[Henry Gastonard informs Paddy O’Connell of his probable return to
London.]
July 21st, 1905.
Dear Paddy,--I have received your letter dated July 18th, but I cannot
say that I have hastened to reply to it. This is very fit and proper,
for who would dare to reply in haste to a document which contains so
formidable an indictment.
I am going to the devil, you say, and going, in motor parlance, upon
my fourth speed. The writing is upon the wall, but I have no eyes to
read it. A few brief months shall roll and then my inheritance pass to
the amiable parson at Beldon, and I become a beggar upon the
streets--or in the poorhouse, as the case may be. So be it, my dear
Paddy--for what is written is written, nor shall all the tears blot
out a single line.
Consider the irony of it. I am to earn five hundred pounds a year by
my own labours. The fortune bequeathed to me by my dear father is not
to help that undertaking. Useless for me to go into the city, to
choose a Hebrew at hazard and to say to him, pay me five hundred per
annum and I will lend you twenty thousand. The Will forbids the trick.
The money must be earned by me, by my own labour and industry, or my
cousin must have my fortune. Poor devil, he wants it badly. I have not
the heart to begrudge him a single penny of it.
But, Paddy, imagine your friend Henry Gastonard upon an office stool
or seeking half commissions in the purlieus of Throgmorton-street! Of
talents I have none. I could not earn a shilling by writing for the
newspapers, or persuade even an enthusiastic friend to set up a bust
of mine in any hall or cellar in Europe. The world has been to me a
pleasant place. I have drunk of the fountains of Bimini and quaffed
draughts of perpetual youth. To dress and drive, to dine, to dance, to
sing, to sleep--behold my curriculum! I can no more imagine life
without its music, its laughter, its love than I can depict the
Châtelet without its Zulema or the Athénée robbed of the art of
Mademoiselle Yalone. If I have lived in Paris among the Bohemians, it
is because they stand to me for the fullest impersonation of the _joie
de vivre_. I may sink to poverty, pass into the shadows of
obscurity--but to the degradation of the servile state, never, dear
Paddy, upon my honour.
So your letter leaves behind it but the gratitude of a man who bends
to the truth but is obstinate to the fact. I am answering it by a
confession--and one which will not be very welcome to you. Yesterday
I saw our old friend Lea d’Alençon again and spent many hours in her
company. She is to be divorced, I understand, and Paris amused by a
pretty scandal. You know how little this concerns me. You will be very
sure that my meeting with her was accidental and that I forbore to
seek her out of my own volition--even as I promised you.
Let me say that it began with a wild dinner given at Charine’s by that
mad voluptuary, Willy Martin, the American. I accepted his invitation
because Paris has bored me very much since Mimi went away, and there
are not enough decent people left in the whole city to keep a
reasonable man from suicide.
We dined in a room set out to represent a cabin in the mountains.
There were back cloths of perpetual snow and cooling glaciers, distant
views of mountain peaks and wonderful pictures of impossible valleys.
The table was supposed to be a bank of the driven snow, above which a
cascade suspended its frozen waters. For partners of the feast, there
were handmaidens in dominoes--beautiful of course, because Willy
Martin declared them to be so. When I drew a paper from the basin and
discovered that my particular lot was to be cast with a green domino
of some magnificence, then I thought of St. Patrick and of you and
declared myself in luck. Alas, Paddy, I had not been two minutes at
the table when, despite her domino and a most excellent disguise, I
discovered that I had the amorous Lea for a companion and that the
drawing was entirely to her satisfaction.
It is some weeks, as you know, since I have seen this adorable
creature. To judge by her conversation, she has been on the verge of a
decline because of my neglect. Almost her first words destroyed that
fond illusion of her poverty which helped her to win my sympathies
when she visited me at Poissy.
I no longer believe her story that d’Alençon left her without a
shilling, although it would appear to be true that his patience is
exhausted and that he is about to take a quite unusual step for a
Frenchman, and to divorce her. This, if the tongue of gossip has not
done her an injury (which is possible), he appears to have the right
to do; and yet it is delightful to hear her protesting her innocence
and declaring that all her fault is a love of the light and a positive
aversion from social darkness.
“I shall go and live in the East,” she said to me in a languorous
outburst, when the dinner was still young. “I must have sunshine and
music, Harry--all the sober things are hateful to me; I could never be
an obedient wife to any man. Of course, I am sorry for my husband. It
is the privilege of a woman to be sorry for the man she cannot love.
He married me--I did not marry him. What child in a convent ever
marries any man, or is to be held responsible for the womanhood which
comes to her afterwards. Marriage to me was a release from routine and
the lives of the Saints. I had learned to hate the Saints; I would
have kissed the feet of any man who closed that dreadful book to me.
And all the world was opening to my eyes, the great world, immense to
the childish imagination as the heavens, and as full of golden stars.
Do you wonder that I leaped for joy when they told me I was to be
married.”
I had never heard Lea serious before; but I do believe she was serious
upon this occasion. My promise that if she went to the East she would
hear little even of the “tom-tom” in a harem, and find the prophet’s
limitations trying did not move her a hair’s-breadth. Had she not seen
“The Belle of Teheran” as they staged it at the Bouffes, and did not
that glittering spectacle of sequins and seraphs stand to her for the
whole glory of the Asiatic world?
“You would be one of four, Lea,” I said to her, “an adorable quarter
of a gloomy _ménage_. It is true that you would be permitted to sleep
upon cushions, and to wash your hands in a fountain, but, my dear
lady, consider the _dernier cri_ in turbans, and reflect. There is no
glamour of the East except in the West. Go to the Bouffes when the
floats are dark, and see what the scenery looks like. Does it remind
you of anything on earth which is not the apotheosis of the mean and
the shabby. To me the East stands for a kind of opera comique, which
is to be suffered only by those who view it from afar. I like to read
of pashas and pagodas, of temple bells and little Burmese maidens; but
when I am among them I think of the fleas. You, Lea, would be calling
for sweet scents and a passage home before you had been in the place
twenty-four hours. As for the aged Vizier who owned you, I doubt if he
would have a whisker left in a week. My compassion would go out to
him.”
Well, Paddy, she refused to see it, and I perceived that for the
moment some wild scheme of romance is in her head, and may lead her to
new extravagances sufficiently wild and sufficiently foolish to
astonish this Paris which loves the bizarre and the daring. She is not
without rich relatives, and, as she told me to-night, there is an
uncle at Marseilles who is always ready to befriend her. Men are
sometimes very gentle toward a woman whose chief enemy is her own
beauty. Lea will find defenders, whatever may be charged against her;
and it would not astonish me in the least to hear that she had become
a queen of the colony at Cairo or a novice among the Benedictine nuns
at Subiacum. Nothing, indeed, would be too outrageous for the changing
dispositions of a woman who has drunk of the cup of satiety, and
already has found it bitter.
Willy Martin’s dinner came to an end, I should tell you, in a blaze of
glory, which nearly set the restaurant on fire. A nymph, supposed to
be imprisoned in the ice, but really shut up in a glass case, danced
a wild _pas seul_ upon the table, and overturned the candlesticks into
the lap of little Jane Merlot, from the Opera Comique. When her robe
caught fire--and she could ill spare it--the soda water was employed
to extinguish the flames--a bright idea, and one which set this
rollicking company to other notions not less brilliant. From this
moment, a battle of the corks took the place of that polite talk so
dear to our forefathers.
I found myself at five o’clock of the morning upon the road to
Versailles in a forty-horse car driven by Lecallo, of the Opera. Lea,
in a green domino, soaked to the hems in aerated waters, was at my
side, and heaven alone knew whither we were going! As for Lecallo, he
drove like the devil possessed; and before I had quite realised the
absurdity of the venture, we stood at the door of the Hôtel de
France, at Chartres, and a pretty crowd of early birds were cheering
us to the echo.
Such, my dear Paddy, was the first stage of an adventure as ludicrous
as it was lamentable. I give you my word that I would have paid a
hundred sovereigns at any moment of it to have been quit of the
predicament and safely back in my own room at the Hôtel St. Paul.
This sum I would have doubled when Lecallo, with intentions of the
loftiest kind, chose to drive his car on to Tours, and left me in the
Hôtel with one green domino and a crushed opera hat. Now, for a
truth, was my own position both perilous and impossible. It became
infinitely worse when Lea, disdaining all other arts, threw herself
upon her genius for romance and suggested an immediate journey to a
desert island where none should discover us.
“What has Paris done for us?” she asked me dramatically.
I answered that it had just given us an excellent dinner and a nymph
in a block of ice.
“Be serious, my dear Harry,” she said; “did you not tell me last night
that you never wished to see Paris again?”
“Not until the morning, Lea. At night I never wish to see Paris again
until the morning.”
“Ah, you jest when I am so much in earnest. Take me away, Harry, take
me from all temptation--to the sea, to the woods--anywhere, if I may
forget what has been, and learn to hope.”
“But, my dear Lea, does a pretty woman ever cease to hope?”
“She ceases to hope when the man who should be her friend ceases to
remember. I have been telling myself for the last ten days that the
luckiest day of my life was the one which determined my husband to
divorce me. The supreme injustice demands the supreme sacrifice. I am
now going to blot out ten years of my life and start again from my
girlhood. I shall leave Paris, perhaps leave France. As I do not
intend to deceive myself, there will be no part for religion in this
reformation of a soul. I shall live as all the other good women about
me. Reputation will be nothing to me, for I shall have nothing to win
by reputation. Even my name will not betray me, for I shall be Madame
d’Alençon no more. This is my settled resolution. I am waiting to
hear how far you, the oldest of my friends, approve it.”
This, my dear Paddy, was the astounding confession this romantic woman
now poured into my amazed ears. Whether to take it seriously, or to
believe it to be the natural sequel to a night of frivolity, I know no
more than the dead.
For the moment I appeared to be confronted by a sudden purpose, and to
become aware of an aftermath to the harvests of folly. Lea, I said,
had wearied at last of all that Paris had to give her. Love, light,
laughter, music--these revolted her, and she would turn from them. It
might be possible that the tongue of slander had wholly maligned her,
and that at heart she was a virtuous woman, seeking something as yet
lacking to her life. Upon this I felt able to pronounce no settled
opinion. Has not old Georges Oleander written that the one riddle man
may never solve is the riddle of a woman’s confidence?
“What do you want me to do, Lea?” I asked her baldly. “How can I help
this wonderful scheme of yours? Do you suggest that I buy a desert
island and a camping outfit for two? Or shall it be a caravan and a
month in the forests of Amboise? You have only to say the word.”
Well, this pleased her immensely. She clapped her hands at the novelty
of the idea, and I could see that the “reformation of the soul” had
gone to the wall for the time being, at any rate.
“I should like nothing so well,” she said. “A caravan in the
forest--how absolutely delightful. Did not the Chevalier Leblanc have
one last year? You remember--it was in all the papers. A motor
caravan--a little bedroom, a salon, and a kitchen behind it. My dear
Harry, you could not suggest anything I would like half so well. Let
us go back to Paris immediately, that I may order my dresses.”
“But, Lea, I don’t happen to own a caravan, and it would take some
months to build one. Besides, I made no promise to go with
you--certainly not alone.”
She looked at me amazed. Here was a thing that Lea d’Alençon could
not for a moment understand.
“My dear Harry, what do you mean? Shall we take a _sergent de ville_
with us, then?”
“But, Lea, consider our reputations. I grant you that this appearance
at Chartres is little to our credit, but, at the worst, we can blame
the car. I don’t think your friends would accept a similar excuse in
the case of a caravan. We could not say that we burst a tyre and were
detained for a whole month in the Forest of Amboise.”
She was much piqued. Of course, she did not take my words literally,
but they were understood in some way as an anticipation of all she had
been leading up to, and a ready repudiation of it. Her reply intimated
this in plain terms, and also was very far from that flippant response
I had expected.
“Are my friends’ opinions anything to me, Harry? Will they be anything
when I am a divorced woman? Is it really of no concern to you
whatever, what happens to me afterwards? I do not believe it. Honour
gives a woman claims which love may deny to her. Are you insensible to
them?”
“You know that I am not, Lea. My friendship for you would do much, but
it would not do it upon a false compulsion of honour. The story of
your life is your own. It would be no kindness to make it mine, nor
should I permit you to do so.”
“You have never loved me, Harry.”
“I have often said so, Lea.”
“Then why do you not go away from me?”
“Perhaps I shall take you at your word--in a caravan.”
She laughed a little angrily. I could see that she was greatly
chagrined by our brief talk, but by no means ready to accept it as
final.
“Would you leave me without a friend in Paris, Harry--must I think
that of you?”
“You know me better than to think it, Lea.”
“But you are telling me that you mean to go?”
“I am answering you as you asked to be answered.”
“And that is the man--always--always--when the flower is cut from the
tree, it is already a dead flower to him.”
“Not always, Lea. I have known him to keep it quite a long time--in a
book. But, of course, the particular man was very young. Now, here is
our breakfast coming. Is not that a subject more agreeable to you?”
She shook her head, and would not admit the fact. The repast was the
dullest I have ever shared with the stately Lea, and even the purchase
of a respectable frock--the best that the city of Chartres could
discover--did not allay her gloom. In truth, my dear Paddy, she has
determined to marry me when her husband divorces her, and is dismayed
to discover that I am not as determined to marry her. For my part, I
know not what to think, and I am wondering if honour may not have
something to say to me after all. Certain it is that her husband’s
jealousy chose me before others for its subject, and chose me without
a shred of justice or reason. They say in Paris that there would have
been a reconciliation but for that mad journey of hers to Poissy and
the inn. You know how little I was responsible for that--you do not
need to be reminded of its circumstances.
All that has happened to Lea d’Alençon has been of her own seeking.
For this reason my mood impels me to decline to respond to her
sentiment or to be deceived by it. Nor am I yet wholly convinced that
it is real. When we returned to Paris to-night, Lecallo having called
for us unexpectedly at five o’clock of the afternoon, the first decent
person we met, upon quitting the Bois de Boulogne, was the Count of
Marcy, just returned from Dieppe, and upon his way to the Engadine. He
greeted Lea rapturously, and immediately spoke of a little dinner at
the Ritz, and of another couple who were to dine there with him. She
accepted the invitation instantly, and quitted me to go and dress. It
is true that I promised to meet her to-morrow and to give her a “man’s
opinion” upon the whole situation; but that promise will not be
fulfilled. And it will not be fulfilled, Paddy, because Farman has
just brought me the precious news that Mimi has been traced to England
and is now engaged with a troupe of ragamuffins playing in the barns
and booths of my own country.
So I go to London immediately. The decision is irrevocable. And it may
be that I have seen Lea d’Alençon for the last time.
I will not say I wish it so, for I have called her my friend; but the
event might be better in the end for her and for--Yours in great good
hope,
Harry Gastonard.