The same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known
so well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though
I went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself
to enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and
sat down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys,
and I turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked
every door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and
went away. Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in
charge of my apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople.
During the two years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our
letters, we never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their
names crept in. I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack’s
letters replying to one of mine—
“What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill,
and feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice, of course
troubles me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight
after he died. I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part
of your delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it
you.”
Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in
India so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I decided
to return at once to Paris. He wrote: “I am well, and sell all my
pictures as artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of
my own, but I am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off
a strange anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a
breathless expectancy—of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing
me out. Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall
anything afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating,
and all day the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night
to recall the same experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have
determined to break up this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I
go to Bombay, or will you come to Paris?”