Jane had made no impression on my mother. Mrs. Carpenter had made
too much of one. She had deflected my mother’s attention from Jane
to herself and this, with unfortunate consequences. Mrs. Carpenter
affected my mother like a loud and unpleasant noise, and my mother
hated noises more than anything in the world. I am not trying to be
witty. I mean this literally. I have seen my mother grow pale with a
sort of nervous nausea and close her eyes in a desperate effort to
control the faintness that came over her at the sound of a harsh ugly
voice raised in anger. There was something about Mrs. Carpenter that
set her nerves on edge in the same way. Her metallic jingling clothes,
her loose easy swagger, her wiry grey curls, her humorous rolling eye,
made up an _ensemble_ that though to most people not seemingly at all
“loud” gave my mother sensations of clashing and clanging. When she
was about it was impossible for _Maman_ to think of or listen to any
one else. All the effort of her hypersensitive nervous organism was
concentrated on just simply bearing her, and she was obliged now to
bear her often and for hours at a time. Mrs. Carpenter didn’t let her
off. She had wanted to know my mother; she knew her now and she made
the most of her.
During the weeks that preceded the wedding, Izzy was incessantly
with my mother. She was in the highest of gay good humours. A big
fashionable wedding to prepare for, she was in her element. Having
achieved her ambition she professed to take it all as a joke. She
treated the approaching marriage of her daughter as a great lark and
wanted my mother to have her share of the fun. She consulted her about
everything, submitted lists and samples of engraved invitations,
dragged her to dressmakers who were preparing the trousseau and
made her come and help open presents. I have a picture of my mother
in a corner of Mrs. Carpenter’s drawing room, limp and pale in her
black clothes, submerged in cardboard and tissue paper, while the
indefatigable Izzy on her knees in the middle of the floor held up
one object after another and gave vent to shouts of indiscriminate
rapture or groans of unenlightened contempt. Poor, dreadful Izzy. She
had such definite ideas about things. Her ignorance was confident
and documented. She had priced every marble and bronze in Paris. No
jeweller’s shop held any secrets for her. She was a connoisseur in
lace. But the little tarnished faded treasures sent by some of our
relatives to Philibert’s bride belonged to no such category, and were
viewed with bewildered disdain. Antique furniture had never been seen
in her own apartment, but she knew that cracked lacquer and tarnished
gilding was respectable in tables and chairs. Beyond that she could not
go. Her instinct had stood in the way of her desire to learn. She clung
irresistibly to baubles and coveted with passion the massive silver tea
service sent by Aunt Clo. I know that Aunt Clo hesitated between this
and an exquisite Ingres drawing. I remember Izzy weighing the monstrous
kettle in her hands, her face a study of shrewd gloating apprisal and
her knee planted firmly on the face of a poor little Louis XV doll that
had come from Aunt Marianne’s cabinet of XVIII century toys.
It was unfortunate that my mother was forced to assist at these
séances, and that Jane herself was so often absent trying on clothes.
The absence of the one and the ignorance of the other were proofs to my
mother that neither knew how to behave. She judged Izzy as if she were
a Frenchwoman and supposed that because the noisy creature did not know
a treasure of art when she saw it that she most probably put her knife
in her mouth. And so during those days that would have exhausted a much
more robust woman than my mother, Izzy did, I believe, at the very
beginning of Jane’s life with us, use up all the vitality that _Maman_
could dispose of on behalf of Philibert’s American family.
The dinner she was obliged to attend for which Mrs. Carpenter had
collected two ambassadors and a slangy Duchess was the last straw. My
mother had never been to such a dinner in her life, and I confess to
a complete sympathy with her when she gasped out afterwards that it
was incredible that she should have been preserved from such ordeals
throughout her youth when she had enough energy to bear them, only
to be subjected to them in her old age when she hadn’t. That dinner,
with its ten courses, was the funeral feast of a relationship not
yet born, but that might truly have come into being and flowered to
full sweetness between the grave awkward girl in the straight white
frock, and the little quivering lady whose twitching eyebrows and
frightened hurried glances alone testified to her acute agony of soul.
Poor _Maman_, poor Jane, poor Izzy. I was there. I saw, and I did not
realize the full meaning. I did not realize how lasting the effect
would be. I was on the contrary absurdly reassured because of Jane
herself. I saw in her silence, her gravity, her perfect timid deference
to my mother, a promise of future felicity. I gathered that she would
never be guilty of publicly blushing for her own parent, but that she
would and did appreciate mine. I was right in this, but I was wrong
in believing that my mother would appreciate in her turn the tender
tribute. I reckoned without her nerves, her weariness, her discouraged
sense of being victimized and exposed, all the accumulations of her
years of abhorrence of the thing that was now thrust upon her. She
had complained so little that I had failed to understand how deeply
humiliating to her were the circumstances of her son’s marriage. She
considered it indisputably a _mésalliance_, and yet she was forced to
appear to rejoice in it with indecent exhibitions of familiarity. Mrs.
Carpenter not only had disregarded her request for a little family
gathering but had evidently succumbed to the desire to show her to just
those people who, not having yet seen her, would especially relish the
sight. “Just as if, _mon cher_,” my mother wailed afterwards, “I were
anything to look at. Fancy wanting to show me, a skimpy bundle of black
clothes.” She had done violence to herself in going to that dreadful
apartment in the Avenue du Bois, and the effort was too much for her.
The place was too much for her. She never forgot it and, I believe she
never looked at Jane without remembering those golden plates, those
loud nasal voices, those large glasses full of crushed ice and green
peppermint, those horrid scraping fiddles. To my mother such an evening
was a souvenir to last her the rest of her days. The most she could
do after that was not actively to dislike her daughter-in-law, and
she seemed to achieve this by cultivating in all that concerned that
young person a consistent vagueness. When people talked of Jane she
only half listened and answered irrelevantly. Her phrase was always the
same--“_Mais oui, elle est si gentille._” When Jane herself was there
she would look absent-mindedly beyond her and put her phrase in another
form and murmur--“_Comme vous êtes gentille._” Jane could never get
any further than that. It constituted a barrier, graceful and light as
gossamer, impenetrable as steel armour. All the girl’s longing to be
loved and to please, all her naïve attentions, all her thoughtful plans
for the older woman’s comfort, were met with the same sweet gentle
vagueness. When she brought flowers, when she asked advice, when she
put her motor at the other’s disposal, when she asked her to come to
her, it was always--“_Comme vous êtes gentille_,” followed by a little
plaintive sigh that the girl gradually came to understand. Even when
she worked out and carried through all on her own, a scheme for adding
considerably to my mother’s material ease, the formula was merely
changed to “_Vous êtes vraiment trop gentille_” and finally when Jane’s
baby was born, and she believed that at last her mother-in-law would
show some warmth of feeling, the words that greeted her when she opened
her eyes and saw the latter leaning over the bassinet, were--“Comme
elle est gentille,” this time addressed to the slumbering infant.
I know that my mother tried to be kind to Jane, and I believe that she
was never positively unkind, never at least during those first years
of her marriage, but aside from the unpleasant pressure Mrs. Carpenter
had brought upon her and that had given her a kind of chronic nervous
depression in all that concerned Jane, there was also the fact that
Jane was not the sort of person who would ever have appealed to her.
My mother liked Bianca and had wanted her for a daughter-in-law; how
then could she love Jane who was the antithesis of Bianca, and who
by usurping Bianca’s place, so my mother put it to herself, brought
the contrast constantly to her mind? I have heard my mother say that
she liked people to be more interesting than they looked, and found
it amusing to be with people whom she was led on by some subtle
provocative charm to discover. She recognized this charm in Bianca
without ever discovering the sinister meaning of it, and she felt that
Jane showed too much and therefore promised too little. Jane was too
big and too striking to please her. She made, to my mother’s eyes, too
much of a display. My mother liked above everything “_mesure_.” Her
favourite form of condemnation was to call a thing “_exagéré_.” What
at bottom she cared most for in a person was their being “_comme il
faut_.” I don’t believe that she ever went so far as to consider her
daughter-in-law vulgar, but there were things about her that she would
have called “_outré_.” If she had ever allowed herself to depart from
the vague affectionate affability that she preserved so consistently
and so bafflingly, she would have said, (perhaps she did say something
of the kind to Claire, I know they discussed Jane between them) that
there was something almost shocking in a young woman with such an ugly
face having such a beautiful figure. They, Claire and _Maman_, would
have liked the ugliness of the face better if it had not been held so
high on such splendid shoulders. They would have forgiven Jane her
profile if it had not been for her really marvellous hands and feet. In
the same way they would have known better how to deal with the whole
striking physical being if it had not gone with such shyness and such
humility. What they could not make out, and found it hard to put up
with, were her incongruities. Such looks should aesthetically have been
combined with audacity and hardness. Instead they found on their hands
a poor quaking creature of a pathetic docility who seemed to present to
them on her lovely palms an exposed and visibly pulsating heart, that
they didn’t know what to do with, didn’t want to touch, were positively
afraid of. It seems strange, but it was nevertheless true that Jane
frightened them. Her need of them exposed there quite simply to their
gaze, her simple, inarticulate but all too visible desire to love them
and be loved, made them turn away in a kind of flurry that was partly
delicacy and partly fear. There was an intensity about her that opened
dangerous and wearying vistas of emotion which they wished at all costs
to avoid. Claire said to me one day--
“Mother is afraid Jane will crush her, throw herself on her, I mean,
literally, and hug and squeeze her, and she doesn’t like physical
contact of that sort, you know that.”
Of course I knew. We all knew. From our earliest years we had always
approached _Maman_ as it were on tiptoe, delicately, as if she were
made of some precious perishable stuff that would be broken at a rude
touch. Our sense of this had been for us one of her subtlest charms.
When she allowed us to kiss her we did so lightly and quietly. The
touch of our lips on her hair or her soft worn cheek, was the fleeting
pleasure of a winged instant, yet it was a pleasure; she had a way of
conveying to it a quality, a fine quick elusive meaning. We never felt
that we had been cheated, on the contrary, her kisses were rare and
might have been deemed meagre, but they were beautiful. There was a
grace in the way she laid her hand on one’s arm and drew one down that
was more than artistry; it conveyed a sense of something precious that
had never been vulgarized by handling and mauling. I do not remember
her ever folding any of us in her arms, and if my memory of her
demonstrations is particularly acute because they were more often for
Claire or for Philibert than for me, that only proves that I know what
I mean and in no way diminished the beauty of what I was so often able
to observe from my distance. The act of opening wide her arms would
have been extraordinary in my mother. I never saw it. With Claire who
was the person in the world to whom she was closest, I often noticed
how delicate and restrained was her manner, and yet somehow with
scarce any demonstrations of affection, they conveyed to each other
an infinite tenderness. They were constantly together, they talked
everything over. Claire had, I believe, no secrets from _Maman_. They
depended on each other. Together they tasted the ineffable sweetness
of almost perfect communion. And yet I never saw them cling together,
I never surprised them in each other’s arms. So strangely alike, so
perfectly in harmony, they reminded me sometimes of characters on the
stage, two figures in some graceful pantomime who had been drilled to
make the same gestures in time to the same music and who moved always
through the close articulate measure of their parts in perfect unison,
tracing parallel patterns in the space round them, mysteriously united
yet never touching and scarcely ever looking at each other.
Such an impression I sometimes had in the old days when I still lived
in the bosom of the family, and now, as a kind of moral outcast,
looking back I find even more in it than I did then. I see them not
so much as actors who had learned a part, but almost as hypnotized
beings who, whether they wished it or not, were bound to move and
act and speak in a certain way. What it all comes to, I suppose, is
that they were the fine perfect products of a system that held their
individualities chained. So perfectly representative of their class, of
their race, of the discriminative intolerant idea of their forebears,
as to have been born with a complete set of gestures and prejudices
and preferences and vocal intonations all ready for them, existing in
them regardless of their own volition. I see them as the slaves of a
hyper-sensitive, super-subtle inheritance, and I understand that with
them many things were more truly impossible than with most people. It
was impossible for them to make an ugly abrupt movement. The strong
occult force of their breeding controlled their limbs and gave them a
kind of grace that if one watched carefully was reminiscent of heavy
powdered wigs and unwieldy panniers. It was impossible for them to
mingle in crowds or walk along the street or take an interest in public
affairs. It was impossible for them to look at the public without scorn
or subject themselves to the physical contact of poor people in crowded
trains. Instinctively they manœuvred to hide themselves from the eyes
of the public. It was really as if they had lived under another régime
and could not quite realize this one.
How could I not understand what Claire meant when she said that _Maman_
was afraid that Jane would crush her? Jane was no reincarnation of some
spoiled beauty of another century. If she represented any one but her
glorious healthy self, it was more likely a Red Indian princess or a
blond Norse amazon. Jane had not learned in a previous existence how
to conceal one set of feelings and delicately convey another. She did
not even know that such feats were expected of her. She would learn,
but it would take time. For the moment she was just obviously what she
seemed, a brave ardent young thing, capable of all sorts of mistakes.
She would come in with her long beautiful stride and tower over my
mother and sweep down to her; to Claire it seemed like swooping not
sweeping, and my mother would huddle in her chair and struggle against
the inclination to shut her eyes, and then the confused, intimidated,
glowing creature in the marvellous clothes of Philibert’s designing,
would sit dumbly, wistfully, waiting and wanting something, anything in
the way of a crumb of comfort; would watch for any sign of unstudied
natural joy at her presence and would accept in its place the pleasant
flow of my mother’s vague affability, and would go away humbly, to
come back the next day with an offering, flowers or a book or some
precious little gift, and always my mother would say--“_Comme vous êtes
gentille._”
And besides all this the things that Jane and Philibert did were not
calculated to amuse my mother in the least. She had never cared about
public shows, and had always considered the fine art of entertaining
to exist in the number of people one eliminated. Philibert’s enormous
parties, his balls, his dinners of a hundred couples, his fantastic
“_Fêtes Champêtres_,” dismayed her. She thought they were Jane’s
parties. It was Jane whom she held responsible for all that was
spectacular in the brilliant existence of her son; it was Jane she
blamed for the phenomenal marble Paris mansion. It would have been
impossible to have explained to her that Jane had scarcely glanced
at the plans of the house when Philibert presented them to her. She
refused to go to any of their parties. Her dislike of magnificence
was a part of her deep absolute view of what was “_comme il faut_.”
Magnificence was suitable to crowned heads, and though she would not
have admitted that anything was too good for her son, she did not
like to see him playing at being a king, and perhaps because all her
life she had cherished a loyal personal sentiment for the destitute
Orleans family, taking their political mourning for her own, it filled
her with horror to find her son surrounded by all the trappings of
an actor monarch and scattering largesse to the rabble, in a way her
impoverished, unrecognized, exiled sovereign could not do. His enormous
house, which she persisted in believing to be Jane’s, depressed her.
The really phenomenal harmony of its richness escaped her. The regal
vistas of its apartments, all warmed and glowing and made by her son’s
consummate artistry habitable left her cold. The fine tapestries, the
riot of blended colour, the audacious effects of light and shadow, the
profusion of precious lustrous silks and gleaming brocades, wearied
her gaze. Knowing well enough, who better, good things when she saw
them, there were here too many to look at. I have pathetic memories of
her shrunken black figure tripping through those immense chambers on
Philibert’s arm. I see her pass with little pattering steps across the
endless expanse of polished floor, her lorgnon to her eyes, her head
turning this way and that with quick bird-like movements, pretending to
look at everything while refusing to see anything at all. The size of
the place oppressed her and made her suspicious. She could not believe
that such enormous rooms could be full of fine little treasures. Her
experience told her that fine pieces were rare and were kept under
glass, and were not to be bought, save at a price. Even Jane’s fortune,
which she had been so often made to feel was too much for good taste,
could not in her opinion have filled that house with genuine things.
Her son had been led astray. He was guilty of imitation. If he took her
straight up to a gem of a cabinet and made her scrutinize it, well, she
admitted its existence, but what was one cabinet in a room where there
were twenty? She was in her way incorrigible. She did not believe in
miracles, and while the rest of Paris was gaping it only made her feel
dreadfully tired to be so put upon. That was her real feeling about the
gigantic mansion. It made her feel tired. She was obliged to take the
grand staircase slowly and stop on each landing. With her hand on the
polished marble balustrade she toiled up it panting, gently catching
her breath in the presence of mocking marble fauns and disdainful
goddesses. Dear little fragile figure, growing smaller and more bent
with time in her unmodish garments and simple black bonnet, fine proud
gentle lady, I believe in the bottom of her heart she was sometimes
afraid one of the army of constantly changing footmen would mistake her
identity and show her to the housekeeper’s room. It was the sort of
thing she would have taken as a horrid joke with a dreadful moral.
I find that I am taking a vast deal of trouble and time in explaining
my own family, and seem to be getting absolutely no nearer my goal,
that is the heart of Jane’s own problem. And yet I am sure it was all a
part of it. In going into my mother’s feelings in such detail, I do so
because of what happened later, and I sometimes wonder whether perhaps
my mother foresaw what was going to happen and knowing whichever way
it turned out that she was going to take Philibert’s part, made up
her mind at the outset that it would all be much simpler if she never
gave Jane any encouragement to expect anything else. Her attitude of
increasing aloofness as time went on becomes more explicable if one
interprets it as an anticipation of trouble. Heaven knows trouble
was obvious enough to anybody who was interested. Weren’t there bets
on at the club as to how long Philibert would stand it, that is, his
enforced conjugal felicity? And other bets as to how long it would
take his wife to find out certain things that every one else knew? It
required no special prophetic gift to foresee that some day something
was bound to happen, and I am sure my mother foresaw it. But I am a
little puzzled as to why Philibert himself chose to make matters worse
by keeping his wife and mother estranged, for I am perfectly sure that
if Philibert had wanted my mother to love Jane, she would have done it,
simply because she always did what he asked her. And again, if _Maman_
had brought herself to care for Jane, she would have influenced her
and guided her; she might even have prevented her from precipitating a
crisis. One would have thought Philibert would have availed himself of
such aid. But no, that was not his idea. His idea was quite other. He
wanted his mother to dislike his wife for reasons of his own, or, at
any rate, he did not want any understanding intimacy to exist between
the two. On the other hand he asked Claire to make friends with her and
help him with her education. And he seemed content that Jane and Bianca
should be friends. Was this because he knew Claire would never care for
Jane, however much she saw of her, and was afraid my mother might? I
don’t know, I am not sure. There are aspects of the case that grow more
obscure the more I think of them.
As for Bianca--and Jane--that I learned about afterwards.