But I did not get away. I never got away. I never escaped from Bianca. I never got out of range of the sense of her presence and of her infernal charm. I still cared for her. Hating her, I still wondered that she could have hurt me, still wept and called out to her in the dark at night to know why she had done it, still felt her to be the most fascinating woman I had ever known, and it was this that made my jealousy of Philibert unbearable and fiendish. I had been twice betrayed and I knew loving them both, and knowing them both, precisely the quality of the delight they had in each other.
And I knew too, that Bianca was acting as she did because of me—even more than because of Philibert. I was conscious and I was convinced that she was conscious that the real meaning of the whole thing lay in her feeling for me. There was between us, a relationship that had become hateful, but that was still going on, a thing that was going to endure, a mutual sympathy outraged and hideous now, but persisting. If she had only wanted Philibert—well, she had him already. No—what she wanted was to hurt me. And making all allowances for the attraction between them, had it not been for me, he would not have inspired her with a sufficient energy to bolt with him. The situation would have lacked that something peculiar and curious which she wanted, had she not felt as she did about me.
But I may be confused between what I knew then and what I know now. It may be that I did not understand it all so well, then—I forget—I cannot recall my actual state of mind. I give less importance to my preoccupation with Philibert than I should do, and lay too much emphasis on Bianca, because you see, I have got over Philibert, the hurt he did me is long since past and I no longer care about it, but from Bianca—I have never recovered. She never let me go—she never finished with me. It wasn’t just one thing—it was a series of things stretching over years, a continual coming back. You see—in the last analysis it was because of me that she ran away with Philibert, broke Fan’s heart and laid schemes for corrupting Jinny—and these things took fifteen years to accomplish. There was war between us for fifteen years.
The story of my life is the story of my duel with Bianca. Other people played a part, other feelings absorbed me for long periods, other relationships endured, but my relationship to Bianca was the long strong rope that hanged me. You will see how it was.
Why did she go on with it? I don’t know. Unless it was that I never gave in. Had I collapsed after Philibert left me, she might have been satisfied—and satisfied, she would have lost interest in me—and I should have been saved.
II
It is very difficult for me to recall my state of mind during the days that followed Philibert’s going off with her.
I’ve an idea that I was in a kind of stupor, not much noticing anything. I must have given orders that no one was to be admitted, for I learned afterwards that Claire and your mother both called, and a number of other relatives. I think I remained in my room for a day or two lying on the bed with my clothes on and refusing to open the door to my maid. It was Jinny who roused me. The servants were frightened. The nurse brought her down and she pounded on the door with her little fists till I opened it, but when she saw me she gave a shriek and ran away from me and hid in her nurse’s petticoats. That brought me to my senses, my child’s fear and the servants’ faces. I had a bath and something to eat. They brought me my letters obsequiously, and with furtive curiosity. I could hear the servants hanging about whispering. I imagined them talking, talking, endlessly talking it over downstairs. They were strangers to me, Philibert’s servants, servants of that great, horrible house that I disliked. I had no reason to stay there now. Nothing kept me—I would go home to St. Mary’s Plains.
I started a letter to my Aunt Patience, what was I to say to her? “My husband has run away with another woman. He never loved me. My mother married me to him for her own purposes. Now that she is dead there is no more reason to go on with this horrible farce. I am coming home.” Something of that kind? No, I couldn’t. I stared at the words I had written—“My dearest Aunt Patty.” I seemed to see her sitting off there, at the end of that great distance, adjusting her spectacles, opening my letter with expectant fingers. I saw the shabby room, the sunlight on the worn carpet, the littered writing desk, the piles of books, the stuffed birds in their glass cases. I saw my aunt an old woman, facing old age alone, with equanimity, following year after year the pursuit of knowledge, not afraid of time, not oppressed by solitude, going up to bed night after night in the empty house and kneeling down in her flannel dressing-gown beside her narrow white counterpane to pray to God, and remembering me always, never forgetting me, never leaving me alone.
Once she had said, “When you’re in a hole, Jane, and don’t know what to do, you can always do the thing you hate doing most and you’ll probably not be far wrong.”
Looking out of the window I became aware of Paris and I thought of those words. Paris! There it was streaming by, to the races. Was it aware of what had happened to me? I wondered. Did people know that Bianca and Philibert had run away together like a couple of actors, like a pair of quite common people? I imagined society agog with the scandal. I saw them gloating pitying. I heard women saying—“Cette pauvre femme, elle était vraiment trop bête.” It seemed to me that every one in the street must be looking up at my windows with curiosity and derision. They were invading my privacy, pulling off from me the last decent covering of my dignity. Well, why sit there and bear it? Why suffer public humiliation? My eyes fell on my engagement book. I observed that Philibert and I were due for dinner that night at your Aunt Clothilde’s. I rang for my maid and told her to telephone Madame la Duchesse and say that although Monsieur, having been called out of town, would not be able to present himself at her dinner, I would come with pleasure, as had been arranged. My face in the glass seemed much as usual. I had done all my weeping with you, my poor Blaise, three nights before. Having made up my mind to go out I now experienced a certain relief. The coiffeur was summoned and the manicurist. Aunt Clo’s dinners were very special affairs, so I chose a nice dress, white, and put on an extra rope of pearls. As you know, my appearance created something of a sensation. I saw that at once. They had thought me already dead and buried, and were gossiping as I suspected, over my remains. My business for the moment was to show them that I was alive.
Ah, but how dreary and trivial it all seems now. Why? Why? What earthly difference did it make what they said or thought? But I am telling you about it, just as it was. I wanted, I needed desperately at that moment, the sense of my own dignity. It was all I had left. So I went out to that dinner party and defended it.
Aunt Clo was nice. She was pleased with me and put me opposite her. It was a vatican dinner, semi-political. I had, I remember, the Italian Ambassador on my right and the Foreign Minister on my left. Your aunt was between the Archbishop and the Duc de B—— recently arrived from Rome. The talk was brilliant, I believe. I heard it in a daze, but managed to keep my end up somehow. Clémentine was there, at her best, in wonderful form. She must have known all about Philibert, for she came up to me after dinner and said—“Blaise de Joigny is my great friend. You must come to see me. We have much in common.” Our friendship dates from that night.
But when I reached home I felt more tired than I had thought it possible to be. I went up to the nursery. Jinny was asleep in her cot, hugging a white woolly dog. I knelt beside her and sent out my spirit in search of God, but I did not find Him. I could not pray. I heard my baby’s breathing, blissful, trustful breathing. I knelt listening. She was so small and sweet. Above her was an immense blackness. She made now and then happy little sounds in her sleep, and lying there so still I saw her moving on and on, invisibly, into the future to the ticking of the nursery clock, carried along as she lay there on the current of life, life that was an enormous dupery, an ugliness and a lie.
The days passed, separate and distinct, moving in a procession, each one to be watched and endured separately, moving by their own volition, taking no account of me, having nothing to do with me, answerable to some mysterious power that started each one rolling like a bead dropped from the end of a string, and in each one, as in a crystal, I saw the pageant of Paris revolving, but I was outside, drifting in empty space.
The longing to get away from it all was unbearable. I would go—I would go—I must go—Patience Forbes was the only person in the world who could help me—and yet I went on working out my idea that took me about among people, and you, dear Blaise, went with me. Your attitude was of a delicacy rare even in your world of delicate adjustments and sympathies. You understood, you constituted yourself my escort. Do you remember those days, how we went from one place to another, luncheons, dinners, private views, official receptions, and how we tacitly agreed on just the amount we were bound to do for our purpose? I scarcely realized at the time all that it meant for you to do this, and how the family would resent your attitude. I know now that they never quite trusted you after this. As I remember we talked nothing over and did not, I think, mention Philibert save once, when I asked you if you knew where he was. You did know, of course. Every one knew, I suppose, except myself. They had been seen, those two, boarding the Simplon express. They were in Venice, you told me, I had wanted to know for convenience. Having adopted a line, it seemed best to follow it consistently. One was to assume that my husband had gone away for a holiday. I was there to make his excuses to suffering hostesses deprived of his society. The note to be struck was light and commonplace, as if his absence were like any other of his many past absences. The pretence deceived no one, but then the consistent lying made for decency. I was marking time. It was particularly difficult because I was not acting in accord with my nature. Had I been natural at that time I should have been horrible; I should have smashed things. But I was not behaving like myself. I see now what it was; I was behaving like one of you, behaving as Claire, for instance, would have behaved in my place. I was adopting your methods and your standards. Not to give myself away, not to let any one suspect what I was feeling and thinking, not to make a false step, not to make above all a public fuss, that seems to have been my idea. To preserve appearances as beautifully as possible, that was what you and I were working at, as we trailed drearily round from one place to another saying suave things with smooth faces.
And there was another influence working on me, even more subtle and far more pervasive. You will smile, perhaps, when I tell you that my quiet behaviour came from looking every day across the Place de la Concorde to the austere and reserved façade of the Madeleine, or across a silver distance of pale houses to the far alabaster pinnacle of the Sacré Coeur high above the city, but it was so. Paris exercises upon its inhabitants a fine discipline of taste. Those who love it change unconsciously. The long, wide, symmetrical avenues, the formal gardens, with their slim fountains, single waving sprays of crystal water, the calm façades of long rows of narrow, uniform houses, palest yellow in sunlight, pearl white towards evening, these things have an effect upon one’s manners that is imperceptible and profound. They spelt to me harmony and restraint and Plato’s idea of beauty. My high falsity was at the best only less futile than a good, noisy bout of hysterics. What comforted me in these hours of doubt was that I knew you were no more certain than I. You did not represent your family. You were neither a go-between nor a spy nor a jailor, you were a friend. Positively I believe there were moments when you wanted me to break out, break away, throw caution and carefulness to the winds. Sometimes there was so much compassion in your face that I almost cried out to you not to care so much. I wanted to warn you that it was only for the moment that I was keeping my head up, that I wouldn’t be able and didn’t intend to go on with it indefinitely and that the thought behind all my smooth social words was; “He has gone for ever. Soon I’ll be free to say so.”
I did really believe Philibert had left me for good. It never occurred to me that he would ever come back, and that belief was in a way my refuge. I was rid of them both; Bianca, I told myself, would be satisfied now and would leave me alone. She would carry on her mischief elsewhere, not in my life. My life was, I believed, my own, separated for always from hers and from Philibert.
Then one day Fan turned up. She came in jauntily, her head in the air, as if nothing had happened. She looked very smart, her hat set at a rakish angle, her short, pleated skirt flippant above her neat ankles. From across the room she called out “Well,—Jane, we’ve married a nice pair of men. Here’s Philibert’s skipped and I’ve had to send Ivanoff packing. He’d taken to beating me, I’m black and blue all over. Some people like it—I don’t.” She gave me a peck on the cheek. “Poor old Jane, you’re taking it hard, I suppose.” She turned back the sleeve of her dress. Her arm had welts on it. “You should see my back.” I shuddered, but at sight of my emotion she twitched away from me with a nervous laugh. “Between my Slav and your Frenchman I don’t know that there’s much to choose. God, if it were only an occasional beating I shouldn’t mind.” She did a waltz step across the room, twirled round on her tiny feet, lit a cigarette standing on tiptoe, and collapsed into a chair in a spasm of coughing.
“I had it out with Ivanoff, my dear, about you, and I know all about it—just the exact sums you gave him for me, bless your baby heart, and everything. At first I doubted you. I was a fool. I’m sorry. Unfortunately I found out other things. There are other women in the world who don’t love me at all, but who pay for my shoes. Do you hear? Do you get what I mean? I find I’ve been paying my bills with their money. What do you say to that? I ask you simply. And we’re on the streets now—at least he’s gone—I’m staying with Madeleine de Greux, and the bailiffs have got our furniture.” And she went off into a wild scream of laughter. It was incredibly painful. She sat there as neat and smart as a pin. Her small cocked hat on one side of her head, her pretty little legs crossed, one high-heeled patent leather slipper dangling in the air, the other tapping the floor, she puffed smoke through her little tilted nose and looked at me desperately out of her hard, level eyes, while she yelled with laughter just as if some one were tickling her till she screamed with pain.
I went to my desk and got out my cheque book. “Let’s pay off the furniture first,” I said as prosaically as I could, but she jumped up irritably.
“God! Jane, what a fool you are. Put that cheque book away. Do you think I’d touch another penny of yours? There—don’t be hurt. Of course I would if I needed it, but what good will money do? I can’t go and hunt out Ivo’s mistresses and pay them back, can I? Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!—I did like him. Men are devils. Even now I’m worried about him. I imagine him locked up somewhere or dead drunk in the gutter lying out in the dark—whereas he’s probably at Monte having a high old time. By the way, your French family is in a great state about you. Claire says their position as regards you is very delicate. I suppose it is. They don’t know whether to come here or to leave you alone. They wonder what you’re going to do. They’re frightfully cut up about Fifi, and they’re afraid you’ll do something final like getting a divorce.”
“Well, my dear, that’s just what I do think of doing.”
“I see.” She ruminated, chewing her cigarette that had gone out. “They’ll never forgive you if you do.”
“I suppose not, but I don’t see that that matters.”
“Oh, but it does. They’re so perfectly charming. They’d make Paris impossible for you.”
“That sounds charming, I must say.”
“Don’t be stupid, Jane. You know what I mean. You know how clever they are. They’re the most attractive people on earth. But if you set them against you, the whole clan, you’ll find life here very different.”
“I don’t propose to live here.”
“Where then?”
“In St. Mary’s Plains.”
“Heaven help you, my poor misguided lamb.”
“I’m homesick,” I persisted obstinately.
“Of course, for the moment, because you’re unhappy.”
“No, not only because I’m unhappy. I like the Grey House. I belong there. It’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s real, it’s the place I know best in the world.”
“Nonsense. It’s a dingy little shanty.”
“You can call it names if you like. I don’t care what you say. I’m going back there.”
“For good?”
“I don’t know—perhaps.”
“Well, you won’t stay, so you’d better not risk it.”
“Risk what?”
“Having to eat humble pie and come back to be forgiven.”
It was my turn to get up with a fling of exasperation and walk about. She followed me with her bright, piercing gaze.
“Think a little, Jane. Use your brains, if you can. Think of the difference between your life here and your life at home in that Godforsaken hole of St. Mary’s Plains. Look at this room. Look out of the window and remember. Don’t I remember? Wooden sidewalks with weeds growing between the boards, boys playing marbles in the street, women hanging out their washing in backyards, Sunday clothes, oh, those best Sunday clothes, revival meetings, Moody and Sankey in tents on the lake shore, picnics, bicycle rides, dances at the Country Club, freckled youths kissing you on the verandah, great news—Ethel Barrymore is coming in her new play that’s been running a year in New York. Excursions on the lake, fifty cents a round trip and soft drinks, sarsaparilla, ginger ale, buggy rides, shopping down town, talking to old women—cats who gossip about somebody’s new red silk petticoat, too flighty, indecent. All going to church and shouting ‘Hallaleluja’ and eating blueberry pie afterwards till their mouths are all black inside.”
“Well,” I said. She wriggled about as if sitting on pins.
“You want to give up Paris, this house, your position here, for that? You’ve got Europe at your feet. You’ve only got to sit tight and every one in Paris will be on your side. Fifi will come back and be as good as gold. You’ll be able to do what you like with him after this.”
I stopped her.
“So you think I’d take Philibert back?”
“Yes, I do. We all do.”
“And begin again living together, after this?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t find it appalling even to think of—?”
“No, merely a little uncomfortable to begin with.”
“You take my breath away.”
She eyed me calmly. “My dear Jane, don’t be the high tragedian. All marriages are like that. How many women do we know, do you suppose, whose husbands haven’t had little vacations—?”
“If you don’t mind we won’t talk about it. Other women’s marriages are nothing to me.”
She shrugged her shoulders and lit another cigarette, and for a time we were silent. I looked at her. She seemed to me terrible, hard as nails and more cynical than any one, and yet she was my friend. Nothing, I knew then as I watched her, nothing that she could say or do would alter that fact. She belonged to me. What she felt would always affect me. In some absurd way I was responsible for her. Our childhood and its meagre austere background, with all that she repudiated, held us together.
Presently she began again. “Now listen to me, Jane. Philibert may be a brute, but he’s done a lot for you. He has given you a very great position. You were rich but he knew how to make your money tell. There’s not a house in the world like yours. I don’t mean only the furniture. Your parties are beyond everything. You’re more recherchée than any woman in Paris. You can pick and choose from all the great people of the world, the men with brains. Lord! how you could amuse yourself if you wanted to. I only wish I had your chance. Do you think I’d let my husband’s infidelity spoil my life? I’d be no such fool. I might not like it, but I’d make up my mind to forget it. Well, here you are and you want to go back and crawl into that little hole in a prairie and stifle there.”
“Yes, I do.”
“But the people there—” she almost screamed.
“I don’t know about the people. They may not be what you call amusing, but they’re at any rate natural, common or garden human beings, and anyhow if there weren’t another soul there’s Aunt Patty; she’s the finest woman in the world, and I adore her.”
Fan looked at me in amazement.
“I’d die!” she gasped on a long, wailing breath. We were again silent, then, while the image of Aunt Patience took shape before us, gaunt, with her big bones showing under her limp, black clothes, worn, strong, knotted hands, crooked humourous face, weather-beaten like a peasant’s, straggling thin, grey hair. And suddenly I saw her as she appeared to Fan, a shabby old maid in frumpy clothes, talking with a nasal twang, saying things like Mark Twain, worshipping Huxley and Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, a child woman of stern moral principles, unaware of the existence of such life as ours, displeased and angry at our doings, hurt deeply by our words and our laughter. I imagined her in Paris, stalking down the Rue de la Paix like a pilgrim from the Caucasus, a figure of grotesque grandeur disturbing the merry frivolous traffic, sublime, terrible spectre of stark simplicity, utterly out of her element in our world. And I was angry with Fan for evoking such an image. I turned away from it in distress, ashamed.
“You’ve already gone too far,” she said impishly. “You can’t get back. You’re spoiled for your Aunt Patience.”
“We’ll see,” I muttered. My suspicions were suddenly roused by a look in her little squirrel face.
“You’ve been talking to Claire,” I said.
“Well, what if I have?”
“She sent you.”
“Yes, she did; but I was coming, anyway.”
“I don’t believe you. You hate my being unhappy, you were worried, but you’d have avoided coming if you could. The fact that we’ve always been friends and that you can’t help it is a nuisance to you. Well, tell me, what is Claire’s point of view?”
“She thinks in some measure that it’s your fault. She says Fifi has behaved very badly, but that if you’d been clever he wouldn’t have done anything sensational, anything to make a scandal.”
“I see.”
“She’s very unhappy about it all. She says it’s making her mother ill. She says that if it were not for her mother it would not matter so much, but that if you divorce Philibert it will kill her.”
“Why doesn’t Claire come herself and tell me all this?”
“She doesn’t dare. She says you don’t like her.”
“That, my dear, is funny. I’ve adored her for years and she’s consistently snubbed me.”
“Well, anyway, you’re so different, she feels you wouldn’t understand. You see, she puts up with a good deal herself.”
“I know. Perhaps I understand more than she thinks I do.”
“She’s very unhappy in her marriage, too, but she doesn’t make a fuss about it. She doesn’t expect the impossible.”
“Whereas I do?”
“Well, yes. Between you and me and the lamp-post I think you do.”
“I only ask to be allowed to save Geneviève from a fate like my own.”
“Oh, my dear, if you think they’ll let you have Geneviève—”
“What do you mean?”
“A man always has rights over his child in this country, whatever the facts against him.”
“You suggest that the law wouldn’t give me my own child?”
“It wouldn’t, not the French law.”
“Well, we’ll see about that, too.”
“Jane, you’re terrible.”
“Am I?”
“Yes, you frighten me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What shall I say to them?”
“To whom?”
“Claire, Madame de Joigny, your Aunt Clothilde, all of them.”
“Say nothing. Why should you serve them? Why should you side with them against me? Weren’t you mine years before you ever saw one of them? What’s become of our friendship? What’s become of your loyalty? You’ve sold yourself, you’re not what you used to be, you’d do anything now for a pleasant life. Because they’re attractive and have attractive manners and make pretty speeches you’d do anything for them. What good does it all do you? You’re ill, you’re worn to a frazzle, your husband has been dragging you down, down, into a darkness, queer, unimaginable, shameful, and you can’t get loose. You just dance about in the blackness. Your feet stick in the mud. Having a good time somehow, anything for a good time. Coughing yourself to pieces, raging fever on you, your heart sick with distrust, restless, evasive, evading issues, you go on dancing, laughing, having a good time. Why don’t you pull yourself together? Why won’t you let me help you? I love you. I love you much better than Claire does. If your husband were put in prison what would Claire do, do you think?”
But Fan had grown deadly pale. I stopped, horrified. She was leaning against the mantelpiece, spitting into her handkerchief: there was blood on it.
That evening when I had taken her back to Madeleine de Greux’s—for she refused to stay with me—and we had put her to bed, she clung to me weakly. Her eyes closed. “It’s all true, what you said, Jane,” she gasped, “but I can’t help it, I can’t stop. If I stopped amusing myself I’d die.”
“But, my darling, let me get you well first, let me take you somewhere.”
“Perhaps, later,” she whispered, “if you don’t go to America. Perhaps we might try Switzerland, but not where there are sick people.” She shuddered. “I hate sickness so, and unhappiness. It’s so ugly. Being gay is beautiful. It makes things look beautiful. Ivanoff is a devil, but you’ll admit he was beautiful. I like attractive brutes better than clumsy saints. So do you, that’s why you married Philibert, just because he was so attractive. No one could be so attractive when he tried. Admit it, he gave you wonderful hours, you know he did. Wasn’t that something? What’s the use of being good if you’re deadly dull? Good men aren’t our kind, my dear. They’d bore us to death. Philibert made you happy for a time, wonderfully, because he knew how. What more do you want? Don’t be a fool. Take it all as it comes. Make an arrangement with him—you owe him something. I’ll be all right in a day or so. Let me know what you decide. Americans are hipped on their ideals. All that’s no use. French people know what’s what. Claire would love you if you gave her a chance. They are all ready to be fond of you, and they’re delicious people. Don’t be a fool. There, leave me now. We were idiots to quarrel. You have a nasty temper, my poor Jane, and your heart’s too big for this world. You’ll come an awful cropper if you’re not careful.”
III
Philibert’s family had shown up to this point, a remarkable restraint. As long as I went about as if nothing had happened, they left me alone, but after my scene with Fan I allowed myself a revulsion of feeling. I stopped going out. I shut myself up and sent for my lawyer. Philibert had been gone two months. I saw no reason to put off any longer, the action that I was determined on; I would start divorce proceedings, leave things in professional hands and go home. What else could I do?
July was drawing to a close. The season was ending in a languid dribble of belated garden parties. Fan, with a characteristic spurt of energy, had recovered and gone off to the Austrian Tyrol with the de Greux, leaving me with a last bit of reiterated advice about not being a fool. I observed that I had no place to go, and nothing to do. Biarritz, Trouville, Dinard, would mean carrying on the sickening pretence under an even closer scrutiny than in Paris. The Château de Ste. Clothilde had no charms for me now. I had liked the place, but Philibert had spoiled it with his endless improvements. It was now, his creation stamped with him. Sitting alone in my room at the top of the house with the shabby relics of the Grey House, I thought of him as he had been there in the country, strutting about directing his army of workmen, cutting down trees, pulling up whole lawns to replace them with gravelled terraces, and sinking into the reluctant earth marble basins for the lovely vagrant waters of the park. He had always professed to be the enemy of nature. It was true. What he called—“Les bêtises de la nature,” filled him with disgust. Spreading trees and green fields dotted with buttercups and bubbling streams tumbling through thickets got on his nerves. “Regardez donc le laissez-aller de tout cela,” he would cry. “How ugly it is. How stupid. It has no form, no design.” Clumps of trees in a meadow he would liken to pimples on hairy faces. He called grass the hair of the earth, and couldn’t endure it unless it was close cut. He never saw a stream of water without wanting to use it up in elaborate fountains. Gardens he regarded as “salons” in the open air. One should use the shrubs and trees and flowers as one used silks and brocades in an interior. Everything in a garden must be “voulu.” Nothing must be left to go its own way, not a vine, not a rosebush, not a tree should be allowed a movement of its own. Nature must be bound and twisted into a work of art. “Ah,” he would exclaim, “how it amuses me to torture nature.” You know what he did. The result was very fine of its kind, certainly very grandiose. He would lead people out on the terrace and, standing a minute, a shiny dapper little manikin, five foot four in high heels above that great design of gravel walks and fountains and squares of water, with their little parquets of green grass closed in by hedges, like a series of drawing-rooms, he would sparkle with enthusiasm. “You see,” he would say, “what I have done, you see how these gardens s’accrochent au château, how it is all a part of the house. The château could not exist without the garden, nor the garden without the château. One would have no sense without the other. Before I restored the grounds and elaborated on the old designs of Lenôtre, the house was horrible.” He had placed complicated machinery under his fountains that made the waters when they were in play take a dozen varied successive shapes. Nothing amused him more than watching all those waters playing, twisting, turning, tracing strange designs in the sunlight, designs that he himself had imagined. It gave him a peculiar joy to see his own idea produced in crystal drops of water. He had worked in sunlight and limpid flowing water as a painter works in colours, and had in a way produced for himself the illusion of the miraculous.
He couldn’t understand why I suffered when he had all those magnificent trees uprooted and when later on I complained that there was no shade anywhere and no place to lie down with a book: “But, my poor child, you’ve your bed for that, or your ‘chaise longue.’ This garden is neither a bedroom nor a boudoir, it is a ‘salle de fêtes’.”
I remembered all this. Certainly for many reasons Ste. Clothilde was out of the question. I would take Jinny home with me to St. Mary’s Plains. The moment had come. A strange excitement came over me as I at last wrote out the cablegram to Patience Forbes announcing our sailing on the first of August. On the same day I had a talk with my solicitor. Maître Baudoin was a jaded, dry man, I believe honest, and rather dull. He was eager for a holiday and very bored, I could see, at the idea of being kept in town. He gave me little sympathy.
I wished to divorce my husband. That might or might not be possible. It depended, of course, to a certain extent, to a limited extent, on whether I had sufficient grounds, and whether Monsieur le Marquis contested the suit. I intimated briefly that I believed I had sufficient grounds. He eyed me gravely through half-shut deferential and sleepy eyes. Did I think my husband would defend the suit, because if he did, no matter what my grounds were, the case might last five years. He told me this as a matter of conscience. Such a case would be lucrative to him, of course, but it might prove fatiguing to the parties more directly concerned. Five years? Yes, or even ten. That was the way in France. A divorce against a man who fought it was very difficult to obtain, and of course the Church did not recognize it. That was not his affair save in so far as if I had the intention of re-marrying, such a marriage would of necessity be considered bigamous by all good Catholics. I had, I said, no intention of marrying a second time. He seemed at that rather mystified. I desired, then, nothing more than legal separation? That was much simpler. It was all a question of property. Was there a settlement? He supposed I wished “séparation des biens.” I told him that I had no wish to leave Monsieur de Joigny in financial difficulties and that that question might be left until later, but he proved obstinate and kept on talking on the same subject till my head ached. Finally I gathered that he was suggesting as delicately as he could that Philibert might be bribed. “But I can’t settle on him a large sum,” I objected wearily, “the fortune is tied up for my daughter.”
“Ah, a trust?”
“Yes.”
“It all goes to your child on your death?”
“Yes, to my children or child, by my father’s will.”
“I see. She becomes, then, the important factor.”
“What do you mean?”
“You would lose her.”
“Why?”
“The law courts would not deprive her father of her custody.”
“But if he doesn’t care for her?”
“Are you sure he doesn’t?”
“He has left her.”
“For a time, perhaps, but she is his, and if, which would be most unnatural, he did not care for her, he might still care for what she represented.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that he cared for nothing but his mistress, but I left the vulgar words unspoken. After all, I was not sure that Philibert did not care for Geneviève. His moods of a doting father might be genuine. He might indeed fight for her. My will hardened as I wearily dismissed the tiresome discouraging man of law. It was all more complicated than I had thought.
He had scarcely got out of the house before it was invaded by relatives. With a startling promptitude, they bore down on me. They must have had spies in the house. My secretary must have telephoned the alarm, or the Governess or the Butler, any one, or all of the staff may have been keeping them informed. In any case, there they were, miraculously ushered into my presence without warning one by one, or two by two, or in groups, aunts, uncles, cousins, first, second, third cousins, cousins by marriage once removed, some of them people whom I scarcely knew, strange old women in wigs with withered faces and ragged feather boas, unearthed for the occasion out of their old grand sealed houses; shrivelled old men with stiff knees and watery eyes; it would have seemed funny, had my nerves not been on edge, had their visits not appeared to me so exceedingly misplaced. I soon found that no hinting on my part would make them take this view. They meant business. They were the family. They were acting for the family and as a family. Some of them constituted that sacred thing the “conseil de famille” and they were acting in accordance with the rights and duties of a French family in harmony with and under the protection of the law of the French state. With correct and concise politeness they gave me to understand that I was not free to do as I liked, that I was one of them, bound as they were bound, and that if I chose to go against their will, and defy my obligations, then I would do so at my own peril and at the cost of what I held most dear. I saw what they were driving at. They meant to keep Jinny whatever happened. If I declared war, I would lose my child.
I put it brutally. They didn’t. They were charming. They beat round the bush. They asked after my health. They drank tea and smoked cigarettes and patted Jinny’s head and said charming things to her and gave her bonbons but they made their meaning clear and the more diplomatic they were, the angrier I became.
This kind of thing went on for three days. I remained obdurate. I refused to commit myself, but gradually I was becoming frightened. What frightened me was that I saw that they all, every one of them, even those that I had thought most human, even your Aunt Alice who was a saint and your Uncle Stanislas all sided with Philibert, all stood solid behind him, all would stick to him no matter what he did, before the world and against the foreigner who threatened the close fabric of their community; and I took it as a sinister portent that those of the immediate family, whom I knew best, your mother and Claire and Aunt Clothilde, stayed away. In despair I went to Aunt Clothilde. What, I asked her, did it all mean? She gave me no comfort. It meant simply that things were so in France. French families were like that. They clung together, and they did not admit divorce. If I tried to divorce Philibert I would fail and would in the attempt lose my child. Philibert, of course, was a rascal, but what would you, I ought to have known it from the beginning. American women thought too much of themselves. There was no modesty in the way I was behaving. Why should I suppose that the whole scheme of the social state should be upset because my husband liked another woman better than he did me? She liked me, of course she liked me—for that reason she had refused to take part in the family’s councils of war. But she was disappointed in me, she had thought I had pluck. Here I was, behaving like a fish wife who has been knocked into the gutter, screaming for my rights, for vengeance. I had better go home and say my prayers. I went, and as if in answer to the dreadful old woman’s bidding found a bishop in the drawing-room. My nerves by that time were in such a state that the suave and polished prelate soon had me in tears. He mistook them for tears of repentance. He talked a long time about the consolation of religion and the comfort of confession and rejoiced to find that I was less inimical to the benign influence of Rome, than he had thought. I scarcely heard what he said, but his fine ivory face and glowing eyes and thin set mouth, gave me a feeling of uncanny power. I remembered that I belonged to his Church, that I had been solemnly married at the High Altar of Rome, that there I had taken vows, had professed beliefs, and I felt a sudden superstitious terror. What if it were true, their truth? What could they do to me, these mysterious ministers of the Pope? What could they not do? In my fever, I saw myself tracked to St. Mary’s Plains, followed up the steps of the Grey House by sallow figures in black cassocks, and suffering, labouring for the rest of my days, under the mysterious blight of an ecclesiastical curse.
When one lives in a country that is not one’s own, among strange people whom one knows only superficially, surrounded by customs and conventions that one does not understand, one finds it difficult to decide moral issues. I felt bewildered and at a loss. It still seemed to me at moments inevitable and right to divorce Philibert. At other moments I felt less sure. The disapproval of the organized compact community was having its effect. The antagonism of the family acted on me with incessant pressure, however obstinately I repeated to myself the words “I don’t care.” I did care. I was alone. I could not even be certain that my Aunt Patience would approve. She might say in her terse way, “Quite right, Jane. He’s forfeited your respect, get rid of him,” or she might say, “You married him before God, you can’t undo that,” I did not know what she would say. And the problem of Geneviève tortured me. The fear of losing her if I divorced her father was no greater than the fear of seeing her gradually slipping from me as the years passed, if I remained his wife. No one knew better than I how charming he could be if he chose. I watched him in anticipation stealing her heart from me, turning her against her own mother. I saw her becoming more and more like him, becoming his pupil, his work of art. Philibert made things his own so easily. He had a genius for conquest. Everything that he touched became his. How different from me! There was nothing in Philibert’s house that belonged to me, except the few sticks of furniture that I had hidden away in that room upstairs. The lovely things in the great rooms troubled me. They affected my nerves as if a chorus of small muffled voices were calling out to me in strange tongues that I could not understand. I realized their beauty, but was conscious of not appreciating them as they deserved. There was no sympathy between us. They affected me but I did not affect them. I could never make them look as if they were a part of my life. I was loath to handle them, but no amount of touching with my fingers would have given them a familiar look; the tables and chairs and tapestries remained there around me, enigmatic, permanent, unresponsive. My life spent itself, throbbing out among them, beating against their calm, smooth surfaces without reaching them. There was no trace in that house of the tumult of my own life. It continued cold, inexorable and strange.
It remained for your mother to seek me out in my loneliness and show me what I should do. I thought at the time that I recognized her words as words of truth. I do not know now whether I was right or wrong.
Claire never came. She sent her husband instead, not so much as a messenger, more as an object lesson, a mute reminder—I caught her idea—I was to look at him and realize what she was putting up with and draw from the spectacle of his awfulness the moral. Unexpectedly, his awfulness, appealed to me. There was something about this keen little stolid French bounder that was a relief. His oily head, his fat brown face, his monstrous nose and little bright beady eyes, these unattractive things made up a hard compact entity. He was solid and complete, round paunch, tight trousers, plump hands fingering a gold watch chain, smell of bayrum and soap, aura of success, of materialism, of industrial jubilance and all the rest of it. But he showed me for the first time that day something more, himself smarting under his thick skin with the innumerable de Joigny slights stinging him, controlled enough not to let on, determined to get out of them in exchange what they could give him, but not counting it much, a shrewd downright kind little rascal, with a good old middle-class self-respect strong in him, strong enough to make him feel himself their superior.
It didn’t take him long to make his point. He talked quickly and neatly.
Claire was unwell, she had sent him to add his voice to the family howl. Claire never howled. When there was trouble, she withdrew. It wasn’t her genre, to mix herself up in a fuss. Well—he wasn’t at all sure that he had anything to say. Firstly because, after all, it was none of his business. He wasn’t a member of the de Joigny family and never would be. They had made that perfectly clear, years ago. So why should he interfere?
I smiled. “Why indeed?” He smiled back, his hands crossed on his stomach; his smile took a cynically humorous curve.
“If on the other hand, Madame, my sister-in-law, you want an outsider’s opinion, it is at your disposal.”
“Two outsiders, confabing together,” I ventured.
“No,” he spoke abruptly, in a light sharp staccato, a nasal voice, not unpleasant, the voice of the phenomenally intelligent French bourgeoisie. “You are not as I am. You are a woman. They won’t let you in—but they won’t let you out. You belong to them. I don’t—beside I am of their people. I am French—I have my own backing. They don’t like what I represent but they are obliged to admit its importance. It is the backbone of France that I represent, the bread they eat, the stones they walk on, the nation they ground under their heels in the old days. They stamp on me now, but only in play, only to save their faces—not seriously—they can’t. You, Madame, are different. You are a foreigner, and ‘sans défense.’ La famille de Joigny have a contempt for foreigners. Your protectors are in America. They snap their fingers at them. You are helpless—”
It was true. Well then?
He eyed me, humorously. “It depends on what you want out of them. I take it they can’t give you much of anything. You didn’t marry one of them, as I did, to ameliorate your situation in society. Putting aside the charm of the son and daughter, why did we do it? I did it as a bit of business. For me it was ‘une affaire—’ how it turned out is neither here nor there. I can look after myself. For you it is different, I repeat you are helpless. They are too many for you.” He chuckled good-naturedly.
Again it was true; I assented meekly.
“Ah ha—Voilà, you see it. Then, my advice is—‘Filez’—get out.”
“And Geneviève?”
“Bribe them.”
“You think—?”
He ruminated, his nose in the air—“Yes, I think—if you make it enough.” He laughed again, rose briskly, took up his hat, his cream-coloured gloves, his gold-headed cane. For an instant his bright little eyes scrutinized me—he seemed about to speak, his thick lips formed, I saw them there, grave words, a confidence perhaps, a lament, a plea for sympathy, I know not what. He didn’t speak them; he was very intelligent; he had a delicacy as fine as theirs, when he cared to show it. There was a nicer compliment to me in this clever little bounder’s attempting no understanding with me, than any I had received in many a long day.
He left with me a pleasant feeling of my own independence, he left me invigorated and more sane than I had been, but your mother wiped out the impression he had made, with one wave of her hand.
I remember the sight of her in my doorway. I was so little expecting her that I had a chance to see her quite clearly during one instant, before I realized who she was. A small black figure in a stiff little ugly black hat and short cape, a dumpy forlorn little figure of no grace or elegance, and a worn nervous face, out of which stared a pair of very bright determined dark eyes. She might have been a very hard-driven gentle woman, determined to brave insults and apply for the post of housekeeper. This in the flash before all that I knew of her covered her like a veil, and before she spoke.
I did not want to see her. I knew in an instant why she had come. I remember wondering if I could get out of the other door before she spoke, before I really looked at her, and all the time I was looking and she was looking, we were staring at each other.
I had always had a deep regard for her. The fact that she did not like me, made no difference. That was where Claire’s husband had fallen short in his putting of the case. He didn’t know that I cared for Madame de Joigny; he didn’t know that I wanted the family to love me, because I loved them. Now in your mother’s presence, I felt the immense disadvantage of this. She cared nothing for me and I was bound to give in to her. I knew I would give in. I knew that I was about to make one last attempt to win her. I tried to rouse myself. I recalled and went over in my mind the opinion I knew she had of me. I knew that physically I was repulsive to her. Often when I approached her, I had seen her shudder. She thought me outrée. Once she had said, “Why is it Jane, that you can never look like other people? Everything you put on becomes gorgeous and exaggerated. It is most unfortunate.” And she was afraid of my feelings, my violent enthusiasms and my deep longings. Oh, I knew, I knew quite well. Instinctively she felt my hot blood pounding in my veins—and recoiled from contact.
Most of all she hated me because of what I had done to Philibert. I had made him nouveau riche; I had made him ridiculous; I had made him unhappy, and worst of all, I had made him appear to her, cruel and vulgar. When he was unkind to me, she hated me for being the cause of his unkindness. You thought her love for Philibert a blind adoration but it was not blind. She understood him, she knew him to his bones, and she spent her life in shielding him from her own scrutiny. Her relief was in submitting herself to his charm. She delighted in him, but she hated his conduct. It seemed to her that he was a victim of what she most hated. She accused him in her own heart of being faithless to her faith, the faith of his ancestors. She saw on him the stains and distorting marks of the vulgar world that amused him, but she was continually falling in love with him and losing herself in his charm, seeking solace, suffering, being disappointed. I believe Philibert made your mother suffer more than he made me suffer, far, far more, for you see she couldn’t stop loving him, she could never be free from him. He was her own, her first-born, the child of her passionate youth. He was her self that she had projected beyond herself, he was her great adventure, he was the gauge she had thrown down at the feet of fate, and it took all her courage to face calmly the travesty he made of her miracle.
My existence, you see, added immeasurably to the difficulty of her task. If he had married Bianca, Bianca, she believed, would have kept him in order and would have presented him to her soothed eyes in the light of a gallant gentleman. In marrying me he committed a serious error in taste to begin with, and having married me he behaved to me like a brute, and this was almost more than she could bear. The interesting thing to notice was that though she suffered horribly she made no attempt to remedy matters, did not try, I mean, to help us, and never gave me even as much as a hint as to how I should wisely have treated him, but limited her energy to just bearing her mortification without giving a sign of it. It did not seem to her worth while interfering to try and put things right when they were bound to go wrong, but it did seem necessary to keep up the make-believe that they were not going wrong. Almost everything in the world was going wrong. One couldn’t face it. One must shut oneself up. One must ignore ugly facts.
Philibert’s going off with Bianca in that spectacular fashion did, I know, very deeply hurt your mother. The horror of it to her must have been unspeakable. Here, at last, was an ugly fact of monstrous proportions that she could not ignore. She was bound at last to do something. She saw her son disgraced, her name dragged through the divorce court, she heard her world echoing with the clanging noise of scandal. She felt around her the brutal heaving of the foundation of her life. In her little tufted silken drawing-room that reminded me always of the inside of a jewel case, she had sat listening, shivering with apprehension. News came to her of the runaways. They were in Bianca’s palace in Venice giving themselves up to curious orgies of pleasure. People told strange tales of their doings. They seemed to have gone mad. News came then from another quarter. I had consulted my solicitor. Claire was thoroughly frightened. Your mother did not hesitate then. She was old, she was tired, she was without hope or illusions. She saw her son as he was, and she saw Bianca at last as she was, and she believed that for her there was no happiness to be derived ever again from those two people. But she loved Philibert, she loved him with anger and contempt and a breaking heart, and she was determined to save him the last final ignominy, and so she put on her bonnet and came to me. And as I thought of these things I was drawn out of my chair toward her in spite of myself.
I begged her to be seated. I told her that I was touched and distressed by her coming to me, and that had she sent me word I would have gone to her. She smiled wanly with her old infinite sweetness. That smile was the most consummate bit of artistry I have ever beheld. It denied everything. It assumed everything. It fixed the pitch of our talk, it indicated a direction and a limit. It outlined before me the space in which I was to be allowed to move. It gave her the leading rôle in the little drama that was about to be played out between us, and it established her position once and for all as that of a great lady calling upon an awkward young woman. But I saw beyond her smile. I saw what she had been through, and was suffering. The combined play of her terrible reddened eyes and that lovely unreal smile impressed me profoundly.
For any other woman the beginning of such a conversation would have been difficult, but your mother, opened up the subject that lay before us with ease and delicacy. Her phrase was finely pointed. She used it as she might have used a silver knife to lift the edge of a box that contained something ugly.
“I do not know,” she said, “whether or not you have ever loved my son, but I have felt that his sudden departure must have seemed to you very shocking, so I have come to reassure you.”
I recoiled at this. It seemed to me that I was being attacked and that was the last thing I expected. I was startled and puzzled by those opening words. What difference did it make whether or not I had loved her son? For a moment I felt angry. After all it was he that had left me; why then, should I be accused? As for reassurance, I did not want any. This was no time for reassurance. An ugly spirit stirred in me. I was about to answer abruptly, when I saw that the purple-veined hand that lay across the table before me was trembling. It was animated by some painful agitation that shook it even resting as it did on that strong surface. The withered palm was rubbing and quivering against the polished wood, the worn finger tips were tapping spasmodically. My eyes smarted at the sight of it. I spoke gently.
“Yes, belle-maman, I thank you for coming.”
“Ah, my poor child—and the family—I hear the family has been at you.”
“They have been here.”
“You must not mind them. They do not understand. In our world women, you know, take things differently, they do not expect what you expect.”
There was a pause. What could I say? She seemed very reasonable and very kind. I had never felt her so near to me before.
When she spoke again it was even more simply. “I have had no news of Philibert,” she said sadly. “Have you?” The tone of her voice was intimate and more natural than I had ever heard it when addressed to me. It implied that we were both unfortunate together. I responded to it with a flicker of hope.
“No,” I replied, “I have no news, but I have reason to believe that he will not come back.”
“Ah,” she cried. “What makes you think that? But it is impossible.”
“No,” I continued, “it is not impossible. It is true. He gave me to understand that himself.”
I felt her watching me closely.
“You mean?” she breathed.
“I mean that I must now take measures to live my own life. It is impossible for me to live in his house any longer.”
It was then that she made one of her quick, characteristic mental turns.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a monstrous house. I don’t wonder you detest it.”
I almost smiled, but I was determined to get to the point. “Dear Belle-Mère,” I insisted, “that is neither here nor there. What I mean is that I must be legally free from Philibert.” I hesitated, I saw her face whiten, but I pressed the point. “It is best for me to tell you that I have decided to divorce your son.”
I don’t know what effect I had expected and feared to produce. It may be that I thought she would break down or faint dead away, or something of that kind. She had seemed so frail that I had been really afraid of the effect of my words. But nothing of this sort happened. The blow I had dealt seemed to spend its force in the air. It glanced off and went shivering into the rich, cold atmosphere of the room.
“My dear,” she said, enunciating her words very precisely, “on ne divorce pas dans notre monde.” And she looked away from me, coolly taking in the room with its priceless objects as if summoning them to witness to the truth of her statement. She was right to look round that room. It was her room, not mine. It understood her, not me. She had called it a moment before a detestable house, but that made no difference. Its magnificence was to be made use of all the same. We were in the room that Philibert always referred to when he took people over the house as “le salon de Madame de Joigny,” or “le boudoir de ma femme.” It was the nicest room in the house. You remember it well, with its pearly grey boiseries fine as lace, its Frangonard panels, its green lacquer furniture, the three windows on the garden where a stone fountain lifted its fine sculptured figures from the lawn. The light in the room was silvery green and translucent as the light seen beneath the surface of clear water, and in that dim radiance the fine precious objects floated above the polished floor as if even the laws of gravitation had been circumvented in the fine enclosed space. The boiseries had been in the Trianon—you remember Philibert had procured them after much bargaining. They had been designed and executed for Madame de Montespan. Their perfect beauty constituted a document, a testimony to the marvellous taste and finished craftsmanship of an epoch. France, in all its delicate dignity, existed in that room. It is no wonder that your mother looked about her for moral support. The rest of the immense house might have belied her, here she could place her faith without hesitation. I opposed to it the profession of my own faith.
“In my country,” I said dully, for I was beginning to feel baffled and confused, “we are not afraid to admit errors, to put away the past and begin something new.”
“But this, my dear child, is your country,” she said more gently. “You are a Frenchwoman now.”
I smiled. “Do you really think so?” I asked her. She drew a sharp breath. “Ah, if you only were,” she cried softly, “you would know how impossible it is to do what you want to do, and how useless.”
My attention closed sullenly like a clamp on the words “impossible,” “useless.” I stared at the floor. Why impossible? Why useless? Why did I listen to this woman who did not love me, and who told me that my longing to live was useless? How was it she made me listen to her? Where was her advantage? She was certain and I was uncertain, that was it. I was not quite sure, but she was sure. Her definite idea was projected out at me and into me like a hook. It took hold of me. I felt myself wriggling on it, and I heard, through the confusion of my own ideas that seemed to buzz audibly in my head, your mother’s voice talking.
“You are young,” it said. “You come of a young people. You believe in miracles. You seek perfection on earth. Believe me, I am old and wise, ideals are all very well, but one must be practical about life. Philibert has behaved very badly. He has made a scandal, but you can remedy that and maintain your dignity by disregarding his escapade, or at any rate treating it as nothing more than an escapade. And such it is, nothing more, believe me. The acts of men are never anything more. Mon Dieu, if we took what they did seriously, where should we be, we women? We must take them for what they are. Il le faut bien. We must never count on them. We must count on ourselves.”
But I seemed gradually to lose track of her words. It was strange, but the sound of her voice was conveying a meaning more profound and more direct than her spoken phrases. The sound of her voice rang in my ears like a light, mournful, warning bell, high metallic, hollow and sweet. It was old, an old sound much older than the lips through which it issued. It seemed to come from a far distance, from the distant past. Hollow and sweet and measured, its monotony insisted on the fine tried truths of the past, it called up proud, faded images of old resignations and compromises and lost illusions, and sounded constantly the note of the persistent obstinacy of pride. The words “we women” reached me. I was a woman, she was a woman. We were together. There were men in the world and women. When one reduced things to their last simplicity all women were bound together in the same bundle, dealing with the same problem. She, the older woman, was wise, I was foolish; but we were sisters in disappointment, we were weak, we must be proud. We had both loved Philibert, but even I had never loved him as she loved him. And he had broken her heart. The dignity of our life depended on our pride, to hide our hurt, to make no sound, no complaint, to arrange silently to make things bearable, to influence men without their knowing it. Our advantage lay in our clairvoyance. We could see through them when they could not see into us beyond our skins. We were weak if we treated them as they treated us, but we were strong if we remained mysterious, mute, proud. The children were ours. Everything we did was for our children. Philibert was her child. She must remember, she could not forget, he was her son. If we destroyed the family we destroyed our children. Even when the men destroyed it we must hold it together. We must pretend, for our children. When the man was gone we must pretend he was still there. Truth and beauty and dignity lay behind the pretence. We must pretend obstinately. If we pretended well enough it became true. We must not endanger our children’s lives, anything but that.
Little Geneviève came dancing into my vision, her hair flying, her little skirts blowing, her toes dancing; a shadow fell on her, she stopped her gay jumping about. She was all at once pale. Her eyes gazed at me reproachfully, mournful eyes of a child, suffering. Something about her was wrong, twisted, maimed. I shuddered. Your mother’s voice was still going on. The words she spoke were concise, delicate little pieces of sound strung together close like beads, they made a long, pale, shining chain that reached from the beginning of time out into the future. Over and over again I heard the same words. It seemed to me that she was endlessly repeating the same thing as if it were a bit of magic, of hoodoo. I wondered if she were hypnotizing me. Women must pretend—women, the protectors—the strong foundation—the family the basis of life. Women must keep the family intact. If we destroyed the family we destroyed our children—Philibert her child—Geneviève my child.
I looked up and saw your mother as I had never seen her before—she was bare—she was stark naked—she was fighting for her child, for her son, for what he was to her, for him as he must and should be to her and to the world, for his safety, and his dignity. There was nothing between us. We were together, two women. She was appealing to me as a woman like herself. Philibert was her child. Even if she were deceiving me, pretending to care for me, what did it matter? I understood her—she was there in the great simplicity of her pretence assuming me to be like herself, proud, gentle, sure, a woman like herself. Vulgar! I was vulgar; my struggling for freedom was coarse; I was making an ugly disgusting fuss; I was ashamed.
A sensation of warmth and delight crept over me—and I knew that I had decided to do what she wanted. It seemed to me that she became my own then, and that I belonged to her and she to me. It was impossible to wound her. The most important thing in the world was not to disappoint her. She expected something of me, renouncement. She expected me to spare her son. She asked for my life, my freedom, two little things I could give her, so that she would not be disappointed. I must give them to her. It would be beautiful to make her happy. That was wonderful. Whatever happened she would always know. There would be something fine between us. We would be together. I would belong to her and she to me: two women who had understood something together.
I touched her hand. I saw that her eyes were filled with tears. Her fingers clutched mine. “Ma pauvre enfant, ayez pitié de moi,” she quavered.
“There dear, don’t think of it any more.”
“Wait, at least, until I am dead,” she whispered. I knelt beside her, just touching her hand. I was weeping, too, now, silently as she was, gently, mute tears.
“I will never do it,” I said. It seemed to me wonderful to give her my freedom, gently, like that, in a whisper, kneeling close to her, not frightening her, asking nothing, putting things right, easily, at the cost of all my life.