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NOTWITHSTANDING
By MARY CHOLMONDELEY
AUTHOR OF "RED POTTAGE"
Und was
Ist Zufall anders, als der rohe Stein,
Der Leben annimmt unter Bildners Hand?
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1913
_First Edition October 1913_
_Reprinted October 1913_
_All rights reserved_
TO
MAY AND JEANNIE
NOTWITHSTANDING
CHAPTER I
"Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne
M'a rendu fou!"
VICTOR HUGO.
Annette leaned against the low parapet and looked steadfastly at the
water, so steadfastly that all the brilliant, newly-washed,
tree-besprinkled city of Paris, lying spread before her, cleft by the
wide river with its many bridges, was invisible to her. She saw nothing
but the Seine, so tranquil yesterday, and to-day chafing beneath its
bridges and licking ominously round their great stone supports--because
there had been rain the day before.
The Seine was the only angry, sinister element in the suave September
sunshine, and perhaps that was why Annette's eyes had been first drawn
to it. She also was angry, with the deep, still anger which invades once
or twice in a lifetime placid, gentle-tempered people.
Her dark eyes under their long curled lashes looked down over the stone
bastion of the Pont Neuf at a yellow eddy just below her. They were
beautiful eyes, limpid, deep, with a certain tranquil mystery in them.
But there was no mystery in them at this moment. They were fixed,
dilated, desperate.
Annette was twenty-one, but she looked much younger, owing to a certain
slowness of development, an immaturity of mind and body. She reminded
one not of an opening flower, but of a big, loose-limbed colt, ungainly
still, but every line promising symmetry and grace to come. She was not
quite beautiful yet, but that clearly was also still to come, when life
should have had time to erase a certain ruminative stolidity from her
fine, still countenance. One felt that in her schoolroom days she must
have been often tartly desired not to "moon." She gave the impression of
not having wholly emerged from the chrysalis, and her bewildered face,
the face of a dreamer, wore a strained expression, as if some cruel hand
had mockingly rent asunder the veils behind which her life had been
moving and growing so far, and had thrust her, cold and shuddering, with
unready wings, into a world for which she was not fully equipped.
And Annette, pale gentle Annette, standing on the threshold of life,
unconsciously clutching an umbrella and a little handbag, was actually
thinking of throwing herself into the water!
Not here, of course, but lower down, perhaps near St. Germains. No, not
St. Germains,--there were too many people there,--but Melun, where the
Seine was fringed thick with reeds and rushes, where in the dusk a
determined woman might wade out from the bank till the current took her.
The remembrance of a certain expedition to Melun rose suddenly before
her. In a kind of anguish she saw again its little red and white houses,
sprinkled on the slope of its low hill, and the river below winding
between its willows and poplars, amid meadows of buttercups, scattered
with great posies of maythorn. She and he had sat together under one of
the may trees, and Mariette, poor Mariette, with Antoine at her feet,
had sat under another close at hand. And Mariette had sung in her thin,
reedy voice the song with its ever-recurring refrain--
"Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne
Me rendra fou, oui, me rendra fou."
Annette shuddered and then was still.
It must have been a very deep wound, inflicted with a jagged instrument,
which had brought her to this pass, which had lit this stony defiance in
her soft eyes. For though it was evident that she had rebelled against
life, it was equally evident that she was not of the egotistic
temperament of those who rebel or cavil, or are discontented. She looked
equable, feminine, the kind of woman who would take life easily, bend to
it naturally,
"As the grass grows on the weirs";
who might, indeed, become a tigress in defence of her young, but then
what woman would not?
But it is not only in defence of its babes of flesh and blood that the
protective fierceness of woman can be aroused. There are spiritual
children, ideals, illusions, romantic beliefs in others, the
cold-blooded murder of which arouses the tigress in some women. Perhaps
it had been so with Annette. For the instinct to rend and tear was upon
her, and it had turned savagely against herself.
Strange how in youth our first crushing defeat in the experiment of
living brings with it the temptation of suicide! Did we then imagine, in
spite of all we saw going on round us, that life was to be easy for
_us_, painless for _us_, joyful for _us_, so that the moment the iron
enters our soul we are so affronted that we say, "If this is life, we
will have none of it"?
Several passers-by had cast a backward glance at Annette. Presently some
one stopped, with a little joyous exclamation. She was obliged to raise
her eyes and return his greeting.
She knew him, the eccentric, rich young Englishman who rode his own
horses under a French name which no one believed was his own. He often
came to her father's cabaret in the Rue du Bac.
"Good morning, mademoiselle."
"Good morning, M. Le Geyt."
He came and leaned on the parapet beside her.
"Are you not riding to-day?"
"Riding to-day! Ride on the Flat! Is it likely? Besides, I had a fall
yesterday schooling. My neck is stiff."
He did not add that he had all but broken it. Indeed, it was probable
that he had already forgotten the fact.
He looked hard at her with his dancing, irresponsible blue eyes. He had
the good looks which he shared with some of his horses, of extreme high
breeding. He was even handsome in a way, with a thin, reckless, trivial
face, and a slender, wiry figure. He looked as light as a leaf, and as
if he were being blown through life by any chance wind, the wind of his
own vagaries.
His manner had just the shade of admiring familiarity which to some men
seems admissible to the pretty daughter of a disreputable old innkeeper.
He peered down at the river, and then at the houses crowding along its
yellow quays, mysterious behind their paint as a Frenchwoman behind her
pomade and powder.
Then he looked back at her with mock solemnity.
"I see nothing," he said.
"What did you expect to see?"
"Something that had the honour of engaging your attention completely."
"I was looking at the water."
"Just so. But why?"
She paused a moment, and then said, without any change of voice--
"I was thinking of throwing myself in."
Their eyes met--his, foolhardy, inquisitive, not unkindly; hers, sombre,
sinister, darkened.
The recklessness in both of them rushed out and joined hands.
He laughed lightly.
"No, no," he said, "sweet Annette--lovely Annette. The Seine is not for
you. So you have quarrelled with Falconhurst already. He has managed
very badly. Or did you find out that he was going to be married? I knew
it, but I did not say. Never mind. If he is, it doesn't matter. And if
he isn't, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters."
"You are right. Nothing matters," said Annette. Her face, always pale,
had become livid.
His became suddenly alert, flushed, as hers paled. He sighted a possible
adventure. Excitement blazed up in his light eyes.
"One tear," he said, "yes,--you may shed one tear. But the Seine! No.
The Seine is made up of all the tears which women have shed for men--men
of no account, worthless wretches like Falconhurst and me. You must not
add to that great flood. Leave off looking at the water, Annette. It is
not safe for you to look at it. Look at me instead. And listen to what I
am saying. You are not listening."
"Yes, I am."
"I'm going down to Fontainebleau for a bit. The doctor says I must get
out of Paris and keep quiet, or I shan't be able to ride at Auteuil. I
don't believe a word he says, croaking old woman! But--hang it all, I'm
bound to ride Sam Slick at Auteuil. Kirby can look after the string
while I'm at Fontainebleau. I'm going there this afternoon. Come with
me. I am not much, but I am better than the Seine. My kisses will not
choke the life out of you, as the Seine's will. We will spend a week
together, and talk matters over, and sit in the sun, and at the end of
it we shall both laugh--_how_ we shall laugh--when you remember this."
And he pointed to the swirling water.
A thought slid through Annette's mind like a snake through grass.
"_He_ will hear of it. He is sure to hear of it. That will hurt him
worse than if I were drowned."
"I don't care what I do," she said, meeting his eyes without flinching.
It was he who for a moment winced when he saw the smouldering flame in
them.
He laughed again, the old light, inconsequent laugh which came to him so
easily, with which he met good and bad fortune alike.
"When you are as old as I am," he said not unkindly, "you will do as I
am doing now, take the good the gods provide you, and trouble your mind
about nothing else. For there's nothing in the world or out of it that
is worth troubling about. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing."
"Nothing," echoed Annette hoarsely.