He had made a desert, and he could not even begin to call it peace.
Liane sacrificed was Liane present, and the presence of Liane crowded out every other possibility. Everywhere Jean saw her face, not Liane’s face as he had last seen it with the cruel, narrow eyes and the cutting oblivion of her stare, but Liane’s face as it looked out of her picture with the strange entrancing smile, Liane’s eyes as they melted into his, and all the miserable memories of his happy, passionate hours!
Jean began to discover that it was not very easy to give anyone up. He had always considered memory a pleasant faculty belonging to the old; he found now that it was a relentless spirit which pursued the flying soul even of the young. They would not let him go, those cruel hours of joy; they came back upon him pure from the clumsy touch of reality, refined by his own imagination, vivid as visions only can be vivid, in anticipation or in memory. He tried hard to reason with himself, to urge that Liane had never been as beautiful as that, never so tender, and never for a moment half so true; but passion with delirious eyes and empty hands pushed him into perilous falsehoods, and dazzled him with wild desires.
He felt incredibly bitter cravings for the sight and touch of Liane. What freedom does a dog desire who has lost its master? and what music was left in a world so empty of delight? And Liane was not only a woman, she was a life; she had dragged him from the sordid sadness of his poor room; she had given him his first taste of luxury and the natural love of living as his own class lived, hours full of beauty, and within reach of their own satisfaction.
He had lost Liane, and he had lost through Liane everything else; was it any wonder that he cursed himself for his incredible folly, kicked his piano, and looked at Margot with hostile, vindictive eyes?
Margot lived in three badly-furnished rooms on a sixième étage. There was the kitchen, sitting-room, dining-room, all in one. It was filled with crude attempts at a useless prettiness and pervaded by an odour of perpetual cooking. Leading out of it was her bedroom and her mother’s, from which there came the unwholesome smell of one of Madame’s hidden bottles. Jean’s room across the passage was furnished with Spartan simplicity, but irritatingly full of Margot’s desire to please him, which took the form of religious pictures and many superfluous small pieces of embroidery. He would gladly, he assured himself, have borne with poverty—he had simple tastes—if only there had been some escape, some world of sympathy and thought into which he could step down as into a stream, and refresh his parched and jaded soul. But there was no such stream, there was only Margot’s sitting-room.
In the first moment of his new life, Jean had received two disagreeable shocks. Margot’s mother was one; how could he have expected Margot’s mother to be like that?
Somehow or other he had fancied Margot’s mother to be an older edition of Margot, a creature aged and softened by time; he was more inclined now to think that Margot was merely a younger edition of her mother, temporarily consecrated by the freshness of her youth; he was, of course, wholly unjust in both surmises. Then he was very naturally shocked and horrified at Margot’s dismissal from the theatre. It was an inconceivable and disgusting incident; it looked almost as if he had caused it; it certainly put him under an obligation to the girl. The worst of it was that he saw no way at present of compensating her for the sacrifice (he meant freeing himself from the obligation, but the other way of putting it sounded better). So that he was naturally extremely annoyed with Margot, and ready to quarrel on the first provocation.
“Do you know I have been here three days, and I have not yet given you a lesson?” he observed sternly, one wet morning on which he saw that he must practise, or else face the fact that he hadn’t a career at all. Margot was ironing a tablecloth and her mother was sleeping out, with a systematic zeal which crept through the wall, an unfortunate meeting with a too generous friend the evening before.
“It takes time to settle in,” ventured Margot, looking up from her ironing.