It was two weeks before I went to see him at his home. Two weeks of
indecision. Ellice Valentine had gone, and had been refused admission,
and there was no question but that he both hated and feared any
intrusion from his old life.
Ellice reported the place as comfortable.
“A hideous little house in a row,” she said. “But as well as I could
see, past the woman who opened the door, well enough furnished.”
“What sort of woman?”
“Elderly. I know what you are thinking. It wasn’t Julie.”
I _had_ thought of Julie. She might still be trying to live up to the
Cynara. And, in a way, I was sorry it was not. She had the Frenchwoman’s
gift of making a man comfortable, at least, and Sidney must have needed
that. It was, in a sense, all he had left.
“You sent in your name?”
“Yes. He just told her there was a mistake. And she added that he
received no visitors.”
But not even that, after his violent gregariousness of early days,
brought the changed conditions so vividly to me as did my first visit.
I rang the bell and was refused admission, as I had expected. But I
stepped past the woman into the hall, and called to him sharply.
“Don’t be a fool, Sidney,” I said. “It’s Maurice, and I’m not going
away.”
Something dropped in a room nearby, and I heard him swearing softly. I
opened the door and walked in.
The room was perfectly dark.
Nothing could have brought home to me the catastrophe as did the black
night of that room. For he had been working there. By the ray of light
from the hall, I saw him standing, modelling tool in hand, before a
small sketch model in clay. His head was uplifted irritably, and his
body crouched almost ready to spring.
“Get the hell out of here,” he snarled.
“What’s the use?” I said. “Now I’m here. I needn’t come back, but I’m
not going now.”
He said nothing for a minute. Then I suppose he saw the futility of
further concealment, for he said:
“You’ll find an electric light switch behind the door. I don’t need
it—as I suppose you know.”
“Yes,” I said, and turned on the light.
“Just what else do you know?” he asked rather sharply.
“I happened into the studio the other day. I had no idea—I suppose you
know the altar piece is magnificent.”
“Cement!” he commented bitterly. “Imitation stuff, imitation art!” But
he added: “It’s good, as far as it’s gone. And it’s to be stared at by a
lot of European peasants! Has it struck you that the best art has always
gone into the churches, to be lost there for generations?”
I repeated an old quotation of Father Alexis, that, if religion did not
exist, the artists would have had to invent it. And he countered it with
his old jibe: that behind real sculptor lies essential truth, and what
did the churches know of truth?
But it seemed to me that he was talking against time. He was not easy;
he seemed to be listening, almost waiting. Once, at a sound outside, he
turned his face toward the door, and I felt that his body stiffened.
When nothing occurred, however, he grew gradually easier. But the talk
was unsatisfactory; there were too many roads he refused to follow. He
would not discuss the old days at Saint Cloud, nor his present
circumstances, beyond saying that he was comfortable. He grumbled about
the studio, and sneered about American art. And he asked me what I had
been doing. He smiled a little when I said I had been wandering.
“You’re a faithful soul, Maurice!” he said. “They’re not worth it. Not a
God-damned one of them.”
When I finally rose to go, he did a curious thing. He moved rather
quickly to the door into the hall and opening it, stood there for a
moment, apparently listening. He seemed satisfied then, and threw the
door wide.
“Good-night, Sidney.”
“Good-bye, Maurice.” And then, after a pause and with difficulty, “I
appreciate your coming.”
“But you don’t want me to come back?”
“What’s the use?” And after a pause, “Christ, man! Don’t try to bring
the dead to life.”
“You’re doing magnificent work.”
“Then let me alone to do it,” he said, and closed the door in my face.
He had, I felt, every right to close the door of his life to me. If he
chose to crawl under a porch like a sick dog, at least he was entitled
to his isolation. But I wished I had summoned my courage to ask about
Anne. Somehow I felt that he knew.
Then—curious how the Cynara figures in all this—I went once more to
see it, before I started away again. It had, you remember, the look of
Anne; not the Anne who had run away with Martin Burke, but of Anne the
girl.
And standing looking at the Cynara was Anne herself. Not even a changed
Anne, except that she was a little thinner. Just Anne.
How unimportant I was in her scheme of life was shown by her greeting of
me. She neither flushed nor paled. She came straight to me and held out
a hand in a rather shabby glove.
“You haven’t forgotten me, Maurice, have you?” she asked. She did not
smile; Anne was never a smiling woman.
“No,” I said. And again, “No, Anne.”
“I wanted to see you the other night, but I thought I’d better not.”
“The other night? Anne, you haven’t gone back to him?”
“What else was there to do? He was so awfully helpless at first. And, of
course, I was responsible for it, Maurice. I—had to see him through.”
I did not undeceive her. She had not been responsible, but if she
thought so—
“And he took you back?”
She did smile a little, then, but it was the sad ghost of a smile.
“Not as his wife. I had made that impossible, of course. But he supports
me, and I—look after him.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Eight years now,” she said. And turning away, stood staring at the
Cynara. “I think he is coming back, Maurice. He’s doing some work now
that is really good. At first it was—ghastly.”
Still thinking only of him, you see. He had both imprisoned and enslaved
her for years, and she saw neither prison nor slavery, but only the man
and his work.
“It is very good work, Anne. I’ve seen it. But what about you? Have you
no friends? Have you let him shut off the entire horizon?”
“I haven’t minded it, Maurice.”
“Is he kind to you?”
“He never forgets what I did, of course. But now he’s working again,
things are better.” She hesitated. “Sometimes I think lately he has to
_force_ himself to remember. You know what I mean.”
She would not let me see her home, and she asked me not to come again.
“He did not go to bed at all the night you were there,” she explained.
“I could hear him walking the floor. And he has been very—uncertain
ever since.”
I could guess what his being “uncertain” would mean. I remember the day
Julie Termonde said he had tried to kill her, when I had found her
cowering in a corner. And I had a clear vision of that blind man going
berserk in the little house, throwing things about, yelling at the
frightened servant, and hurling all the venom stored in his embittered
heart at the very soul in the world who loved him. Enraged at her very
silence and submission; torturing himself with old memories; jealous
with that fiercest jealousy of all, the jealousy of pride and not of
love.
For he was jealous and suspicious. I knew that, looking back. Jealous of
me! He had not wanted me to see Anne. He had taunted me with being a
loyal soul. He had forbidden me to come back. Jealous of me and
suspicious of Anne.
That, I think, may be the heaviest cross a woman who has once gone wrong
may have to bear. Suspicion. She was more his prisoner than his slave.
He did not love her, but he watched her.
I did not sleep that night. It was I who walked the floor, enraging
myself against him. He who had gone from a mistress into marriage, and
from marriage to unfaithfulness, condemning Anne for her one error to a
living death! Virtue in him, as in most men, was as hypocritical as had
been Julie Termonde’s black silk dress and gold crucifix.