Chapter XI: Part II: I (4)

Your dinner was awfully nice, Blaise dear. I remember the evening well. A few snowflakes softly floated down in your little courtyard as old Albert, your manservant, in his ancient green coat, opened the door. He had cooked the dinner and arranged the table and made the fire in the living room and put the champagne on ice; I knew that, but his manner was of a fine, calm formality as he ushered Aunt Clo and myself into your presence. A group of men who somehow impressed one as not at all ordinary, and a bright little lady dressed like a parrot, in a tiny, shabby, candle-lit room, filling the place comfortably with their easy good-humour, that was my first impression, followed quickly by others, pleasant, special impressions, aspects sharp and neat in an atmosphere that gave one a feeling of tasting a fine subtle flavour. Each person in the room was an individual unlike any one else. With no beauty to speak of, several were old men in oddly cut clothes, they were more interesting to watch than any lovely creature. Their faces were worn and lined and gentle, thin masks through which one saw the fine play of intelligence. Some were already known to the great world of thought and public affairs, others have since become so, but all were simple, homely men that night, with a certain childlike gaiety that was very appealing.

Albert’s food was excellent; succulent, substantial food that suggested the provinces. The wine was very old. For a moment as I watched your convives inhaling the bouquet from lifted glasses, I imagined myself far away in Balzac’s country, a snowy street of silent houses stretching out between high poplars to a great river, a carriage at the door, with a postillion in a three-cornered hat, waiting to drive me to some romantic rendezvous. But the talk swept me along with its merry-go-round of the present.

I cannot, after all these years, recall what was said, impossible to recapture now the quick turns of wit, the dry little jokes, the swift touches of poetry, that followed each other with such rapid intellectual grace. It was all incredibly rapid. I could just manage to keep up with the sense of it. I didn’t attempt to take part. Ideas were as thick in that room as confetti at a fête. Clémentine, in an apple-green dress, with a round red spot of rouge on either cheek, swayed this way and that in response to innumerable sallies, her face changing like lightning. She was a match for those men. Her wit played over the history of her country like a jolly little ferret nosing out and pouncing upon joke and anecdote from the vast field of the past. Cardinals, princes, and ruffians were held up to ridicule. International affairs were dealt with clearly and deftly by her cutting tongue. She played with the ideas round her as if they were a swarm of brilliant darting winged creatures. Her delight in this battle of wit was contagious. The talk grew faster and faster. Soon every one was talking at once. No one could finish a sentence.

Cambon was explaining to Aunt Clothilde why the Government would not tolerate an Ambassador to the Pope. Clémentine was defending the English, no one appeared to like the English. Felix was making fun of Diaghilev, the new Russian who had appeared with his Imperial Ballet a week before.

What delightful people! Certainly without reservation of any kind I find them now as I did then the most delightful people in the world. Ludovic wore a celluloid collar. His body was too heavy for his legs and his head too big for his body; no matter; his profound, quiet gaze and tired, brown face expressed a nobility that made one ashamed of noticing his ill-cut coat. Felix looked like a faun. With his exaggerated features thrust forward into the candle-light he said funny, penetrating things that kept Aunt Clo chuckling. I watched, fascinated. These were the people Aunt Clo called disreputable, utterly lacking in a moral sense. Were ever sinners so joyous, so light-hearted? Rebels against creeds, against the fixed order of society, against the didactic spoken word, they were kind to me, the Philistine, exerting at once and with unconscious ease the most disarming charm.

Vaguely I recalled the mentality of my American home. It was there behind me, like a cold and lifeless plaster cast behind a curtain. Here was something infinitely more interesting, something brilliantly living, something merry and subtle and fine that defied disapproval. The powers of evil? Chimeras! No room for them here, no room for anything dismal and boring. I felt an uplift, it was like an awakening. All that horror of soul searching, all the dreary puritan A. B. C. of right and wrong was a childish nightmare. These people understood the world. They made fun of evil. They loved each other and found no fault with their friends. Under their gaiety was a deep sympathy for poor humanity.

They said things that would have sent St. Mary’s Plains reeling with horror into one large devastating revival meeting. If St. Mary’s Plains could have dreamed of the character of their conversation it would call upon God to destroy them. I laughed. Albert filled my glass.

Some one was saying--

“Time is a circle.”

“The sunrise, why the same sun? Who knows?”

“Truth? Why should one want truth? Truth is a thing we have invented. An accurate statement of facts? But there is no accuracy except in mathematics, and in mathematics there are no facts.”

Were they joking? Or were they serious? Both. I felt like a schoolgirl, very ignorant, very crude, with a stiff blank mind like a piece of cardboard. They slowed down to listen to Ludovic. I remember Ludovic speaking to them all with his eyes smiling under their spiky grey eyebrows. I think I remember what he said. It was the first time I had heard him talk, as he talked to me so often afterwards.

“I sit in some old city of the past and look back upon the present and still further back into the future. Why not? Time is an endless circle, wheeling around one. Why trouble to imagine a beginning or an end? Why these unnatural conceptions? The old legends are more sensible. The ancient mystic symbol of matter, Ouroborro, the tail-devourer, a serpent coiled into a circle, symbol of evolution, of the evolution of matter. There is something there, something to think of. Let us all think of molecules, and remember the Philosopher’s Stone. Have you ever laughed at the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone that can transmute metals and give the elixir of life? What if it were discovered, this stone? Suppose radium were in the legend stone of long ago. Wouldn’t that suggest to you that we have only just discovered out of the long labour of our known cycle of civilization something that was known before by another race of men? Who knows, perhaps that race conquered its earth with this stone, turned it from a savage planet like this of ours into a Garden of Eden, and then, surfeited with ease, died of inertia, lapsed into darkness, fell from the Heaven it had made. That is to say, Adam, the father of our race, may have been the last survivor of a race of fallen gods, supermen.”

Clémentine took my arm as we went out of the dining-room.

“You find us a little mad?” she asked.

“Oh, no.”

“Tell us how you find us. You are different, big and strong and young and strange. Your point of view about us would be something new.”

“I find you extraordinarily happy.”

“Oh yes, we are gay.”

The men had followed us.

“We laugh.”

“We find the world so funny.”

“But we’re serious too. There’s Ludovic as solemn as a trout. He’d be dreary if we let him be.”

“Only we don’t. Why should one worry? One can’t change anything. You must be one of us. It’s so amusing with us. You will see how amusing it is.”

So it was that they adopted me. And that night as I drove home through the moonlit streets I thought of St. Mary’s Plains with distaste and impatience.

But what I remember best of all about that evening was the sweet funny way you beamed down the table when you saw that your friends liked me. You were, you know, just a little nervous about the impression I would make on them. They were so much more brilliant than any one else that I don’t wonder. But it all went off well, bless your heart, thanks to the penetrating sweetness of your will that willed us to be pleased with one another.

There followed years of power and pleasure. Your friends made good their promise. They taught me to enjoy. Ludovic began to form my mind. Clémentine gave me the daring to use it. I learned how pleasant it was to follow one’s caprices, to indulge one’s tastes, to realize one’s dreams. Do you remember the things we did? What indeed didn’t we do, with our picture shows, our pantomimes, and our music? When we wanted to do a thing we did it. When we wanted to go to a place we went. What fun it was going off at a moment’s notice to Seville, to Constantinople, to Moscow. Some one would say--“Have you seen the _Place Stanislas_ at Nancy by moonlight? No? But you must.” “Let’s go tomorrow,” and we went. Or--“I hear that at Grenoble there is a lady who owns a glove shop and who has in her back parlour a Manet, let us go and buy it, if it is true.” Of course we went and found it was true and bought it. Felix it was who took us all the way to Strasbourg for one night and day, to eat a pâté de foie gras and hear mass in the Cathedral.

But we were happiest of all in Paris. Paris was inexhaustible. Not a nook or cranny of interest and charm escaped us. Sometimes early in the spring mornings we would walk through silvery streets or along the quais or take the penny steamer down the Seine. We sampled every restaurant known to our gourmet Felix. We sat in icy studios at the feet of shy ogres. Even Dégas thawed to us, while rare spirits from odd corners of the earth joined us in the evenings. And increasingly the beauty of Paris was revealed to me. I cared for it intimately now, and I loved its smooth pale historic stones with a delicate sensuousness.

I was happy. I was as happy as an opium eater. I lived in a continuous mood of enjoyment that had the quality of a dream. All this was mine to behold and delight in, and I was responsible for none of it. I was passive. I was calm. The play played itself out about me, and I was in no way involved. What people did and what they didn’t do had no real significance. When Ludovic said: “A man has as much right to take life as to give it,” I thought placidly, “Perhaps so, in this world.” When he denounced property and capitalists and said we should all be poor, I thought, of course, that is so, and when he pointed out to me a woman who had killed her father because he was cross-eyed and got on her nerves, I merely looked at her with mild curiosity. He said that she was very sensitive and charming, and I believed him. It didn’t seem to matter.

And if at times it occurred to me that I was becoming callous and selfish, at others I felt that I was becoming intelligent and charitable.

Jinny was my one responsibility, a little will-o’-the-wisp creature who danced into my room of a morning to drop a kiss on my nose and dance out again. Jinny, so entrancingly pretty, so ridiculously dainty, who never soiled her hands or tore her frock or spilled her food, who said her prayers night and morning to a silver crucifix that her father had sent her from Italy, and who confessed her minute sins every Friday to a priest but never confided in her mother.

My child baffled me. There was nothing in my own childhood’s experience that threw any light on the little close mystery of her nature. She didn’t like animals, she hated romping about, she was afraid of the cold. What she liked was to be curled up on cushions in front of the fire and listen to fairy stories. Her indolence was complete, her capacity for keeping still, extraordinary in one who moved so lightly when she did move. Sometimes when I looked up from the book I was reading aloud to her, I would find her great brown eyes fixed on me with a look of uncanny wisdom. She seemed to disapprove of me. I wondered if this had anything to do with the teaching of her priestly tutors that her father had prescribed for her, or whether it sprang from a natural precocious feeling of the difference between us. We were certainly a strange couple. Even in moments of my most anguished tenderness, I could not but feel the incongruity. The idea that she was much more her father’s daughter than mine was one that I tried not to dwell on.

I had been going happily along, thinking that I could enjoy this adventurous life of my new friends without being involved in it, when I found out that I was much less free than I thought. Your mother did not approve, I knew, and I gathered that she blamed you for leading me astray, but it came nevertheless as a surprise when she gently interfered.

“Aren’t you making yourself a little notorious, my child?” she asked one day.

“Notorious _belle-mère_?”

“Yes. Dining in restaurants in the company of such strange men.”

“They are not very strange, dear, except in being so very intelligent, and I never, at least scarcely ever, dine alone with men. There is almost always Clémentine.”

“I know, that’s just it. For a chaperone, you couldn’t have chosen worse.”

“But surely, _Belle Mère_, I need no chaperone, I am old enough to go about alone?”

She closed her eyes wearily, opened them and spoke sharply.

“French women of good family never go about alone, and never dine in public places.”

“But Clémentine--”

“Don’t talk to me of Clémentine.” I was startled by the sudden note of sharp personal grievance in her voice. “Her conduct is scandalous. Her mother was my first cousin and dearest friend. It is fortunate that she is dead. How could she be blamed for that marriage, yet Clémentine always blamed her and set to work deliberately to make her suffer.”

“I know nothing of Clémentine’s marriage.”

“Well, her husband--but no matter, there is no excuse for her making herself an object of derision.”

“I scarcely think she does that, dear, she is in great demand you know, in the very highest quarters.”

“At foreign courts, perhaps, not in her own country. If it weren’t for the obligations of kinship no one, but no one would speak to her.”

“Just what is it that she has done that you so disapprove of?”

“She has made herself cheap. She has vulgarized her position, she plays at being a bohemian, she has bartered away her dignity for a little sordid amusement.”

“And I?”

“You are in danger of doing the same, but in greater danger.”

I was annoyed and rose and moved to the door.

“You are going?”

“I am afraid I must. I have an appointment.”

“Ah, you resent my speaking to you?”

“No, dear, but--”

“But--?”

“I am afraid I cannot quite agree with you.”

Her face hardened. I made an effort.

“_Belle-mère_, I am doing no wrong. Surely you believe that. These men are nothing to me, not one of them.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “You love no one?” she asked.

“No.”

“That too, is just as I thought.”

“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.”