It became increasingly evident as the winter wore on that there were influences at work, perhaps a special influence that was worrying them both, but I had no suspicion of the truth. Had I known I would have done something effective—I would have wasted no time with Bianca.
Fan had burned her bridges. There was no going back for her now, no slipping down into the old stupefying pleasures. He had changed her, he had purified and weakened her. There was for her a future with him or nothing. If she lost him, she would be done for. She knew this. She remained clear-headed and played her cards with desperate caution. And I watching her, saw just how frightened she was, but she told me nothing.
I did not know that Bianca knew Micky. She went out very little now. People spoke of her living shut up in her house as they might have spoken of some lurid figure of legend, some beautiful ogress, gnashing her hungry teeth in a cave, but I didn’t listen when they talked of her. I wanted less than ever to hear about her. She still saw Philibert, I knew, but this no longer concerned me. And she seemed to have given up pursuing me. I ought to have known she was up to something. I am sorry now that I refused to think about her, for I might have reasoned it out and discovered by a process of logic, what she was up to—I might have known that she would inevitably choose Micky for her own, just because he was in love with another woman, just because he was the pet of Paris, just because finally, Fan’s life depended on him and because I cared for Fan as if she were my own child.
In March Fan began to lose her nerve. She said to me one day—
“You know that I’m frightened but you don’t know how frightened. Some day, any day, tomorrow perhaps, he’ll see me as I am, a shrivelled-up hag who has played the devil with her life. Do you remember Jane, how your grandmother used to make us read the Bible on Sunday mornings in St. Mary’s Plains? I remember a phrase—‘Born again.’ Well, I’ve been born again. My soul is beautiful, it’s as beautiful as the morning, but I’m as tired and ugly as ever—and my mind is as old as hell. I’ll lose him if I marry him, or if I don’t, I feel it in my bones. I used to think—‘I’m so much cleverer than he is that I’ll be able to keep him.’ My dear, don’t talk to me about cleverness in holding a man. I’d give all the brains in the world for one year of beauty. If only I could be quite quite lovely for just one year. God! but it’s tiring to be always trying to look nicer than you are.”
On another day she broke down and sobbed and implored me to tell her that she was mistaken, and that he wouldn’t get tired of her. “He’s so sweet,” she cried, “so sweet. He gets so cross with women who aren’t nice about me. When they make love to him he doesn’t seem to understand, he thinks them idiots, but each time that he comes back to me from one of them, I am afraid to look at him, afraid to see his eyes, veiled, shifting. It’s awful—too awful! He couldn’t hide anything from me, could he?”
The next time I saw her she was the colour of ashes.
“He hasn’t been near me for a week. Some one has got hold of him. I know who it is.” Her teeth chattered, she kept twisting her hands, but as I sat there miserably watching her, the telephone rang, and she was off like a crazy woman. “Yes, yes, I’m at home, of course. Oh, Micky darling, do—do—come quick, quick”—and when she came back to me she was laughing and crying and saying over and over, “I’m a fool! I’m a fool.”
It was the end of March that they made up their minds to go away together to Italy. She was very lucid and calm about it. Paris had got on their nerves. The life they were leading was impossible. His family might cut him off without a penny, but that couldn’t be helped. They would stay in Italy until the divorce decree was made absolute, and they could be married. Micky had a foolish idea about its being unwise for them to start together from Paris. They were to take the Simplon Express. She was to go ahead and board the train at La Roche Junction. As this was very near Ste. Clothilde, would I mind her going there and stopping the night?
As it happened I was going to Ste. Clothilde for Easter, a few days later, so I advanced the date of my journey and took her with me.
How much she knew or suspected of what had been going on between Micky and Bianca, I do not know. She never told me. All that she ever said was—“I know he didn’t plan it deliberately, I know he didn’t mean to—when I left him.” But she must have known enough to be terribly anxious, and I imagine that her decision to go off with him to Italy was a last desperate move.
The Simplon Express left Paris at nine and stopped at La Roche at eleven o’clock at night. Micky was to take two tickets and the sleepers and get on the train at Paris, ready to lift her aboard.
“Once I am on the train,” she kept saying, “I feel that I will be safe.”
La Roche was a three hours’ motor run across country from Ste. Clothilde, the roads were winding lanes, confusing and indistinctly marked; so we decided that she had better do the distance before dark. She might puncture a tire, the motor might break down, anything might happen, she was feverishly anxious to allow herself plenty of time. She started at three o’clock.
Her face was strained and seemed no bigger than a little wizened infant’s face as she said good-bye. For a moment, on those immense stone steps in view of Philibert’s great formal gardens with their fountains and statues and broad gravel walks, she clung to me. Then with a final nervous hug flung away and jumped into the car. Her last words were “I’ll not come back till I’m married, Jane, so give me your blessing.” And out of my heart I gave it, kissing both my hands to her as the motor swung down the drive, and through the great iron gates.
I felt singularly depressed. Fan and I in that formal and splendid panorama, were such minute creatures—were no bigger, no stronger than a couple of flies. Never had the Château de Ste. Clothilde seemed so cold, so inhuman, so foreign. I no longer disliked the place, I had grown used to it as I had grown used to other things. Its imposing architectural beauty, delicately majestic, serenely incongruous with nature, had made its effect on my mind. I understood to some extent the idea that had created it, the high peculiarity of taste that had chosen to mock at woods and fields, by building in their midst a palace smooth and fine as a thing of porcelain. Gradually I had come to appreciate the bland assurance of the achievement with all its bold frivolous contradictions of reason and common-sense. The moat that surrounded three sides of the château, was like a marble bath. It had no raison d’être. Never had any owner dreamed of defending this place from any invaders, but the moat was there, full of clear water, palest green in which were reflected the silvery walls and high shining windows. And on the fourth side of the house, a joke perhaps, or to contradict the chilling effect of the moat, the eighteenth century architect who adored Marie Antoinette in her shepherdess costume, built an immense flight of steps straight across the length of the south façade, lovely, smooth, shallow steps, made to welcome a crowd of courtiers in satins and trailing silks, and dainty high-heeled slippers. It had amused me at times to imagine them there in that theatrical setting, and to recreate for myself the spectacle of their fêtes galantes—but on the day that Fan left me to go to her boy lover, I took no pleasure in the ghostly place. The sky was grey, the faintly budding trees marshalled a far-off beyond the formal gardens, showed a haze of green that seemed to me sickly, and the suggestion of spring in the air gave me a feeling of “malaise.”
I remembered that Bianca and Philibert had gone off by the same Simplon Express five years before. They too must have stopped at the station of La Roche at eleven o’clock at night, or had they boarded the train farther down the line? I couldn’t remember what they were supposed to have done. All that had nothing to do with me, yet I was waiting for Philibert to arrive with a dozen people who would be my guests, his and mine.
My chauffeur reported his return at nine o’clock that evening. They had reached La Roche at six as planned. He had left the Princess at the station. The Princess had not wished him to wait until the arrival of her train. He had insisted, auprès de Madame la Princesse, as I had told him to do, but she had been displeased and had sent him away.
It was a rainy night, loud with a gusty April wind. The big rooms of the château were peopled with moving shadows and filled with whisperings and sighs. The wind moaned down the chimneys and set the far branches of the trees in the park to tossing. I was alone in the house save for the servants. Jinny had gone to her grandmother for a few days.
I slept badly and woke early. My room was scarcely light. The sun was not yet up, or was obscured by a dismal sky. I listened apprehensively to the moaning restless morning. I listened intently for something—a sound, I didn’t know what. Then I heard it. The telephone downstairs was ringing. I knew in an instant what that meant, and flew down the corridor, my heart pounding in my ribs. A clock somewhere was striking six, seven, I did not know which. A man’s voice spoke over the phone,—“La Gare de La Roche—La Princesse Ivanoff prie La Marquise de Joigny de venir la chercher en auto—La Princesse l’attendra à la Gare—La Princesse s’est trouvée malade dans la nuit et a manqué son train.” I did not wait to hear any more. I was on my way in half an hour. The drive seemed terribly long, interminably long. Fan all night in the station of La Roche—what did it mean?
I found her sitting on a packing case on the station platform, her head against the wall. Her face was bluish, her lips were a pale mauve, her hands, wet, like lumps of ice.
“I’ve been sitting here all night,” she said in a dull voice. “I’m cold.” The station master helped me get her into the car. He seemed troubled and ashamed. He explained that they had not noticed her during the night. After the passing of the express he always went home to bed. The station was deserted during the middle of the night, and the waiting room locked. No passenger trains stopped between twelve and five in the morning. At five the Princess had been discovered by an employé but she had refused to move. They had tried to get her to drink some coffee from the buffet. She had asked him to telephone which he had done. The Princess had told him that she had felt faint during the evening while waiting and had thus missed the train.
On the way home she did not speak. Her body was as heavy against me as a corpse. Her head kept slipping from my arm. I held her across my knees and gave her a sip of brandy now and then. Half way home she began to shiver. Her body shook, her teeth chattered, grating against each other. By the time we reached home, she was in a burning fever.
That night Philibert entertained his guests alone. I sat with Fan in her room. About ten o’clock she stopped for a moment her terrible exhausting tossing from one side of the bed to the other and said—
“I heard her laugh. She put her head out of the car window and laughed.”
“Who laughed, dear?”
“Bianca—she was with Micky in the train. They wouldn’t let me get on. I had no ticket—”
She lay on her back now staring at the ceiling. Some one downstairs was playing a waltz on the piano. The wind had fallen. Out of doors the night was soft and still. Fan’s voice came from her dried lips, distinct and harsh.
“I tried to get onto the steps of the train. The guard stopped me. Bianca must have fixed him beforehand. Micky was drunk. She had fixed him too, by making him drunk. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been drunk. The railway carriage was very high, but I could see into the lighted corridor. I saw Micky. His face was red and stupid. I called ‘Micky—Micky, my ticket—quick; they won’t let me on without it.’ But he didn’t seem to hear me. Some one was behind him in the compartment.
“The wagons-lits man asked me what I wanted. I screamed out—‘That gentleman has my ticket.’ He half believed me. I saw him go in and speak to Micky, and looking up—you know how high the carriages are—I saw Micky shake his head. The attendant came back then and told me that I was mistaken, the gentleman was expecting no one, there was no place, the car was full. A whistle blew. The train started to move, I grabbed the handle by the steps. The wagons-lits man slammed the door shut above me. The train moved faster, I ran along holding on. ‘Micky’ I called, ‘Micky.’ Some one pulled me back, wrenched my hand loose, I stumbled, then I heard Bianca laugh, I saw her. She put her head out of the window and laughed. I was on all fours, in the wet. It was raining. I scrambled to my feet and ran down the platform. The train was moving fast by this time. The last carriage passed me. I reached the end of the platform. I saw the red light at the back of the train. They were in the train together, Micky and Bianca. They were together, in the little hot lighted compartment. They were going away together. She had taken my place. I stood there. The red light disappeared. There seemed to be no one about, it was very windy and cold. I don’t know what I did after that. I remember the steel rails stretching out under the arc light into the darkness. I wanted to run down the rails and catch the train, but the train was gone, and I was afraid.”
They were dancing downstairs; I heard their feet scraping; the time was changed to a fox trot—but Fan did not notice. She lay in a deep dark empty place of her own, cut off from all the sights and sounds round her, watching something, following something, the red lantern perhaps at the end of a train going away in the dark.
I gave Philibert no explanation of Fan’s presence or of her illness. The other people in the house thought that she had come for a visit and had caught cold during a walk in the rain. I had told my maid to suggest this explanation to the servants. She understood. They did not give me away. Philibert never knew what had happened to Fan, but he found out when he went back to Paris that Bianca had gone away with the English boy. I remember wondering afterwards, how he liked being the one who was left behind, but I wondered vaguely, without any feeling for him. He mattered less than he had ever done. Nothing mattered for the time being but Fan, very ill, with congestion of the lungs, who wanted so much to die and end quickly what was already ended. But she couldn’t manage dying. Death eluded her. Life was unwilling to let her miserable body go. Like the remains of some sticky poisonous substance left in a battered dish, it stuck to her. Unwelcome, noisome, contaminated stuff of life, she couldn’t get rid of it although the convulsing frame tried to eject it from her lips. The horror of her coughing! the shaking of her pointed shoulders, the sound of her wrenching stomach, the rattling of her breath in her poor bony chest, the great deep resounding noises of pain in the fragile box that held her wasted lungs! Her eyes would start out at me in terror. She would clutch at me wildly and gasp—“Hold me. Hold me, Jane, I’m shaking to pieces,” and I would hold her through the long spasm, and then she would fall back exhausted and clammy with sweat. My heart ached and ached and ached. I wanted so, for her to die. If she had asked me to do it, I would have ended her life with an injection of morphine, but she said nothing.
Early in May she had a bad haemorrhage. All the scarlet blood of her veins seemed to me to be staining the cloths that I held to her mouth. And afterwards she lay at peace, and I thought “Thank God this is the end,” but it wasn’t. She rallied. Some strength came back to her. The doctors told me to take her to Switzerland. I did so, and did not remember until we were installed in our chalet near the sanatorium that we were within a few miles of the place where she had first met Micky, but she seemed not to mind at all being there, and would lie on the balcony in the sun looking across the valley at the mountains with a smile on her face, while I read aloud to her. Sometimes she talked of St. Mary’s Plains, sometimes of Paris, a great many people wrote to her, women who had been unkind when she was happy, were sorry for her now; sometimes she was gay, laughing and childishly pleased with new chintzes and tea sets and cushions that I ordered from Paris but she never spoke of Micky.
Gradually she grew smaller and smaller. Her face was disappearing. There was nothing much left of it now, but a pointed nose with painfully wide distended nostrils, and two sunken eyes. I took the hand glass away from her dressing table one night when she was asleep—she didn’t ask for it, but one day not long afterwards, she said suddenly “I would like something, Jane.”
“What, my darling?”
“I would like some new clothes, especially hats. I would like six new hats from Caroline Reboux”; and then she looked at me suspiciously like a sharp little witch.
I said, of course, that I would write for them at once. She dictated the letter. Caroline was asked to send us the newest and smartest models she had. “She knows my style,” said Fan from her pillow, “she’ll send something amusing, won’t she, Jane?”
“I’m sure they’ll be ravishing, my dear.”
“Do you think I’m silly, Jane? I’ve a feeling it will do me good to have those hats—when they come we’ll try them on, we’ll go for a drive. We’ll pick out the most becoming and drive to—but how long will it be before they come?”
“Not more than ten days—I should think,” I said avoiding her strange eager eyes.
The next day she was very tired, she asked if there were letters but only looked at the envelopes, saying—“They don’t care a damn whether I live or die,” and the next day and the next, she asked again for letters only to fling them aside.
In the evening she said, “I’m a beast, Jane—and a fool. Why did we write for those hats? I know I can’t wear them, but I’ve always wanted to order hats like that, half a dozen at a time without thinking what they cost. You won’t mind paying, I know—and I don’t mind now. I’ve been a beast about you, Jane, I used to envy you so many things.”
“What for instance—?”
“Well, your ermine coat with the hundreds of little black tails, the sable cape, and your jade necklace, and your pearls. I always adored pearls. I believe I could have sold my soul for pearls like yours at one time. Funny, isn’t it? Lucky no one ever offered me any—no one ever did you know. I wasn’t the kind to have ropes of pearls given me for the asking. If I had only been beautiful, Jane—I would have gone to the dogs sure as fate, but oh, I’d have had a good time. As it is, I don’t seem to have had much fun, now that I think of it. My past is like a dingy deep pocket with a hole in it somewhere. I’ve been dropping trinkets into it all my life, and now I find it’s empty, just an empty dark pocket—that’s my past.” She gave her old shrill laugh. “It’s damn funny isn’t it, Jane—life, I mean. We go on, hoping, hoping, looking forward, looking for something, thinking always there’s something nice ahead for us, being cheated all the time, never admitting it, never giving in, always expecting—fooling ourselves, being fooled—up to the very end. What makes us like that? What keeps us going? Who invents the string of lies we believe in?”
She lay propped up on pillows, her head sunk between her pointed shoulders, her knees sharp as pegs pushing up the bed-clothes, and her skinny hands like birds’ claws picked at the lace on her sleeve.
“Happiness—Jane? I was happy once, you know. It made me good, at least I thought so. I felt good. I tried to be good. Everything dropped away; it was like moulting. I came out a plucked chicken, no fine feathers left. What was the use? I was too far gone I suppose, when it came—” She stared up at me, her cheek bones flushed, her wide nostrils, great black holes in her small face, palpitating. “Love came—now death—and I’m not good enough for that either. What’s death to me? Nothing. I can’t rise to meet it. I want some new hats. That’s all I can think about, all I can bear to think about. My death Jane, like my life, is empty. I fill up the emptiness with things, little things.” She held her two hands against her side as if the emptiness were there, hurting her. “Jane,” she said suddenly, “I wonder—” Her eyes widened, and in them I saw the shadow of the great terror that gets us all in the end. She stared, her dreadful gaping nostrils dilating, her mouth open, her hands out in front of her, pushing against the air. Then suddenly she laughed. “No, no, damn it all, let’s be frivolous up to the end. It’s as good a way as another of seeing the business through.”
She died the end of July, with all her new hats strewn round the room and a piece of wonderful lace in her hands. “Lovely, lovely lace, isn’t it, Jane?” she had said a minute before, and then there was a tearing sound in her chest and the scarlet blood flowing from her mouth, and one choking cry as I sprang to her side.
“Jane—Jane—I’m going now and I’ve not seen him. Jane, tell him, tell Micky I hoped—” Her eyes were agonized. The blood choked her. She couldn’t speak, but I saw in her eyes what she meant—terribly I saw—how she had believed up to the end that Micky would come back to her.
It was Ivanoff who came and Ivanoff, great hulking shameful pitiable creature who wept over her poor lonely coffin. We brought her back to Paris, Ivanoff and I, and buried her in Père-Lachaise one rainy afternoon and then he disappeared again for the last time.
I went straight to Deauville. Philibert was there with his mother and Jinny, but I went to find Bianca. I had seen in the paper that she was at the Normandy.
I may have been out of my mind, I don’t know. I remember that I thought I had Fan’s disease, but that does not prove that I was off my head. The smell of it was in my breath, the dry sound of its hacking cough in my ears, and constantly I saw before me, Fan herself, pallid, shiny with sweat, two black holes in her face opening, panting for breath—and behind her, looking over her dank head I saw Bianca, her pointed lips smiling, cruel as only she in all heaven and earth could be cruel.
It is true that I took a revolver with me to the Casino that night. I remember putting it in my silk bag and pretending at dinner that I had a lot of gold pieces by me, for luck. I had. I was going to the Casino to gamble. I would find a place opposite Bianca and sit her out. You remember the scene. People talked of it enough Heaven knows. One would have supposed women never had played high before. A crowd gathered round us—half Paris was there. I remember the Tobacco King, a very fat man with a red face. It pleased him at first, he swelled with importance. By three in the morning he had lost five hundred thousand francs. His place was taken by the Brazilian millionaire—Chenal, the opera star, was opposite. A number of men accustomed to playing in the men’s rooms, joined our table. They half realized there was more in it than just a game. Bianca opposite me, was white as a sheet. Her face was like a white moon among all those red bloated faces. I watched her. I watched her long carmine finger nails glinting as she handled her piles of folded notes. We played against each other. The luck was against me after the Tobacco King left. I was losing heavily. The fact made no impression on me. I wasn’t playing with Bianca for money. The little wads of thousand franc notes were symbols. The game was a blind. I went Banco against her as a matter of course, automatically, but all the time I was playing another game. I was repeating silently to myself, words that were meant for her. Your psycho-therapists would say I was trying to hypnotize her, to subject her to my suggestion. Well, I was; I was attacking her brain with all the power of my will. I was concentrated on her to break her down. I was determined to frighten her, to fill her with dread, with frantic dread of my hatred, my loathing, my determination to make her pay for what she had done. I succeeded. At four o’clock she began to show signs; attendants kept bringing her whiskey, liqueurs, champagne; her face had turned blueish, she went on. She was still winning. But she knew now, that that wouldn’t help her. At five I saw her waver. She started to scrape together her winnings. I did the same. She looked into my face; it was evident to her that if she left the table I would follow her. She went on playing. We sat there as you know till six o’clock. We left the Casino as the doors closed—we left together.
“I am going with you, Bianca—don’t hurry, there is no hurry”—I kept her by my side. The sun was rising as we crossed towards the Normandy. “No—” I objected, “not there—come out on the beach.” It was low tide. The sea was still. A light mist hung along the horizon. The little waves glinted in the first sun rays. We went out across the wet sand, Bianca’s turquoise blue cape trailing behind her in the little pools where crabs scuttled out of the way of our high satin heels. The sunlight bathed us. It showed her pallid as a corpse. What I looked to her, I do not know. Our two long shadows moved ahead of us to the edge of the water. There was no one near. Behind us stretched the sands—in front of us the sea—afar out, was a ship, minute white sails, sea birds darted in the blue—space—sunlight—silence. We faced each other, and I told her very briefly what was in my mind. I told her that the earth must be rid of her, at any rate that part of the earth which held me, that I had a revolver in my bag and was quite prepared if necessary to put an end to her life, or give it to her, and leave her to do it herself. On the other hand I saw no particular point in suffering the consequences of her death, and would be content if she disappeared for ever from the world that I knew, from Paris, from France, from the civilized places where ordinary men and women like myself were in the habit of living. I told her that I would not allow her to live anywhere any longer where I was—that she could choose—either she would go—take herself off—disappear for ever—or shoot herself there in my presence—If she didn’t, I would kill her the next time I came across her.
It sounds extraordinarily silly and puerile as I relate this but it did not sound silly to Bianca. You must remember that I knew Bianca and knew just how that sort of thing might affect her—and knew that physically she had always been afraid of me. I counted on her superstition, her morbidness, her lassitude. I counted on the stillness, the wide mysterious dawn, the still sea, the cold sky—and I counted on her lack of character—on her “manque d’équilibre.” I was right. I told her that she was loathesome and that at bottom she loathed herself; I told her that she was sick of loving herself and in fact, couldn’t go on much longer even pretending to herself that she wasn’t vile. I told her that her vanity was strained to the breaking point, that any day it might snap and that she would collapse. When she could no longer keep up the fiction of her own interest to herself what could she do? Nothing. She would be a drivelling idiot—she would go insane as she had feared. Coldly I repeated it, over and over. She was diseased; she was a maniac—an egotistical maniac and she would one day become a raving lunatic. She could take her choice. End it now—or go off and develop her lunacy elsewhere in some far country where the curse of her presence would affect no one that mattered to me.
I can see her now—as she was that morning—standing in the sunlight in her evening dress, her feet wet, her cloak trailing on the sand, her face working. I had never seen her face twist before. That morning in the glaring sun, it twitched and jerked and pulled, until almost I thought that her mind had snapped and that she was already the idiot I had prophesied, but she pulled herself together to some extent and managed after a while to speak. What she said was trivial.
“It is your fault, Jane—you wouldn’t do what I wanted so I had to hurt you again—you shouldn’t blame me—you know that I am possessed of devils—Well, have it your own way—I’ll go. Don’t look at me like that—I’ll go, I tell you. Stop looking, you frighten me—Yes, I’m afraid of you—I admit it. Your look is a curse in itself—Wasn’t I cursed enough when I was born—what have I done after all—Fan’s death—? Pooh! She’d have died any way.”
But at that I gripped her. I must have twisted her arms. She gave a shriek, then a whimper as I let her go, and staggered away from me, back towards the shore. I followed her as far as the bathing boxes; all the way she made little noises like a wounded animal, whimpering, sniffing, almost growling. It was horrid. Her long swaying staggering figure, her head hanging forward, her hands twisting her clothes round her, clutching her sides—her shoulders twitching; she was, I suppose, on the verge of hysterics. I felt no pity for her. The sight of her was shocking and disgusting. She had gone to pieces as I thought she would do. She had no character.
I watched her go—From the wooden walk I watched her stumble towards the hotel, break into a run, turn to look back, disappear. It was seven o’clock. An attendant opened a cabin for me. I stripped and swam out—out—a mile, two miles, three, I don’t know. When I got back to the villa Jinny was at breakfast. I felt hungry. We laughed over our honey and rolls. At twelve I was told that Bianca had left Deauville by motor.
That was in 1913, the year before the war.
VIII
Jinny liked to wear silks and velvets when she was quite a little girl. Her taste for pretty clothes was something more than childish vanity. I used often to find her in the room lined with cupboards where my dresses were kept, sitting on the floor amid a heap of soft shining garments, that she had dragged from their hooks, stroking the fabrics lovingly, and purring to herself like a blissful kitten. She couldn’t bear the touch of wool or starched cambric, and screamed herself into hysterics when in obedience to the doctor’s orders, I tried one winter to put her into woollen combinations. Her father humoured her in this. I think it rather pleased him that she should be so delicately fastidious. He found in it a proof of an exquisite sensibility and likened her to the fairy-tale princess of the crumpled rose leaf. Unfortunately he told Jinny the story and she immediately accepted it as illustrative of herself, acted it out literally in her nursery, obliging her nursemaid to make and remake her little bed, to smooth and stroke and smooth again until every imaginary wrinkle in the soft sheets was gone, before she would consent to get into it. This habit lasted for some weeks until she read one day in her “histoire sainte” of a saint who had acquired great spiritual blessing by sleeping on the floor of her cell, whereupon she took no more interest in the way her bed was made. The nurse was delighted until she discovered that as soon as she had turned down the light and left the room, Jinny hopped out of bed and lay down on the floor, choosing fortunately a spot near the radiator. The harassed women, governess, nurse and nursemaid said nothing to me the first time, nor the second that they found her asleep on the floor, but finally came to me explaining that Mademoiselle was very determined to die of pneumonia.
Jinny looked at me with grave shining eyes when I asked her what such naughtiness meant.
“It is not naughtiness at all, Mamma, you misunderstand, it is the saintly life, ‘la sainte vie.’”
Fortunately I was sufficiently aware of her romantic absorption in the lives of the saints, and of her habit of applying everything that she read or heard to herself, to guess what influence was working on her. The “saintly life” had come up before. She had already had periods of fasting that had given way before her great liking for bonbons, and periods of prayer, that had given way to sleepiness, and had even attempted at one time to beat her little shoulders with a strap off a trunk, all of which things had worried me considerably, but none of which had been immediately dangerous to her health, so I entered straight upon the subject in as sympathetic a tone, that is on as high a moral ground as I could find, using all my wits to adapt my conversation and my thought to her mind, as if, as indeed may have been the case, her idea was more lucid than my own.
“Darling,” I said in a tone as grave as the one she had used to me, but with a certain timidity that she in her exaltation of the young devotee had certainly not felt at all, “the saintly life is a beautiful thing when rightly understood; it is too beautiful to be entered upon easily and capriciously. If you have a true wish to model your life on that of the saints who gave up every comfort for the salvation of their souls, then I will help you. I will do it with you. We will change everything. We will take away all the pretty things, and empty these rooms, yours and mine, of the pictures, and the rugs, keeping only the strict necessaries. We will sleep on hard beds, floor, we will eat bread and water every day, nothing more; we will wear no more nice clothes, we will each have a serge dress and very plain underwear, of some strong cotton stuff, we will—”
But poor Jinny had grown quite pale. “Oh, Mummy, Mummy, you are cruel. Don’t you see I can’t do all that? Don’t you want me to want to be good.”
That you see ended well. She cried a little in my arms, and listened quietly as I explained that being good was quite another thing to the saintly life as she had understood it, and that this latter was not vouchsafed to children, and we arranged between us that it would be much more truly good, to take a great many baskets of toys to the little poor crippled children in the big hospitals than to jump out of bed when no one was looking, but I was not immeasurably reassured by my victory. With Jinny it was always a case of its being all right till the next time, and the next time was never slow in coming.
I take it that my own feeling for Jinny needs no explanation. I am a simple woman, and I was her mother; she was all that I had. But Philibert loving her so much was curious, don’t you think? It seemed so inconsistent of him! I don’t even now understand it. Perhaps the most obvious explanation is the real one. Perhaps it was just because she was so very attractive. Had she been ugly I believe that he would have disliked her. She was never ugly, she had never had an awkward age. At fourteen she had already that look of costliness, of something luxurious, sumptuous and precious that she has today. She was slender and fragile and smooth. At times she suggested a child Venus by Botticelli. Her mouth had the delicate drooping curve of some of his Madonnas, her hands were full and soft and dimpled with delicate tapering fingers. Sensuous idle hands, they were to her instruments of pleasure. Touching things conveyed to her some special delight; with her finger tips she enjoyed. I know for I have watched those hands for years, moving softly and deftly over lovely surfaces, and following the contours of flowers, of porcelain vases, but she never did anything practical with them. Even embroidery, she disliked. But jigsaw puzzles amused her—she and Philibert always had one somewhere spread out on a table. They spent hours together fitting in the innumerable tiny bits, their heads close together, excitedly comparing, fitting, exclaiming. Philibert liked the idea of his daughter’s distaste for doing anything useful. He encouraged her laziness and her absurd little air of languid hauteur. When she dropped a glove or handkerchief and waited for a servant to pick it up for her, he laughed.
Sometimes I tried to reason with him.
“You are spoiling her,” I said on more than one occasion, but he only shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t you see, Philibert?” I would insist, “that it is bad for her to live in this atmosphere?”
“What atmosphere?”
“The atmosphere of this house, of Paris, of the world we live in.”
“Well, my dear, it is her house, her Paris, her world—she’s born to it, and belongs to it, so she may as well grow up in it. What would you have for her—something more like your own home over there, eh?—the place that turned you out, so admirably fitted for our European life—you want her to be as you were, is that it?”
“God forbid.”
“Well then—”
I couldn’t argue with him. I couldn’t tell him what I really felt and feared, or explain to him how I hated for Jinny, all the things that I now accepted for myself, for he was one of those things, the principle one; I had accepted him. I had even grown to understand him, and if it hadn’t been for Jinny, I felt that we might become friends. His extravagances, his cynicism, his fondness for women were things that I now took for granted. They no longer bothered me. For me, he would do now, I no longer asked anything of him, but for Jinny he wasn’t half good enough. As a father to my child, I found him impossible.
One often hears of estranged couples being brought together by their love for a child. With Philibert and myself, it was the contrary. We were both jealous of Jinny. We were afraid, each one, that she loved the other best, and our nervousness on this point acted to keep us in each other’s company while it made friendship impossible. Neither of us liked to leave the other alone with her for any length of time. I had stayed with Fan for three months and had come back to find Jinny hanging on her father’s every word, and to find what I imagined was a coldness between her and myself. This may have been my imagination, or it may have been true; I don’t know, but I suspected Philibert of working to alienate her from me, and he suspected me of the same thing. If I suggested taking Jinny to Ste. Clothilde for a fortnight, he either found a way of keeping us in Paris or accompanied us, and if Philibert wanted for some reason to go away, to London or Berlin or Biarritz, he was haunted by the idea that in his absence I might steal a march on him with Jinny, so really bothered I mean, that nine times out of ten, he would give up going unless I went with him. The result was that we were more constantly together than we had been since the first year of our marriage.
Looking back now to that winter of 1913-14 I see it as a season of delirium, of fever, of madness. Paris glows there, at the eve of war, in a lurid blaze of brilliance, its people giddy, intoxicated, dancing over the quaking surface of a civilization that was cracking under them. A period in the history of the human race was drawing to a close. The old earth was rushing towards the greatest calamity of our time, carrying with it swarming continents that in a few months were to seethe and smoke like beds of boiling lava—and the people of the earth as if aware that the days of pleasure were numbered, were possessed by a frenzy. I say the people of the earth, but I mean of course, the rich, the idle, the foolish, the so-called fortunate who make up society and of whom Philibert and I were the most idle, the most foolish, as we were perhaps the richest.
That winter marked the height of our folly and of our worldly brilliance, and for me it marked at the same time the deepest depth of futility and cowardice.
Philibert and I were like two runaway horses harnessed together, and running blindly, with the smart showy vehicle of our empty life rattling and lurching behind us, and poor little Jinny inside it.
His extravagance that winter was colossal. I did not try to restrain it. He felt the inertia of old age coming on him, and was having a last desperate fling: I felt sorry for him. His parties were fantastic. He bought the servants’ under-linen at Doucet’s; I only laughed when he told me. Money? Why not spend it! The more he spent, the less would be left for Jinny, and that, I argued, was all to the good. If only he could manage to run through the whole lot, then Jinny and I would be free. Dinner succeeded dinner, dance followed dance. We received half Europe and were entertained in a dozen capitals. London, Brussels, Rome, Madrid, we took them all in. It was very different from my picnic trips with you and Clémentine when we travelled second-class, carried paper bags of sandwiches and had literary adventures in old book shops with ancient scholars in skull-caps and spectacles. Philibert and I travelled in Rolls Royces or in private trains. We had maids and valets and couriers to smooth away every discomfort and every bit of unexpectedness. Philibert never missed his morning bath and massage, his Swede, too, travelled with us.
It was not very interesting. One glass of champagne is like another. Royal palaces are as alike as cabbages. Everywhere we met the same people and did the same things. We danced, we gambled, we gossiped, we ate and drank and changed our clothes, and I was often bored, and often gloomy. Too much brilliance has the effect of darkness.
In my dismal moods I told myself that I hated it, but probably I didn’t. No doubt it had become necessary to me to be surrounded by a crowd of flatterers. We are all fools—And I had no precise idea of myself. Even at night, when I was alone, and when I should have been stripped naked to my soul in the dark, I was still wrapped about to my own eyes, in the flattering disguises of the world’s adulation.
In Jinny’s eyes alone did I seem to see myself as I really was. I trembled as I looked into them.
I wonder if all women are afraid of their children? Perhaps not, the woman who has the love of her husband and a clear conscience and a sure hope of heaven. I had none of these things, and I was afraid. I had staked everything on Jinny, but my conscience was not clear about her. Instead of a hope of heaven, I had the hope of her happiness and yet I knew that I was not doing what was necessary to realize it. What I was doing was, when one thought it out, futile and ridiculous. I was wasting my life to save hers; because of her, I had been involved in this endless round of futility and I was behaving as if I believed that if I were wretched enough, she would be happy.
What I wanted most of all was to save her from an experience like my own. For her, there were to be no wretched sordid compromises with life, no unclean pleasures, no subterfuges, no lying, no fear. She was to remain good and brave and lovely and I was to find a true man for her who would love her as I longed to have her loved, reverently.
And in the meantime, she was growing up surrounded by slavish servants, by doting relatives, by luxury and dissipation and all that I did to protect her, was to shut her up as much as possible in the schoolroom.
I had always been in the habit of talking to her of Patience Forbes, her great aunt in America. It had seemed to me important for Jinny to understand and value my people. I wanted her to love the woman who had so loved me. To secure for that distant lonely admirable character the respect and affection of my child was, it seemed to me, my duty. And as a little girl Jinny had been interested in hearing about the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains, the waggon slide down the cellar door, the attic full of old trunks, crammed with faded panniered dresses and poke-bonnets, and the back garden full of hollyhocks and bachelor buttons, and larkspur. She liked to hear of the great river that one glimpsed between the houses at the bottom of the street behind the garden, and of the ships that came smiling down laden with lumber from the great forests, and she would climb into my lap and say—“Now tell me more about when you were a little girl”—but as she grew older she lost interest in these stories, and was more and more unwilling to write to her great aunt and one day, when I finished reading to her a letter from Patience, she gave a sigh and said petulantly,
“What a boring life—‘Quelle vie ennuyeuse.’”
“Jinny!” I exclaimed sharply.
“But it is, Mummy. It must be. I see her there. Ah, Mon Dieu, so dismal. ‘Une vieille—vieille.’ An old old one—in dusty black clothes, in a horrid little room. All her stuffed birds round her in glass cases—so funny! But the atmosphere is cold. It sets the teeth on edge, and she is ugly, like a man, with big feet and hands. There—look!” She took up poor Aunt Patty’s photograph from the table. “Look—what has that old woman to do with me? Why does she write to me ‘My darling little Geneviève’—I’m not her darling, I don’t love her at all. I don’t want to think of her.”
I was very angry. “Jinny, you make me ashamed.”
“I can’t help it,” she almost screamed at me. “I can’t help it. C’est plus fort que moi—she’s strange—she’s ugly.” And she flung the photograph on the floor and stamped her feet—her face was white, her eyes blazing—“I don’t want to think she belongs to us. I don’t want you to love her,” and she flung herself into a chair in a paroxysm of angry tears.
I sent her to bed; it was five o’clock in the afternoon, and gave orders that she was to have bread and milk for her supper but when I went to her later in the evening, though she was quiet, she stuck to her idea.
“What did you mean by your terrible behaviour, Jinny?”
She eyed me gravely from her pillow.
“I don’t know, except that it is all dismal and strange in America, and I can’t like Great Aunt, and if I can’t—why then I can’t—Cela ne se commande pas.”
I sat beside her, strangely depressed. Her little white bed with its rosy hangings, her curly blond head on the lace pillow, the white fur rug, the shaded lamp, the flickering fire, swam before me, blurred; I half closed my eyes, and saw another child, an ugly child with a long pigtail, in a cotton nightgown and flannel wrapper, kneeling by an old wooden bed in a bare little room, and a tall grizzled woman standing with a candle while the child said her prayers. “God bless my mother in Paris and take me to her soon, and make me keep my temper and be like my Aunt Patty—”
I had failed—I had failed.
But Jinny’s voice roused me. “Papa says it is an ugly country, America—miles and miles of empty fields, just grass and grass stretching all round.”
“Your father has never been there.”
“I know, but he knows about it. He says he would never go there, not for anything, and that I needn’t—so if I’m never to see Great Aunt—why bother?”
Why indeed? They were too much for me, those two, my husband and my child.
In my depressed moods I used to go to see Clémentine. She listened patiently, lying on a couch in purple pyjamas, smoking a cigarette through a holder a foot long, and watching me intently while I explained that I was no longer in control of my own life, that I was as impotent as a paralytic, and that I hadn’t even the feeling of being a part of anything that made up existence.
“It is all unreal—I have lost touch. I can’t grasp anything. There’s a space,—‘infranchissable,’ between me and it. At times I feel that the only reality is the past, the remote past. My childhood is real to me, nothing much else. I remember my home in America, now this minute sitting in your room, more vividly than the house I left half an hour ago. Pleasure is a narcotic—I drug myself with it, but I don’t really understand joy—I understand sorrow. Joy is a perfume that evaporates—suffering is a poison that remains.”
Clémentine broke in abruptly.
“Ma chère amie—take my advice, I know what you need—take a lover.”
I burst out laughing, but she eyed me gravely.
“You laugh, but I know what I am saying. Your life is abnormal, don't go against nature.” She rolled over on an elbow and laid a hand on my knee. “You must love—it will wash away all your sick fancies. You’ll see. Any one you’ve a liking for will do; surely you like some one? Don’t be romantic, be practical. Face facts. Take things as they are, and you will find beauty, mystery, rapture and sanity. Beyond the little prosaic door of compromise you will find the world of dreams. Believe me, materialism is the only road to happy illusion, and to remain sane, we must have illusions.”
Well, that was her point of view, and she may have been right. I never found out. I didn’t take her advice. Perhaps had I done so, I would be in Paris now content with the illusion she promised me. Who knows?
That sort of thing is the solution of most lives. A growing lassitude, a growing fear, the feeling that one has missed life, that it will soon be too late, and at last we give in and take in the place of what we wanted, what we can get.
I couldn’t. There was no one about who in the slightest degree resembled a lover—my lover. And I was sick of the subject of love. For years and years and years it had been served up to me, for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. Every theatre, every music hall, every novel one opened, every comic paper was full of it. Travestied, caricatured, perverted or idealized, but always the same old thing—sex—sex—sex in all its ramifications—always monotonously the same; it bored me to extinction.
Philibert, fastening on this woman then that one, all my friends falling in and out of love, like ducks round a muddy pond; it put me in a rage with the world.
The War came—and with it the end of a world.
I sometimes think that God’s final day of judgment will not be so very different. The Edict will go out from Heaven. Life will stop. Humanity suddenly arrested on the edge of time will look over the precipice of Eternity—will pause—will shudder—then, why should it not act? Why not revolt as it did in 1914 against the menace of universal destruction? Was it not just like that?
Death was let loose on the earth. And men refusing to die, gave their lives so that man might live.
The obliteration of life! Something else took its place. All the usual things of life disappeared, human relationships, amusements, ambitions, business, hope, comfort. The people vanished. No familiar faces anywhere. Armies took their place. Men were changed into soldiers, all alike. Women were turned into nurses. Their personalities fell from them, they appeared again, a mass of workers, colourless, uniform, with white set faces in professional clothes.
Our world, Philibert’s and mine suddenly fell to pieces; all the men servants left, most of the women, called to their houses to send their men to the war. Philibert found himself one morning a private in an auxiliary service of the army; he too disappeared. The enemy was marching on Paris; Ludovic telephoned me to say that I had best leave for Bordeaux. I packed off Jinny to Nice with her grandmother. A woman whose work in the slums I had been interested in for some years, was taking an équipe of nurses to the front. I went with her. Philibert’s secretary had orders to pack up all the valuables in the house. I forgot them. I forgot everything.
We went as you know to Alsace—were taken prisoners—sent back again.
On regaining Paris, I turned the house that I had hated into a hospital. Most of its treasures had already been packed up and sent away to a place of safety. The empty salons were turned into wards, my boudoir into an operating room. I enjoyed filling the place with rows of white iron beds and glass topped tables and basins and pails and bottles and bandages. It had been a hateful house, it made a good hospital. When it was in running order, I left again for the front.
I enjoyed the War. It set me free. I reverted to type, became a savage, enjoyed myself. In a wooden hut, on a sea of quaking mud under a cracking sky, I lived an immense life. I was a giant—I was colossal—I dwelt in chaos and was calm. With death let loose on the earth, I felt life pouring through me, beating in me; I exulted. Danger, a roaring noise, cold, fatigue, hunger, these my rations, agreed with me. I was a giantess with chilblains, and a chronic backache; I was a link in an immense machine, an atom, a speck in an innumerable host of atoms like myself, automatons, humble ugly minute things doomed to die, immortal spirits, human beings, my brothers.
I observed that my little tin trunk contained everything needful for life; soap, warm clothes, rubber boots, a brush and comb. I wanted nothing; I was content to go for days without a bath. The beef and white beans of the soldier was sufficient. I ate it ravenously.
I worked and was happy. I lifted battered men in my arms, soothed their pain, washed their bodies, scrubbed their feet; poor ugly swollen feet tramping to death in grotesque boots, socks rotting away in them. I enjoyed scrubbing them. I had, for the business, pails of hot water, scrubbing brushes, the kind one uses for floors, and slabs of yellow soap. For some months, it was my job to wash the wounded who came in from the trenches. Many of them were peasants, old bearded men who talked patois, in soft guttural voices and called me sister. Their great coats were covered with mud and blood, they crawled with vermin. I loved them. They had given their lives, they had given up their homes, their deep ploughed fields, their children, their cattle. They did not complain. Their stubborn souls looked out at me kindly from weary eyes, sunk under shaggy brows, and loving them, my brothers, I loved France, the France I had not, before, known.
We were sent from one part of the front to another. Our équipe had a good reputation. Passing through Paris from time to time, I found opportunities for using money. I gave, gratefully. Supply depots were organized. Every one was in need, every one was doing something. The de Joigny family were pleased with me. They made a great fuss over me when I came to Paris. They spoke of my generosity, my devotion, my courage. I loved them too, bulking them together with my comrades, my poilus, the men of France.
I had lost track of Philibert during the first months of the war. Then I heard that he had been put to guard one of the Paris gates. He stayed there for three months, standing in the road, with a gun, stopping the motors of officers, looking at passes. Poor Philibert! And there was no one to take any interest now in what became of him. His world was finished, his friends could do nothing for him. The France that was at war with Germany did not know him. The men who were leading the nation had never heard of him, or if they had, remembered him with a sneer.
Ludovic had entered one of the ministries. I went to him. Philibert, I pointed out, was being wasted. He was a linguist. A month later he was given the rank of interpreter and attached to the General Staff. Occasionally he accompanied Ludovic to London, or Rome, or Boulogne. Poor Philibert! He would have gone to the trenches if he could. He was too old. I scarcely saw him, for four years.
When I had leave I spent it with Jinny. He did the same, but our leave didn’t often coincide.
Jinny came back to Paris and lived with her grandmother. There was a room kept ready for me in the flat.
Sometimes I motored down from the front, along the thundering roads where armies moved in the dark, and with the gigantic rumble of motor convoys, and the pounding of the guns in my ears, I would step into the little still bright sitting room with its glinting miniatures and silk hangings to find the two of them rolling bandages or knitting socks.
Jinny seemed to me quite safe there.
And in a way I was glad that the years of her girlhood should be passed in a seclusion and quiet that would have been impossible in peace time. There was no one left to spoil her now, no army of servants for her to order about, no pageant of pleasure to dazzle her eyes. The problem of her life seemed like everything else to be simplified out of recognition.
I did not know that Bianca had come back to Paris. I had forgotten her. Jinny was very sweet to me when I came. She would turn on my bath and help me take off my things, and wail over my dreadful hands, stained with disinfectants and swollen with chilblains.
“Oh, darling,” she would say, “how brave you are to do it,” and then she would shudder and add—“I couldn’t—the sight of blood makes me sick. How you can bear the ugliness—”
And I would assure her that she was much too young to do nursing.
Your mother was very kind to me. The war had aroused her from the lassitude of old age. She had risen to meet it. Lifting her gentle head proudly, she had seemed to look out beyond the confines of her narrow seclusion, across the years, and to see her country rise before her in its old beauty, its one-time grandeur.
“France will have her revenge now,” she had said, with a flash lighting her weary eyes.
And her mind appeared more vigorous. She read all the newspapers or asked Jinny to read them aloud to her. She took a great interest in my work, and seemed to regard me as some admirable but inexplicable puzzle.
“You are too brave, mon enfant, and too exalted. When the war is over and you come back to your old habits, to take up your old life—you will see—”
“Maybe I shall never come back to it, dear—never take up again the old life as you say.”
And again she smiled, thinking that I was joking, but I was not joking, my brain was clear, I believe I knew even then, that I would never run Philibert’s house again.
“You look happy, my child,” she said to me one day.
“I am, belle-mère.”
“Ah—but how curious!”
“But dear—it is not as if any one very near or dear were in danger. Philibert is safe, Blaise too, driving his ambulances.”
“But the horror, the pain, the suffering all round one—look—already in our family five young men killed—your Aunt Marianne bereft of her sons—your Uncle Jacques crippled—”
“I know—I know—I do feel for them, and I do feel for France. When I say that I am happy, I only mean, that for me the equation of life is so simple, that I am content as never before.”
“I see—you are happy because of the sacrifice you have made—because of all you have given up in the cause for our country. Cela est très beau.”
“No, dear.” I felt bound to try and explain. “It is not that. It is not fine at all. I haven’t given up anything that I cared about. I have only got what I wanted. I have found my place, my right place—the place of a worker.”
She looked puzzled, then turned it off with a smile.
Jinny was growing up and the war was slipping by over her little blond head like a monstrous shadow. She seemed in that greyness, to become unreal. I did not know what was going on in her mind.
One night in March 1918 I staggered in on her. I must have been more tired than I realized. My head was burning. The little soft still room, your mother with her hair in stiff regular waves, a lace shawl round her shoulders, and Jinny, smiling over a story book; it was like a dream.
And Jinny was like a little creature in a dream. Her idle delicate hands, her plaintive voice were strange. She had on a rose coloured frock, and was eating sweets. Some one had sent her a box of chocolates.
“Look, Mummy, chocolates—we never have them any more, do we, petite mère?”
I had seen the world rushing to destruction; the powers of darkness triumphant. Just beyond those walls, along the road, one came to the edge of the abyss.
“Mummy, I hate the war, c’est si bête—when will it end?” she pouted.
Suddenly I was angry; I felt that it was wrong for my daughter to be like that, wrong and stupid.
“Jinny,” I cried—“are you asleep? Don’t you understand that the world is coming to an end?”
But she looked at me with curious defiant eyes and asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I say. Come with me tomorrow. Come and see. Come and help—you’re no longer a child. Come!” But she drew away from me with a shiver.
“I couldn’t,” she said in a fine hard little voice.
And your mother broke in,
“Jane, you must be mad to suggest such a thing.”
“But I want her to know—to understand—to share—”
“That is wrong. What is there for her to understand? She is a child. Her life is not involved in the war. It lies beyond. She should be protected from this nightmare.”
“I want her with me.”
Your mother shook her head sadly. “If you want her with you, you should stay at home and look after her. You have been admirable, you have devoted yourself, but when the war is over, you will perhaps find that you have made a mistake.”
“Mistake! Would you have me stay at home while men are dying by thousands!”
She sighed gently. “Ah—well—dear—you know best, but I wonder sometimes, if you are not deluded—”
Jinny had disappeared. I found her in her bedroom, her head buried in her pillow.
“I’m a coward,” she sobbed, “a coward. I would be afraid to go.”
I took her in my arms. “My poor little lonely Jinny.” I held her a long time—a long time—comforting her, conscience-smitten, troubled, but the next day I left again for the front, following my monstrous illusion, answering the terrible call of the greatest imposture in creation. For I was wrong and your mother was right. The war was not a fine thing. It did not save the world or renew it. It left nothing fine or noble behind. It was an obscene monster. It called up from the soil of a dozen continents all the fine strong men, and devoured them, it summoned out of the heart of humanity, heroism, and it devoured that. Courage, faith, hope, self-sacrifice, all the dreams of men were poured into its jaws and disappeared. Nothing was left but broken men, and a ruined earth.
I ought to have stayed with Jinny. That was my job.
Her nineteenth birthday was a week after the armistice. She had changed from a child to a woman while I was away, helping men to die uselessly and suddenly I saw that she was wise as I had hoped never to see her. She said to me that day,
“I know Mummy about you and Papa—you needn’t pretend any more.”
It was time, the family said, that she should be married.