with outwardly an air of the most supercilious indifference, which was
contradicted by miaows of greeting that were to the miaows of ordinary
cats as a violoncello to a violin.
"Pierrette!" Mary exclaimed gladly.
The small cat flirted her kinked tail in response, but lest she might
seem to have displayed too much dependence upon a poor human being at
once sat down and began to clean a slim chocolate paw.
"Pierrette! Aren't you coming to talk to me?"
The answering miaow was almost too deep for a violoncello's capacity.
Indeed to call it a miaow was an insult to the jungle noise it was.
"The people have gone, Pierrette. Do come and talk to me. I'll give you
all my attention."
Pierrette looked steadily at her friend from large round eyes, the
pupils of which distended by the approach of night glowed in the
firelight. Presently she drew near to Mary's chair, upon the brocade of
which she defiantly sharpened her claws before jumping up with a trill
on the black silk lap to which she had been invited. Here she settled
down couchant to regard the fire.
"Dear little cat," Mary murmured.
Pierrette's ears twitched back to take in the endearment; the faintest
quiver of her tail showed that she had heard, understood, and agreed
with the description of herself.
"I was saying to myself that it was getting quite like old times in
Paris."
The cat began to purr in approbation of European peace.
Mary stroked Pierrette's back, which was the color of _café-au-lait_,
soft and glossy as chiffon velvet. Contact with the small and shapely
creature upon her knee was soothing. The grace and youth and vitality
of the cat were so superabundant that the human being whom she had
decided to favor by making use of was refreshed. It was impossible
to feel old with this pulsating life so near to one. Mary patted her
affectionately.
"Darling little cat!"
Pierrette's tail really wagged in response to such genuine admiration
and love, and because her tail could not express quite all her
appreciation she dug her claws into Mary's knee and pressed her warm
body closer than before, purring now with a steady monotony of pleasure.
The dusk had deepened, and Mary's head drooped in meditation upon
those old times. Had the move to Paris been a success? Or was not her
enjoyment of life here an illusion caused by the stimulus of the war?
Had her activity, her ceaseless activity during these last six years,
in which her hair had grown white, been genuine or artificial? She
had seen so many women pretending--not wilfully, but mesmerized into
supposing that they really desired to be useful--yes, so many women
pretending an activity that was only another aspect of a woman's lust
for what was the fashion. Had her Red Cross work been anything more
than that? Yet, after all, did the motive matter if the action was
good and useful? Questions these that were unanswerable, questions
that would never be asked if she were not suffering from the reaction.
Thanks to the war her move to Paris had been a success, a great
success. She might have found it hard otherwise to have passed these
last years. When in 1913, bored with the big empty house, she decided
to give up Woodworth Lodge, her imagination had seized upon Paris as
the place to live, because she was already beginning to exist only in
the past. That meant old age. Youth lives in the future; middle-age
stagnates in the present; old age lives again, but alas, in the past,
lives with only the ghost of its former life, always in the past. Her
first year in Paris had been occupied in furnishing the house and
preparing it to be a suitable place in which she might for the rest of
her time here sit by the fire and dream of the past. Then the war had
happened, and for a few years she had felt so much younger, but now,
when it was finished, so much older than the years spent by the war
justified her in feeling. She had made many friends. Indeed, she had
never possessed so many as now. But these friendships formed late in
life had little value. Friendship needed the future. There must exist
in any friendship worth having a kind of physical exultation. She was
fonder of this little cat than of all her Paris friends, much fonder.
Pierrette was young. Youth! Youth! It was not that she longed to be
young again herself. That would be foolish and indeed an undignified
repining; but to be surrounded by youth, that was surely a legitimate
desire.
"And it's that of which fate has robbed me," she sighed aloud.
Pierrette wagged her tail. The sound of her friend's voice was so
pleasant to hear, and the silken knee was so delicate a resting-place
for a royal cat. This soft-spoken human being deserved a little
attention. Her hands were tactful. Not like Célestine's hands.
Célestine was the maid who had taken the place of Adèle, dead before
her mistress returned to Paris, a move which would have given Adèle so
much pleasure. Pierrette did not care for Célestine, who was always
lifting her off delightful nests of lace and silk. Célestine, in
Pierrette's opinion, had the hands of a butcher rather than of a lady's
maid. The thought of Célestine gave her a _fisson_, and she yawned in
disgust.
Mary held Pierrette so that the cat's equilibrium should not be
disturbed while she leaned over to ring the bell. It was morbid to
sit here in the twilight thinking about youth. But when François had
arranged to his satisfaction the folds of the brocaded curtains and
when he had turned on the lights and left the room in a radiancy of
rose, Mary could not think about what she called practical things,
which meant the _séance_ she had arranged for to-night. Her headache
was gone; but the shadows of the past which had crept out of their
lurking-places in the twilight were still in the _salon_, not visible
indeed, but all the more hauntingly insistent because they were not
visible. The room seemed vaster and lonelier now that every corner of
it was illuminated. Mary felt infinitely small and utterly deserted.
It was only the company of the small cat which kept her from getting
up and hurrying away in panic. "_Le demon du midi_," she found herself
repeating. What specter begotten of gloom and shadow could outlive
the horror that existed in a desert of light? Her nerves were upset.
Perhaps she was indulging too frequently in these spiritualistic
experiments. But what else was there to do? If she were to renounce all
activity, she would just sit shriveling slowly before the fire. After
all, sixty was not such a great age. One would have to be at least
seventy before one really considered oneself old. And probably even at
seventy one would find that seventy was by no means the great age it
had formerly seemed. Even eighty? Grandmamma had been eighty when she
died. She had looked very old; but had she really felt old? Did anybody
ever really feel old? What seemed so bad about the arrangement of human
life was the amount of time wasted at the beginning and the end. The
first ten years, for example, what were they worth? Mary was watering
her nasturtiums in that abandoned room of the warehouse in Paternoster
Row. "Old stock!" She could hear the very tones of Mr. Fawcus' voice.
And the sunlight on the golden cross of St. Paul's. It flashed upon her
inner eye more vividly than all the sunlight of the last twenty years
put together. A sudden pity seized her for the two old people who had
fostered her and from whom she had been so abruptly snatched. She saw
Mr. Fawcus with his big bandana handkerchief wiping away the tears
and waving his farewell from Dover Quay. How little she had understood
what it cost them to lose her! How gayly she had set out for Paris!
She ought when she was older to have visited them. It was wrong of her
grandmother to forbid all intercourse. Suppose she should be given the
guardianship of Geoffrey's little daughter, should she try to keep her
away from her mother? Mary tried to think that she would not, although
it was hard to be charitable about Geoffrey's wife. When he was killed
early in 1915, it surely ought not to have been impossible for his
wife to forgive. She had written to her so anxiously. Perhaps it had
been a mistake to inclose another check. A woman like that might have
supposed that she was trying to buy her. Still, to send back the check
torn in half, that surely was not justifiable after so many years.
She had not suggested that the little girl should be handed over to
herself entirely. She had only asked for a few months every year. Would
Geoffrey really have wished that his mother should be debarred from
helping her granddaughter? Had it really been Geoffrey replying the
other evening through the medium of _la planchette_? _Mary must go to
her grandmother._ Nobody except herself knew anything about Geoffrey's
little girl, and she herself had certainly not guided the pencil.
It was all very well for skeptics to say that one guided the pencil
unconsciously. Anything could be explained by auto-suggestion; but it
was not reasonable to explain the inexplicable by something every bit
as inexplicable. If it was auto-suggestion, why had she never succeeded
in getting a communication from Richard's spirit. If ever anybody
desired with all her heart and soul to speak with one dead, she desired
to speak with Richard. Yet he was silent. With all the will she had to
believe that he would come to her out of that immense world of death,
she had never received any message that could possibly be ascribed to
him. How hard she had often tried to twist those unintelligible scrawls
into words of hope and assurance from Richard! If auto-suggestion could
have done it, surely auto-suggestion would have done it. All theories
about the world of spirits were no doubt inadequate; but it seemed
natural to suppose that year by year the dead moved farther and farther
away from the earth, and therefore that Richard was already beyond her
reach. Geoffrey, on the other hand, died comparatively a short time
ago. Moreover, without being ridiculous one might imagine that the
number of people killed every day during the war would produce----
Mary paused. She could not help feeling that the picture of a crowded
railway junction which her ideas of the confines of eternity implied
was rather absurd. Perhaps the Sicilian crystal-gazer would throw some
light upon the problem this evening. She would make a great effort
to put out of her mind the notion of being given the guardianship
of Geoffrey's little girl. She would concentrate upon something
entirely different. Pierre for instance. He too had been killed out
in West Africa early in the war. It was the end he would have chosen
for himself. It was a fine death for a man over sixty to be killed in
action, a fine death for the boy who fifty years ago had followed the
drum-taps along that white road of France. It had given her a thrill of
pride to read of his career since he and she parted forty years ago. He
was one of those who had helped to prepare his country for the effort
she had to make to save herself from the ancient enemy. Thus had they
written of him who had loved herself as well as his country forty years
ago. Such a little time ago really. If she shut her eyes and thought
for a moment, she could reconjure every moment of that last meeting in
the drawing-room of the King's Gate house.
"I wonder what you would have thought of Mac?" she asked, stroking
Pierrette, who accepted the caress with a purr that showed how far she
was from grasping the insult of such a question.
"Mac was a dog, you know. And you don't much care for dogs, do you, my
dear?"
Pierrette continued to purr when Mary patted her, laughing.
"Conceited little cat!"
And then once more her consciousness was flooded with the apprehension
of how much Pierrette meant to her. Those fragile paws soft as
flower-buds with thorns for the unwary, that foolish tail not much
bigger than a small cigar and of the same color, and most of all those
big blue eyes indifferent as chalcedony, supercilious as a prince of
Siam, and for a ball of wool sent rolling across the floor wild as a
leopard that waits to spring upon a sheep, how much they represented in
her lonely existence.
"Pierrette, would you like to be married?"
The little cat put out her claws with the air of an affronted virgin.
"Wouldn't you like to have a nice husband to play with when I'm too
busy to play with you? Wouldn't you like to have dear little snow-white
kittens? Because your kittens would be snow-white when they were born,
you know. Would you be a good mother?"
Notwithstanding Pierrette's lack of interest in the suggestion, Mary
was much taken up by the notion of obtaining a mate for her. It came to
seem of the utmost importance that Pierrette should hand on her charm
to kittens like herself. The search for a Siamese male as well-bred,
as beautiful, and as intelligent as herself occupied Mary's time more
successfully than spiritualism. It happened that the crystal-gazer
recommended by Madame de Sarlovèze was, at any rate so far as Mary's
_séance_ was concerned, a complete failure and unable to perceive
anything except various indeterminate shapes which she most dubiously
likened to pigeons. When nobody present could muster up the faintest
interest in pigeons, the charlatan (thus already Mary characterized
her entertainer) suggested even more dubiously that they might be swans.
"Or geese," Mary had muttered sharply, whereupon Madame Diana had
turned sulky and complained that she could not hope to have any success
with the crystal when scoffers were present.
"The woman's an obvious fraud with her pigeons," Mary declared; and
she turned her attention to a husband for Pierrette, a commodity which
was unprocurable in Paris. A friend assured her that the best European
strain of Siamese cats was to be found in Vienna, and in spite of the
difficulties of traveling Mary would have set out for Vienna if another
friend had not suggested that the famous strain would by now probably
have succumbed to the effects of the war. In the end, she went to
England, accompanied by Pierrette, for by now nothing else mattered
except that Pierrette should have kittens.
Mary took rooms in the Victoria Palace Hotel overlooking Kensington
Gardens, where with Célestine and Pierrette she settled down to spend
Christmas. The gayety of the golden shops in High Street reminded her
too poignantly of Christmastides when the boys came home from school
for the holidays; and when Muriel who had heard of her mother's arrival
in England wrote to suggest that she should spend Christmas as the
guest of the Community, it seemed a wise way of escaping from the
sadness of memory.
The house of which Muriel was sister-in-charge was in a remote
Gloucestershire village and was used as a home for old women whom
the Order befriended. Mary felt rather like one of those old women
herself when she attended vespers in the little chapel on the evening
of her arrival. It did not seem credible that the capable sister of
whom everybody, including herself, stood so much in awe was her own
daughter. Muriel appeared not a day older than when she entered the
Order ten years ago.
"I was wrong, dear," her mother said, when she was sitting in the
parlor with Muriel during recreation on Christmas Eve. "I was quite
wrong, dear, to oppose your becoming a nun. Your intention took me so
completely by surprise that I never had time to imagine the lines on
which you might develop. It is only now when I see you mistress of your
own house, as it were, that I realize how perfectly the life suits your
temperament."
And that night when after Mass the old women, flotsam from life's
seat at last forever still, knelt round the crib where lay the image
of the infant Saviour, Mary began to apprehend that there was in
the Christian religion something more satisfying than the ambiguous
promises and performances of crystal-gazers, than the always to be
suspected rappings and tappings of mediums. Her mind went back to hours
spent with Mademoiselle Lucinge in her gray room at Châteaublanc when
the garden was melodious with autumnal birdsong and above the notes of
robin-redbreasts Mademoiselle spoke to her about God. This summer she
would revisit Châteaublanc, and perhaps in the little church where her
old school-mistress had prayed for the woes of France to be lightened
she should find that perfect assurance of something beyond which had
been denied to her grandmother, but granted to her own daughter. She
looked across to where in the flickering candlelight Muriel knelt
praying, her eyes turned heavenward and full of tears. Tears for what?
For the mere imagination of the reality of that Divine Infant in the
manger of Bethlehem. To Muriel's limpid faith had been granted all that
motherhood could confer on woman. To her kneeling there belonged a baby
that would never grow up to compass her disillusionment, a baby that
promised to all who believed in Him immortal life. Hers, hers by the
gift of faith.
Yet when Mary tried to give herself what she was able to understand had
been given to Muriel, she could only perceive the image and miss the
reality it tried to express. The faces of the old women kneeling round
the crib appeared as meaningless as a row of pippins on the shelf of a
store-room. For the sake of a comfortable bed and plenty of food they
would have been every bit as willing to kneel round _la planchette_.
"Do you believe, dear child, in the possibility of communicating with
the dead?" Mary asked her daughter at the first opportunity she was
given of talking to her in private.
"If you mean, do I believe in spiritualism, I certainly do not," said
Muriel severely. "And if there _is_ anything in it, I should say that
it was controlled by the spirits of evil. I wish you wouldn't practice
such a wretched substitute for worship," she continued. "I cannot
understand why people who profess to believe in such hocus-pocus do
not submit themselves to the demands of a true religion. It is surely
just as easy to accept the doctrines of Christianity as the frauds of
mediums."
"There are some people, Muriel, who think that real religion has been
ruined by ecclesiastical bigotry. Personally I have never been able to
accept a man-made religion. You see, dear, I have been so much in the
world. I have suffered so many disappointments and disillusionments
that the notion of a man standing between myself and the hereafter is
repugnant."
"My dear mother, if you will forgive me for saying so, you are really
talking nonsense. All your life you have been accustomed to rely upon
yourself instead of upon God. You cannot expect to receive faith if you
do not ask for it."
"Auto-suggestion!" Mary exclaimed. "When I receive a direct
communication from the world of spirits, I am told it is
auto-suggestion. But surely to receive a belief that you expect to
receive can only be called auto-suggestion. Mind, I do not say that
what you believe is not true. I am perfectly sure in any case that it
is highly suitable for you to believe it, for I have never seen you
looking better. Nothing could have given me greater delight than to
behold your happiness in the life to which you have dedicated yourself.
I am only trying to suggest that there may be other ways of approaching
the unseen and, however inadequately, of solving the great problem that
lies before us all, a problem which I am likely to solve, I hope, many
years before you. I hold no brief for spiritualism. In fact, the more
I see of its practice the less I am attracted to it. I envy you your
faith, dear child. I envy and respect it. And I've greatly enjoyed my
little visit."
"It is very peaceful down here," Muriel agreed with a smile.
"And old age will have no terrors for you," her mother murmured.
"Because I understand so well that for you old age will simply seem a
slow and tranquil drawing nearer to God. Happy little girl of mine!"
"Yes, I am happy."
"And that makes me happy, for it helps me to realize that so far as my
children are concerned I have not been a complete failure. I wish I
could stay here longer, but I've left my little cat in London with only
my maid to look after her, and I think I ought to be getting back."
Mary perceived that an obligation to a cat was something utterly
incomprehensible to her daughter, and when she kissed her good-by,
kissed those cheeks cold and faintly flushed like the petals of a
Christmas rose, she felt that she was parting from a creature more
remote than either of her dead sons.
"Flesh of my flesh," Mary thought. "And yet my little cat is nearer
to me. Those are the kind of puzzles that really do make human life a
riddle."
Mary remembered how sometimes her grandmother had tried to draw near to
herself, because the two of them were all that was left of a family.
"She must have supposed that my remoteness came from my mother's blood.
But it probably would not have made much difference if I had been her
own daughter. I suppose that we all grow to resent those first years
of dependence upon other people. I suppose we all care only to think
of ourselves as complete personalities. And is there anything more to
come? Is there? Is there? Or do we instinctively know that this life
is the whole of our individual life and for that reason do we cling so
hard to being ourselves while we live it? And when we are growing old,
do we crave for the contact of youth in order to delude ourselves with
the belief that we shall grow young again in death?"
When Mary reached the hotel, she was met by Célestine with a grave and
frightened countenance.
In a moment Mary guessed what had happened. "Pierrette is ill."
The maid burst into tears.
"Very ill?"
"_Madame, Pierrette est morte. J'ai télégraphié ce matin. Le medicin
était très brave pour elle, mais la grippe, Madame, la grippe! Elle a
souffert beaucoup, la pauvre petite!_"
The manager of the hotel drew near to express his condolences and
to explain that he had assisted Mrs. Alison's maid in every way by
telephoning for the best veterinary doctor in Knightsbridge. He had
advised Mrs. Alison's being communicated with by telegram as soon as
the animal's serious condition was obvious. Yesterday it had seemed
unnecessary to summon Mrs. Alison back from the country. Of course,
if he had known then that the illness was likely to terminate fatally
he should have done so. He appreciated what the loss of such a pet
meant. Only this summer his wife had lost a pet cockatoo, and she had
been quite inconsolable for two days. One did not expect a cockatoo
to die suddenly. One always thought of them as living forever. He was
sorry that it had not been possible to keep the dead cat in the hotel,
but Mrs. Alison would understand that it might be liable to create an
unpleasant impression upon the other guests. So many people dreaded
influenza in any shape. It was with the deepest regret that he had
ordered the remains to be taken away; but he was sure that the sight of
the poor little dead animal would have been a grief for Mrs. Alison.
Could he send anything up to her room? It was early for tea; but, after
her journey and the sad news, perhaps Mrs. Alison would like her tea
early.
"We shall return to Paris to-night," said Mary. "Go and pack my
things, Célestine. I do not wish to go upstairs to my room. I shall
take a little walk in the Gardens by myself. By myself."
It was an afternoon of silver frost and sunshine under a pale blue
December sky. The walks of Kensington Gardens were thronged with
children whose vivid laughter made Mary feel of less account in the
human scene than one of the skeleton leaves lying on a bed of last
year's flowers. She tried to escape from the sounds of youth and
merriment; but wherever she walked the air was full of laughter, the
crystalline air tinkled with laughter.
Had Pierrette wanted her at the end? Had she failed the one living
creature in the whole world that might have looked to her? Question for
evermore unanswerable, regret for evermore unquenchable, longing for
evermore unappeasable!
She had not felt able to revisit the room where she had left Pierrette
sitting so cosily by the fire, when she set out to Gloucestershire; and
yet she had been able to decide to go back to the house in Paris which
without Pierrette would seem emptier, vaster, lonelier than ever.
If now she could pray!
For what?
For mercy upon her old age.
For something to lead her out of the shadows.