Chapter XII: Part II: I (5)

She lifted her face then and looked at me, her eyes were wide and accusing. “Oh, no, Mummy, they said your names, they said Jane and Philibert, your two names. It was at Aunt Claire’s. Dicky and I were just behind the door, and I pulled him away so he wouldn’t hear any more, but he only laughed at me and said, ‘Every one knows your parents detest each other’--in French, you know, ‘_Tout le monde sait que tes parents se détestent_,’ and then I kicked him.”

“Jinny!”

“I only kicked him a little. It didn’t hurt. I wanted it to hurt, dreadfully.”

“My child, my child.”

“I know, Mummy, that it was very wicked. I told Father Anthony all about it at confession, and he looked so sad, so beautifully sad. I wept and wept. He told me to pray very hard to the Virgin to save me from angry passions, and I did, but I enjoyed being angry. I felt big and strong when I was angry, quite, quite different from ordinary, and I thought you would understand. Were you never angry when you were a little girl?”

“Yes, darling, I was.” Her question had startled me. I was profoundly disturbed by this sudden revelation of her character.

But again her little mobile face had changed.

“You aren’t like that, are you, Mummy? You couldn’t be?”

“Like what, my darling?”

“Unforgiving.” Her eyes were on mine.

“I hope not, Geneviève.” She flushed at my tone, but continued to look at me gravely and steadily.

“I thought you might have been angry with Papa for leaving us for so long,” she said with an air of great wisdom. “I was, but I forgave him at once.” I smiled.

“You see,” she went on, “I couldn’t bear him to be unhappy, for I love him.”

“I know, darling.”

“And you love him, too?”

“Of course.”

She heaved an immense sigh.

“Then we are all happy.”

“We are all happy,” I echoed.

A minute later she was at the door, wafting me a gay little kiss. I had not been able to keep her. She was not more than ten years old at that time, but even then she was already the complete elusive creature of swift fleeting moods and superlatively lucid mind that she is today.

And still I suspected Philibert of playing the part of adoring father in order to make me do what he wished. So without alluding to Jinny, never, in fact, daring to allude to her, I tried to bribe him. He had hinted occasionally about wanting to resume our old habits of entertaining, and his hint had shocked me. Such a farce had seemed altogether unnecessary. Now I gave in to him and the same old extravagant theatrical life began. To me it was incredibly boring and at times quite ghastly. There were moments when it was as if over the old sepulchre of our married life he had built an enormous and hideous altar to some obscene heathen deity, some depraved Bacchus before whom he and I giddily danced, with vine leaves in our hair.

“But,” I argued, “this is what he likes, and if I help him do it he will have got from me all that he wants, he will leave Jinny alone. He will have less time for her and will forget about her.” Unfortunately all these social antics took up as much of my time as his. The result was that neither of us saw the child save in hurried snatches, and in that horrible house, now so constantly filled with people, with armies of servants, and streams of guests, I had a vision of her skipping about like a little white rabbit in a monstrous zoo. Poor Jinny, what a wretched mess we made of her childhood, Philibert and I, with our constant vigilant, yet inadequate, lying to each other in her presence, and our ridiculous absorption in the tawdry pageant of society. And yet we both loved her and were doing it, even he in his way, for her. He wanting her to have an incomparably brilliant position in the world, I wanting to keep him away from her, thinking in my jealous stupidity that she would belong more to me the more he belonged to the world.

It was when she fell ill that I was at last convinced of his caring for her. She had pneumonia, you remember, and was very near death for three days. I can see Philibert now, sitting through the night by her bed, he on one side, I on the other, I can see his face as he watched her painful breathing, a face clammy with sweat, contracting suddenly in a curious grimace when she struggled for breath. He never touched her. He left that to me and the nurses. But he never once took his eyes off her swollen little face. I was deeply impressed by the sight of that fidgety, nervous man sitting so still, hour after hour, and I remember his sobbing when the child’s breathing grew easier and the doctors said the crisis was past. Poor Philibert, with his arms thrown across the foot of Jinny’s bed and his head on them, sobbing like a child, I felt very sorry for him that night.

But it was too late for Jinny’s illness to make any real difference in our relationship. We had gone too far, I knew him too well. All that I could do was add to my knowledge of him the fact that he loved his child and leave it at that.

VII

The years passed, crowded with incidents, colourful, varied, gay. I saw them going by, like gaudy pleasure boats, richly panoplied and filled with graceful merry-makers, floating down a sullen river. Sometimes I seemed to be alone, watching them go by, sometimes, beyond them, a long way off, I heard a sound that was like the sound of waves breaking on a distant beach.

You wince at what you feel to be my poor attempt at poetic imagery--I am not trying to be poetic, I am trying to express to you my experience, as precisely as possible. It was like that. In the middle of a crowded place, at the Opera where women in diamond tiaras nodded from padded cages, on the boulevards where a thousand motors like shining beetles buzzed in and out of rows of clanging trams, in a drawing-room ringing with staccato voices, I would find myself, suddenly, listening to a sound that seemed to come from an immense distance; a faint far rhythmic roar that was audible to my spirit, and that I translated to myself in terms of the sea because it affected me that way, like a booming murmur, regular as the booming of waves. I knew what it was.

I seemed at such times to see Patience Forbes, standing on the other side of the Atlantic, like some allegorical figure of faith, a gaunt weather-beaten old woman, her strong feet planted firmly on the shore, the wind whipping her black clothes about her, her brave old eyes looking out at me, under shielding hands, across that immense distance.

The distance between us was growing greater. I no longer wrote to her every week. There seemed so little to say. I found a difficulty in telling her of my occupations and amusements. When it came to describing to her the people I associated with, they appeared suddenly trivial and peculiar. There was no one about me, whom she could have understood. Clémentine with her genius for amorous-adventure, Ludovic with his nihilistic philosophy, Felix the intellectual mischief-maker; when I wrote to her of these people, I found that I misrepresented them, made up for them colourless characters that did not exist and would not distress her. Her innocence cut her off from us. The recital of my life was like telling a story and leaving out the point. I gave it up, disgusted by my feeble insincerity, and limited my letters to news of Jinny and comments on public events. And she understood, of course, that I was keeping everything back. She was no fool. I can see now, when it is too late, what a mistake I made, and what a pity it was. Now that she is dead, I think of her sitting alone in the Grey House, waiting for my letters, opening them with old trembling fingers, reading the meagre artificial sentences; her face growing tired and grim at the meaningless words, then putting away the disappointing sheets of paper in the secretary by the door. I found them there, all of them afterwards arranged in packets with laconic pencilled notes on their wrappers--“Jane doesn’t tell me much. She’s not happy.” “A bad winter for Jane, she’s taken to gambling; she says nothing of her husband.” “Jane was coming but can’t. I’m disappointed.” That note was made the summer Fan died--I had determined to go to St. Mary’s Plains. Fan’s illness stopped me.

I had been seeing very little of Fan. She had established herself in a flat near the _Étoile_ where she lived alone, but where her husband paid her an occasional visit. Ivanoff was pretty well done for in Paris. There had been a scene at the Travellers’ Club, and afterwards his old victims had refused to play cards with him. So he had gone elsewhere. Men like Ivanoff can always pick up a living at Monte Carlo. He spent most of his time there, but when he came back, Fan always took him in. I never saw him on these occasions, nor apparently did any one else, but Fan would announce his arrival bluntly, and with a sort of defiant bravado, would put off her dinners and lunches to be with him.

She lived from hand to mouth. People who accused her of accepting his ill-gotten gains were wide of the mark. Ivanoff contributed nothing to Fan’s keep. It was the other way round. He came back to her when he was on the rocks, came back to beg from her and to recuperate. Once she said to me, “Ivan’s been asleep for thirty-six hours on the sofa in the drawing-room. I swear to you it’s true. He has only waked up twice to eat a sandwich and have a drink.”

But when I asked why she put up with him, she flung off with a laugh, and--“God only knows.”

She lived from hand to mouth in a state of extravagant luxury. Her stepfather had died, leaving her four thousand dollars a year, that gave her twenty thousand francs before the war. One would have said that she spent at the least five times as much, but she didn’t. She had resources, and little arrangements that made it unnecessary for her to pay for a good many things; and she earned a good deal. Her reputation as one of the smartest women in Paris, and her popularity, represented her capital, a very considerable sum. New and ambitious dressmaking houses clothed her for nothing, and in return she brought them the clientele they wanted. She had a standing account at certain fashionable restaurants, where she was allowed to lunch for five francs and dine for ten, and where to “pay back” she was the centre of many a cosmopolitan dinner party. For ready cash she wrote social notes in a fashion paper and occasionally launched a South American millionaire in society. Every one knew about all this; no one minded. She never gave any one away or presumed on her friendships and her frankness about her own affairs which was dry and desperate and funny disarmed criticism.

“My dear,” she said one day to Claire over the tea table, “I’ve had a letter from Buenos Aires from a man who offers me forty thousand francs if I’ll take his wife about next spring, and a five thousand franc tip extra, each time she dines at an embassy. Isn’t it a perfect scream? I wrote back asking for a photo of the wife. It came yesterday. I’ve turned down the offer.”

She borrowed from no one and accepted no gifts of money from her friends, men or women, and I take the last to be the more to her credit because half the people in her world assumed that she did and the other half wouldn’t have blamed her if she had done so. Virtues, that you all held so lightly, have at least a relative value. Fan was incurably extravagant; she adored luxury, and I consider that her having married a poor man, and having refused to procure for herself in a manner so accepted by her world, the ease and comfort she craved, proves her to have been an interesting person. I see that you don’t believe what I say, but I know that it is true. Men did not pay her dressmaker’s bills. As for her little motor brougham that created so much comment, she bought that after an extremely lucky venture in rubber. She gambled on the “Bourse” of course. Old Beaudoin the banker gave her tips. Sometimes he invested her money for her. She would give him a few thousand francs and a month or two later he would perhaps sends her back twice the sum, but it is not exact to say that he always arranged to double her investment. And if he did take her wretched pennies and speculate with them and pretend that he had won when he lost, what harm did that do him with all his millions? It was all by way of repayment anyhow. Fan had got him and his fat wife asked to a lot of nice houses. He owed her far more than he ever paid. And when she crowned her services to him by making his daughter’s marriage, surely she had earned the cheque he sent her or the block of shares, whichever it was.

To have a good time, to be happy, a more sentimental woman would have put it, that was her idea. Who of us all had a better, or a different one? Weren’t we all looking for happiness, always?

Once I saw a street arab playing in the dirt with bits of mica, constantly threatened in his game by horses’ hoofs, wagon wheels, policemen and hooligans. Fan reminds me of him. I remember his tiny eager hungry grimy face, intent on his game. Fan was like him, I watched her playing with bits of worthless brightness in the crowded muddy streets of life, jostled, buffeted, knocked about, a little rickety gutter snipe, fighting for the right to play, that is the way I see her. It had a beauty! you’ll admit that, I suppose.

But we quarrelled. I bored her. She didn’t like having any one about who couldn’t keep up the farce of treating her as the happiest of women, and she made fun of my taking the intellectuals so seriously.

When I wanted to see her I had to go to her flat where luxury and poverty and dissipation and folly were mingled together in an unhealthy confusion. It was a curious place, very bare and new and totally lacking in the usual necessities of housekeeping, such as cupboards and carpets, table linen and blankets, but there were flaming silks thrown about, and a good many books and heaps of soft brilliant cushions. A grand piano stood in the empty drawing-room on a bare polished floor. The dining room table held always a tray of syphons and bottles. There might be no food, there were always cocktails and ragtime tunes to dance to. Sometimes the electric light was cut off because the bill wasn’t paid, but there was a supply of candles for such emergencies, and if creditors were too pressing, Fan would take to her bed and lie under her cobwebby lace coverlet on a pile of white downy pillows all frills and ribbons, smoking endless cigarettes while weary tradesmen rang the door bell, and her friends sat about on the foot of the old lacquer bed telling each other questionable stories, and going off into muffled shrieks of laughter.

Her friends were many and various. Among them were people like Claire and Clémentine and the wife of the Italian Ambassador, but her own small particular set, the group that she went about with most, had its special stamp.

A cosmopolitan lot who had seen better days, and were keeping their heads up, by grit and bluff; they were I suppose the fastest set in Paris. The men didn’t interest me, but the women did, rather. There was something hard and dependable about them that I liked. They bluffed the world but not each other. Their talk was terse and to the point, their language coarse and brutal. They made no gestures and seemed always to be looking very straight at some definite invisible thing that occupied their cold attention. It may have been the ugliness of life that they were looking at. If so, it didn’t make them wince. It may have been the past, if so it didn’t make them shudder or creep. They wasted no time in remorse or regret.

At times they reminded me of tight-rope walkers crossing a dizzy abyss. There was something tense and daring about their stillness, as if a chasm yawned under them. No doubt it did, but it was not their worldly position that was precarious, it was their actual hold on life. They would go on with their old titles and ruined fortunes leading the dance till they dropped, but they might drop any time. People in their entourage did, they were accustomed to violence. One had had a lover who called her up one morning and shot himself while she listened over the telephone. Another had tried twice to kill herself. Most of them drank and took drugs. Their hard glittering eyes gave out a glare of experience, but their faces were cold, calm, non-commital, and if they were worried by the caddishness of the men they loved, by debts and the torments of passion, they gave no sign and held together and helped each other. For damned souls, they made a good show, and I admired them.

They thought me a fool, however, and made a hedge around Fan, shutting her off from me.

One morning I rushed round to her flat on an impulse. I had had no message from her but a curious feeling of nervousness had bothered me in the night. Some one had mentioned Ivanoff at a dinner table. I had heard the words--“wife-beater”--“card-sharper.”

I found things at the flat in an indescribable state of disorder.

The drawing-room was strewn with the remains of supper. The table had not been cleared. There were broken glasses on the floor, empty champagne bottles about; a puddle of wine, some one had spilled a bottle of Burgundy. The cook opened the door for me. The manservant and Fan’s maid had decamped with the silver leaving word that they had taken it in payment of their two years’ wages. A bailiff was sitting on the sofa. Fan was lying in her room in the dark with a wet towel round her head. She said “Oh, hell!” as I came in and turned her back on me. The room had a curious sickly odour, some drug she had been taking, I suppose. Her clothes lay in a heap in the middle of the floor. The dress was torn, the stockings soiled and stained. I felt sick at my stomach. Fan gave a groan.

“For God’s sake, Jane, go away; I’ve got the most ghastly headache.”

All I could do was settle with the bailiff and help the cook clear up the mess. Fan scarcely spoke all the morning. The telephone kept ringing.

“Tell them I’m ill. Tell them to go to the devil,” she called out. She lay there in a dripping perspiration, the sheets clinging to her thin body. She looked like a corpse fished out of the Seine. Suddenly she sprang up. “Good heavens! what time is it? I’m lunching at the Ritz with the Maharajah’s crowd at twelve thirty.”

She sat with her feet dangling over the side of the bed holding her head in her hands. “My head’s bursting--my head’s bursting. Get me a blue bottle off the shelf in the bath room--six drops--no ten--I’ll take ten. It’s wonderful stuff--wonderful! I’ll be alright. You’re an angel.” She talked in a kind of singing moan, a despairing half-crazy chant. “You’re an angel, Jane--you’re too good for this world. I’ll never be able to pay you. How much did you give that man? Oh God! My head! I wish you hadn’t--leave me alone now. I must get dressed. Those Indians won’t know I’m half under. I’ll be all right if I can find my things. Go along--no--no--I don’t want any more help. Ivanoff was here last night; he went off at three this morning. I don’t know where he’s gone; they played chemmy. He won fifty thousand francs from that boy of Adela’s--that baby. I made a scene; I made him give it back. He knocked me down afterwards. He won’t come here again. Anyway he’s gone for good this time. If you ever speak to me of this, I’ll go mad. Leave me alone now. You won’t tell me what you paid that man, but I hate you to pity me, and you’re an angel--you’d no right to interfere. Do for heaven’s sake leave me alone now. God! what a world!” She tottered to her bathroom, trailing her lace nightgown after her. It hung by a ribbon to her bruised shoulder. She shut the door. I heard her turn on her bath. I went away. She avoided me for weeks after that.

Bianca had come back to Paris; she had been, so gossip related it, travelling about Spain with a famous matador. Some people said she had joined his troupe disguised as a boy and had, more than once gone into the arena in a pink suit embroidered in silver and had planted once, the banderillas, in a bull that had five minutes later run his horns through her paramour. I neither believed nor disbelieved the story. José had seen her in the Stand at Seville looking marvellous in a lace mantilla, a black dress high throated and a string of pearls which she flung to the popular hero. She had been wild with excitement, had stood up in her box and called out, and had torn her pearls from her neck with twenty thousand delerious Spaniards shouting round her, and Bombazelta III the Matador on his knee before her, beside the carcase of his victim. Why shouldn’t she have gone a bit further? She liked danger. She could look the part. Actually, I did see a picture of her; three cornered hat, slim tight jacket and breeches, embroidered cape. It suited her, of course; she had the body of a boy, and Bombazelta III was a peculiarly striking man. His photograph was in all the Spanish papers. I found them lying about the library in Paris. Philibert must have sent for them. His nervousness during those days betrayed his interest. Though he never mentioned Bianca’s name, I knew that he was still in touch with her, that they wrote to each other, that he followed her movements. It did not surprise me, when during that summer he went for a week to Saint Sebastian, he called it Biarritz, but I knew where he was. It was Philibert’s behaviour on his return that made me think the stories of Bianca’s sensational caprice were true. Besides, it was just the kind of thing to amuse her for a time.

I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to know anything about her. All that I wanted was never to see her again. But she had no intention of leaving me alone. Her bullfighter dead, she came back to Paris. Paris is a small place. The community in which we lived was crowded, cramped, intimate. Every one was constantly meeting every one else. Bianca stepped back into her place in it as if nothing had happened. Except for the fact that we were not asked to meet one another at lunch or dinner, one would have supposed that our acquaintances were unaware of our having any reason to dislike each other. The inevitable happened. A newly appointed ambassador gave one of his first dinner parties and found no better way of making it a success than having us both present. We sat on either side of a royal guest. Across his meagre chest we eyed each other. Bianca looked much as usual, younger if anything. She had simplified her make-up. Her fine eyelashes now unplastered with black, curled wide from her great blue eyes that looked as innocent as forget-me-nots. Her face was smooth and white. The smallest thinnest line of carmine marked the curve of her lips. Her dress was a piece of black velvet wound round her white body that was immaculate and lovely. She had the freshness of a water lily, and moved through the salons, cool and serene in an attitude of still dreamy detachment, and her curious magnetism emanated from her like a perfume. She drifted up to me after dinner.

“You must talk to me, Jane--” Her voice was cool and concise. “We have important things to say to each other.”

“I have nothing to say.”

She lifted her eyebrows. Her lips curved to a point. She gave a little sigh.

“Why do you lie? You are _très en beauté_, Jane--you are wonderful. Why do you lie?--You know you owe it all to me--”

I turned my back on her but I felt her standing behind me, watching me, her eyes shining, her delicate nose palpitating faintly, her eyes reading me. She had no intention of leaving me alone.

Our next meeting was at Madeleine’s. Madeleine was the woman who looked after my face. Bianca went to her too. I was sitting in front of the dressing-table, my head tied up in a towel, my face plastered with grease, when Bianca came in. She chattered and gossiped and held up the photograph of herself in the costume of the Spanish bull-ring. “I was distracting myself--” she laughed. “I had been bothered by some very curious ideas. You remember our talk at the ‘_Château des trois Maries_.’ Well, that sort of thing. I thought the excitement would help. It did. I was within a yard of the bull when he died. Some of the blood splashed me. I didn’t like that.”

I broke in saying that I didn’t believe a word of it.

“Don’t you, Jane? Well, it’s no matter. It’s unimportant. The important thing is that I’m sick to death of everything. Every one bores me. I find you are the only woman in Paris who is alive. I’ve been watching you--you are very extraordinary. You care for no one. You are self-sufficient. You have achieved the impossible.”

All this time Madeleine was massaging my face and pretending not to be interested. I could say nothing. I boiled with rage, helpless, wrapped in sheets and towels, my face plastered with grease, and Bianca sat there, her little white face buried in her furs and laughed at me. When at last she had gone, Madeleine said the Princess had such a beautiful character.

I felt that I was being bated like one of her famous bulls. I resolved to make no move. I refused to be goaded to an attack. I was afraid of her.

Then one day Fan came to see me. Instead of rushing in with her usual shrill greeting, she walked up to me quietly, put her arm round me and laid her cheek against mine.

“I’m so happy, Jane dear; I’m so happy.” Her voice was gentle. “I have found what I have been waiting for all my life.” She went down on her knees and looked up into my face. Hers was calm and rested and had upon it an expression of sweetness that I had never seen there before. “I’m in love, Jane dear. I’m in love with the most wonderful man in the world. I wanted to tell you because I knew you’d be glad I was happy.”

She stayed with me for an hour and told me all about it. It was the strangest thing, hard cynical Fan, suddenly become young and sentimental and timid. They had met at St. Moritz that Christmas. He was an Englishman, half Irish really, with a strong streak of Celt in him. His name was Mark. She called him Micky. He was very beautiful, as beautiful as a god. He had taught her to ski. They had been together high up on snowy peaks above the world. One day she had fallen and sprained her ankle. He had carried her down the mountain in his arms. He was strong and straight like a young tree. He wanted her to divorce Ivanoff and marry him. He said there was no other way for them to be happy. He wanted to meet me. Would I come to lunch now, right away? He was waiting for us. She had told him all about me.

I went, of course. That boy,--you remember him, and how handsome he was, with his golden head and fresh bronzed cheeks and the long curly eyelashes fringing his blue eyes, and his broad sunny smile. He was too beautiful I had felt until he gave me that very broad smile.

Our luncheon was a happy absurd affair. Those two were ridiculously in love--they behaved like children. They beamed, they blushed, they looked into each other’s eyes, he very shy and sweet and attentive, calling her Fan, and in talking to me trying to be dreadfully solemn. “Please, Madame de Joigny, make her be serious. She must divorce that chap, you know. There’s no alternative. It’s got to be done and I want it done right away. Please back me up. I say, you mustn’t smile, you know. It’s dead serious.”

How could I help smiling? He was very appealing. He rumpled his hair and his eyes grew dark, and little beads of moisture stood out on his high tanned forehead. I looked at Fan. Poor Fan! so much older, so worn, so stamped with the stamp of her harrowing racketing years, and yet a new Fan with a young light in her eyes; I was disturbed and anxious.

My fears seemed during the weeks that followed to be groundless. She held him. They continued their dream of bliss. He satisfied her utterly. It was of course his beauty that she loved. Always she had adored beauty in men--now she had it in its most charming aspect, fresh, clean, young. They had nothing in common, but their passion. He was stupid and rather a prude. He had grown up with horses and dogs and a family of sisters in an English country house, had joined the army and then had gone to South Africa with his regiment. He had ideas about womanliness and the honour of a gentleman and the duties of his class. He had never been in Paris before. Fan found no fault in him.

She began taking him about with her. Society was at first amused and indulgent, then again the inevitable happened. He became the rage. A number of women lost their heads over him. He was invited out without her. Soon he was everywhere in demand, and Fan rightly or wrongly persuaded him to go. This at first quite worried him. Women wanting him for themselves and finding him obstinately faithful, turned spiteful. He didn’t understand, for he wasn’t fatuous, but he must have heard a good many things about Fan that he didn’t like.

I felt for him in a way. It seemed to me that he was holding his own pretty well and behaving on the whole very decently, but I wished that Fan’s divorce could be hurried along. She had hesitated about divorcing Ivanoff. “Of course,” she said, “he lives off women, but I’ve known that all along, and it doesn’t seem quite fair to get rid of him now--” but she had given in, in the end.

The months dragged on. I began to wonder whether Micky would hold out. It had been difficult to find Ivanoff. A long time elapsed before the divorce papers could be served on him.

Micky still stuck to Fan, but he began talking about compromising her and, after a time, I had an impression that he stuck to her grimly, without enthusiasm. I imagined him to be cursing his own weak character. He was weak and he knew it, and so did we. He clung to Fan as a woman should cling to a man. This did not make her despise him, it gave her a feeling of strength and safety. She encouraged his dependence on her and adopted the rôle of guide and counsellor.

About this time I had a telephone message and a note from Bianca; both summoning me to her in her old peremptory style. The message was that the Princess wished to see me on urgent matters and would be at home all that afternoon. I did not go. The note, received next morning was as follows:

“It is silly and dangerous to stand out against me. I am attacked
by all the demons you know about and if you don’t come, something
unexpected and unpleasant will happen.”

I paid no attention to it.

Fan’s character and the quality of her life changed completely; she gave up going out and sank into the deep secretive isolation of a woman who lives for one man alone. Her other men friends melted away. Many of her women friends dropped her. Not those of her own little band, but Micky didn’t like these. Claire who was fond of her, said--“_Elle se rend ridicule avec ce garçon_,” and refused to have them to dinner together. Fan didn’t seem to care; she stayed more and more at home. This created for her serious money difficulties. She had never had any meals at all to speak of in her own flat, and her butcher’s bill had come to nothing, but now her boy had to be fed. He would come into dinner or lunch nearly every day, rosy and ravenous, and consume large beef steaks, fat cutlets, chickens, eggs, butter, sweets. Her bills became larger as her revenues dwindled. She could or would no longer avail herself of her old sources of wealth. Her vogue was vanishing, and with it the amiability of dressmakers and restaurant-keepers. She had a distaste now for gambling on the Bourse and asking Beaudoin for tips. Micky it seemed disapproved of women gambling. Her love affair was costing her her livelihood; and Micky himself gave her nothing, perhaps because he had nothing much to give; perhaps because of some idea of honour, perhaps because he didn’t know how hard up she was. Fan was not the kind to let on. I know for a fact that she often went hungry to give him a good square meal, and I suspected that under her last year’s dresses, she didn’t have on enough to keep her warm.

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.