XII
One day toward the middle of the winter of that year, Claire said to me; “What has happened to Philibert? He acts as if he were in love with his wife.” It was true. We had all noticed it. I mean Claire and my mother and myself, but gradually we came to notice something else as well, namely that Philibert’s increased attentions did not seem to be making Jane happy. She was strangely preoccupied and for her, strangely languid. Her old buoyancy was gone, and with it the impression she had so often conveyed of an over-powering awkward energy. Maman need never fear now that Jane would fall on her and crush her. Claire need not worry about being pushed into corners. When Jane did join our family parties, and she came much less frequently than in the early days, she was almost always so absent-minded as to seem scarcely to realize where she was. She would come in with Philibert and the child Geneviève, kiss my mother gently on the forehead and then sink into a chair and forget us. We might now have said anything preposterous that came into our heads. She would not have noticed us. She did not listen to our talk, and when we addressed her directly would give a little start and say—“Je vous demande pardon, je n’ai pas compris.” Sometimes I caught Philibert watching her as if he too were mystified and troubled. He would drag her into the conversation. “Mais, mon amie, écoutes donc, quand on vous parle,” he would exclaim in affectionate remonstrance, and she would flush a little and make a very obvious effort to pay attention. My mother felt there was something wrong. It may have seemed to her that she was herself responsible. She may have felt a certain contrition about Jane, or she may merely have found it intolerable that any one should derive from her drawing room circle so little apparent interest. In any case she made on her part an effort and talked to Jane much more, and in a different more intimate way than she had ever done before. And, of course, when actually talking directly to Maman Jane was perfectly attentive and perfectly courteously sweet-tempered. But when my mother turned her head toward some one else, Jane, as if released from the end of some invisible string that had held her erect in her chair, would slip back and lean her cheek on her hand, and the light in her eyes would be veiled by that invisible glaze that means an inward gazing. Such are the eyes of the blind. One could at such moment have waved one’s fingers an inch from Jane’s face, and she would not have blinked, at least that was my impression.
And she was incredibly thin. Many people thought this becoming to her, but to me it was painful. I had no wish to find Jane beautiful if I felt that she was going to die, and there were days when I did feel she was, as one says, going into a decline. She had been so harmoniously big that one would never have supposed she carried much superfluous flesh, until one saw it wasting away and found her still alive, and not a hideous skeleton. Her marvellous hands and feet were now, I suppose, even more marvellous, but to me their beautiful exposed structure of lovely bones was a source of pain. Her wrists and ankles were so slim that one felt if she made a wrong movement they would snap, and her rich lustrous clothes seemed to find round her waist and bust nothing to cling to. Only her broad shoulders and narrow hips seemed to support them. One could not tell where her waist was. Sometimes under the silken fabric of her skirt one saw the shape of a sharp knee bone. Her face seemed to have grown much smaller. The cheeks hollowed in under prominent cheek-bones, and her small green eyes were sunk into her head—that was more than ever like some carved antique coin and had taken on a quite terrifying beauty; I mean that the charm of her ugliness had received its special ordained stamp, the mark that the god or imp who made it had meant it to have. She reddened her lips a little now; otherwise her face was untouched by powder or rouge. The skin was of the palest ivory colour, a close smooth dull surface, without a blemish, soft and pure and dead. There was about the texture of her skin something curious. It made one dream of a contact so cold that if a butterfly brushed against it the little living thing would fall lifeless to the ground.
And a new charm disengaged itself from her person. She seemed possessed of a hitherto-unused and undiscovered magnetism, and she dwelt with it silently, wrapped in a kind of gentle gloom that she tried now and then to throw off as one throws off a wet clinging garment. I do not want to give the impression that she was moody, for that would be untrue. She was, on the contrary, of an uncanny equanimity, and when she smiled her smile crept slowly and softly over her face and as softly faded away. There was no jerk of nerves about it. Nervous was the last word one could apply to her. She was superlatively quiet, unnaturally calm, and yet at times she looked at me like a haunted woman, a woman haunted not by a ghost but by an idea, perhaps by some profoundly disturbing knowledge.
We were increasingly troubled. We wondered if at last she had found out things about Philibert, particularly about Philibert and Bianca, and somehow the fact that we knew he was devoting himself more to Jane and less to Bianca did not console us. What indeed was it but just the most disturbing thing of all that Philibert’s new devotion to Jane produced in her no flush of responsive joy? My mother was very worried indeed, and we were affected by her anxiety. Even Claire began to watch Jane with a questioning puzzled attention. Often I found Claire’s dark eyes travelling from Jane to Philibert, from Philibert to my mother, from my mother back to Jane. And simultaneously my mother’s eyes moved from one to the other, and so did Philibert’s and so did mine. We were all looking from one to the other, watching, referring, puzzling, comparing. Jane alone looked at no one.
I should have felt this to be humorous had it not humiliated and annoyed. It seemed to me that we were slightly ridiculous at times, and at other times lacking in delicacy. The last impression irked me exceedingly. For my mother and sister to be guilty of indelicacy was strangely unpleasant, I knew they were not impelled in their new interest by affection. They did not even now care for Jane. She had become to them an enigma; that of course was something more than she had been; there was a shade of admiration now in their wondering, but no genuine feeling for her and no sympathy. Their sympathy was for Philibert, and perhaps, a little for themselves. In any case they were afraid for Philibert. They saw his great social edifice swaying. They were holding their breath. And Jane gave them no sign. Had she calculated her effect with consummate art her manner could not have been more perfectly tuned to the high fine note of suspense. And they dared not to ask her anything.
But as the weeks passed, they gave way to asking each other. In her absence they constantly talked of her. It was curious how much of their attention she took up by staying so much away. Claire and my mother could now often be heard to say—“Have you seen Jane? What is the child doing with herself? I find her looking very unwell. Has she complained to you of feeling ill?” and now and again with a sigh of reproach either my mother or Claire would say to the other—“What a pity you never won her confidence. She tells us nothing, but absolutely nothing. It’s as if she didn’t trust us.”
And Philibert seemed as much at a loss as they. He could enlighten them very little. Gradually as their nervousness made them less discreet they took to questioning him. “But what is the matter with her?” they would ask, and he would shrug his shoulders. He didn’t know. Did he think she was ill? No, she wasn’t ill, she had never been so active. Was she then unhappy? Ah, who could say? She was now and then very gay, much gayer at moments than he had ever known her. She went out constantly. She had ideas of her own about receiving. She was arranging a series of musical evenings for the audition of unpublished works of young French composers. She was multiplying her activities. Sometimes he did not see her alone for days together. And here my mother gently and timidly interrupted him. “Mais mon enfant, when she is alone with you, is she amiable, is she kind? Enfin, is she gracious?” And Philibert again, but this time with a more exaggerated movement, shrugged his shoulders—“Comme cela. I have no right to complain.”
And then quickly I saw them all look at each other and saw the same thought flit from one mind to the other and dodge away out of sight, and the spectacle of those intelligent evasive glances exasperated me.
“Yes, it’s a different story now, isn’t it?” I didn’t care for their combined shocked stare, now centred on myself, and continued to Philibert—“After all, you’ve got what you wanted, haven’t you? You remember you told her not to love you so much.”
“Blaise!” My mother’s exclamation was a check. I had a sensation of shaking myself free. “Well, isn’t it so? Weren’t you all awfully bored with her caring too much for you, and now that she doesn’t, now that she has withdrawn, is leading a life of her own, you are troubled, you wonder. How can you wonder? Isn’t it all quite simple?” But I knew that it was not so simple after all, so I stopped.
“You think then,” put in my sister gravely, “that she no longer cares for us?” Her tone made me stare in my turn. It was earnest and enquiring, and I heard Philibert to my astonishment echoing her words. “Ah, you believe she no longer cares?” And most wonderful of all my mother’s phrase. “Tell us, Blaise, what she does feel. I believe that you understand her better than we do.”
It was quite extraordinary. I had the strangest feeling for a moment of pride and power. They had all turned to me. They had all recognized simultaneously that I possessed something valuable. And for a moment I enjoyed the novel sensation. They wanted something from me, that was pleasant, but what they wanted was Jane’s secret. They believed she had confided in me, and they believed I would tell them. I felt again weary and impatient and humiliated, and I brought out the truth abruptly. “I know no more than you do what is going on in Jane’s mind, she has told me nothing.” But I saw that they did not believe me.
The room, my mother’s room, seemed to shrink visibly. It appeared very small and trivial. Its innumerable bibelots and souvenirs winked and glinted, mischievous and precious, minute tokens of delicate prejudice, obstinate and conventional and colourless. It all looked small and meaningless and pale. I could have laughed. I was important there at last. But it was a tiny place to me now. I pitied it. I felt suddenly free and alone. I thought—“Jane has told me nothing, it is true, nevertheless she trusts me,” and I felt them reading my mind and it didn’t matter. They might know for all I cared that I knew nothing, they would feel all the same that I knew Jane as they would never know her. But what they would never know was, that knowing Jane as I did, I knew many other things, wonderful things. I felt a lift, a lightening, a widening of space, a fresh rush of wind as if I was being blown upon by the breath of those wide American forests. Somewhere in my mind vistas opened. I heard the murmuring of a free wind in high branches. And all the time I saw my frail little mother in her damask chair, in her little crowded silken room, and I loved her with tenderness and compassion. An impulse seized me. I went over to her. I took her hand.
“If only you would love her,” I said, “everything would be all right.” Then I saw that I had blundered. How could I have been so stupid as to have imagined that they had been with me for that moment in those wide high spaces where I knew Jane lived? My words sounded grotesque and fatuous. I saw a shade come over my mother’s face. I heard Claire’s swish of impatient drapery. Philibert snorted. I felt myself blushing. My face tingled. I had made myself ridiculous. My mother’s hand kept me off. Its nervous clasp pushed me from her while she murmured plaintively—“Mais je l’aime bien, mais je l’aime bien.”
Claire followed me out of the room. In the little dark hall we stood close together. She had closed the door of the drawing room after her. Beyond it we heard Philibert’s high nasal voice arguing. “What do you really think, Blaise?” My sister’s voice was low and confidential. I felt her mind pressing upon me with gentle insistence.
“I don’t know.”
“But you see a great deal of her, she talks to you.”
“Yes, but not about herself.”
“Come, Blaise.”
“Not about the present, only of the past, her home over there.”
She made an impatient gesture.
“Does she never mention Philibert?”
“Never in any way that matters. How can you think—? Do you imagine then that she is vulgar?”
But Claire’s eyes, tranquil and dark with their usual mournful depths of mystery, looked at me deeply as if she had not heard.
“I am afraid,” she said, “of Bianca.”
I was startled. The idea that Claire was afraid, so afraid as to voice her fear to me in that low tone of secret confidence, seemed to make everything worse, much more miserable.
“Why?” I asked, searching her face that so often evaded me with its mockery and now was so grave and deliberate.
“She may do something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, but she’s jealous.”
“Jealous of Jane?”
“Yes, hadn’t you noticed? She follows her about?”
“Bianca follows Jane about?”
“Just that.”
I thought how strange women are, seeing things that we none of us notice. I followed Bianca, Jane and Claire in imagination, moving about Paris in smooth rapid motors, slipping in and out of crowded streets, shops, drawing-rooms, theatres, watching each other. But how could Claire see one pursuing the other with all those people round them, all the music, the waiters, the footmen, the lights scattered along dinner-tables, the obstructing tables and chairs, the endless engagements? My mind wavered, I felt dizzy. I saw each one of the three women stepping out of her car, going into her house, the door closing upon her, hiding her from the world.
I came back to Claire’s delicate face and brooding eyes.
“But why should Bianca be jealous?”
“But why not?”
“You mean she thinks Philibert is escaping her?”
“And isn’t he?”
“I don’t know.” Suddenly I felt at the end of my strength, as if I had been undergoing a great nervous strain. “How should I know anything about Philibert? You all seem to think I know what Philibert is up to.” I felt strangely exasperated. “And what, mon dieu, is there exactly between Bianca and Philibert?”
“Ah,” my sister smiled faintly, “that I cannot tell you, but whatever it is, it is enough.”
“Enough to make trouble, you mean?”
“Yes, enough to make trouble.”
“Well, if you really want my opinion, it is that Jane does not bother at all about Bianca.” And I began irritably to get into my coat. But Claire, helping me on with it, still pressed me and said over my shoulder—
“So you don’t think Jane in her turn is jealous?”
“I don’t think anything about it. What I think is that it is none of my business.” And I grabbed my hat and left her, but looking back as I went down the few steps to the outer door, I saw her looking after me with an inscrutable smile, as if she had learned something from me that she had wanted to know, and I determined to keep away from such family talks in future.
I had my theory about Jane during those days, of course, but according to Clémentine I was wrong. Clémentine thinks that Jane loves Philibert even now, even now over there in that dreary little house. I can’t believe it. But what does Clémentine mean by love, anyway? Clémentine is a Latin, the smooth willing exponent and devotee of her senses. She has known love—“elle a rencontré l’amour plusieurs fois.” If she means anything, if there’s anything in what she says about Jane, it is that Philibert still has the power to affect Jane, to make her pulse beat quicker, even now. I wonder, but I don’t want to think about it.
I believed that winter that Jane had ceased to care for Philibert, and that that was the explanation of her strangeness, that made her appear so often like a sleep-walker. I argued that to a person like Jane it would be more terrible to no longer love than to be no longer loved. There were moments when alone in my room with her image before me, I was certain that she was beginning to despise him. How could she help it I would ask myself, and be filled with an exulting bitterness. I see now what it was. I wanted her to despise him, and so believed it. But it was not so much that I fiendishly wanted Philibert to suffer, for I did not believe he would suffer. I wanted Jane to right herself. That was it. I wanted her to get loose from her bonds that seemed to me to expose her in an attitude humiliating and pitiful. I couldn’t bear to contemplate her as Philibert’s slave. It was this thought that sent me out at night to walk the streets in a fever. Ridiculous? Perhaps. But haven’t I a phrase of Jane’s sounding in my brain even now that justifies all my sickening suspicions of the past, one phrase, the only one that she ever let fall that threw any light on her relations with her husband.
It was only the other day in St. Mary’s Plains. Time had made it possible for her to speak as she did. Ten years, fifteen, had passed, but she spoke with an icy distinctness as if controlling a shudder.
“Bianca,” she said, “was jealous of that process of corruption that she called my happiness.” But this is all too painful. I must stick to the facts of my story.
Claire’s fear was all too well founded. Bianca was jealous and Bianca was going to intervene. Philibert was slipping away from her and falling in love with his stupid wife. That could not be tolerated. She stirred uneasily. Moreover Paris was beginning to take account of Jane. People were talking about her wherever one went. They argued about whether she was ugly or just the most beautiful woman in Europe. Sides were equally divided. But what did it matter whether one called it beauty or ugliness, once her appearance had made its impression upon the receptive mind of Paris? The Byzantine Madonna or the Egyptian mummy or whatever it was that she had been said to resemble had come to life. Paris recognized her as singular, and that was all that was necessary. Soon she would be the rage. Some one would set the ball rolling. Bianca saw it all quite clearly. Like a little witch bending over a boiling pot she made her preparations. It would be funny to think of if it had not come off just as she intended. The sorceress was again on the move astride her broomstick. She was chanting her incantations that were meant to bring a woman to the dust and a man to her side. But first she sent for Fan and told her all about Ivanoff and Jane and about Philibert’s interference in Biarritz. She had got the whole story from Philibert and used it now with just the effect she wished. She began lamenting the fact that she saw so little of Jane, Jane was dropping her old friends. Hadn’t Fan noticed a difference? No, Fan hadn’t. But Ivanoff—surely Jane didn’t see anything much of Ivanoff these days, not at any rate as she used to? Fan laughed. If Bianca thought Jane capable of flirting—. But Bianca meant nothing so silly. Bianca meant simply that Jane had been very foolish and that Philibert was angry with Ivanoff and wouldn’t have anything to do with him because of Jane’s foolishness. Fan at this, had grown suddenly serious. The rest was easy. It all came out. Ivanoff had had large sums of money from Jane. Philibert had found out, and Jane had made him swear to do nothing about it so that Fan should never know. This, of course had been most unfair to Ivanoff as the latter had been given no chance to clear himself with Philibert. Ivanoff might have been able to explain many things that remained obscure.
The result of this conversation was all that Bianca would wish for. Poor Fan rushed home to her dilapidated attic on the Isle St. Louis and flung it all at Ivanoff’s great sleek meek head. He had been taking money from Jane. How much money? When? Why? Where was it? How could he? How had he come to think of such a thing? Didn’t he have any sense of honour? Didn’t he have any shame? Ivanoff bowed his head. Meekly and humbly he let her rave at him until exhausted, she flung herself on the bed in a torrent of tears, and all that night he sat on the floor beside her bed, extravagantly ashamed, thinking vague dark hopeless thoughts, and now and then heaving a sigh.
It didn’t occur to him, the next day or the next or any day after that to explain anything. Probably he was unaware that Fan’s second thoughts were more poisoning and disturbing to her than the first. Ivanoff was no psychologist. If he noticed that Fan was strained and looked at him queerly, he remained passive and mute, and no light of curiosity seemed to strike down into his abysmal calm. When suddenly Fan flashed out the question—“Did you make love to her?” he merely shook his head, and when at last after a week of fidgetting she announced that she had written to Jane to tell her that they couldn’t pay the money back and that she would understand the wisdom of their not seeing each other any more, he stared vacantly, then frowned and sat down in a heap on the divan for the rest of the day. Judging by his fantastic subsequent behaviour, he must have been pondering upon the question. He probably thought—“Women are worthless cattle. Jane has told. She has given away the secret. She has hurt Fan. I am getting tired of Fan. Some day I will go away, but Jane hurt her and made her tiresome and she must be hurt too, before I go. But how? But how?” That was the difficulty. He must think of some way. And all the time he was sitting there thinking, he could hear Fan coughing and tossing in her room, and he could see her little tame chaffinches jumping about in their cage in the window. Fan was often like that, like a neat little bird flitting and hopping about, but now she was sick and ruffled and not gay and chirpy at all.
XIII
I come now to the night of old François’s ball that he gave for his daughter Bianca, that dreadful night of climax and exposure when the fabric of appearance was torn to shreds and we were left there, betrayed by ourselves to the eye of God, stark naked in all our senseless passion and trivial brutality. The experience of that night stands up for me out of the past bald and glaring in all its garish savagery like a totem pole in a glittering desert. I circle round it. The habits and tastes of civilization appear there like a mirage. I see the actors of the drama behaving like primitive creatures possessed by demons. Civilization skin deep? The banality is apt here. I have called Philibert and Bianca the spoiled darlings and perfect exponents of an ultra-refined social system, and so they were, but that didn’t prevent their behaving like a cave man and woman. The only difference was that they knew what they were doing. They were calculating and deliberate and amused. They turned loose the reckless savagery with the little dry laugh of knowledge.
I did not go to the ball myself. I had been away, had come back unexpectedly, and had found myself by some extraordinary mischance, some curious combination of circumstances, locked out of my rooms and without a key. It was late. I remember being unwilling to rouse my mother at that time of night, and standing in the street wondering which one of my friends I would ask for a bed, I don’t know why I suddenly decided to go to Philibert’s. I had never spent a night in his house in my life, but now, as if Paris were suddenly an unknown city of strangers and his roof the only prospect of shelter, I found my way in a fiacre to his bleak and imposing door.
I remember the emptiness of the house as I entered, the great silent entrance hall with its sleepy porter, and the coldness of the wide marble stairway and my unwillingness in spite of the solicitations of a couple of men servants to go to bed anywhere in any one of the blank luxurious rooms offered to me, until Philibert or Jane came home to authorize me to do so. “Monsieur et Madame would undoubtedly be very late,” the footman told me, “they were ‘chez Monsieur le duc,’ where there was a ball.” I listened vaguely, accepted a tray of refreshments and sent the men to bed, saying that I would wait up for the master. But the wine and biscuits placed in the library did not tempt me to ease or somnolence. I felt restless and oppressed. How big the place was to house a man and a woman and a child. What a distance to little Geneviève’s nursery. I picked up a book, put it down. A long mirror opposite me reflected a portion of the great high shadowy room and my own small wizened figure seated like a gnome in a circle of light. The sight of myself, always unpleasant, set me wandering. I turned on lights here and there. All was still and smooth with the vast ordered beauty of a cold enchanted palace. The thought of Philibert’s success as a house decorator passed through my mind without engaging my attention, that seemed somehow to be fixed on something else, something deep and elusive that had a meaning could I but find it. What did they stand for, those high polished walls with their lovely panellings? What did they enclose beyond so many treasures of art? The rare still air in those gleaming spaces seemed to have a quality, a presence, cold, enigmatic, and final. I tiptoed round the immense deserted salons like a thief. I waited and waited with a growing sense of the ominous, and then at last I heard the whirr of a motor coming into the porte cochère, and going out along the gallery to the great wide shadowy stairhead, I looked down and saw the light flash out, filling the vast white lower hall, and saw Jane come in alone, trailing her long gleaming draperies behind her, and advance across that expanse of marble like a woman in a trance, holding up and out in her hand before her, well away from her as if she were afraid of it, a small object that I identified when she had almost reached the top of those interminable stairs as a small dead bird with a jewelled pin run through its body.
She spoke in a queer tired voice that grated slightly.
“I found it in the car, on the cushion. Ivanoff must have put it there. It is one of Fan’s birds. A chaffinch—you see—He meant it as a symbol.”
It was as if her teeth were almost chattering, and she were controlling that shaking of jaws with an effort. And as she spoke, I saw Ivanoff distinctly, taking that tiny feathered thing out of its cage and wringing its neck with his strong brown fingers, and smiling through his slits of eyes. Jane continued to hold it out before her and stared at it. Presently she said again in that queer rasping voice—
“Look, it’s quite dead. It has been speared through the heart. The pin is one I gave Fan years ago. The bird is her pet chaffinch. My Aunt Patience used to tame chaffinches. There was one that used to perch on her head while she worked. That was in St. Mary’s Plains.”
She stopped and looked at me a moment in silence enquiringly. We were standing at the head of the stairs. Something in my face must have arrested her attention. “Come,” she said in a sudden tone of command. “Come into the drawing room. We will wait together for Philibert.” She said the last three words much more loudly than the others. They seemed to go rolling down the long gallery like rattling stones. I remember thinking that she must be very ill and that I ought to persuade her to go to bed. We moved in the direction of the drawing rooms. She was dressed in some shining glittering sheathlike thing of a silvery tone and wore emeralds in her ears and on her hands. Her eyes were as green as her earrings, and her face the colour of yellowish white wax. She dragged a chinchilla cloak after her as if it were terribly heavy. It had slipped off her shoulders and I noticed that her skin was covered with little beads of moisture. I thought—“The Lady of the Seas.” She looked as if she had been in an accident—been wounded somewhere. I half expected to see a red spot spreading over her side as she let fall her cloak in the great drawing room and turned on, one after another, a blazing circle of lights. The effect was startling. There was no stain of blood on her gown, but the livid pallor of her face and arms in that glare of light suggested that she was all the same in the state of one who had all but bled to death. Under the glittering lustre of many crystals, her face was a gaunt mask of yellowish bone and pale greenish shadow, and her lips were drawn tight across gleaming teeth. Her expression was famished, thirsty, breathless.
I was frightened, and at the same time strangely excited. Where was Philibert? What was the meaning of Jane’s feverish icy glitter? Why were we there, she and I, at three o’clock in the morning, transfixed in a blaze of artificial light in a room that was as inimical as a palace in Hell? As she turned away and moved to the mantelpiece, where she stood with her back to me, leaning her elbows on the black carved marble, I had a moment’s respite. What did she want me for? Wouldn’t Philibert think it queer our waiting up for him in such ridiculous solemnity. I addressed her long shining back.
“Do you often wait up for him?” She turned half way round.
“No, but tonight we must wait, we must wait until we know.”
Her words gave me a feeling of weakness. I was obliged to sit down. All that light, all that gleaming parquet, all those precious cabinets, full of rare glimmering treasures, and the night outside, wheeling towards day, and Philibert coming from somewhere in a motor, and all the people of Paris sleeping, quite still, in their beds but being whirled through space on a turning globe, made me dizzy. I heard her say from a great distance—
“Fan is not dead. She was at the ball. She avoided me. She looked very ill. Ivanoff wanted to frighten me. I would have been, if I hadn’t been more frightened by something else. Fan was my friend, so was Bianca. I have no friends now. It is very strange to be quite alone when things are going to happen.”
“What is going to happen?” I tried to speak naturally.
“I don’t know. We must wait. We will find out.”
She came across to me and then looked at me shyly. It was suddenly as if she had come to herself again, and whereas she had seemed terribly old, as old as a deathless woman of some strange legend, she was now for a moment merely young and helpless and unhappy.
“You will be a friend to me, won’t you?” she asked dropping into a chair before me. I nodded, unable to speak.
And so we sat on in the centre of that immense room in two gilt fauteuils under the full glare of the chandelier. Occasionally she said something, then would sink into silence and seem to forget that I was there. But each time that the clock on the mantelpiece struck the quarter or the half hour she would start convulsively.
At a quarter to four she said—“Ivanoff meant me to feel that I had broken Fan’s heart, but Fan is all right. I saw her. She looked quite happy tonight and she danced continually. What does that mean—a broken heart? What makes one feel pain in one’s left side when one is unhappy? Just the power of suggestion? Perhaps if that power were strong enough it would affect the actual heart in one’s body, make it burst in one’s side.” Then without transition, “I would have sent for my Aunt Patience, but I did not want her to know. I was safe in her house. Sometimes I think of the Grey House as the only safe place in the world. If I went back there now, I wonder if I would feel the same, or whether it would seem very small and stuffy and shabby. My people there were very simple people. They loved me. They were all very religious except my Aunt Patty who believed in science. One ought to believe in something—I don’t. I can’t. I joined the Catholic Church to please Philibert but I don’t believe. If my Aunt Beth knew she would worry about my eternal life. I wonder if I would find that a nuisance or just the most touching thing in the world. I wonder if they would all look like funny old frumps or seem quite beautiful. One can’t tell.”
Her voice stopped. We sat in a silence that grew steadily more tense and unbearable. The clock struck four and she started to her feet, and a spasm twisted her features and she began to talk very rapidly while at the same time she seemed to be panting for breath.
“I have found out tonight. I found out at the ball. It was like a revelation from heaven. I saw it all in a blinding burst. The noise of the music, the crowd, pale faces wheeling round me, bobbing ducking, they couldn’t hide it from me. Bianca was there, at the centre, cold, sharp, like a silver needle, watching Philibert, drawing him to her like a magnet. Every one was there. I was alone. I saw Fan in the distance. She avoided me, but I heard her coughing and her high little voice crying out through her hacking cough to some one—‘Yes, my dear, I’m dying. Why not? 39 of fever, but I simply had to come. What’s a woman’s life worth if she can’t dance.’ And then that cough again. Every one danced interminably. I saw Aunt Clothilde sitting like a bronze fountain with a watershed of grey silk spreading all round her, in a corner of the library; she was saying witty things in her squeaky voice to solemn old men in wigs. I stood alone in a window, watching Bianca watch Philibert. I must have spoken to a number of people, I don’t remember. Hands reached for mine, voices murmured, voices addressed me by name. Other voices laughed and whispered and cried out round me. The music throbbed. Faces whirled past. Some women shrieked and giggled out in the garden. Waiters and footmen moved about. Motors hooted in the street. The waves of darkness welled up behind me to meet the waves of light rolling out of the hot rooms. I was cold, cold as ice, my face burning. Some one going past shouted at me, ‘I say, you look ghastly. Have something?’ I didn’t answer. I was watching Bianca. Bianca was my friend—I loved her. I watched men and women approach her, touch her fingers, move away. I watched other men circle round her, keep coming back, hang forward humbly, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, waiting for a word from her, fascinated men who desired and pleased her. Philibert was among them, but he didn’t hang forward bowing. He stood near her, twirling his moustaches, talking to one and then another, making gestures, laughing, frowning, snubbing people, being impertinent, being amusing, flattering old dowagers, glaring at presumptuous youths, criticizing women with his cold eyes, and every now and then exchanging a look with Bianca. They scarcely spoke to each other, but I could see their communion was uninterrupted. I saw and understood—He has always loved her. They have always been together like that, always. That is what I have found out, and more, more. It was so before I came, before he met me, while we were engaged, when we were married, always Bianca, she was always there.
“Tonight I saw them together, perfectly. I watched them. I wanted to fathom them, to know what it was they possessed between them. I knew it was evil. I longed to know their evil. The sight of Bianca roused in me a horrible envy. I stood like a stone watching her. She used to be my friend—I loved her. Evil appeared to me upon her face beautiful, shining out like a sickly light, potent, alluring. Suddenly I heard a squeaky voice say—‘Come here, child. You shouldn’t show yourself with a face like that. If it’s so bad lock yourself up. Men are all brutes. Some day you won’t care.’ I looked at your Aunt Clothilde, blind with rage, you know, blind, and turned and went out through the window into the garden. At the far end in the dark I walked up and down alone. The music and the light streamed out of the long windows. I saw innumerable heads bobbing. It looked like a madhouse. Philibert and Bianca were in there together, cool, sane, infinitely wise. I was the insane person. At one o’clock I went in again and crossed to where Philibert stood beside Bianca and asked him if he were ready to come home. Bianca was in white. She was almost naked. She had a cloud of white round her and her body was as visible through it as a silver lily through water. She looked fresh and cool as dew. Philibert answered but did not look at me. ‘You need not wait,’ was what he said, but I was watching Bianca’s face and I saw there something else. Her eyes were wide open. They poured their meaning into mine. Her face was like a still white flower holding two drops of deadly poison. She did not move. She did not smile. It was all in her eyes. I looked down into them for an instant, one instant. It was enough. I had a feeling as I turned away of coming up out of a great depth, of breaking a spell. The Duke took me through the rooms to the top of the stairs. I walked beside him, my hand on his arm. I didn’t look back. I left them together.
“I found Ivanoff’s dead bird in the car. It didn’t frighten me. But I was frightened. I felt as I drove away like some one who has had a narrow escape, a very close shave. Why? What was it? Nothing had happened, nothing visible, nothing to disturb the still immensity of the spell-bound avenue. I drove on alone, up the Champs Elysées. The sky was studded like a shield with hard pointed stars. The double row of roundheaded lamps lining the black gleaming surface of the pavement stood like sentinels put there to conduct me out through the Arc de Triomphe into desolate uncharted space. I held Ivanoff’s dead bird in my hand, and I felt as if I were driving away from that crowded ball room straight over the rim of the earth. The sight of you here, at the top of the stairs brought me to my senses. I remembered. I understood on the instant of seeing you that I had wanted to kill Bianca, tonight. That was what had frightened me. That was my close shave. You stood there, worried and tired and kind. I recognized you.”
Her voice stopped suddenly. She covered her face with her hands. I rose to my feet and took a step towards her, and just then the clock struck five and its little gilt angel stepped out with his tiny jewelled trumpet. She whirled towards it, lifting her face that was drawn like an old woman’s.
“Philibert will not come ... I know now,” she whispered. “He has gone away with Bianca.” She swayed, looked this way and that around the wide gleaming room, them at me, holding out her hands. “Help me, Blaise.”
In a moment she had given way to sobbing. Ah, then, then I, who had never touched so much as her hair or her cheek or the fold of her dress, then indeed, I would have taken her in my arms to comfort her, as one takes a child. But she was the great strong creature, I was the weakling. I could only kneel by her chair and try to steady her convulsed frame and heaving shoulders with my own arm round them in futile incompetent anguish, while I heard her heart breaking as if it were so much strong stuff being splintered there in her side.
It was six o’clock when she went to her room. The servants were not yet about. The house was still, impenetrably calm, the curtains still drawn, the formality of its beautiful equanimity unchanged.
Six o’clock; Bianca and Philibert were well on their way by that time, travelling south, rolling smoothly along over long white roads between mysterious poplars in a misty dawn. They had provisions with them in the car. I can see them now as I think back, opening a bottle of champagne, eating sandwiches, and I can hear their laughter. They were very gay, very pleased with the way they had done it. They had walked straight out of François’ house together at three thirty in the morning, had stepped into the motor in the presence of a crowd of departing guests, and had disappeared. The audacity of the thing was of a kind to tickle them immoderately. They must have laughed a good deal. I wonder that Jane and I, spellbound under that glaring chandelier, didn’t hear them. Strange that the echoes of their light laughter didn’t travel back to us across that widening distance, while we waited and listened. Strange to think of that old roué François wandering back through his emptied rooms, among the débris of that night’s festival, all unsuspecting. Very curious to think of Philibert and Bianca murmuring to each other, their laughter giving way to the bitter and exultant growling of their excited senses, while I led Jane back to her room. No one saw her go tottering down the hall leaning against me. No one saw her swollen face looking through the door and trying to smile at me before she closed herself in alone.
PART II
I
That was long ago. We were young then. What a haunting annoying phrase. One meets it everywhere, in books, on people’s lips, or unspoken in their eyes. The other day in the Grey House, sitting opposite Jane in the shabby little parlour, there it was again. She spoke it, but not wistfully, more with relief than regret. I stayed ten days in St. Mary’s Plains and during those days she told me the rest of the story, bit by bit, till she came to the end—I put it down now as she told it—what follows are her own words as I remember them.
* * * * * * * *
That was the end of my youth and the beginning of life. Until then I had been made use of, but after that I acted and I became responsible for myself.
Fifteen years ago, we sat till morning waiting for Philibert. I no longer remember what I felt. Have you tried to recall sensations of pain, and by thinking very closely about all the little circumstances surrounding them, to experience again the stab or the ache? One can’t. I can’t feel again that agony. I suppose it was agony. You remember it better than I do, for you saw it. One remembers things one has seen and things one did, but not what went on inside one’s own dark, impenetrable body and soul, invisibly. I remember what I did at that time and what I said and what other people said and looked. I remember your face, and Jinny’s fear of me, and her fretting for her father, and Fan’s coming and saying that I looked like a mad woman, and from these facts I deduce the other fact that I was suffering, but I have forgotten the feeling. That is very strange when you come to think of it, for how, then, can I know that it was so? I don’t know. It is all merely conjecture. One would have thought, from the way I behaved and the way it changed everything that my emotion of that time was tremendous; was immensely important. But it wasn’t. It had no substance. It didn’t stand the test of time. It has vanished completely. Other things have lasted.
What are these feelings, emotions, passions that we make such a fuss about? Nothing but sparks struck from an impact, a collision of some kind. They seem to burn us up, to consume us for a moment, then they vanish. They have no body, no staying power, no reality, but we mould our lives by them.
I am a woman. My life has always centred about people. In tracing the course of events, I find that their causes were invariably personal—My life is a long strong twisted rope made up of a number of human relationships, nothing more. There was first my mother, and my Aunt Patience, then Philibert, Bianca and Geneviève. Philibert went away. I did without him. One can do without anything,—everything. I am proving it now. But Bianca kept coming back; I never got rid of her.
My life is a failure. It is finished. It is there in its dreadful, unchangeable completeness spread out before me. I look at it, as I would look at a map, and when I think that it is I who made it, this thing called a human life, I am bewildered and ashamed. How did it come about that I made so many mistakes, and did so much that was harmful to others? There was no desire in my heart to hurt, no will to do wrong. On the contrary I wanted to make people happy, I wanted to do right. It is very strange. It is almost as if the intensity of my will to do right forced me to do the wrong thing. Is there some explanation? Is there a key to the problem of living that I never found? Or was it all simply due to Bianca? My Aunt Beth used to say that the only way to live rightly was to do the will of God. But what does that mean? How is one to know what the will of God is? Often I wonder whether my failure is due to my never having found out about God. Most of my people here in America would not hesitate to say yes—but I am not sure. It seems to me that I was even more eager to do His will than I would have been if I had been certain of His existence. It would have been an immense relief to me to have known that God was in His Heaven and that I did not have to bother about my own soul. “Put your troubles on the Lord,” our parson used to say in St. Mary’s Plains. Well—I don’t know. That is a solution for many. If they do that—just shelve everything and go by texts in the Bible for their order of daily conduct, living must be very much simplified—but I couldn’t do that. Something stiff and hard and honest in me wouldn’t allow it. I couldn’t believe that I could talk to God and ask His opinion. I used to try—when I was a child and when I was a woman. Praying was like whispering into a chasm, a void, an echoing emptiness. My questions came back to me, unanswered, mocking echoes of my own tormented soul.
So I floundered along.
I do not excuse myself. I am to blame. I am responsible. I know that. I lived among charming people. I had, as people say, almost everything heart can desire. My husband did not love me, but beyond that what had I to complain of? I had money, health, power, friends. I was one of the fortunate. Hundreds of women, no doubt, envied me.
I hadn’t the gift of living. Your mother has it, so has your sister. It is common among French people, they are artists in life, but I was for ever looking beyond life for its purpose, and thus missing its savour and its meaning. The people I loved were too important to me and the people I hated—but I can see now that Bianca wasn’t as interesting or as important as she seemed. She was only a vain and selfish woman after all. But she was for twenty years my obsession.
I must talk about Bianca. It was really in order to talk about Bianca that I asked you to come, for I am not yet rid of her. She haunts me here in this innocent old house. Enigmatic in death as she was in life, her personality persists, exquisite and depraved and relentless. She comes to accuse me. Having ruined my life, she accuses me of her death.
I did not kill her. Some of you thought that I did. You didn’t mind. You didn’t blame me, but you thought so. Ludovic, I am sure, is convinced of it, and if he does not precisely approve, he at least accepts the fact as the inevitable outcome of our long exhausting duel. More than once he told me that until I could rid myself of the obsession of Bianca, I should be unable to understand the first little thing about life. He was the one person who understood my feeling for her and hers for me. In his uncanny wisdom, so devoid of all prejudice, he knew that our hatred was based upon an intense mutual attraction, and that we hounded each other to death because under other circumstances we would have loved each other. The long and dreary spectacle of two women hating each other for years with intense sympathy, or if you like, loving each other with an exasperating antagonism and hatred, was to him pitiful and contemptible. He would have had me put an end to it somehow, anyhow, at any cost. Taking another’s life is to him no crime compared to ruining one’s own. Well, it is at an end now. Bianca is dead, and I am buried alive. We did each other in, but it took twenty years, and I never touched her with my hands, or did anything to bring about her death, save will her to die.
And her death came too late to do me or mine any good. Philibert was finished. My life was in pieces. There was nothing left to patch up. She had come between me and my husband and child, while living, but her death cut me off from them, more absolutely than anything she could have done alive. And, fiendishly, as if with consummate cunning, she died mysteriously leaving with me the unanswerable question, as to whether or not, I had made her kill herself. I go over and over it all, day after day, week in, week out. I remember my last view of her alive, in that hotel corridor, the look she gave me over her drooping shoulder, leaning against the half open door, her hand on the door knob, her long languid weight on it, one pointed foot trailing, and on her grey face, a desperate vindictive longing, a wistful cruelty, a question, a threat, a prayer. Was she at last imploring me? Did she in that moment remember everything? Was she mutely and bitterly asking me to come and hear her confession? Would it all have been put right by some miracle had I gone to her before it was too late? I don’t know—I shall never know. I only know that our wills clashed again for the last time, that for the last time I resisted her, and let her drag the incredible weight of her diseased and disappointed spirit out of my sight, for ever.
And how am I to know that her death wasn’t an accident, and that her look of desperate appeal wasn’t just such a piece of acting as she had treated me to, at intervals for twenty years? Over and over again, she had done the same trick. Invariably, after one of her pieces of devilry, she would approach me with that wistful penitent masque, and stir me to forgiveness and compassion. Repeatedly, she fooled me. I could save her—I could influence her for good. I was strong and balanced and sane. If only I would give her what she needed, what she lacked, some relief from herself in some external thing, some faith, some definite obstinate purpose, beyond the gratification of her own vanity.
And each time I believed, each time I forgave, each time looking into her wonderful face, I thought I saw there, a spiritual meaning. It is enough to make one scream with laughter. It was all acting. It must have been. It was all done for the purpose of tormenting me more exquisitely afterwards. For years she fooled me—for years I wouldn’t believe she was what she was, a woman of immense personality and no character, but I am at last certain that this was so. Ludovic says that it takes as strong a character to be really wicked as really good. He used to rave over Bianca, to anger me, I suppose, call her perversely—“une femme admirable—la plus courageuse damnée qu’il avait jamais vue.” I don’t agree with him. I do not mean that Bianca had a weak character. I mean literally that she had no character at all. Where one feels in the average human being, the strong resisting kernel, the stern spiritual centre that contains identity there in Bianca there was nothing. At the middle centre of her being there was emptiness. She had, morally, no core. She was as formless as one of those genii in the Arabian Nights who came out of Ali Baba’s earthenware pots.
I ought to know, for I loved her. She was my friend during the happiest years of my life, when I believed in Philibert, and was confident. I say it again, we were friends. I believe even now, in our early friendship, in those days, Bianca was actually, and much to her own surprise, fond of me. That she began being nice to me out of a spirit of mischief is no doubt true. The idea of making Philibert’s wife, her intimate, was the sort of thing likely to appeal to her but having made the advances out of perversity, she found herself interested and attracted. Why did she like me? It is difficult to say. Perhaps because I was a new type and one that wouldn’t in the ordinary course of events come her way. I puzzled her. To her I was something primitive, savage, and dangerous. She used to call me her “Peau Rouge.” She said I made her think of Buffaloes and Bison and prehistoric animals, of black men round camp fires in jungles, of snake dancers and deserts and the infantile magic of savage races. She wove stories about me and hunted up old prints of queer outlandish people who she insisted had my type of head. I was, she asserted, only half-tame, and being with me gave her the same kind of pleasure as having a leopard about. She was physically afraid of me. Not only at the beginning, but always to the very end, but in those days, my losing my temper, she found, “un très beau spectacle.” Her blue eyes would shine, her lips part in amazement, and timidly she would stroke my shoulder, murmuring—“How wonderful you are. What a volcano.”
She used to ask me endless questions about my childhood and appeared greatly intrigued by my obstinate attachment to what she affectionately termed, my ridiculous impossible background. She would make me tell her about life in the Grey House, the baking of cakes in the kitchen, the hymn singing on Sunday evenings, and the summer trips to the wilderness, to the woods of Canada, or across the prairies of Omaha, Dakota, and Arizona. She would lie on her couch in her boudoir making patterns in the air with her lovely fingers and purring like a pleased little cat while I described the plains, stretching endlessly under the sky to the white horizon, the lonely wooden shacks blistered in the sun, and infested with flies, the lazy cowboys on indefatigable loping broncos—and she would murmur—“Ah, je comprends cela—c’est grand, c’est monstrueux, c’est beau.”
As for me, need I explain why I loved her? Who has not felt the quality of her beauty? What man or woman that ever saw Bianca, failed to respond to the peculiar penetrating charm of her personality? I see her in memory, a vivid creature, perfect, compact, clear in the midst of a crowd of blurred and colourless shadows. Her beauty was incisive, keen. It cut into one’s consciousness sharp as a stab. It stamped itself on one’s brain, indelible and certain. I see her face as clearly today as I saw it the day I first laid eyes on her when she came up to me in your mother’s salon and said—“You must like me, I insist.” It is there close to me, rising out of the grave as pure, as firm, as precisely drawn as if I held the perfect indestructible masque in my hand.
I see her eyes open lazily, wider and wider, and shine out suddenly, bluest blue, so blue that they seem to send out a blue light through their black lashes. Ah, how lovely she was! How could I not believe in that loveliness? Blue, brilliant fire-blue eyes set far apart under a fringe of black hair and pointed curving thin red lips. I could model her now exactly—the cup of her small chin, her long round white throat, flat bosom and shoulders flowing down thin arms to her narrow beautiful hands. Her body was a fragile thing, strong as steel.
And women of Bianca’s breeding never give themselves away in ordinary life. They are closed and secret books, open only to those who have the key. No one can read them who is not of the initiated. I did not know the language. There was nothing about her to convey to me that she was anything more than she seemed, a remarkable and gifted woman of great distinction, a creature so refined as to seem to me to belong to another planet from the one on which I had been born. It seemed to me extraordinary that such a person should notice me at all. I was filled with gratitude. I was humble, devoted, flattered, and Philibert gave no sign. If not actually enthusiastic about our friendship, he still seemed content enough, and I was happy in the thought, that this wonderful woman who had been his comrade from childhood was now, my friend too.
And she was careful, as we grew more intimate, to show me, only those aspects of herself that she knew would flatter and delight me. Never did she mention subjects likely to frighten me. Her talk was all of art shows and music and books and the ridiculous absurdities of “le monde” and those things in her life that I couldn’t help noticing with concern, she explained in a way to enlist my sympathy. She was desperately unhappy, she told me, in her marriage, her husband’s immorality was a great grief to her; the sorrow of her life was, that she could have no children and so on, and so on. Once she even confided to me that there was insanity in her family, and that she was constantly haunted by the fear of going insane. I was, at this, in a tumult of sympathy. I was prepared to forgive her a far greater number of eccentricities than she ever showed me.
She was, she told me, of a mixed strain of southern blood, a Venetian on her mother’s side, on her father’s a Provençale. From her I learnt that the old Duke, her father, was descended from the Comtes de Provence of a line that had numbered kings in the middle ages. For many generations they had been Seigneurs of a wild and mountainous region north of Avignon. Their fortress, the “Château des Trois Maries” stands high against the sky on a spur of rock that reaches out from the ragged hills, above the wide valley of the Rhône. This was Bianca’s home. There in that sad and wonderful country of brown sunlight, she was as nearly happy as she could ever be on earth. I went to Provence with her one summer. And now that she is dead, I think of her, not as she was in Paris, languid, perverse, and irritable, but as she was in her own country. I see her against the swarthy background of those ruined hills scarred by the hordes of invading Saracens. Her little person seems to ride above that sunbaked land of blistered roads and dry river beds, on the wings of legend through a burning and sanguinary past of repeated invasions; of Barbary pirates from across the sea to the south, and Visigoths from the north, of wandering Bohemians, of steady marching Roman armies, of Popes flying from Italy for refuge, of gentle saints stranded in tiny boats on the desolate marshy shores of the Camargue and I see her as she ought to have been and as she was sometimes, down there, her face brown, her blue eyes flashing, and her thin body, lean and hard, mounted on one of the small fleet horses of the country, galloping at the head of the thundering fighting bulls towards the arenas of Nimes or Arles. This was her proper setting. It was here at the Château des Trois Maries that she showed herself to me, as she would have been had she not been accursed.
I remember one day in her room in the west tower of the Castle, her talking of herself, as she never talked to me before or since, honestly, as honestly as she could, and with light laughter breaking into her short light biting phrases. From the high window we could see the white dust of the road whirling down the valley before the hot scurrying wind, groves of poplars bending their plumed heads, little brown houses surrounded by close vineyards huddled behind screens of cypress trees.
“I was born here,” she said, “of a woman who loathed her husband and hated this country—but I wasn’t really born—I was made by witches one hot windy midsummer day. They made me out of the burning sun and the shrieking mistral and the hot white dust, in the black shade of cypresses, and they added to the hot mixture, ice water from that mountain stream; then they each laid on me a curse. One said, the oldest and wickedest—‘She will covet the earth, but only love herself.’ The second said ‘She will be haunted by the evil spirits of dead men.’ The third said—‘Since the people of this country are fond of wild jokes and pranks,—they are you know, très blagueurs, les Provençaux, she will be much given to playing mischievous jokes that will do others harm.’ Then they left me in the dark cypress grove, where my mother who was wandering about and longing for the laughter and music of her Italy, found me. She, poor darling, invoked the three Marys for my protection, les Saintes Maries de la Mer who are carved in the stone over the great door, Marie Salomé, Marie Jacobé and Marie Madeleine; their shrine is in the grotto behind the house—but they had been shipwrecked themselves and were too inefficient to cope with my witches—and so that you see is what I am—burning hot and icy cold, and with a dry wind, shrieking in my heart, and three times accursed. I feel it. I know it. I have known it since I was a child—At first I struggled, then gave in, took my curses in my arms and made them mine, made them, I tell you—my religion—” She gave her dry laugh. Her voice was high and sweet and careless. She spoke, without passion, in her dry conversational tone. “If I could never love any one but myself, never forget myself, try as I might in excesses of every kind, then I would love myself utterly. If I was to be haunted by the unfulfilled ideas of men and women long dead, then I would give myself up to those ideas, and if my pranks were fated to do people harm, well—what business was it of mine? I would enjoy doing people harm—idiots that they are, why should I care for their thin silly feelings?
“You think I am talking nonsense. If you believed me, you would be horrified—eh, bien—be horrified—but you will never understand. You will never believe that I am as bad as I am. That is the reason I like you—that is the reason I talk to you. You are obstinate and faithful and strong—and beside that you have demons too—I see them in your awful sullen face that I like.
“I tell you—that I am used by ideas that are not my own—that do not come out of my own head, that come to me from I know not where. They come persistently—out of the sky, circling back again and again like black birds coming out of the sky to this tower. For instance; an idea comes to me that I must go to Nimes and see a certain matador and send for him and make him love me—I know he will be stupid and coarse and disgusting, and I refuse. Then things happen. Every day lines appear in the papers—his name is everywhere, in every village on every stable wall—I laugh—and give in—and it is all stale and horrid before it begins, but the idea had to be carried out. That you will say is just the stupid giving into caprice of any idle woman—but it is not always so ordinary. Suppose that some day the idea comes to me that I must entice my husband into the oubliette. I laugh at the idea and chase it away. Six months later it comes back more insistent, a thing with a voice. It says ‘Get him into the north tower. He is a mean creature. He will fall down the oubliette’—and I say peevishly—‘But I don’t mind his being alive—he doesn’t bother me, I am not interested in killing him’ and again I drive away the idea—but it will come back, it will keep coming back till it is satisfied. There have been many ideas like that demanding of me to be satisfied. Sooner or later I carry them out—do their bidding. Often in hours of lucidity I see how dangerous they are. I fight against them, distract myself with some idiocy or run away—take the train, go in the opposite direction—but almost always I give in, in the end.” She stopped. I see her now against the stone coping of the window, leaning out—her head in the sun—looking down—the wall fell sheer—a hundred feet of masonry and rock. “Sometimes I think I will throw myself down to get rid of them, these ideas of men and women whose restless bones are the hot dust of these mountains—but why should I—why give myself as a sacrifice? It would be silly—the people I will hurt if I live aren’t worth it—”
She jerked back into the room and came to my side, laying a hand on my shoulder, and standing so that I could not see her, a little behind me, her lips close to my ear. “There are other things,” she whispered, “worse things—ideas—that I couldn’t tell—” Her fingers clutched my shoulder, tightening until they hurt me—“You help me, but sometimes I am angry with you for being what you are and want to hurt you. Some day, who knows, the idea may come to me to do you harm. You are safe now because I don’t understand you, and feel you are stronger than I—but if I ever detected a weakness in you—or if you ever bored me, then I should hate you, then I would certainly do you a hurt. It’s a warning—” she broke off with a laugh, kissed lightly the tip of my ear and left me.
I was not afraid of her then—what she said did not disturb me. I laughed at it; I was happy and confident. I had everything in the world I wanted, and I lived in a daze of joy and excitement—Europe, Paris, the miracles produced by my wealth, still dazzled and amazed me; going to bull-fights with Bianca, or hunting wild boar, with the old Duke, or attending the Courts of Rome, Vienna, Berlin or St. James’s with Philibert, everything was marvellous. I had no time to worry, and no reason to do so that I knew of.
But I remembered what Bianca had said, and in the light of what happened, I understood that she had been speaking the truth. It was simply her way of admitting that she was a supreme egotist. Put simply, it meant that the one motive power in her, was her vanity. It was her vanity that held her together and gave her an outline. And as she grew older she developed it as other women develop a gift for music. She worshipped herself, and she made of her egotism an elaborate religion. Her adoration of herself grew into a passion and burned with the ardour of a saint’s miraculously revealed inspiration. She would have gone to the stake for it. It incased her in complete armour. No one and nothing could touch her through it. She was the only woman I have ever known who lived consistently and exclusively for herself, and she did so with the sustained passion of a religious maniac. One can only compare her to a Savanorola.
Her vanity was her power and her curse. It was an ogre. It had to be fed. Human beings were thrown to it as to the devouring dragons in fairy tales. We were all victims. I was, and you were, and Philibert and Jinny, and Micky and Fan and all the others. Insatiable vanity, that was all there was to Bianca in the last analysis. That was all the meaning of her, but its manifestations, its results, its devious ways of arriving at its own ends, these were infinite, would fill volumes.
You can see how the curse would operate. It operated through her intelligence. Had she been stupid, all would have been well, but concentrated on the study and care of herself, elaborating year after year her attentions to herself, nursing her body, her face, her senses, supplying to herself stimulants and soothing preparations, searching for curious new sensations, she was aware of her own limited power to please herself. Distinctly she perceived something beyond her reach, a quality of experience outside her range, a beauty she could not attain. She would have liked best to have been a queen of love, whom all men adored, like the radiant Simonetta—fairy queen of Florence, beautifully worshipped by an entire population, and she only succeeded in being la femme fatale. With no gladness in her soul, she could not inspire gladness—always in the faces of her victims she saw a reflection of her own darkness. If occasionally, in the lurid light of the excitement she could so easily evoke, she saw in a man’s face a flash that resembled joy, ecstacy, delight, she as often saw it fade to a dismal stupidity, or rage or disgust. Impossible for her to create anything more than an imitation of bliss. Her egoism spoiled its own gratification. It contained poison. Her touch was magical and deadly. This, in the end, bored her. She used to complain exasperatedly of people being afraid of her. The care with which they succumbed disgusted her. Men grovelling at her feet, men writing sentimental verses, men touching her with clumsy hands; she came to loathe them. There was nothing in it; she wanted something else, something out of the ordinary, something continually surprising, unexpected, dramatic. Alas! Humanity goes its stolid way comfortably enough in spite of the Biancas of the world. Men will “play up” to a certain point. They will pretend to be dying of love to please a beautiful lady’s caprice, but they won’t really die. One of the things Bianca longed for was to have a crop of suicides laid to her account. She would have been pleased had some of her victims blown their brains out, but somehow they didn’t. They only threatened to do so. Once out of her sight, they recovered the normal and sallied forth from her boudoir to enjoy fat beefsteaks.
Her tragedy lay in understanding what she missed. She observed that inferior people experienced a range of feeling of which she was incapable. Insignificant women inspired the passions she longed to inspire. She envied and despised them. She envied every happy woman her happiness, every lover his love; her eyes watched them all, with curiosity, disdain and exasperation.
What in me began, after our three years of harmony, to get on her nerves, was my monotonous and exclusive feeling for Philibert. That such a sentiment should continue to absorb me and satisfy me, after five years of marriage was too much for her. She became irritable and teasing. She began to make fun of my love for my husband. She called it stupid, vulgar, grotesque, indecent. I lost my temper, she grovelled, enjoying that, but when next we met she began again, professing an extraordinary merriment at the sight of my mawkish sentimentality. With a sudden flash of insight I accused her of envy. She grew livid. In a choking whisper, she told me that Philibert for his part was no such idiot and that all I had to do was to look about me to find out the truth. I left her in a rage and stayed away. I did not see her again until the night of her ball, some months later, to which I went, knowing that she had determined to take Philibert away from me. It was the fact that Philibert as she believed had begun to care for me, that made her finally act. She simply couldn’t bear to think that Philibert and I should come to understand and truly care equally for each other.
I went to her ball to make a scene, to frighten her into giving him back to me, but I did nothing. I didn’t speak to her. I didn’t go near her. I simply stood and watched her. The sight of her paralysed me. I realized that no man who had ever known and loved Bianca, could care for me. And I came away, knowing that between me and Philibert, everything was ended, and I came away terrified. As I left the house, I remember muttering to myself “I must escape”—“I must escape.” Escape from what? I don’t know. From them both, from what they had done, from what they stood for, from the world of treachery and deadly pleasure to which they belonged.