“What made her do it?” I asked Ellice Valentine, when I made my call a
few days later. “She was the last woman in the world to make a break
like that.”
“I suppose the answer is that she loved him.”
“Burke? I don’t believe it.”
“No. Sidney. She adored him. She was rather pathetic about it. And I
have an idea that she never loved him as much as the day she ran away
with the other man. Women are like that, sometimes, Maurice.”
“It sounds like insanity.”
“Maybe it is,” she said calmly. “Personally, I don’t think any woman in
love is entirely sane. The things they do!” She stared for a moment at
her wedding ring. “I saw her that last day, you know.”
Well, it was a pitiful enough picture as she drew it; Anne standing
crying in a jumble of little slippers and bright negligées and garments,
with a swollen-eyed maid packing, and a photograph of Sidney on one end
of the dressing table and one of the Cynara on the other.
Anne, she said, picked up the Cynara and flung it, frame and all, into a
waste-basket. She hated it, she said.
“She didn’t know of Julie?”
“No. But she felt it had hurt her, somehow. She didn’t know just how.
She said that that was the way Sidney seemed to think of her—in marble
or something of the sort. He’d been away for two days then; she didn’t
know where he was.”
“She meant, probably, that he loved his dream of her, rather than
herself.”
“Maybe,” said Ellice, rather vaguely. “He didn’t love her. Didn’t even
pretend to. And she had learned to be loved, you see. He had been
adorable at first.”
She gave me one of her quick searching glances.
“You see, women need to _be_ loved,” she said. “They are not like some
men, who just go on caring year after year, without any return
whatever.”
“He must have cared; he shot himself.”
“Not for two years! Don’t lay that to Anne, Maurice. He shot himself
because he couldn’t repeat Cynara, not because he couldn’t
repeat—Anne.”
Yes. Sidney had reached the point of suicide, and had failed. I had been
wandering about China when the word came, and I had had a very clear
vision of that failure, and of Sidney recovering, lying there and
stubbornly adding this to the list of his other failures.
Holy images about, and nuns, and probably Father Alexis, with his
shameful old soutane and his faded, other world eyes, remonstrating
against this crime against God-given life. And Sidney sneering and
thinking perhaps of Julie and Anne, but mostly of how he had bared his
soul to the world. That unbroken front of his broken; a confession made,
not to his priest, but to the press!
He was a proud man, Sidney.
“I wrote him at once, when I heard,” said Ellice. “But he didn’t answer.
I rather thought he wouldn’t.”
“What in the world did you say?”
“Oh, just a friendly letter. You know—about the children, and all that.
He’d liked the children, in his—” she smiled, “—in his own fashion.
But I _did_ say something else. I told him not to worry about repeating
Cynara; that things like that came as the result of an emotion, and that
when the emotion came again so would everything else.”
Somebody came just then, and I left. But Ellice followed me out into the
hall, and laid a detaining hand on my arm.
“You don’t know anything about Anne, do you, Maurice?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve tried, haven’t you?”
“She left Burke after a year. In Vienna. That’s all I know.”
“You don’t think he ill-treated her?”
“No. I think she simply still cared for Sidney. That’s all. In spite of
what you said a half hour ago, there are women like that, too, Ellice.”
She patted my arm and let me go.
Curiously enough, she wrote me a letter that very night, and I received
it the next morning. “Somehow your face haunted me to-day, Maurice,” she
said. “And you know my old habit of impulsively writing letters. But you
see, my dear, I was once so very badly in love with you, and so I feel
tenderly toward you, as we do to all old loves. Don’t worry! It’s all
over ages ago, but it is true. The hours we all spent together, with me
caring for you, and you in love with Anne, and Anne only living for
Sidney! Luckily the chain stopped there, for Sidney only cared for
himself, but if the Director of all has a sense of humour, how funny we
must have seemed!
“But this is what I want to say. Aren’t you cherishing a dream at the
expense of reality? And aren’t you exactly as bad as Sidney if you do?
Think it over.
“And don’t stay away because of this letter. Come in and see the
children have their tea, and you will know what I mean.”
V
This is not my story. It is the story of Sidney and Anne Bush, and
perhaps, in a way, of Julie Termonde, of Ellice Valentine and myself.
But I have given Ellice’s letter to show the reason I did not see her
for a time. A man may feel flattered by the knowledge that a woman has
cared for him, but it is also an embarrassing matter. And when she
cheerfully proclaims that she has long been “over” it, it also contains
certain quite difficult elements of discomposure.
Thus a month went by and I did not see Ellice Valentine. I was preparing
for another of those wanderings which have kept me fairly interested and
fully occupied for the last few years, when a rather peremptory summons
came from her by telephone. It had something to do with copying an
antique marble mantel I had brought from Italy, and I gathered that she
had found a firm to do it.
“In cement,” she explained. “They take casts of it in plaster, and then
build it. It will only clean your mantel, Maurice. And I daresay it
needs it!”
“Go ahead,” I said. “But what am I to do, outside of providing the
mantel?”
“You’re to come and see the people with me. They haven’t the slightest
respect for my ideas.”