Jane--Our Stranger: A Novel

by Mary Borden

And yet, even to me, she did seem at first very queer. It seemed to me that she was really too different to be innocent of all desire to make trouble. She often annoyed me by remaining so silent when any one else would have burst out with a flood of protest, and by going pale as death when a moderate flush ought to have expressed a sufficient sense of disturbance. The excessive emotional restraint evidenced by those sudden mute pallors of hers used to worry me with their exaggeration. I understood how this sort of thing, displeased my mother. I can remember moments when I expected to see her bound across the room and go crushing through the mirror, so tense was her physical stillness. Claire used to look at her then with lifted eyebrows and turn away with a nervous shrug of impatient disdain. I felt with Claire. I understood this sort of thing little better than she did. We were accustomed to people whose gestures were used to enhance the fine finished meaning of spoken phrases, not to dumb creatures whose eyes and quivering nostrils and long strong contracted fingers betrayed them in drawing rooms. I, caught up in the fine web of my family’s prejudices, had found myself from the midst of those delicate meshes seeing her as they saw her, as some gorgeous dangerous animal who was tearing the very fabric of their system to pieces with its many gyrations. As I say, I doubted her innocence. I suppose like every one else in the family I was affected by the glare Mrs. Carpenter’s obvious ambition threw over her. It didn’t seem to me possible that Jane had married Philibert simply and solely because he fascinated her. Not that I didn’t know Philibert to be capable of fascinating any one he wanted to, but because such fascinations had never seemed to me to contain in themselves any basis for marriage. The truth involved too great a stretch for my imagination. I had to find it out gradually. It necessitated too, the admission on my part that for Jane the name of Joigny counted for absolutely nothing. I couldn’t be supposed to know that Jane didn’t care a straw about marrying our family, when her mother so obviously laid great store by her doing so.

But I started to explain Philibert, and suddenly it comes to me; I believe that at the bottom of everything he did was the controlling impulse of his hatred of life. Undeniably he despised humanity. It exasperated him to tears. Its stupidity put him in a nervous frenzy. He was animated by a kind of rage of mockery. Everything that humanity cherished was to him anathema. He had been born with a distaste for all that men as a rule called goodness, and was nervously impelled towards that which they called evil. And yet the evil he courted didn’t do him any harm. I mean that it didn’t wear him out or spoil his digestion or stupefy his intelligence. On the contrary it agreed with him. He had begun to taste of life with the palate of a worn out old man. The good bread and butter and milk of the sweetness of life was repulsive to him and disagreed with him. He could live to be a hundred on a moral diet that would have killed in a week a child of nature. Sophistication can go no further. His equipment was complete, and he had, I suppose, no choice. His nature was imposed on him at birth. His punishment was that he lived alone in a world that bored him to extinction.

Seriously, he appears to me now, as I think of him, as a man living under a curse. I believe him to have been haunted by a sense of unreality. To get in contact with something and feel it up against him, that was one of the objects that obscurely impelled him. His extravagances of conduct were efforts to arrive at the primitive sensation of being alive. He did not know this. He only knew that he hated everything sooner or later. He was conscious merely of an irritating desire for sensation and amusement. His fear was that he would run through all pleasure before he died and find nothing left for him to do. It may have occurred to him at times that the world minus human interest did not provide endless sources of amusement. The things one could do to distract oneself were not after all so very many. Even vice has alas, its limitations, and it was not as if he were really in himself vicious. He had an absolute incapacity for forming habits good or bad. Could he have saddled himself with one or two the problem would have been simpler. Could he have become a drunkard how many hours would have been accounted for! If women had only had an indisputable power over him, what a relief to let himself go. But no. He was the victim of no malady and no craving. Drink as he might, his head remained excruciatingly clear, debauch himself as much as he would, he remained master of his passions, and day after day, year after year, he was obliged to plan what he would do with himself.

He found in the world only one kindred spirit. Bianca was the one creature on earth who was a match for him. She was more, and he knew it; she was in his own line his superior. Many people have been astonished at Philibert’s liaison with Bianca. They have considered the intimacy of these two people strange. I believe that Philibert’s feeling for Bianca was as simple as the feeling of a good man for a good woman, and as inevitable as if he and she were the only two white people in a world of black men. I believe that Philibert turned to Bianca in despair and clung to her out of loneliness. He and she were alone on the earth, as alone as if they had been gods condemned to live among men. She was his mate, moulded in the marvellous infernal mould that suited him. Voilà tout.

But she was a more refined instrument than he was. She filtered experience through a finer sieve. She had a steadier hand. Hers was the great advantage of being able to wait for her amusement and her effects. She was economical of her material. Philibert was afraid of running through the whole of experience and exhausting too soon the resources of life. Bianca was not afraid of anything, not even of being bored. She meted out pleasure with deliberation. She calculated her capital with fine precision, she measured the future with a centimetre rule, and poured out sensation into a spoon, sipping it slowly.

Philibert was a spendthrift. Bianca was as close as a peasant woman. And on the whole Philibert was honest. He did not try to deceive the world. He was too impatient and despised it too much. When he fooled it he did so openly and if people found him out he laughed. But Bianca was deep as a well and as secretive as death. What Philibert was so he appeared, but no one knew what Bianca was.

During the summer that Jane spent alone at Joigny with her child, Philibert and Bianca saw a great deal of each other. Bianca had musical evenings that summer, in her garden, and little midnight suppers that were quite another variety of gathering. Philibert never drank too much at these suppers, neither did Bianca; as much cannot be said of some of the others, if Philibert’s own account of these graceful orgies was true. It was at one of them that poor Fan Ivanoff’s husband threw a glass of champagne in her face, cutting her cheek. Neither Fan nor her wretched Russian were asked again. Bianca did not like that sort of thing.

Jane has told me that she did not go to America that summer because she hoped that Philibert would come to her at Joigny. She had found it impossible after the first shock of his revelations to believe that they were true. She told herself that he had been carried away by one of his fine frenzies of talk and had said things he had not meant. It was incredible to her that he should really mean that he cared nothing for her. He had, to her mind, given her during those years of marriage too many proofs to the contrary. Thinking it over alone she came to the conclusion that there was some mystery here that only time would make clear to her, and she therefore determined to wait. For a month, for two months, for three, she believed he would come and if not explain, at least put things on some decent footing, but he did not come for the simple reason that Bianca wouldn’t let him.

One has only to stop a moment and remember what he had at stake to realize the extent of Bianca’s power over him. He was entirely dependent on Jane for money. There was no settlement of any kind and he had none of his own. With her enormous income pouring through his hands, he had not a penny to show if she left him, and when people accused him later, as some did, of having put aside a portion of that revenue for himself they were wrong. His code of ethics, morals, what you will, his idea anyway, of what was permitted and what was not, allowed him to spend all her income and even run into debt; but not keep any of it for the future. It did not shock him in the least to spend Jane’s dollars on his various mistresses but it would have disgusted him to find any of these coins sticking to his palms. As long as he poured them out he was satisfied with himself; had he hoarded it he would have been ashamed.

In any case he knew the risk he ran, for he understood Jane, and knew that the fear of scandal would not keep her if she once decided to break with him. Nor could he have diminished the magnitude of the catastrophe that this would mean. His sensational reign had only begun, but it had already become vital to his happiness—I use the word happiness, for lack of another. He had done great things, but nothing as yet to compare with what he intended to do. The fame of his entertainments had already reached the different capitals of Europe, he had seen to that, but this was mere advertisement, preparatory work necessary to the realization of his ultimate purpose. He was in the position of a company promoter who had sent out his circulars and gathered in a certain amount of capital, but had not yet founded his business, and was still far from holding the monopoly he aimed at. He was certain of success but he must have time. If his plans miscarried now he would be his own swindler.