I
It is a pity we do not die when our lives are finished. Jane may live
another twenty years--a long time to wait, alone between two worlds.
Jane is forty-three, I am five years older, Philibert is fifty-six, my
mother nearly eighty, we are all alive, and strangely enough _Maman_
is the only one whose life is not yet ended. Hers will not end till
the moment of her death. She has been a wise artist. She is still
embroidering delicately the pattern of her days; she still holds the
many threads in her fingers. Quietly, exquisitely she will put in the
last stitches. They will be the most beautiful of all; they will be her
signature, the signature of a lady. Then she will close her eyes and
commend her soul to God and the perfect work of her worldly wisdom will
be finished.
As for me, I see no reason why I should not live on indefinitely just
as I have done, and on the whole I am more comfortable here than in
Purgatory, a place that I imagine to be like the suburbs of London. I
see myself there, tapping with my crutch, along endless tramway lines
between interminable rows of dingy perky villas. This little street
in the Faubourg Saint Germain is much nicer. It is old and proud and
secretive; a good street for a cripple to live in; it shelters and
protects him. Once he has entered it he has no distance to go to get
home. It is usually deserted and the great pale houses show discreet
shuttered windows with no one behind the shutters to stare at him. I am
Philibert’s crippled brother. Something went wrong with me before I was
born. Nothing else of importance has ever happened to me, except Jane’s
marrying my brother.
Jane loved this little street. She said that it told her the story of
France and conveyed to her all the charm of the Paris she loved best,
the proud gentle mysterious Paris of the 18th century that with all its
fine reserved grandeur assumes modestly the look of a small provincial
town.
I came to live here when Philibert sold our house in the Rue de Varenne
that is just round the corner, and my mother went to her new apartment
near the Étoile. That was twenty years ago, and very little has changed
in the street since I came to these rooms at the bottom of this little
courtyard between Constantine’s big white house and the Embassy. The
little man who peddled bird-seed has vanished long ago, his voice is
no more to be heard chanting, but other street vendors still come by
with their sing-song calls. What indeed was there that could change,
save perhaps old Madame Barbier’s grocery shop at the corner, tucked
up against Constantine’s stable wall? But even Madame Barbier has
remained the same. Her hair is as smooth and glossy black, her tight
corsage as neat, and her trim window with its glass jars of honey and
the nice bright boxes of groceries is as it always has been. A thrifty
respectable woman is Madame Barbier, with a pleasant word for her
neighbours. For the rest, on the opposite side of the street there is
the convent, with its pointed roof and the chapel belfry showing above
the wall, and there are the five big houses with their great gates that
make up the whole length of the street. Not a long street--often when
I turn into it at one end, I recognize a familiar figure going out of
it at the other, the good Abbé perhaps going home after confessing the
sisters in the convent, or old Madame d’Avrécourt in her shabby black
jacket, her fine little withered face under her bonnet, wearing its
habitual enigmatic smile. Monsieur l’Abbé says that her voluminous
petticoats are heavy with the sacred charms she has sewn into the
hems, and that may well be; I know that her devotion is very great and
her interest in the outside world very small, and the sight of her is
comforting to me.
It is so quiet here, and so confined. It is like a cloister--or a
prison--I am glad of that.
Tonight, Good Friday night, I can hear the good sisters in the chapel
singing. The mysticism of their haunting chant penetrates the walls
of this old house, and tonight because of their lamenting, because of
their dread disciplined agony of supplication, the street is immensely
deep and high, whereas yesterday it was just small and dim and worldly,
with its houses blinking over its walls, a proud battered deceiving old
street, hiding the rare beauty of its dwellings, guarding the secrets
of its families behind mute shutters, till the day it should crumble
to pieces or an insolent government should turn it upside down like an
ash-bin.
It never, of course, could get used to Jane. Who of us did get used
to Jane? Did I myself? Wasn’t she a big troubling problem to us all
till the very end? How could we not be afraid of her? Poor magnificent
Jane--fine timid innocent child--dangerous nature woman--dreadful
crying message from a new bellowing land--what was she? What was she
not? How could she fit in here? She was as strange here as a leopard
beautifully moving down the grey narrow pavement. How she used to
frighten the good Abbé. I have seen him scuttle into a neighbouring
doorway to let her pass, as if there were no room for him along the
stones she walked so grandly. It was true. There was no room for any
one but Jane when she came, and now that she is gone never to come back
again, the place is as dreary and empty as an abandoned cemetery and
the light is as insipidly pale as the half shadow in a sick room. She
has left a sickness in this place, because she came here sometimes to
see me--and won’t come any more.
And yet I stay on here. I shall stay here always. I have no reason
to go anywhere now that I have been to America to see Jane, and have
come back with the accurate awful knowledge of the great distance
between us. Ah, that wide sea, that New York, a high cold gate into
a strange over-powering country, those immense prairies, and those
tiny farm houses, with tiny women watching the train; Jane, a tiny
woman, Jane a speck, in a town that is a dot on the map. I will write
down Jane’s story. I will remember it all, everything that she told
me and everything that I saw, and will put it all down exactly with
perfect precision and accuracy, and then, perhaps I shall understand
her. Poor Jane--she wanted to understand life. She believed always
that there was a reason for things, an ultimate reason and a purpose.
She was no philosopher, she was a woman of faith. She should have been
the wife of a pioneer, the wife of such a man as Isak, who went into
the wilderness with a sack over his shoulder. Jane was made for such
a man. I can see them together going out under the sky, he, grave,
deep-chested, long-limbed, “a barge of a man,” and beside him a woman
like a ship, moving proudly. And she married Philibert. Could any
one who has ever seen her with Philibert miss the meaning of their
extraordinary contrast? Philibert with his clever jaunty little body,
his exaggerated elegance, his cold blue eyes and his impudent charm.
She made him look like a toy man. She could have broken him in two with
her hands. Why didn’t she? It is a long story. People say that American
women are very adaptable, very imitative. Jane wasn’t. She never became
the least like us, except in looks and that meant nothing. Paquin and
Chéruit and Philibert did that for her almost at once, but her looks,
even without their aid, were always a disguise, never a revelation of
her self. Some women are all of a piece with their charming exteriors,
Jane was a child cased in armour. As she grew older she learned to
use it, she made it answer, but she used it to become something she
was not. I call up her image as I write. I evoke Jane as she was that
last year in Paris, the most elegant woman in Europe, the most stared
at, and the most indifferent. I remember the cold hard nonchalance
that so frightened people she did not like, and the brilliant metallic
grace that rippled over her like gleaming light when she was pleased.
I remember her excessive hauteur in public, the disdainful carriage
of her strange head that was like a coin fashioned by some morose
craftsman of Benvenuto Cellini’s time. I recall the sidelong glitter of
her little green eyes. I remember her in public places, towering above
other women like an idol, mute, glittering, enigmatic, her curious
profile with its protruding lower lip, the tight close bands of jewels
round her forehead. What a figure of splendour she was in those days,
when Philibert had done breaking her heart; and when at the age of
forty she had ceased to care and had reached the perfection of her
physical type.
I think of her as she was when her mother brought her to Paris and
married her to Philibert; a great strapping girl with a beautiful body
and an ugly sullen face that deceived us all. How could one see behind
it? Can one blame them? I alone caught a glimpse. And she developed
slowly in our artificial soil. It took twenty years for her to become a
woman of the world, une grande dame. That was what they made of her. I
say they, but I suppose I mean primarily Philibert. It is horrible to
think of how much Philibert had to do with making her what she finally
was. And Bianca had a hand in it too. That is even worse.
We had realized the moment of Jane’s apotheosis. We had seen her
beautifully and gravely spread her wings. We held our breath, waited
entranced, and then, just then, she disappeared. Suddenly we lost her.
I refer, now, to our group, the little Bohemian group of kindred
spirits who loved Jane; Ludovic, Felix, Clémentine and the others.
Extraordinary that these friends of mine should have been the ones to
love Jane best. They were a gay lot of sinners, quite impossible judged
by any standard but their own. My mother only knew of their existence,
through Clémentine. She has always been in the habit of discussing
artists and writers as if they were dead. It was distressing to her
that Clémentine who was related to her by blood and had married a
Bourbon, should have held herself and her name so cheap as to consort
with men and women of obscure origin and problematical genius. As for
me, a man could do as he liked within measure, if he did not forget
to keep up appearances. She regarded my friendship for my wonderful
Ludovic and all the rest of them as a substitute for the more usual
and less troublesome clandestine affairs of the ordinary bachelor. As
I could never “_faire la noce_” like other men I was allowed these
dissipations of the mind, but _maman_ never forgave me for introducing
Ludovic to Jane. Dearest mother--it was no use telling her that Ludovic
was the greatest scholar of his day. I didn’t try to explain. After all
Ludovic needed no championing from me. I had wanted to do something
for Jane; I had wanted to relieve in some way the awful pressure of
her big bleak dazzling situation. Hemmed in by the complications of my
relationship to her, how many times had I not groaned over the fact
that she had been married by that awful mother of hers to the head of
our house and not to some one else’s devilish elder brother, instead
of to mine, I had pondered and tormented myself over a way of helping
her that would not give Philibert the chance of coming down on me and
shutting the big strong door of his house in my face, and at length
my opportunity had come. It had seemed to me that for her at last
the battle was over, and that she had achieved the desolate freedom
which we could turn into enjoyment. Fan Ivanoff was dead. Bianca had
disappeared. As for Philibert, he had grown tired of bothering her.
Her sufferings no longer amused him. Her loneliness was complete.
Although still to my eyes a figure of drama while we were essentially
merry prosy people, she appeared to me to have acquired that spiritual
mastery of events which made her one of us. I had reckoned without her
child, Geneviève.
How could I have understood then the fear with which she contemplated
her daughter’s future? And even supposing that I had understood
everything, and had the gift of seeing into that future and had beheld
the shadow of that lovely monster Bianca swooping down on Jane again to
drive her to extremity, even supposing I had known what was going to
happen and how that would take her away from us forever, I still could
have done nothing more than I did do. It had seemed to me that we could
provide her with a refuge, and so we did for a time. If Paris were to
offer her any reward, any consolation, any comfort, then such a reward
and such comfort was, I felt sure, to be found in the sympathy of
these people who had gravitated to one another, out of the heavy mass
of humanity that populated the earth, like sparks flying upwards to
meet above the smoke and heat of the crowd in a clear lighted space of
mental freedom. I gave her the best I had; I gave her my friends; and
if they thought she had come to them to stay, well then so did I. Our
mistake lay in thinking that because we were sufficient to each other
we must be sufficient to Jane as well. I do not believe it occurred
to any one of us how little we really counted for her; I, at least
never knew it until the other day. Actually I had never realized that
her soul was always craving something more, something like a heavenly
certitude or a divine revelation.
Conceited? I suppose we were; but then you see the world did knock at
our door for admittance. We had all literary and artistic Europe to
choose from, and we did realize the things we talked of. I mean that
we translated our thoughts into things people could see, ballets,
pictures, bits of music. We worked out our ideas for the mob to gape
at, and our success could be measured by the bitter hostility of such
people as Philibert, who fancied himself as a patron of the arts--a
kind of François I--and found us difficult to patronize.
Jane realized our worth of course. She had a touching reverence for our
ability. She saw clearly the distinct worlds represented by my mother,
and Ludovic; the one exquisite and sterile, beautifully still as a
sealed room with panelled walls inhabited by wax figures; the other
disordered and merry, convulsed by riotous fancies, where daring people
indulged their caprices, scoffed at facts and respected intellect.
What Jane did not realize was the humanity underlying this life of
ours. She thought us uncanny, but she could have trusted us in her
trouble. And we on our side did not know that we did not satisfy her.
After all, for the rest of us our deep feeling of well-being in one
another’s company was like a divine assurance, an absolute ultimate
promise. It was all the heavenly revelation we needed. When we gathered
round Clémentine’s dinner-table with the long windows opening out
of the high shabby room into the shadowy garden where we could hear
during the momentary hush of our voices the note of its flutey tinkling
fountain, or when we settled deep in those large worn friendly chairs
before Ludovic’s fire on a winter’s night, in the cosy gloom of his
overcharged bookshelves, it would come to us over and over again, like
the repeated sense of a divine conviction, that this exquisite essence
of human intercourse was nothing less than what we had been born for.
Jane could never have had that feeling, but we thought she shared it
with us. We did not know about that deep relentless urge in Jane that
was as inevitable as the rising tide. We never took seriously enough
her fear of God.
And so when she went away they thought--Ludovic and Clémentine and
the rest of them--“She will be here tomorrow, she will come back just
as she was, and she will find us just where she left us.” And they
continued to talk about her as if she had left them but an hour before
to go and show herself as she was often obliged to do in some great
bright hideous salon. Her chair was always there by Ludovic’s fireside,
and they took account in their discussions of her probable point of
view, as if she’d been there with them. There was something touching in
their expectancy. There was that in their manner to remind one of the
simple fidelity of peasants who lay the place of the absent one every
night at table. The truth did not occur to them, and I who wanted to be
deceived let their confidence communicate itself to me. I told myself
that they were right, that she was bound to come back, that they had
formed in her the habit of living humourously as they did, that they
had given her a taste for things she would not find elsewhere, and that
she would never be content to live now in that big blank new continent
across the Atlantic. The word Atlantic made me shiver. I must have had
a premonition; I must have known that I was going to cross it, urged
out upon that cold turbulent waste of horrid water by a forlorn hope
and an anguished desire to see her once more.
I hugged to myself during those days of suspense my feeling of the
irresistible appeal of my city. Had Jane not told me, one day on
returning from Como, that in spite of the problems her life held for
her here, she experienced nevertheless each time she went away such
a poignant home-sickness for Paris, its streets, its sounds, its
river-banks and its buildings, that she invariably came back in a
tremor of fear, positively “jumpy” at the thought that perhaps during
her absence it had changed or disappeared off the map altogether? If
she felt like this after a month’s sojourn in Italy, what had I now
to fear I asked myself? Had we not initiated her into the very secret
heart of Paris? Was there a remnant of an old and lovely building that
we had not shown her, or a fragment of sculpture or a picture worth
looking at to which we had not introduced her? Had she not come to feel
with us the difference of the temperature and tone of the streets, the
excitement of the jangling boulevards, the bland oblivion of the Place
de la Concorde, the ghostliness of the Place des Vosges, the intimate
provincial secretiveness of our own old peaceable quarter? Had not
Ludovic called into being for her out of the embers of his fire the
historic scenes that had been enacted in all these and a hundred other
places? Had he not made the whole rich fantastic past of our city
unroll itself before her eyes? Was it a little thing to be allowed to
drink at the source of so much humanized knowledge? Where in that new
country of hers would she find so fanciful and patient and tender a
friend as this great scholar?
So I piled up the evidence, and then when her letter came I knew that
I had foreseen the truth, and when I took them the news and they all
cried out to me--“Go and bring her back, and don’t come back without
her”--I knew while their high commanding voices were still sounding
in my ears that already I had made up my mind to go, and I knew too,
lastly and finally, that I would not be able to bring her back.
She had enclosed in her letter to me a note for them which I gave
to Clémentine, who read it and passed it on. One after another they
scanned its meagre lines in silence. I saw that Ludovic’s hand was
shaking. When he had finished he closed his eyes for a moment and his
head jerked forward. I noticed in the light of the lamp how white he
had grown in the last year, and how the yellow tint of his pallor had
deepened. Clémentine said looking at me--“It is not intelligible.
Perhaps you can explain.” And I was given the sheet of paper covered
with Jane’s large careless scrawl:
“Dear Friends,” I read, “I am not coming back. I am here alone
with the ghost of my Aunt Patty in the house where I lived as a
child. It is a wooden house with a verandah at the back. There
are snow-drifts on the verandah. I am trying to find out what it
has all been about--my life, I mean. If I believed that I would
understand over there on the other side of death, then perhaps
I would not be bound to stay here now, but I know that Ludovic
is right, and that the hope of eternal punishment like that of
immortal bliss and satisfied knowledge is just the fiction of our
vanity. My punishment is on me now, since among other things I
have to give you up.
“JANE.”
They had cried out at me when I told them, but after reading the letter
they were silent. It was as if they had been brushed by the wings of
some strange fearful messenger from another world, as if some departed
spirit were present. We might all have been sitting in the dark with
invisible clammy hands touching our hair, so nervous had we become. The
fall of a charred log in the fireplace made us jump.
Felix forced a laugh. “The ghost of her Aunt Patty,” he mocked
dismally. “Now what does she mean by that?”
“Her Aunt Patty was the person who took care of her as a child. Miss
Patience Forbes her name was. She seems to have been a remarkable
character. Jane often spoke of her.”
My words only added to their mystification. An old maid in America,
dead now, a remarkable character. What had she to do with them? What
power had she over their brilliant courageous Jane? Were they nothing
that they could be replaced by the wraith of an old puritan spinster?
The room seemed to grow chilly. Some one put a fresh log on the fire.
A little fitful wind was whimpering at the windows. Now and then a
gust of rain pattered against the glass with a light rapid sound like
finger-tips tapping. Felix had wandered away down the long dim room,
his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched as he stood with
his back to us, and his nose close to the packed shelves of books
against the farther wall. The tiny gilt letterings on the old bindings
glimmered faintly in the lamplight. He seemed to be searching among all
those little dim signs for an explanation. Far away beyond the network
of gardens and old muffling houses one heard from some distant street
the hoot of a motor. From the translucent depths of gleaming glass
cabinets the small mute mysterious figures of jewelled heathen gods and
little bronze Buddhas and curious carved jade monsters looked out at us
as if through sheets of water.
Under the aged shadowy eaves of that room, full of strange old symbols
and rare books and still rarer manuscripts, where so many ideas and
faiths and records had been sifted, examined and relegated to dusty
recesses, its occupants remained silent, staring at the new disturbing
object of their mystification. Clémentine, tucked into a corner of the
sofa, her boyish head that she dyed such a bad colour, on her hand,
scrutinized the tip of her foot that she held high as if for better
observation, in one of her characteristic angular attitudes. Her
slipper dangled loose from her toe; now and then she gave it a jerk of
annoyance.
They tried to take in the meaning of what they had read. The emotional
content of that scrawled page was so strange to them as to appear
almost shocking. They were rather frightened. Here indeed their
philosophy of laughter broke down, for they loved Jane and could not
make fun of her superstitions.
“We were never hard on her. We treated her gently.”
“Even when her seriousness bored us we were patient.”
“She can’t have loved us. We have never really known her then, after
all.”
Clémentine jerked about. “I was always wanting her to take lovers. She
wanted me to give up mine. Poor child--we were friends all the same.”
Felix’s falsetto came down to us in a shrill wail of exasperation.
“But we never attacked her religion. We left her alone. We were good to
her.”
Clémentine nodded. “Yes, we were good.”
I remembered the day I had first brought Jane to them, clothed in her
silks and sables, glittering with the garish light of her millions and
her high cold social activities. I had brought her straight from the
preposterous palace she had let Philibert build her to this deep dim
nook where we laughed and scoffed at the world she lived in. I had been
nervous then. I had been afraid they would find her impossible. But
they had seen through the barbarous trappings, intelligent souls that
they were. Hadn’t she realized how they had honoured her? Hadn’t she
known what dependable people they were?
I heard Clémentine say it again. “We were good, but she thought we
were wicked because we broke the ten commandments. She thought a lot of
the ten commandments.”
“It was the puritan spinster looking at us over her shoulder all the
time.”
And still they pondered and puzzled, bewildered, depressed, at a loss,
annoyed by their incapacity to picture to themselves even so much as
the place where she was, alone at that moment. “St. Mary’s Plains,
Mohican County, Michigan” was the address she gave. What an address to
expect any one to take seriously. If it had been a joke the mixture of
images would perhaps have conveyed something to them, but as a serious
geographic sign they could do nothing with it. It had the character
of a new glazed billboard, of a big glaring advertisement for some
parvenu’s patent. To think of Jane sitting down away off there in
the middle of a desert under it was too much for them. But the very
outrageousness of the enigma helped them.
“She couldn’t do it from inclination,” some one of them said at last.
“There must have been something terrible.”
Then it was that Ludovic startled us. He spoke slowly as if to himself.
“She was only beginning to learn how little conduct has to do with
life. For others she had come to understand that what one does has
little or no relation to what one is. I am convinced that she, poor
child, is persuaded that she has committed some dreadful crime.”
But it was Clémentine who said the last word that I carried away with
me.
“If she hadn’t married into your family,” she said, glaring out at me
from the door of her taxi, “she would have been all right. Why, she
should have chosen Philibert--”
“But, _chérie amie_, she didn’t. It was her mother who did it all.”
“Rubbish! She loved him. She loves him still.”