“You wouldn’t mind that, I suppose?”
“Mind it? How should I? How would it concern me?”
I was a little taken aback. “It only matters then what I seem to do, not what I really do?”
She smiled, rather sarcastically, I thought. “Put it that way if you like, my child.”
“But, belle-mère, don’t you really understand at all, that I am trying to be happy and keep my self-respect?”
She eyed me a moment strangely, then dropped her head.
“We will never understand each other,” she said at last. “We won’t discuss things any more. It leads to nothing.”
But Claire felt that she, too, must make an attempt to bring me to reason. She attacked me on the subject of Geneviève. There she was clever. Was I not neglecting my child a little? No, I replied I was not. I was out so much, I seemed to take so little interest in her education. At this I flared up.
“Her education, my dear, is as you know, not in my hands. Her father has made clear his wishes on that subject. Her mind is confided to the keeping of Monseigneur de Grimont and you know what he is doing with it better than I do. What with her prayers, her masses and her confessions, her priestly tutors who instructed her in Latin and Greek, Italian and Spanish, and the good sisters who teach her to embroider altar pieces and to believe every ridiculous miracle in the lives of the saints, such healthy heathen interests as I can cultivate in her little ecstatic soul have small chance of flourishing.”
“But Jane, surely she has her dancing, her riding, her music?”
“Yes, of course, she has everything, everything, but no time for her mother. Her days are as full as a time table. Try as I may, I can never get more than an hour a day with her. How then am I to make her my life’s occupation? That’s what you meant, wasn’t it? You said I neglected her.”
“What I meant was that you seem to have forgotten us all, Geneviève included, and to have forgotten what we and therefore what she must stand for in society.”
“On the contrary.”
“You mean—?”
“I mean that I constantly think of it, but perhaps not just as you do.”
“Well, if you want your daughter to take Clémentine as a pattern.”
“I don’t,” and then added with deliberate wickedness, “I wouldn’t have poor little Jinny attempt anything so impossible.”
“You admire her so much?”
“I do.”
“But she’s grotesque. She goes in for politicians and for journalists.”
“I adore her.”
“She’s shameless—her affairs—”
I cut her short. “I know nothing about her affairs. What I know is that she has a generous soul, a warm heart and the most brilliant mind in Paris. No other woman in Paris can touch her for brains.”
Claire lifted her eyebrows. I saw that she washed her hands of me. At the moment I was glad of it. As for Clémentine, she cared nothing for what Claire or any one else thought of her. She was a law unto herself. Her love affairs, of which I knew more than I admitted, were as necessary to her as her meals. She must have food, and she attached no great importance to it. An artistic find, an amusing trip or an exciting debate in the Chamber of Deputies, would make her forget with equal ease her lunch or a sentimental rendezvous. Her relations with men didn’t seem to me to be any of my business. There was a certain recklessness there that I didn’t understand. I left it at that. It was Fan who told me about Clémentine’s marriage.
“My dear, her husband had unnatural tastes. He kicked her downstairs a month after the wedding. She can never have any children, and she hasn’t spoken to him since. Also, she is said to have said that she would never again have anything to do with a man of her own world. If she did, well, she has kept her word. Her mother stopped her getting her marriage annulled. Clémentine never got over that. She’s at war with the whole tribe of her relations, but of course she can’t cut loose from them for she hasn’t a son, and anyhow one doesn’t in France. So her revenge is to do just those things that most irritate them. They wouldn’t mind a bit how many lovers she had if she would choose them from her own class, and preserve the usual appearances. What they can’t bear is her going about with men whose fathers made boots or sold pigs. And in justice to them you should remember that these men’s grandfathers cut off their own grandfather’s heads.”
“They prefer, I suppose, a person like Bianca.”
“Of course, a million times.”
“It’s nothing to Clémentine’s credit then that she’s a true friend and incapable of grabbing a man from another woman.”
“No, as long as she dresses like a futurist picture, and carries paper bags through the streets and dines with Ludovic at Voisin’s, she’s a horrid thorn in their sides.”
“Well, I’m sorry, because you know I don’t propose to stop going about with her.”
“Lord, no, why should you? You certainly deserve a bit of fun. Come to the Mouse Trap tomorrow night. We’ve a supper party after the Russian Ballet.”
But I knew what that meant, a troup of theatrical people, and every one drunk by morning, so I declined. I saw a good deal of Fan these days, but she had certain friends I couldn’t see. It didn’t amuse me to watch women get tipsy. Those Montmartre parties depressed me horribly. And I felt sure of Clémentine and her band on this point. It was just one of the admirable things about them that they could be so daringly gay and never verge on the rowdy. I had seen her administer a snub to a hiccoughing youth. She could be terrible when she was displeased, and whatever one said of her, for that matter whatever she herself felt, no one could get away from the fact that she was as proud a lady as any in France, and perfectly conscious of her privilege of caste. It was just this consciousness of her lineage, I imagined, that gave her such a sense of security. She knew that she could do anything she chose and be none the less privileged for it, and actually none the worse. If she touched pitch she knew it wouldn’t stick to her fingers. If she dipped into Bohemia, she did so knowing that she could never be said to belong there. There was always behind her a solid phalanx of relatives who would never disown her however much they disapproved. Always in her maddest escapades there were the towers of the family castle looming behind her. They cast an august shadow. She might dress like an artist’s model, never would she be taken for one. She was safe, perfectly safe and she knew it, and so did every one else.
But with me, as Aunt Clothilde pointed out, it was different.
“There’s nothing to prove what you are but the way you behave, my poor Jane. If Clem took it into her head to play at being a barmaid, the de Joignys and all the rest of them would wring their hands and call it a scandalous idiocy, but if you did the same thing they’d say, ‘Of course, it’s quite natural, she probably was a barmaid in her own country,’ and they wouldn’t wring their hands at all, they’d be mightily pleased.”
“So they think my associating with Ludovic is proof of a low mind?”
“Well, what do you find in that old bourgeois?”
“I find a gold mine.”
“A gold mine of what?”
“Information, ideas.”
“Humph!”
“But it’s true, Aunt, he is educating me. He gives me books, philosophy, history, all sorts of books, then we discuss them.”
“Just like going to school, eh?”
“Very much like that.”
“And it doesn’t bore you?”
“On the contrary.”
“Well, no one will ever believe you. If Philibert comes back, he certainly won’t.”
She broke off and looked at me closely.
“Ah ha, you still care for him, then?”
“No, no, how could I, I mean how could he? It’s impossible that he should return now, surely.”
A week later I found a note from him on my breakfast tray, announcing his return. He was installed in his own rooms in the west wing of the house, and he would “present his duties” at the hour I chose to name. And the post that same morning brought me a letter from Bianca. It said—
“If you blame me for taking away your husband, it is stupid of you. I did you a great service in doing so. Perhaps that was why I did it. I can think of no other reason. For myself I regret it, but not for you. I envy you. Bianca.”
My fingers trembled as I read this strange epistle, and I felt cold. Actually—it seemed as if the room had gone cold as ice.
VI
It seemed at first as if Philibert’s return were going to make very little difference to me. For some weeks I was scarcely aware of his presence in the house. There was plenty of room for us to live there without running into each other. When we did meet at the front door or on the stairs, his manner was marked by just that formal courtesy that was the usual sign of deference from a man of his world towards his wife. To the servants, there was always one or two present at such encounters; there could have been visible no flaw in his armour, nor in mine.
Our first meeting had been brief. Whatever his intention in seeking me out in my boudoir, it took him not more than five minutes to find out that there was nothing to be gained by a prolonged conversation, and on the whole, nothing to be feared from me, did he but leave me alone, but I imagined that I read upon his face more disappointment than relief. He had not been afraid, perhaps just a little uneasy, but he had been curious. He had expected something, and as he left me the expression of his back and the vague fumbling of his hand in the tail pocket of his coat, gave me the impression that whatever it was he had wanted, he was going away without it. This impression, however, was fleeting, a deeper and more painful one remained, and kept me a long time idle at my desk. He was changed in a way that for some subtle inexplicable reason had made me ashamed to look at him. There was in his pallid puffy face, in the sag of his shoulders and the crook of his knees, something that I did not want to understand, something that he had no right to show me. Inside his immaculate clothes he was shrivelled to half his size. His wonderful padded coat sat on him as if on a lifeless and flaccid dummy out of which had escaped a good deal of the sawdust stuffing. Bianca had done with him. She had worn him out. He looked old. His eccentric elegance no longer became him. It was as unsuccessful as a plastered make-up on the face of an old woman. That was the sharpest impression of all, he looked a failure. I wondered that he had the courage to show himself, not to me but to Paris, where he had always walked with such impudent assurance. His showing himself to me seemed to me not half so daring. It seemed to me to prove once more and finally his complete contempt for my opinion.
I went on with my life. If I found that the savour had gone out of it, I did not admit this all at once to myself. The situation didn’t bear thinking about. If one thought about it one would be likely to find it quite extraordinary enough to upset one’s mentality, and I proposed not to be upset by it, and Philibert, apparently, with a certain exercise of tact that reminded one of a burglar arranging the furniture and putting out the lights after ransacking a room, made things as easy for me as he could, by, as I say, keeping out of my sight. I soon found, however, that he wasn’t keeping out of other people’s. On the contrary, I began to be conscious of him moving about near me among his friends. It was really rather funny. Only at home under the roof that housed us both, was I quite free from him. In other people’s houses I was constantly meeting his shadow. He had either been there, or was coming, occasionally I was certain, that he had but just taken his departure as I came in. Something of him remained in the room. I caught myself looking about for his hat, and the faces of my acquaintances betrayed varying shades of discomfiture or amusement. Mostly I gathered as time went on, was their feeling one of amusement. Paris had not been at all squeamish in welcoming Philibert, and it found our continued chassé-croisé rather ridiculous. But with its very special adaptibility and its extraordinary flair for situations, it continued to be tolerant of my evident absurd wish not to be coupled with my husband, and did not ask us out together.
Aunt Clothilde, sitting enthroned like some comic Juno above the social earth, put an end to this. As was her habit she sent for me and barged into the subject in hand.
“Now then, Jane, this sort of thing must stop.”
“What sort of thing, Aunt?”
“You and Philibert playing hide and seek all over Paris like a couple of silly children. Don’t pretend you don’t understand. You chose your ‘parti’ long ago when you didn’t insist upon a separation, so now you must go through with it. Nothing is so stupid as doing things half way. You’ve ignored his behaviour. You’ve not bolted the door in his face, and to all appearances you’re a reunited couple.”
I tried to interrupt.
“Don’t interrupt me. I don’t care, and nobody cares what goes on between you and Philibert in your private apartments. Whether you’re nasty or affectionate is nobody’s business but your own, but as regards society, society expects people in it to behave in a certain way, and to make things easy and agreeable and smooth. That’s its main object, its only raison d’être. We people who think ourselves something are nothing if we’re not well bred, that is, if we don’t know how to help other people to keep up the pretence that every one is happy, that life is harmonious and that there’s nothing dreadful under the sun. Society, French society, is very intolerant of bad manners, not as you know of anything else. It is exclusive with this object and adamant on this point. It let you in, now it expects you to behave. You’ve enjoyed its favour, you owe it something in return. What a bore to lecture you like a school-mistress, but there you are. I’m going to give a dinner and you and Philibert are both to come, and that will be the end of this nonsense.”
And of course I did as she said.
And again your mother’s manner to me conveyed a sense of my action having made a difference, but this time an enormously happy difference. She beamed, she was more affectionate than she had ever been. She called me “Ma chère petite” “Ma fille aimée.” Drawing me down to her with her delicate blue-veined hand, she would press her lips to one of my cheeks then the other, lingeringly, and with a pathetic trembling pressure, and look from me to Philibert with happy watery eyes in which was no scrutiny or questioning. She was growing old. Something of her fine discernment was gone. She was no longer curious to know what lay behind appearances. It was enough for her to have recovered her son and been spared the sight of his ruin. Like a child she clung to Philibert. I admit that his manner to her was very charming. He went to see her, I believe, every day.
Claire did not seem so pleased with our renewed family life that resembled so curiously the life we had lived round your mother five years before. Her smile was bitter, her tongue caustic, but she looked so ill, that I put her temper down to bad health. It was, strangely enough, Philibert who explained to me, driving home from his mother’s one Sunday afternoon.
“You mustn’t mind Claire,” he began. “She is in trouble.”
“I don’t. I can see she is in wretched health.”
“Her health is the result, not the cause, of her unhappiness.”
“Oh?”
“Her husband has fallen into the hands of a scheming woman who wants to marry him. He has threatened Claire with a divorce.”
I was taken aback. I stammered. For an instant I wanted to laugh, but Claire’s haggard face was after all nothing to laugh at. I remarked mildly; “But I thought that in your world one didn’t divorce?”
“He’s not of our world, never was, never will be. Besides, it bores him, he’s had enough of us.”
“I see.”
“He’s had too many snubs. We’ve been stupid. That affair of the Jockey Club rankles.”
“You mean that if you had taken him into the Jockey Club ten years ago he wouldn’t want to divorce your sister now.”
“Quite possibly. It would have involved him in other things, given him something to live up to. As it is, he has, as you know, gone in for politics.”
“No, I didn’t know. I never hear him mentioned. I’m very sorry if Claire is unhappy about it.”
“She is, terribly.”
“But she hates him.”
“Not quite that. In any case the disgrace would kill her. She has always been a retiring protected creature. The publicity would be peculiarly awful for her.”
I knew that what he said was true, but he had more to say, and he stammered over it.
“We thought that you, Jane, might do something.”
I was startled. “Do something?”
“Yes, to help, to persuade the man not to.”
“But I scarcely know him.”
“He has a great respect for you.”
“For me? What nonsense.” I looked at him sharply. “What do you mean, Philibert?”
His pale blue eyes turned from mine to the Sunday pageant of the Champs Elysées.
“He wants a place in the Government. He would be greatly influenced by political considerations, a prospect of success. Your friend Ludovic could do something there.”
“You mean that you want me to ask Ludovic to ask the Premier to give your brother-in-law a place in the Cabinet on condition he doesn’t bring divorce proceedings?”
“It needn’t be a big place, you know. An under-secretaryship would do.” The car drew up, came to a stop. “You’d better talk to Blaise about it before you decide to leave Claire in the lurch.”
But you showed a curious reluctance to discuss the question and referred me to Clémentine. I found her in the disused stables behind her house where she had fitted up a studio. She was in a linen overall, her arms smeared with clay, a patch of it on the tip of her tilted nose, her hair screwed untidily on top of her ugly attractive head. She pointed out a clean spot on a packing case and after lighting a cigarette I sat down there.
“I’ve come about Claire.”
“I know.” Her face twinkled. She gave a laugh and taking up a handful of wet clay slapped it on the side of the gargoylish head that she was modelling.
“Why won’t Blaise talk to me about it?”
“He doesn’t like their using you in the matter. He has delicacies of feeling.”
“I don’t quite see. He adores his sister.”
“Of course.”
“And is very unhappy about her, as they all are.”
“Naturally.”
I pondered. “After all, I belong to the family.”
“Quite so, whether you like it or not.” She ducked about scraping and smoothing with flexible thumb.
“But I’m fond of them.”
“Of Claire?”
“Yes.”
“People are.”
“You sound very dry.”
She gave a poke to her ugly old man’s protruding eye.
“Mon dieu, I’m not too fond of your family, as you well know. They bore me. I was brought up with Claire. We know each other.”
“You don’t like her.”
“She is uninteresting, no courage, no character.”
“She has put up with a great deal.”
“Has she? She liked her husband’s money, you know, and he’s not a bad sort, really, merely vulgar, quite good-natured.”
“She loves her children,” I said weakly. At that Clémentine looked round quickly.
“Do you call that a virtue?” she asked.
I stammered. “I don’t know, I suppose so. It seems to me human.”
“Well, my dear, when humanity has nothing more to recommend it than the fact that it cares for its young, I shall be ready to depart to another planet.” She sat down on a high stool, one knee over the other, a foot hung down, dangling a shabby shoe. Her face was full of merriment. She chuckled. Her eyes danced. She gave me, as she always did, the impression of containing in herself an immense fund of interest and gladness and of finding life much to her taste.
“You mustn’t destroy my belief in my love for my child,” I said, half laughingly.
“Your belief in it?” She wondered.
“Yes, in its being—worth something.”
“To which one?”
“To us both.”
She puffed at her cigarette. “If I had had a child I should have loved it terribly, and stupidly,” she said seriously. “I should probably have been worse than any of you. Maternity is a blinding, devouring passion, is it not? I don’t know, but so I imagine. A mother’s love for her child, what is there more admirable in that than in any other fact of nature? Only when it is strong, so terribly strong as to become wise and unselfish is it interesting. Even then, no, it is not interesting, it is only natural and necessary, and often, very often, it is a curse to the children.” Her face had gone dark and intense. She jumped down from her stool, gave herself a shake, laughed, turned to her work—“No, your mother-women are dreadful. I prefer those who love men. Sexual passion is good for the feminine soul. It makes us intelligent. Tell me, is it true that in America sensuality is considered a bad thing?”
“Yes. We—they—admire chastity, purity.”
“How do you mean—purity?”
“One man for one woman, love consecrated by marriage.”
“All one’s life?”
“Yes.”
“How strange. Love, you say, consecrated by marriage. How very funny. You mean then seriously, not just social humbug? In their hearts do intelligent women, women like yourself, feel love, love as the interest and savour of life, coming unexpectedly, perhaps often, to be a bad thing?”
“Many do.”
“And you—what do you think?”
“I? Oh, for me, I can’t generalize about it. I have no ideas on the subject.”
“I see.”
She was silent a while. I watched her clever thumbs pressing and smoothing the soft clay. She was no sculptor, but the head she was modelling had a mischievous ugliness. Though badly done, it expressed something. Watching her I realized again her immense capability, her command of herself, her understanding of the elements of life. What was she thinking of now, her sensitive witty face blinking sleepily with half-closed eyes like a cat’s? Inwardly I felt that she was faintly smiling at some pleasant memory or prospect. She was neither young nor beautiful. Her wiry little person suggested nothing voluptuous or alluring. She was dry and spare and untidy, yet her success with men was unequalled. Impossible to imagine her in an attitude of amorous tenderness, yet men adored her. And her lovers remained her friends. She puzzled me. There was something here that I would never understand. The high game of sex as a life occupation of absorbing interest and endless ramifications, a gallant and dangerous sport at which one became a recognized expert, in some such way I felt that she looked at it. As an Englishwoman gives herself up to hunting, I reflected, and exults in knowing herself to be a hard rider, just so Clémentine would go at the biggest jumps, keep in the first field. Riding to hounds or playing the daring game of love, the same sporting mentality, the same ecstatic sense of life, all our faculties sharpened by danger. Why not? Clémentine was sane, healthy, full of zest and delight. Impossible to think of her in terms of maudlin sentimentality or sordid secret pleasures. And yet for myself, I felt a loathing of men, a disgust at the vaguest image of the contacts of sex. It was very puzzling. There must be some deep racial difference between us, or some tenacious effect of my upbringing that held me in a vice, or was it only that Philibert had poisoned for me the sources of all emotion?
I moved about the dirty studio, brought back my mind to the subject I had come to discuss. “We have forgotten about Claire, haven’t we?”
“Well, yes, what of Claire?” She yawned.
“Philibert says that Ludovic could arrange it.”
“No doubt he could. The President of the Council is you know his greatest friend.”
“Yes, I know, but surely giving away secretaryships—”
“Oh, la la! Why not? Don’t worry about that. Madame de Joigny’s son-in-law will make quite a respectable under-secretary as far as that goes. I only wonder he’s not got what he wanted long ago.”
“What shall I do then?”
She looked at me, her head on one side, screwing up her clever mischievous eyes.
“That, my dear, depends entirely on what you want to do.”
“Do you think Ludovic would mind my approaching him on such a subject?”
She laughed. “Do you?”
“No, I don’t. I should put it quite brutally, he would only have to say no.”
“Quite so.” She continued to watch me with her funny intelligent grin.
“And that wouldn’t spoil our friendship, would it?” I asked again.
“No, I should say not, certainly not.” She laughed again and somehow, frank as was that bubbling sound, I didn’t like it coming in at that moment.
“Why do you laugh?” I asked, looking at her keenly.
Her face grew gradually grave, her eyes opened. We stared at each other and in hers I saw a light, a flash, something keen and swift and bright that made me warm to her, value her, exult in her friendship.
“Vous êtes—vous êtes—” she turned it off, waving a handful of clay. “Vous êtes admirable.” But I didn’t understand then, only long after. I wonder what Claire would say if she knew that her fate hung on the thread of Clémentine’s charity? For Clémentine saw it all, saw quite clearly her opportunity for revenge. She had only to suggest what they, unknown to me, were all thinking, namely that Ludovic, for the simplest of reasons, would never refuse me anything, and their whole little scheme would be undone. But she didn’t suggest it. There was nothing spiteful in Clémentine.
So I went to him and told him the whole thing quite bluntly, and he, without any fuss or without giving me any feeling of doing me a favour, said that of course he would put in a word with the Premier. They, he and the Premier, were going to the country together for a few days. They were going to see Ludovic’s mother in her little farm on the Loire. They would fish and sit in the garden. Perhaps over their fishing rods on the banks of the lazy, reedy river, something could be arranged. He then went on to tell me of his mother, who was very old, nearly eighty-five, and who would not come with him to Paris because of the noise. She was, he said, just a peasant woman, and had no interest in his career. But she sent him baskets of apples from her orchard and socks that she had knitted. She could not write. The curé kept him informed of her health. They had been very poor. As a child he had always been hungry and he and his mother had worked in the fields. Sometimes they had been so poor that they had had to beg for bread. His father, who had been of a different class, had done nothing for him. He had made his own way. The curé had taught him to read and write. His mother was content now. She had a cow and pigs and chickens, an apple orchard and a garden. But she could not accustom herself to having a servant in the house and did the cooking herself. He did not allude again to Claire’s husband, neither then nor later. In time, as you know, the matter was arranged, and I like to think that it was settled in that chaumière where Ludovic’s little old mother in her white cap and coarse blue apron sat knitting, while the hens scratched and cackled beyond the farm door. There is something humorous to me in the fact that Claire’s luxurious home was secured to her in that place of poverty and courage and contentment.
In the meantime Philibert had recovered his health and his looks. His doctor and his masseur and his hairdresser and his tailor had in six months restored to him a very good substitute for youth. He had gone at the business methodically and with the utmost seriousness. Seeing as little of him as possible at home, I nevertheless was aware of what was going on. He lived by a strict régime. His rubber came every morning at eight o’clock, his fencing master at nine. At ten he dressed. At eleven he walked or rode in the bois. Faithfully he stuck to the diet his doctor had ordered for him. He drank only the lightest wine. He gave up smoking. His hand no longer shook. His face was smooth and rosy, he had put on weight, he walked with his old springy impudence. He looked almost the same, almost, but not quite. No beauty doctor on earth could wipe away from his face the mark Bianca had put there. The droop of the eye-lids, the sag of the lower lip, gave him away. To the crowd he might seem the same Philibert, the leader of fashion, the joyous comedian, the perennially young, but not to me, and not to himself. We both knew that he was an old man now, and this fact formed a sort of bond between us, a cold, grim, precise understanding that linked us inevitably together. And for a time I didn’t quite hate this because I felt secure, I felt that I had the upper hand. He was afraid of me, and in a curious way depended on me. He depended on me, not to give him away, not to let on to any one that he was, or had been, in danger of breaking up. His vanity thus kept him at my mercy, while another part of his brain found relief in the fact that I saw him as he was. Sometimes I caught a look in his eyes that seemed to say—“I really wouldn’t have the endurance to sustain this enormous bluff if I had to bluff you as well.” I never answered his look. I couldn’t bring myself to reach out to him in even the most impersonal way. All I could do was to remain there beside him, in public sharing his life, in private withdrawn, impassive, stolid, non-committal, and do him no harm.
And so it might have gone on indefinitely, the atmosphere of our house coldly harmonious, calm as an icy lake, had not Jinny introduced an element of hot, surging, dangerous feeling.
He loved her, too. At first I wouldn’t believe it, but I was bound at last to admit that it was so. When I first began to notice the increasing attention he gave her I had thought that he was “up to something.” I suspected him to be playing the part of devoted father with motives that had to do with myself, and as I could not conceive of his wanting to make me like him, I imagined the reverse, that he wanted to make me jealous, and I set myself to conceal from him the fact that he had succeeded. I was terribly jealous, for whatever the meaning of his apparent feeling for her, there was no doubt of her affection for him. The child was obviously delighted to be with him. Repeatedly when I asked her if she would like to go with me for a drive, she would ask if “Papa” were coming too, and when I said no, her face would change from pleasure to a curious expression of boredom that was like an absurd imitation of his own. She would turn away quickly and put out her hands to the empty room in a funny, hurting gesture of exasperation, then suddenly, feeling my disappointment, would assume a polite cheerfulness and say, with a quick, tactful insincerity that reminded me all too vividly of her grandmother, “It is a pity Papa cannot come, but of course, Mamma, I like best being with you alone.” And I would cry out in my heart, “My poor, precocious infant, where did you get such intuitions?”—but I knew where she got them.
There was between them a very striking resemblance. I looked sometimes with horrid fascination from one to the other. She would come in with him, swinging to his hand, twirling about, clasping it in both hers, and laughing up in his face. Her light, exaggerated grace was his, also the fineness of her little features. No one would ever at first sight take her for my child, no one seeing them together could mistake her for his. They disengaged the same brightness, the same chilly, sparkling charm. How was it that in one it displeased me and in the other so tormentingly appealed? Why, I asked myself, did I not hate her too, since she so resembled her father? But the muttered question was answered only by an inaudible groan. I had given him all my love, and had now transferred it all to her, a stupid, elemental woman, I felt that I was destined to be their victim. Strange thoughts, you will say, for a mother to have about her child. Why not? I was afraid of her, far more afraid than I had ever been of him. In the days of his power over me I had been young, ignorant, insensitive; now I knew what I was capable of suffering, knew only too well what little Geneviève could do to me, did she take it into her head to become as like him as she looked.
I tried to hide all this, but I felt that he saw. His manner changed. He was at once more attentive to me and more careless, less formal, more talkative, in a word more sure of himself. He took to dropping in on me in the evenings before dinner, bringing Geneviève with him and holding her beside him in the crook of his arm, while he unconcernedly chatted, and all the while her great shining brown eyes were fixed on me with their meaning lucidity. I was obliged to prevaricate, to seem pleased, to lay myself out in an elaborate assumption of happy intimacy.
One night she came running back alone after going with him to the door of his room, and threw her arms round my neck. I gathered her close. Her caresses were so rare that I held her, positively, in a breathless delight, with a sense of yearning tenderness so exquisite that it frightened me. “So sweet, so sweet,” I murmured to myself, straining her to me. Then I heard her say intensely, “It’s not true, it’s not true, tell me it’s not true.”
I lifted my face from her curls.
“What is not true, my darling?”
“That you and Papa don’t love each other.” She kept her face buried. I felt her heart beating against me, a frail little gusty heart beating painfully. The room round us was very still, too still, no sound in it, only the felt sound of our heart beats, and the clock ticking on the mantelpiece. I must speak, I must lie to her, and as the words left my lips I knew that they were involving me in endless deceptions, in a long, long ghastly comedy, in countless humiliations.
“No, darling, it’s not true.”
Her little arms tightened round my neck.
“They said—” she whispered.
“Who said, my pet?”
“Some ladies. I heard them talking. They said, they said you would never forgive him.” I felt her body trembling, and I too trembled, and as I realized that I had thought her incapable of intense feeling I felt deeply ashamed. “What did they mean, Mamma, tell me, what did they mean?”
“Nothing, nothing.” I must have spoken harshly. “They were mistaken, they were speaking of some one else.”
She lifted her face then and looked at me, her eyes were wide and accusing. “Oh, no, Mummy, they said your names, they said Jane and Philibert, your two names. It was at Aunt Claire’s. Dicky and I were just behind the door, and I pulled him away so he wouldn’t hear any more, but he only laughed at me and said, ‘Every one knows your parents detest each other’—in French, you know, ‘Tout le monde sait que tes parents se détestent,’ and then I kicked him.”
“Jinny!”
“I only kicked him a little. It didn’t hurt. I wanted it to hurt, dreadfully.”
“My child, my child.”
“I know, Mummy, that it was very wicked. I told Father Anthony all about it at confession, and he looked so sad, so beautifully sad. I wept and wept. He told me to pray very hard to the Virgin to save me from angry passions, and I did, but I enjoyed being angry. I felt big and strong when I was angry, quite, quite different from ordinary, and I thought you would understand. Were you never angry when you were a little girl?”
“Yes, darling, I was.” Her question had startled me. I was profoundly disturbed by this sudden revelation of her character.
But again her little mobile face had changed.
“You aren’t like that, are you, Mummy? You couldn’t be?”
“Like what, my darling?”
“Unforgiving.” Her eyes were on mine.
“I hope not, Geneviève.” She flushed at my tone, but continued to look at me gravely and steadily.
“I thought you might have been angry with Papa for leaving us for so long,” she said with an air of great wisdom. “I was, but I forgave him at once.” I smiled.
“You see,” she went on, “I couldn’t bear him to be unhappy, for I love him.”
“I know, darling.”
“And you love him, too?”
“Of course.”
She heaved an immense sigh.
“Then we are all happy.”
“We are all happy,” I echoed.
A minute later she was at the door, wafting me a gay little kiss. I had not been able to keep her. She was not more than ten years old at that time, but even then she was already the complete elusive creature of swift fleeting moods and superlatively lucid mind that she is today.
And still I suspected Philibert of playing the part of adoring father in order to make me do what he wished. So without alluding to Jinny, never, in fact, daring to allude to her, I tried to bribe him. He had hinted occasionally about wanting to resume our old habits of entertaining, and his hint had shocked me. Such a farce had seemed altogether unnecessary. Now I gave in to him and the same old extravagant theatrical life began. To me it was incredibly boring and at times quite ghastly. There were moments when it was as if over the old sepulchre of our married life he had built an enormous and hideous altar to some obscene heathen deity, some depraved Bacchus before whom he and I giddily danced, with vine leaves in our hair.
“But,” I argued, “this is what he likes, and if I help him do it he will have got from me all that he wants, he will leave Jinny alone. He will have less time for her and will forget about her.” Unfortunately all these social antics took up as much of my time as his. The result was that neither of us saw the child save in hurried snatches, and in that horrible house, now so constantly filled with people, with armies of servants, and streams of guests, I had a vision of her skipping about like a little white rabbit in a monstrous zoo. Poor Jinny, what a wretched mess we made of her childhood, Philibert and I, with our constant vigilant, yet inadequate, lying to each other in her presence, and our ridiculous absorption in the tawdry pageant of society. And yet we both loved her and were doing it, even he in his way, for her. He wanting her to have an incomparably brilliant position in the world, I wanting to keep him away from her, thinking in my jealous stupidity that she would belong more to me the more he belonged to the world.
It was when she fell ill that I was at last convinced of his caring for her. She had pneumonia, you remember, and was very near death for three days. I can see Philibert now, sitting through the night by her bed, he on one side, I on the other, I can see his face as he watched her painful breathing, a face clammy with sweat, contracting suddenly in a curious grimace when she struggled for breath. He never touched her. He left that to me and the nurses. But he never once took his eyes off her swollen little face. I was deeply impressed by the sight of that fidgety, nervous man sitting so still, hour after hour, and I remember his sobbing when the child’s breathing grew easier and the doctors said the crisis was past. Poor Philibert, with his arms thrown across the foot of Jinny’s bed and his head on them, sobbing like a child, I felt very sorry for him that night.
But it was too late for Jinny’s illness to make any real difference in our relationship. We had gone too far, I knew him too well. All that I could do was add to my knowledge of him the fact that he loved his child and leave it at that.
VII
The years passed, crowded with incidents, colourful, varied, gay. I saw them going by, like gaudy pleasure boats, richly panoplied and filled with graceful merry-makers, floating down a sullen river. Sometimes I seemed to be alone, watching them go by, sometimes, beyond them, a long way off, I heard a sound that was like the sound of waves breaking on a distant beach.
You wince at what you feel to be my poor attempt at poetic imagery—I am not trying to be poetic, I am trying to express to you my experience, as precisely as possible. It was like that. In the middle of a crowded place, at the Opera where women in diamond tiaras nodded from padded cages, on the boulevards where a thousand motors like shining beetles buzzed in and out of rows of clanging trams, in a drawing-room ringing with staccato voices, I would find myself, suddenly, listening to a sound that seemed to come from an immense distance; a faint far rhythmic roar that was audible to my spirit, and that I translated to myself in terms of the sea because it affected me that way, like a booming murmur, regular as the booming of waves. I knew what it was.
I seemed at such times to see Patience Forbes, standing on the other side of the Atlantic, like some allegorical figure of faith, a gaunt weather-beaten old woman, her strong feet planted firmly on the shore, the wind whipping her black clothes about her, her brave old eyes looking out at me, under shielding hands, across that immense distance.
The distance between us was growing greater. I no longer wrote to her every week. There seemed so little to say. I found a difficulty in telling her of my occupations and amusements. When it came to describing to her the people I associated with, they appeared suddenly trivial and peculiar. There was no one about me, whom she could have understood. Clémentine with her genius for amorous-adventure, Ludovic with his nihilistic philosophy, Felix the intellectual mischief-maker; when I wrote to her of these people, I found that I misrepresented them, made up for them colourless characters that did not exist and would not distress her. Her innocence cut her off from us. The recital of my life was like telling a story and leaving out the point. I gave it up, disgusted by my feeble insincerity, and limited my letters to news of Jinny and comments on public events. And she understood, of course, that I was keeping everything back. She was no fool. I can see now, when it is too late, what a mistake I made, and what a pity it was. Now that she is dead, I think of her sitting alone in the Grey House, waiting for my letters, opening them with old trembling fingers, reading the meagre artificial sentences; her face growing tired and grim at the meaningless words, then putting away the disappointing sheets of paper in the secretary by the door. I found them there, all of them afterwards arranged in packets with laconic pencilled notes on their wrappers—“Jane doesn’t tell me much. She’s not happy.” “A bad winter for Jane, she’s taken to gambling; she says nothing of her husband.” “Jane was coming but can’t. I’m disappointed.” That note was made the summer Fan died—I had determined to go to St. Mary’s Plains. Fan’s illness stopped me.
I had been seeing very little of Fan. She had established herself in a flat near the Étoile where she lived alone, but where her husband paid her an occasional visit. Ivanoff was pretty well done for in Paris. There had been a scene at the Travellers’ Club, and afterwards his old victims had refused to play cards with him. So he had gone elsewhere. Men like Ivanoff can always pick up a living at Monte Carlo. He spent most of his time there, but when he came back, Fan always took him in. I never saw him on these occasions, nor apparently did any one else, but Fan would announce his arrival bluntly, and with a sort of defiant bravado, would put off her dinners and lunches to be with him.
She lived from hand to mouth. People who accused her of accepting his ill-gotten gains were wide of the mark. Ivanoff contributed nothing to Fan’s keep. It was the other way round. He came back to her when he was on the rocks, came back to beg from her and to recuperate. Once she said to me, “Ivan’s been asleep for thirty-six hours on the sofa in the drawing-room. I swear to you it’s true. He has only waked up twice to eat a sandwich and have a drink.”
But when I asked why she put up with him, she flung off with a laugh, and—“God only knows.”
She lived from hand to mouth in a state of extravagant luxury. Her stepfather had died, leaving her four thousand dollars a year, that gave her twenty thousand francs before the war. One would have said that she spent at the least five times as much, but she didn’t. She had resources, and little arrangements that made it unnecessary for her to pay for a good many things; and she earned a good deal. Her reputation as one of the smartest women in Paris, and her popularity, represented her capital, a very considerable sum. New and ambitious dressmaking houses clothed her for nothing, and in return she brought them the clientele they wanted. She had a standing account at certain fashionable restaurants, where she was allowed to lunch for five francs and dine for ten, and where to “pay back” she was the centre of many a cosmopolitan dinner party. For ready cash she wrote social notes in a fashion paper and occasionally launched a South American millionaire in society. Every one knew about all this; no one minded. She never gave any one away or presumed on her friendships and her frankness about her own affairs which was dry and desperate and funny disarmed criticism.
“My dear,” she said one day to Claire over the tea table, “I’ve had a letter from Buenos Aires from a man who offers me forty thousand francs if I’ll take his wife about next spring, and a five thousand franc tip extra, each time she dines at an embassy. Isn’t it a perfect scream? I wrote back asking for a photo of the wife. It came yesterday. I’ve turned down the offer.”
She borrowed from no one and accepted no gifts of money from her friends, men or women, and I take the last to be the more to her credit because half the people in her world assumed that she did and the other half wouldn’t have blamed her if she had done so. Virtues, that you all held so lightly, have at least a relative value. Fan was incurably extravagant; she adored luxury, and I consider that her having married a poor man, and having refused to procure for herself in a manner so accepted by her world, the ease and comfort she craved, proves her to have been an interesting person. I see that you don’t believe what I say, but I know that it is true. Men did not pay her dressmaker’s bills. As for her little motor brougham that created so much comment, she bought that after an extremely lucky venture in rubber. She gambled on the “Bourse” of course. Old Beaudoin the banker gave her tips. Sometimes he invested her money for her. She would give him a few thousand francs and a month or two later he would perhaps sends her back twice the sum, but it is not exact to say that he always arranged to double her investment. And if he did take her wretched pennies and speculate with them and pretend that he had won when he lost, what harm did that do him with all his millions? It was all by way of repayment anyhow. Fan had got him and his fat wife asked to a lot of nice houses. He owed her far more than he ever paid. And when she crowned her services to him by making his daughter’s marriage, surely she had earned the cheque he sent her or the block of shares, whichever it was.
To have a good time, to be happy, a more sentimental woman would have put it, that was her idea. Who of us all had a better, or a different one? Weren’t we all looking for happiness, always?
Once I saw a street arab playing in the dirt with bits of mica, constantly threatened in his game by horses’ hoofs, wagon wheels, policemen and hooligans. Fan reminds me of him. I remember his tiny eager hungry grimy face, intent on his game. Fan was like him, I watched her playing with bits of worthless brightness in the crowded muddy streets of life, jostled, buffeted, knocked about, a little rickety gutter snipe, fighting for the right to play, that is the way I see her. It had a beauty! you’ll admit that, I suppose.
But we quarrelled. I bored her. She didn’t like having any one about who couldn’t keep up the farce of treating her as the happiest of women, and she made fun of my taking the intellectuals so seriously.
When I wanted to see her I had to go to her flat where luxury and poverty and dissipation and folly were mingled together in an unhealthy confusion. It was a curious place, very bare and new and totally lacking in the usual necessities of housekeeping, such as cupboards and carpets, table linen and blankets, but there were flaming silks thrown about, and a good many books and heaps of soft brilliant cushions. A grand piano stood in the empty drawing-room on a bare polished floor. The dining room table held always a tray of syphons and bottles. There might be no food, there were always cocktails and ragtime tunes to dance to. Sometimes the electric light was cut off because the bill wasn’t paid, but there was a supply of candles for such emergencies, and if creditors were too pressing, Fan would take to her bed and lie under her cobwebby lace coverlet on a pile of white downy pillows all frills and ribbons, smoking endless cigarettes while weary tradesmen rang the door bell, and her friends sat about on the foot of the old lacquer bed telling each other questionable stories, and going off into muffled shrieks of laughter.
Her friends were many and various. Among them were people like Claire and Clémentine and the wife of the Italian Ambassador, but her own small particular set, the group that she went about with most, had its special stamp.
A cosmopolitan lot who had seen better days, and were keeping their heads up, by grit and bluff; they were I suppose the fastest set in Paris. The men didn’t interest me, but the women did, rather. There was something hard and dependable about them that I liked. They bluffed the world but not each other. Their talk was terse and to the point, their language coarse and brutal. They made no gestures and seemed always to be looking very straight at some definite invisible thing that occupied their cold attention. It may have been the ugliness of life that they were looking at. If so, it didn’t make them wince. It may have been the past, if so it didn’t make them shudder or creep. They wasted no time in remorse or regret.
At times they reminded me of tight-rope walkers crossing a dizzy abyss. There was something tense and daring about their stillness, as if a chasm yawned under them. No doubt it did, but it was not their worldly position that was precarious, it was their actual hold on life. They would go on with their old titles and ruined fortunes leading the dance till they dropped, but they might drop any time. People in their entourage did, they were accustomed to violence. One had had a lover who called her up one morning and shot himself while she listened over the telephone. Another had tried twice to kill herself. Most of them drank and took drugs. Their hard glittering eyes gave out a glare of experience, but their faces were cold, calm, non-commital, and if they were worried by the caddishness of the men they loved, by debts and the torments of passion, they gave no sign and held together and helped each other. For damned souls, they made a good show, and I admired them.
They thought me a fool, however, and made a hedge around Fan, shutting her off from me.
One morning I rushed round to her flat on an impulse. I had had no message from her but a curious feeling of nervousness had bothered me in the night. Some one had mentioned Ivanoff at a dinner table. I had heard the words—“wife-beater”—“card-sharper.”
I found things at the flat in an indescribable state of disorder.
The drawing-room was strewn with the remains of supper. The table had not been cleared. There were broken glasses on the floor, empty champagne bottles about; a puddle of wine, some one had spilled a bottle of Burgundy. The cook opened the door for me. The manservant and Fan’s maid had decamped with the silver leaving word that they had taken it in payment of their two years’ wages. A bailiff was sitting on the sofa. Fan was lying in her room in the dark with a wet towel round her head. She said “Oh, hell!” as I came in and turned her back on me. The room had a curious sickly odour, some drug she had been taking, I suppose. Her clothes lay in a heap in the middle of the floor. The dress was torn, the stockings soiled and stained. I felt sick at my stomach. Fan gave a groan.
“For God’s sake, Jane, go away; I’ve got the most ghastly headache.”
All I could do was settle with the bailiff and help the cook clear up the mess. Fan scarcely spoke all the morning. The telephone kept ringing.
“Tell them I’m ill. Tell them to go to the devil,” she called out. She lay there in a dripping perspiration, the sheets clinging to her thin body. She looked like a corpse fished out of the Seine. Suddenly she sprang up. “Good heavens! what time is it? I’m lunching at the Ritz with the Maharajah’s crowd at twelve thirty.”
She sat with her feet dangling over the side of the bed holding her head in her hands. “My head’s bursting—my head’s bursting. Get me a blue bottle off the shelf in the bath room—six drops—no ten—I’ll take ten. It’s wonderful stuff—wonderful! I’ll be alright. You’re an angel.” She talked in a kind of singing moan, a despairing half-crazy chant. “You’re an angel, Jane—you’re too good for this world. I’ll never be able to pay you. How much did you give that man? Oh God! My head! I wish you hadn’t—leave me alone now. I must get dressed. Those Indians won’t know I’m half under. I’ll be all right if I can find my things. Go along—no—no—I don’t want any more help. Ivanoff was here last night; he went off at three this morning. I don’t know where he’s gone; they played chemmy. He won fifty thousand francs from that boy of Adela’s—that baby. I made a scene; I made him give it back. He knocked me down afterwards. He won’t come here again. Anyway he’s gone for good this time. If you ever speak to me of this, I’ll go mad. Leave me alone now. You won’t tell me what you paid that man, but I hate you to pity me, and you’re an angel—you’d no right to interfere. Do for heaven’s sake leave me alone now. God! what a world!” She tottered to her bathroom, trailing her lace nightgown after her. It hung by a ribbon to her bruised shoulder. She shut the door. I heard her turn on her bath. I went away. She avoided me for weeks after that.
Bianca had come back to Paris; she had been, so gossip related it, travelling about Spain with a famous matador. Some people said she had joined his troupe disguised as a boy and had, more than once gone into the arena in a pink suit embroidered in silver and had planted once, the banderillas, in a bull that had five minutes later run his horns through her paramour. I neither believed nor disbelieved the story. José had seen her in the Stand at Seville looking marvellous in a lace mantilla, a black dress high throated and a string of pearls which she flung to the popular hero. She had been wild with excitement, had stood up in her box and called out, and had torn her pearls from her neck with twenty thousand delerious Spaniards shouting round her, and Bombazelta III the Matador on his knee before her, beside the carcase of his victim. Why shouldn’t she have gone a bit further? She liked danger. She could look the part. Actually, I did see a picture of her; three cornered hat, slim tight jacket and breeches, embroidered cape. It suited her, of course; she had the body of a boy, and Bombazelta III was a peculiarly striking man. His photograph was in all the Spanish papers. I found them lying about the library in Paris. Philibert must have sent for them. His nervousness during those days betrayed his interest. Though he never mentioned Bianca’s name, I knew that he was still in touch with her, that they wrote to each other, that he followed her movements. It did not surprise me, when during that summer he went for a week to Saint Sebastian, he called it Biarritz, but I knew where he was. It was Philibert’s behaviour on his return that made me think the stories of Bianca’s sensational caprice were true. Besides, it was just the kind of thing to amuse her for a time.
I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to know anything about her. All that I wanted was never to see her again. But she had no intention of leaving me alone. Her bullfighter dead, she came back to Paris. Paris is a small place. The community in which we lived was crowded, cramped, intimate. Every one was constantly meeting every one else. Bianca stepped back into her place in it as if nothing had happened. Except for the fact that we were not asked to meet one another at lunch or dinner, one would have supposed that our acquaintances were unaware of our having any reason to dislike each other. The inevitable happened. A newly appointed ambassador gave one of his first dinner parties and found no better way of making it a success than having us both present. We sat on either side of a royal guest. Across his meagre chest we eyed each other. Bianca looked much as usual, younger if anything. She had simplified her make-up. Her fine eyelashes now unplastered with black, curled wide from her great blue eyes that looked as innocent as forget-me-nots. Her face was smooth and white. The smallest thinnest line of carmine marked the curve of her lips. Her dress was a piece of black velvet wound round her white body that was immaculate and lovely. She had the freshness of a water lily, and moved through the salons, cool and serene in an attitude of still dreamy detachment, and her curious magnetism emanated from her like a perfume. She drifted up to me after dinner.
“You must talk to me, Jane—” Her voice was cool and concise. “We have important things to say to each other.”
“I have nothing to say.”
She lifted her eyebrows. Her lips curved to a point. She gave a little sigh.
“Why do you lie? You are très en beauté, Jane—you are wonderful. Why do you lie?—You know you owe it all to me—”
I turned my back on her but I felt her standing behind me, watching me, her eyes shining, her delicate nose palpitating faintly, her eyes reading me. She had no intention of leaving me alone.
Our next meeting was at Madeleine’s. Madeleine was the woman who looked after my face. Bianca went to her too. I was sitting in front of the dressing-table, my head tied up in a towel, my face plastered with grease, when Bianca came in. She chattered and gossiped and held up the photograph of herself in the costume of the Spanish bull-ring. “I was distracting myself—” she laughed. “I had been bothered by some very curious ideas. You remember our talk at the ‘Château des trois Maries.’ Well, that sort of thing. I thought the excitement would help. It did. I was within a yard of the bull when he died. Some of the blood splashed me. I didn’t like that.”
I broke in saying that I didn’t believe a word of it.
“Don’t you, Jane? Well, it’s no matter. It’s unimportant. The important thing is that I’m sick to death of everything. Every one bores me. I find you are the only woman in Paris who is alive. I’ve been watching you—you are very extraordinary. You care for no one. You are self-sufficient. You have achieved the impossible.”
All this time Madeleine was massaging my face and pretending not to be interested. I could say nothing. I boiled with rage, helpless, wrapped in sheets and towels, my face plastered with grease, and Bianca sat there, her little white face buried in her furs and laughed at me. When at last she had gone, Madeleine said the Princess had such a beautiful character.
I felt that I was being bated like one of her famous bulls. I resolved to make no move. I refused to be goaded to an attack. I was afraid of her.
Then one day Fan came to see me. Instead of rushing in with her usual shrill greeting, she walked up to me quietly, put her arm round me and laid her cheek against mine.
“I’m so happy, Jane dear; I’m so happy.” Her voice was gentle. “I have found what I have been waiting for all my life.” She went down on her knees and looked up into my face. Hers was calm and rested and had upon it an expression of sweetness that I had never seen there before. “I’m in love, Jane dear. I’m in love with the most wonderful man in the world. I wanted to tell you because I knew you’d be glad I was happy.”
She stayed with me for an hour and told me all about it. It was the strangest thing, hard cynical Fan, suddenly become young and sentimental and timid. They had met at St. Moritz that Christmas. He was an Englishman, half Irish really, with a strong streak of Celt in him. His name was Mark. She called him Micky. He was very beautiful, as beautiful as a god. He had taught her to ski. They had been together high up on snowy peaks above the world. One day she had fallen and sprained her ankle. He had carried her down the mountain in his arms. He was strong and straight like a young tree. He wanted her to divorce Ivanoff and marry him. He said there was no other way for them to be happy. He wanted to meet me. Would I come to lunch now, right away? He was waiting for us. She had told him all about me.
I went, of course. That boy,—you remember him, and how handsome he was, with his golden head and fresh bronzed cheeks and the long curly eyelashes fringing his blue eyes, and his broad sunny smile. He was too beautiful I had felt until he gave me that very broad smile.
Our luncheon was a happy absurd affair. Those two were ridiculously in love—they behaved like children. They beamed, they blushed, they looked into each other’s eyes, he very shy and sweet and attentive, calling her Fan, and in talking to me trying to be dreadfully solemn. “Please, Madame de Joigny, make her be serious. She must divorce that chap, you know. There’s no alternative. It’s got to be done and I want it done right away. Please back me up. I say, you mustn’t smile, you know. It’s dead serious.”
How could I help smiling? He was very appealing. He rumpled his hair and his eyes grew dark, and little beads of moisture stood out on his high tanned forehead. I looked at Fan. Poor Fan! so much older, so worn, so stamped with the stamp of her harrowing racketing years, and yet a new Fan with a young light in her eyes; I was disturbed and anxious.
My fears seemed during the weeks that followed to be groundless. She held him. They continued their dream of bliss. He satisfied her utterly. It was of course his beauty that she loved. Always she had adored beauty in men—now she had it in its most charming aspect, fresh, clean, young. They had nothing in common, but their passion. He was stupid and rather a prude. He had grown up with horses and dogs and a family of sisters in an English country house, had joined the army and then had gone to South Africa with his regiment. He had ideas about womanliness and the honour of a gentleman and the duties of his class. He had never been in Paris before. Fan found no fault in him.
She began taking him about with her. Society was at first amused and indulgent, then again the inevitable happened. He became the rage. A number of women lost their heads over him. He was invited out without her. Soon he was everywhere in demand, and Fan rightly or wrongly persuaded him to go. This at first quite worried him. Women wanting him for themselves and finding him obstinately faithful, turned spiteful. He didn’t understand, for he wasn’t fatuous, but he must have heard a good many things about Fan that he didn’t like.
I felt for him in a way. It seemed to me that he was holding his own pretty well and behaving on the whole very decently, but I wished that Fan’s divorce could be hurried along. She had hesitated about divorcing Ivanoff. “Of course,” she said, “he lives off women, but I’ve known that all along, and it doesn’t seem quite fair to get rid of him now—” but she had given in, in the end.
The months dragged on. I began to wonder whether Micky would hold out. It had been difficult to find Ivanoff. A long time elapsed before the divorce papers could be served on him.
Micky still stuck to Fan, but he began talking about compromising her and, after a time, I had an impression that he stuck to her grimly, without enthusiasm. I imagined him to be cursing his own weak character. He was weak and he knew it, and so did we. He clung to Fan as a woman should cling to a man. This did not make her despise him, it gave her a feeling of strength and safety. She encouraged his dependence on her and adopted the rôle of guide and counsellor.
About this time I had a telephone message and a note from Bianca; both summoning me to her in her old peremptory style. The message was that the Princess wished to see me on urgent matters and would be at home all that afternoon. I did not go. The note, received next morning was as follows:
“It is silly and dangerous to stand out against me. I am attacked by all the demons you know about and if you don’t come, something unexpected and unpleasant will happen.”
I paid no attention to it.
Fan’s character and the quality of her life changed completely; she gave up going out and sank into the deep secretive isolation of a woman who lives for one man alone. Her other men friends melted away. Many of her women friends dropped her. Not those of her own little band, but Micky didn’t like these. Claire who was fond of her, said—“Elle se rend ridicule avec ce garçon,” and refused to have them to dinner together. Fan didn’t seem to care; she stayed more and more at home. This created for her serious money difficulties. She had never had any meals at all to speak of in her own flat, and her butcher’s bill had come to nothing, but now her boy had to be fed. He would come into dinner or lunch nearly every day, rosy and ravenous, and consume large beef steaks, fat cutlets, chickens, eggs, butter, sweets. Her bills became larger as her revenues dwindled. She could or would no longer avail herself of her old sources of wealth. Her vogue was vanishing, and with it the amiability of dressmakers and restaurant-keepers. She had a distaste now for gambling on the Bourse and asking Beaudoin for tips. Micky it seemed disapproved of women gambling. Her love affair was costing her her livelihood; and Micky himself gave her nothing, perhaps because he had nothing much to give; perhaps because of some idea of honour, perhaps because he didn’t know how hard up she was. Fan was not the kind to let on. I know for a fact that she often went hungry to give him a good square meal, and I suspected that under her last year’s dresses, she didn’t have on enough to keep her warm.