, I saw her youth and my youth glowing, and I remembered how we had been together, two strong young things, curiously linked, responding to each other, with a sympathy that should have been a good thing to us. She had said once, “Jane, I love you—you are the only friend I have ever had.” And I remembered the day she had talked to me of herself in that old castle in Provence, above the white road and dusty vineyard.

I felt sick and was aware of an intolerable physical pain in my side. Bianca, who had been so beautiful, and whom I had loved divinely once, was a rotten rag now, soiled, dingy, bad smelling—and I hated her. We hated each other. Our youth was gone—and all its beauty. There was nothing under the sun but ugliness and hatred and the principle of life was decay.

I walked the room. Jinny was asleep—lovely youth—fresh and sweet. What would become of her? Bianca and I were two old women, done for.

To protect Jinny from her, Jinny who hated me, that was all I could do now. I must go to Bianca. Either she would respond to me and give in to me because of the memory that had stared out of her face, or I would make her; I would force her to do what I wanted as I had done before, but this was to be the last time—this must be the end.

I looked in at Jinny. She seemed to be asleep. Out in the corridor some one had turned the light low. The long red carpet of the corridor led straight to Bianca’s room. I went out quickly closing the door after me. It took an instant to reach the door of Bianca’s sitting room. I knocked. There was no answer. I opened it and went in. To the right another door was open, a light shone through. Bianca was in bed. I could see her. Her eyes were closed. The lamp beside her bed shone on her face, a peculiar odour pervaded the room. “I will wake her and have it out with her,” I thought to myself.

I went into the bedroom. A number of bottles, a small aluminum saucepan and a hypodermic syringe were on the night table beside her. She was breathing heavily and noisily, drawing quick, regular, snoring breaths. It was obvious that she was drugged; the noise of her breathing was very ugly. Her face was sharp and pinched and evil. An extraordinary disorder prevailed in the room. I remember now being astonished by it. Untidy heaps of underwear about, not very clean, dragged lacey things on the floor, a high-heeled slipper on the centre table, a litter on the toilet table that reminded one of an actress’s dressing room, a tray with a champagne bottle and a plate of oyster shells on the end of the chaise longue. And pervading every thing that horrid odour of drugs and the sound of snoring.

I stood for a moment looking down at the woman in the bed. The sight of her filled me with loathing. How unclean she was! She was like a corpse. Already she was half dead. She was something no longer human, scarcely alive. Her sleep had the quality of a disease, her breath was poisonous.

Suddenly I felt some one beside me. It was Jinny, wrapped in her dressing gown. White as a sheet, she stood staring down at that dreadful face. “I heard you open the door,” she whispered, “I followed you. What is it? What is the matter?”

“Nothing,” I murmured. “She is drugged, that is all.” I pointed to the bottle of ether, the syringe in its little box. “Come,” I repeated nervously, “come away.” It was horrible to have Jinny in that room.