At two o’clock in the house in the Rue Raynouard, Ellen came in to sit
on the edge of her cousin’s bed and discuss the happenings of the day.
“I guess,” she observed, “Willie will be able to tell them a good story
when he gets back to the Town. His mouth fairly hung open all the time
when he was here.”
Lily smiled. “I don’t know,” she replied, braiding her heavy bronze
hair. “From what he tells me, he’s in the backwater now. There are a lot
of people there who have never heard of us. I suppose Willie and you and
I are just back numbers so far as the Town is concerned.”
After Ellen had gone to her own room, Lily settled herself on the chaise
longue and, wrapped in a peignoir of pale blue chiffon all frothy with
old lace the color of ivory, she took from her desk the enameled box,
opened it and read the worn clippings. The pile had grown mightily.
There were a score of new clippings. The headlines had increased in size
and the editorials were an inch or two longer. The man was progressing.
He was denounced with a steadily increasing hatred and bitterness. It
was clear that he had become a national figure, that he was a leader in
the battle against the roaring furnaces.
For a long time she lay with her eyes closed ... thinking. And at last,
hours after the rest of the house had grown still and dark, she sighed,
replaced the clippings in the box and locked them once more into her
desk. Then she settled herself to writing a letter over which she spent
a long time, biting the end of the silver penholder from time to time
with her firm white teeth. When at last the effort satisfied her, she
placed it in an envelope and addressed it to Sister Monica in the
Carmelite Convent at Lisieux. It was the hundredth letter she had
written, letters in which she abased herself and begged forgiveness,
letters to which there was never any reply save an unforgiving and
relentless silence. It was like dropping the pale gray envelopes into a
bottomless crevasse.
In the following May, Ellen went to Munich. It was the first step in a
grand tour of the German cities. She would visit Salzburg, Cologne,
Vienna, Leipsic. She would call upon Schönberg, Busoni, Richard Strauss,
Pfitzner, von Schilling.... If the spirit moved her, she might even
penetrate Russia. And certainly she would go to the festival at Weimar.
All this was included in the plan she set forth to Lily. There was no
schedule. She would simply progress from one place to another as her
fancy dictated. She knew no German but she would learn it, as she had
learned French, by living among the people. She went alone. Therefore
she would have to learn the language.
The expedition was singularly characteristic of all her life. When she
found that the Town was unendurable she had reversed the plan of her
pioneer ancestors and turned east instead of west, to seek a new world
which to her was far more strange than the rolling prairies of the west
had been to her great-grandfather. When the traveling salesman, whom she
used as a stepping stone, fell by the wayside and departed this life she
was free to go unhindered on her own roving way, fortified by the
experience of a few years of married life. She owned no fixed home. On
the contrary, she moved about restlessly ... exploring, conquering,
exhausting now this city, now that one. She was, it seemed, possessed of
a veritable demon of restlessness, of energy, of a sharp inquiring
intelligence. It was this quality, stimulated constantly by an
overpowering curiosity, which sent her pioneering into the world of new
music which Lily disliked so intensely. She explored those regions which
musicians of a more contemplative and less restless nature dared not
enter. It was as if she were possessed by a Gargantuan desire to devour
all the world within a single lifetime.
Once in Paris she said to Lily, “You know, I am obsessed by a terrible
sense of the shortness of life. It is impossible to know and experience
all that I wish to know.”
But this was as near as she came to a contemplative philosophy. She had
no time for reflection. The hours she spent with the indolent Lily
inevitably fired her with a fierce and resentful unrest. It was then
that she grew impatient, bad-tempered, unendurable. It was the descent
of one of these black moods which drove her from the peaceful solitude
of the house at Germigny upon a new voyage of exploration.
And so it happened that Lily and Madame Gigon were alone on the peaceful
summer evening when Eustache, the red-cheeked farmer’s boy, returning on
his bicycle through the rain from Meaux, brought the final edition of
the Figaro containing a short paragraph of the most enormous importance
to all the world.
Madame Gigon had been installed days before on the first floor of the
lodge, because she was no longer able to leave her bed and insisted upon
being placed where her ears would serve her to the greatest advantage.
The door of her room opened outward upon the terrace above the Marne and
here, just inside the door, sat Lily when Eustache arrived.
She opened the Figaro and spread it across her knees.
Madame Gigon, hearing the rustle of the paper, stirred and said
peevishly, “What is new to-day?”
“Not much of importance,” said Lily, and after a pause. “The archduke of
Austria has been assassinated. Shall I read you that?”
“Certainly,” replied the old woman with a fierce impatience.
“Certainly!”
It was only part of a daily game ... this asking Madame Gigon what she
would have read to her; because in the end the entire journal was read
aloud by Lily--the daily progress of the celebrated case of Madame
Caillaux, the signed articles by this or that politician, the news of
the watering places ... Deauville, Vichy, Aix, Biarritz, the accounts of
the summer charity fêtes, the annual ball at the Opéra, the military
news ... everything was read to the old woman. For Madame Gigon found a
keen delight in the recognition of a name among those who had been
present at this fête or were stopping at that watering-place. After her
own fashion, the blind old woman reduced all France to the proportions
of a village. To her, the Caillaux trial became simply an old wives’
tale, a village scandal.
So Lily read of the Archduke’s assassination and Madame Gigon listened,
thoughtfully, interrupting her occasionally with a clucking sound to
indicate how terrible the affair really was. She understood these
things, being a Bonapartist. It was as if the Prince himself had been
shot down. It was the natural result of the Republican movement, of
Socialism, which was, after all, the same thing. Just another example of
what these wild ideas might lead to.
“These are sad times,” remarked Madame Gigon when Lily had finished
reading. “There is no such thing as law and order ... no such thing as
respect and regard for rank. A wild confusion (_une melée sauvage_) to
see who can gain the most wealth and make the greatest display. Money!”
the old woman muttered. “That’s it. Money! If you make a fortune out of
chocolate or soap, that is enough to put you into the government. Good
God! What times are ahead!”
To this harangue, Lily listened absently. It was all monotonously
familiar to her. Madame Gigon had said it a thousand times. Every evil
she attributed to “these dirty times.” She concluded by saying, “Crazy
Madame Blaise is right after all. There will be a war.... She was
right.... There will be.”
While she was speaking, Lily tore open the only interesting letter among
the dozen. Quietly she read it to herself. When she had finished she
interrupted Madame Gigon.
“I have a letter from M. de Cyon,” she said, “about some furniture I was
selling. He writes that Madame is ill again with indigestion ... quite
seriously this time.”
Madame Gigon made a little grunting noise. “Nadine eats too much.... I
have told her so a dozen times but she will not listen. A woman as fat
as that....”
And from the superior pinnacle of her great age, Madame allowed the
sentence to trail off into unspeakable vistas of Madame de Cyon’s folly.
At the end of a long time during which they both sat silently in the
dripping quiet of the summer evening Madame Gigon said explosively, “She
will go off suddenly one of these days ... like that,” and she snapped
her finger weakly.
At the sound Criquette and Michou got up lazily, stretched themselves,
and waddled close to her chair. For a moment she scratched their heads
with groping fingers and then turning to Lily said, “It is time for
their milk.... And see to it, my child, that they have a little cream in
it.”
Lily rose and called the dogs inside the lodge. Across the river in the
tiny church, the old curé, M. Dupont, rang the vesper bell. Behind the
cropped willows along the Marne the last glow faded above the rolling
fields of wheat. Inside the house Lily was singing softly, “O, le coeur
de ma mie est petit, tous p’tit, p’tit.” There was no other sound.
Presently, Madame Gigon leaned back in her bed and called to Lily.
“To-morrow,” she said, “you might ask M. Dupont to call on me. It has
been two days since he was here.”