IX

Claire was a person who attracted people to her in spite of herself,

even those people whom she did not like. It had been so in the case

of Jane. My sister charmed more often than not without wanting to do

so. People in general were to her uninteresting and indiscriminate

admiration annoyed her. She was constantly worried by having to

snub would-be admirers who bored her. It was generally accepted in

the family that she was the victim of her own charm, and we often

half-laughingly commiserated with her. My mother once quite seriously

said, “_Cette pauvre_ Claire, with whom every one is in love and who

cares for no one, it is really very tiring for her.”

Jane’s devotion was to her from the first unwelcome, though for a year

or two she put up with it kindly enough. When Philibert asked her to

help him with Jane’s education, she replied that she already had four

children of her own to bring up, but she nevertheless let Jane go

about with her, gave her advice about people and clothes, let her do

errands for her; and in a mild way returned the girl’s demonstrations

of affection, but it all bored and worried her. There was for her no

pleasure in being adored by a young woman whom she found to be stupid.

She did not on the whole care much for women, and often said she did

not believe in their friendship. Her need of affection was abundantly

supplied to her in her own family. Between her mother and her children

she found all the tenderness she required; in society she asked merely

to be amused. At bottom she was a confirmed cynic. Human nature

appeared to her unsympathetic and pitiable. Her family represented for

her a refuge from a world that disgusted her more than it interested.

There was for her something ultimate and absolute in the ties of blood

that gave to the members of a family, all of them mere ordinary human

beings, a special precious significance for each other. If she had ever

analyzed it she would have said--“But of course I know that _Maman_

and Philibert and Blaise and _Tante_ Marianne are no different from

other people, but that does not matter, they are different for me.

It’s not that I believe in my brothers as men, it’s that I believe in

their relationship to me, and that, is the only thing I do believe in.

Philibert may be the most selfish man in Paris; nevertheless he would

not be selfish to me. That’s all, and that is enough. I don’t believe

in men. I don’t believe in women. I don’t believe in myself or in love

or happiness, but I believe in my family.” But of course she never did

so express herself. She was not given to talking about herself.

Philibert realized from the first that Claire was necessary to his

scheme, and somehow or other he prevailed upon her to exert herself

on his behalf. She was constantly at his house and became its chief

ornament, and one of its most potent attractions. Jane had her place,

usually at the top of the staircase, but Claire’s corner was the

corner people looked for. Always more quietly dressed than any one

else, (and I believe that Philibert planned the contrast of Jane’s

gorgeous brocades with an eye to the dramatic effect of the two

women) my sister created about her an atmosphere, a hush, a kind of

breathless attention. I have seen her often appear in one of those

great doorways, a slim, shadowy figure, in trailing grey draperies,

and stand there silently while gradually her presence made itself

felt, drew all eyes to her and created a feeling among the assembled

people that a new charm, a finer quality, had been conveyed to the

atmosphere by her being there. Wonderful Claire, clever Philibert;

they played beautifully into each other’s hands. I do not mean that

they were coldly calculating in regard to each other. On the contrary,

their mutual admiration gave them, each one, the warmest affectionate

glow. They rejoiced each in the rare qualities of the other, and

Claire, knowing that in Philibert’s house she would find men worthy

of appreciating her, knowing too, that no artist could so set off her

full value as her brother, seemed unlike my mother to derive a certain

amount of half-cynical amusement from what went on in that mansion.

It is, of course, possible that at bottom she was no more averse to

lunching “_dans l’intimité_” with royalties than was Mrs. Carpenter.

In any event, princes of royal blood paid court to her in Philibert’s

salons. And Philibert was right when he placed her beside him in

that house. She made it _comme il faut_. Her presence was to it a

benediction.

It had taken three years to build Philibert’s palace, and by the time

it was finished, Claire had prevailed upon her husband to move into

Paris and buy there a very nice house of his own. On the whole, things

had turned out for her better than any of us had expected. Six years

of what he would have called I suppose conjugal bliss had tempered the

ardour of my brother-in-law, who had to his wife’s immense relief begun

to look elsewhere than in his home for his pleasures. Though she had

never complained of her slavery and now never spoke of her freedom, we

all knew what had happened and were relieved. My mother was delighted.

“_Enfin_, he hasn’t killed her,” was her way of expressing it to me.

“The poor child is prettier than ever, and she manages so as not to be

talked about.” What it was that she managed I had no reason for asking.

If Claire was happy, if at last she had selected some one from among

her numerous admirers whom she could love and who was beautifying her

life for her, then all was well. I had no fault to find with her there.

My mother’s reading of the case seemed to me the true one. My mother

had suffered over her daughter’s marriage, and was glad to have some

one make up to her child some part of the joy of life she deserved.

All this was quite satisfactory. It never occurred to any one of us

to disapprove of Claire. How could we? Why should we? Had she done

anything preposterous like running away with a footman we should still

have stood by her. As it was she remained one of the most admired women

in Paris, and the least talked about, and her sentimental life was

for us a vague rather romantic secret realm which we took for granted

and respected. We never pryed into her affairs, and when one day

Philibert, in my mother’s drawing room, twitted Claire with the fact

that her beauty increased in proportion to her husband’s infidelities,

she merely laughed shyly and said nothing, knowing well enough that

we expected no explanation. The episode would certainly have passed

unnoticed, if Jane’s face had not shown it to be for her a moment of

quite terrible revelation. It was, I remember, on a Sunday afternoon.

We had all been lunching with my mother, Philibert, Jane, Claire and

I, and were sitting by the fire with our coffee cups. Philibert, with

his coat-tails over his arms, standing on the hearthrug, had been

quizzing me. He was in excellent spirits, having just brought off some

one of his social coups--I think it was the Prince of Wales that week

who had dined with him, and Philibert was particularly pleased with

Claire. His little sally had been meant and received as a token of

affection. Unfortunately he had forgotten Jane; or it may be that he

had not forgotten her and had spoken deliberately. It is possible that

he thought the time had come to carry her education a step further.

He probably felt it tiresome to be always on his guard as to what he

said in her presence for all the world as if she were a _jeune fille_.

She had heard and continued to hear in the houses she frequented,

enough talk of all kinds, heaven knows, to enlighten her as to the

habits of our world, but for all that we had instinctively all of us

in her presence been careful of what we said to each other. It was,

I suppose, our tribute to her innocence, or perhaps even to our fear

of her judgments. More than once I, for one, had stammered under the

gaze of her candid eyes and had swallowed the words that were on the

tip of my tongue. On this occasion the phrase spoken would not have

struck me as dangerous. I did not look at Jane to see how she took

it. I merely happened to be facing her on the sofa and couldn’t help

seeing the pallor that mantelled her face like a coating of wax. It

was like that, not as if she had grown pale because of the ebbing of

blood from her face, but as if a kind of coating of misery and fear had

visibly enveloped her in whiteness. For a moment I did not understand,

and failed to connect Philibert’s words with her aspect. “But, Jane,”

I exclaimed, “what is it? Are you ill?” Fiercely she motioned me to

be silent, gripping my arm with her strong hand so as to hurt me, and

conveying somehow without speaking, for she could not speak, that she

wanted me not to attract the attention of the others. Unfortunately

Philibert had taken it all in. He may have been watching for the effect

of his speech. His next words and his general behaviour give colour to

such a theory. He literally jumped forward toward her across the carpet.

“But, my poor child,” he cried out derisively, “don’t make up a face

like that. It’s most unpleasant. _Voyons_, what a way to behave in your

mother-in-law’s drawing-room. If I had known you were so stupid, I

should have left you at home.”

Those were his words. They were uttered with animation, with an almost

ferocious gaiety, and to accompany them he tweaked her playfully but

not gently by the ear. I got up from my place beside her, feeling

myself flush to my hair. I turned my back to get away from the sight of

that cowering creature huddling back from the hand that held her.

Exaggerated? Certainly she was exaggerated. Idiotic? Perhaps so.

Understand her? Of course I didn’t. It was not until long after that

I began to understand her. It was enough for me at that moment to

understand Philibert and perceive that never, even if she lived with

him for twenty years and maintained intact the dignity of her honesty,

would he respect her.

Claire had been a passive spectator of this little passage between

husband and wife. A slight flush had mounted to her cheek, a flush I

took to be of annoyance, for she rose a moment later with more than

usual abruptness and kissed my mother good-bye, ignoring completely the

other two, not so much as looking at them as she made for the door.

Jane, however, was too quick for her, and wrenching herself free from

Philibert, was upon her before she turned the door knob.

“Don’t go like that,” she cried, “don’t be annoyed. I know he was

joking. I know he did not mean it.” She seemed to be trying to grasp

Claire in her arms, to get hold of her, to cling to her. I had a

confused impression of something almost like a scuffle taking place

between the two women, and of Claire actually throwing her off. I may

be wrong. It may have been merely the expression on Claire’s face and

the tone of her voice that sent Jane backwards. I don’t know, but it

was quite pitifully horrid, and again I turned away my eyes, and with

my back to them heard Claire say in her coldest tone, and God knows how

cold her lovely voice can be--

“Ne soyez pas grotesque, je vous en prie. Laissez-moi partir.”

I do not mean to suggest that I sympathized with Jane that afternoon,

for I did not. It was all too absurdly out of proportion. She had

created out of nothing, out of the blue, a scene in my mother’s

drawing-room, and one had only to look at the little delicate crowded

place to know that scenes were abhorrent there. I believe actually that

a small table full of trinkets had been overturned in Jane’s rush for

the door, and I know that a coffee-cup was broken. It was the sort of

thing one simply never had conceived of. My mother’s nerves were very

much upset, and when Jane turned to her after Claire had shut the door

in her face, wanting to beg her pardon, _Maman_ could only wave her

hands before a twitching face and say, “No, no, my child. Don’t say any

more, it is enough for today.”

After that I did not see Jane for some weeks. Neither she nor Philibert

came to lunch with my mother the following Sunday, nor the Sunday

after. On the third Sunday Philibert came alone and explained briefly

that Jane was indisposed. He seemed preoccupied. He talked little,

ate nothing, and drank a number of glasses of wine as if he were very

thirsty. His lips twitched constantly, forming themselves into a kind

of snarl, and he was continually jerking the ends of his moustaches.

I remember thinking that he looked for all the world as if he wanted

to bite some one. He had never appeared more cruel. I began to have a

sickening foreboding. Claire eyed him strangely. I wondered if she had

something of my feeling. How I wished she had!

It all came out after luncheon. He could not contain himself. He was

beside himself with exasperation. Jane’s stupidity was too colossal.

He could not put up with being loved like that any longer. She had

made him a scene after the absurd affair of the other day and had

asked him to swear that he would never be unfaithful to her. Here he

raised his eyebrows, hunched his shoulders and threw out his hands.

It was incredible how she had gone on. She had said that she had been

thinking over his remark to Claire and was frightened by it, that when

he had spoken so lightly of his brother-in-law’s infidelities it had

come to her as a tremendous shock that such a thing was possible. An

abyss had opened before her--that was her word. How could Claire go on

living with a man who was unfaithful? She could not understand. What

did he mean by her sister’s growing more beautiful in proportion to her

husband’s infidelities? Had he meant anything, or was it only a joke?

Did Claire know her husband made love to other women? She loved Claire,

she thought her wonderful, but she didn’t understand. And so on and so

on.

Philibert recited it all to us. His voice grew shriller and shriller.

He piled up phrase after phrase in a crescendo of exasperation until he

burst into a loud laugh with the words--“She talks, she talks of our

marriage being made in Heaven.” He grasped his head in his hands.

Claire’s face wore a sneer.

“She professes not to know then, how it was her mother made it?” she

asked.

Philibert came as it were to a halt. He looked at us all one after

another. His face was of a sudden impudent, cool, smooth. He began to

explain lucidly.

“Imagine to yourself, she really did not know it. She believed it was

a love match. She believed it till yesterday, I mean last night, or

it may be it was this morning, I don’t remember looking at the time.

Anyhow, as she wouldn’t let me sleep I told her. I told her all about

it.”

“I don’t believe she didn’t know,” said Claire.

He took her up quickly. “There, my dear, you are wrong, and you miss

the whole meaning of her boring character.” He was enjoying himself

now, was my brother, dissecting a human being was one of his favourite

pastimes. In the pleasure it now afforded him to analyze Jane, he

forgot for the moment his personal annoyance.

“One must remember,” he mused, “that she is a savage, with the

mentality of a Huguenot minister. If you could hear her talk of the

sacrament of marriage! She is of a solemnity, and her ideals, _Mon

Dieu!_ what ideals! She once said to me that her grandfather loved her

grandmother at the day of his death just in the same way that he loved

her on the day of her wedding. When I replied ‘How very disgusting’ she

merely stared and left the room. She is always quoting her grandmother

and her Aunt Patty. What a background--I ask you? St. Mary’s Plains!

It would appear that in St. Mary’s Plains they always marry for love

and live together in endless monotony. Faithfulness--she is in love

with faithfulness; purity too, she thinks a great deal of purity. In

fact she has a most unpleasant set of theories. They fill up her

brain. There is no room for reality. What goes on before her eyes means

nothing to her. No, Claire, you are wrong. She knew nothing of her

mother’s bargaining with me for her little life. Believe it or not, it

is true. She married me for myself and believed the good God sent me

to her, and my revelations were a shock. Impossible she should have

simulated the emotion they caused her. The finest actress in the world

could not have done it. I admit that as a piece of acting it would have

been a fine performance. On the stage I would have enjoyed it, but in

one’s own bedroom, the conjugal bedroom--ugh! no.”

“What did she do?” asked Claire.

“She leaned up against the wall, face to the wall, I mean, flattened

against it, her hands high above her head, palms on the wall, too, as

if she were reaching up to the ceiling.”

“I don’t see anything wonderful in that.”

“It was a fine picture,” said Philibert. “But she stayed there too

long. She stayed like that some minutes. In fact I went on talking for

a long time to that image, that long back and those outstretched arms.

It reminded one of a crucifixion, modern interpretation. I was not sure

that she was not dying and expected her to fall backwards.”

My mother had been fussing nervously with her shawl, her sleeves, her

hair, giving herself little pats and tugs and looking this way and

that. Her face was drawn and working. She kept moistening her lips and

saying--“Is it possible? Is it possible?” She now broke in and cried

plaintively--

“But, my son, all this is terrible. I do not understand. What was it

you told her?”

“I told her quite simply, mother dear, that I had married her for her

money, that I had managed it all with Mrs. Carpenter before I had ever

seen her; (Old Izzy is done for with Jane now, I am afraid, but that

can’t be helped) that I was tired of making love to her and would be

grateful if she would become less exacting.”

“_Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu!_” wailed my mother. “Was it necessary to do

anything so definite? Couldn’t you have gradually--_enfin_, does one

say such things?”

“No, one does not, not in a civilized world, but Jane isn’t civilized.

You’ve no idea what it is with her.”

Claire had risen and wandered away to the window with her usual

drifting nonchalance.

“_Et après?_” she asked over her shoulder. “What did she say

afterwards, when you had finished?”

“She said nothing, she fell down in a swoon.”

“Backwards?”

“No, she had turned and was standing with her back to the wall and her

hands against it, leaning forward and glaring, rather like a tiger,

ready to spring when I had finished. But she didn’t spring. When I

mentioned a certain evening before our marriage on which I had taken

her to the Opera, the queer light went out of her eyes. It was like

snuffing out a candle. Then she fainted. I had to call her maid. It

was two hours before she came round. She faints as she does everything

else, too much, too much. _Quel tempérament, tout de même._ You have no

idea what it is to live with her--and at the same time so fastidious.

Certain things she won’t put up with. Professes a horror of--of the

refinements of sentiment. A prude and a _passionnée_. Ah, it is all too

difficult. Anyhow, it is finished, thank God for that.”

At this _Maman_ wailed out--“Finished? What do you mean, finished?”

Philibert laughed. “I only mean that she won’t bother me any more; not

that she’ll leave me. Ah, no, she won’t leave me.” He ruminated; after

a moment he sighed. “And I may be wrong, she may bother me after all,

in a new way, in a new way. She is very obstinate. She may try to make

me love her, now that she knows I don’t. It all depends on whether

she hates me or not. One never can tell. And, of course, she knows

nothing but what I have told you. It never occurs to her that I could

be like other men. Even now she doesn’t suppose that her husband is

unfaithful, and even now I imagine that fact will be of some importance

to her. It is all very curious. I have told you in order to warn you.

It is quite possible that she will come to you for help.”

He pulled down his cuffs, twisted his moustaches into place, looked at

himself in the glass over the chimney piece, and bent over my mother,

kissing the top of her head.

“_Au revoir, Maman chérie._ Don’t let her worry you. Just quiet her

down a little. But if it tires you to see her, of course you needn’t. I

only suggest it for her sake, and for us all. She will settle down. Au

revoir.”

He went to Claire and spoke to her in an undertone. I saw her shake her

head. “_Non_,” I heard her say. “_Je ne peux pas. Tout cela mécœure._

Elle est vraiment trop bête.” He shrugged his shoulders. For me he had

no word of instruction, nor any of good-bye. From the window I watched

him cross the pavement to his limousine. For a moment he stood, one

patent leather foot on the step of the car, talking to his footman and

arranging as he did so the white camelia in his buttonhole. His face

was bland. His top-hat had a wonderful sheen. We all knew where he was

going. Bianca had returned to Paris after a six months sojourn in Italy

and had refused to go back to her husband. The connection for us was

obvious. We had been aware for some time of the renewed intimacy of

these two.

Philibert waved his gloves at me through the window of his limousine

and grinned. A new light dawned on me. It had all been a comedy. He

had done it on purpose. Bianca had put him up to it. If it had not

been for Bianca, he would never have precipitated a crisis with Jane.

All that about her affection being insufferable was nonsense. It was

in his interest that his wife should adore him, and no one when left

to himself could look after his own interests so well as Philibert.

In quarelling with Jane he had done something from his own point of

view incredibly foolish. Had Bianca not interfered he would never have

done it. But what was she up to? That was the question. How should I

know? Who on earth could ever tell what Bianca had hidden away in that

intriguing Italian mind of hers? That she meant no good to any one, of

that I was certain.

When I turned away from the window, Claire was stroking my mother’s

hand. She looked at me inimically. Something in my face must have

betrayed me, though I said nothing. “Don’t ask me to sympathize with

Jane,” she brought out, “for I can’t. I wash my hands of the whole

affair.”

My mother’s look was kinder than Claire’s. Her eyes held that proud

plaintive sweetness that denied all passion, either of anger, reproach,

or pity. Her face was very white and her eyelids reddened, but her

remark was characteristic.

“She has her own mother to go to, and her own mother to thank if she is

unhappy.”

And with that she drew me down to her with one of her beautiful

gestures, and kissed me. I must have been in a highly excited and

unnatural state of mind by this time, for the rare caress, so often

awaited in vain, aroused in me at that moment a vague suspicion. Was

she too, I remember asking myself, afraid I would try to get her to

help poor Jane? If so her fears were unnecessary. Jane did not go to

them. Philibert had been mistaken in thinking that she would rush to

them for help. The time was to come when they would go to her, but of

that later. She spoke to no one of her trouble, and neither Claire nor

my mother laid eyes on her for months. We heard later that she had gone

to Joigny with Geneviève, her little girl. She stayed at the Château

de _Sainte Clothilde_ all summer alone. Long afterwards I found out

that she had not even so much as spoken to her own mother. Jane never

reproached Mrs. Carpenter, never opened her lips on the subject to any

one, until the other day when she told me everything. Poor old Izzy

died the following winter, in ignorance of what her daughter thought

about it all.

X

I am no fatalist. I do not believe that the good God has ordered

to be written down in a book what all the millions of little souls

on the earth are to be doing this day a year hence. He, no doubt,

in his wisdom has a general idea of such coming events as famines,

earthquakes, wars and pestilences, but man must remain full of

surprises for his Maker; his activities are incalculable, and tiny

circumstances, the effect of his minute will, have a way of spoiling

the fine large trend of the great cumulative power of the past that

we call fate. It is true that such characters as Bianca and Philibert

have about them the quality of the inevitable. Certainly, as compared

to Jane, they were not free people. They were the children of an old

and elaborate civilization, and impelled by obscure impulses that they

themselves never recognized and that had their source in some dim dark

poisonous pocket of the past.

Bianca, more than any women I have ever known, seemed fated to be what

she was and to do as she did. She appears to me now as I remember her

as the little white slave of the powers of darkness. But she liked her

darkness. She dipped into it deeper and deeper. She sank of her own

will and because of her own morbid and insatiable curiosity.

But Jane was free. One had only to be in her presence to feel it. No

morbid complexes in her, one would have said. Compared to her we were

like so many pigmies in chains, and Bianca beside Jane was like a

ghost or a woman walking in her sleep. Of course Bianca hated Jane. I

don’t believe in their friendship. As it was, I found it disgusting

of Philibert to let Jane go about with Bianca. And Bianca must have

been pretending to care for Jane out of perversity. Their natures were

as antipathetic as their looks were opposed. Bianca with her little

snow-white vicious face, so white that it showed pale bluish lights and

shadows, her eccentric emaciated elegance of body, her enormous blue

eyes fringed by their thick eyelashes that were like bushes and that

she plastered with black till they stuck together: Jane, magnificent

young animal, strong child amazon, towering shyly above us, looking

down on us with her serious wistful gaze, holding out her marvellous

hands to Bianca, suspicious of nothing, wanting to be friends--Jane

insists that they cared for each other--I can’t admit it. Of course

Bianca hated her, and the fact that until she saw Jane’s hands she had

seen no others so beautiful as her own made it no easier for Jane, for

Bianca may have been a priestess of the occult powers of darkness, she

was as well a vain and envious young woman. A cat, Fan Ivanoff called

her simply.

On the other hand I believe that if Paris had not mixed itself up

in the long duel between these two women it might have ended less

tragically, at any rate less tragically for Jane. Had they lived in

London or Moscow or New York it would have been different. They would

not have been so conspicuous. The vast and impersonal life of a great

community would have absorbed them. But Paris held them close and

watched them. It held them for twenty years. If they went away for a

time they always came back and met face to face and could not get away

from each other, for Paris is small and Paris is more personal than

any city in the world. It is a spoiled beauty, excessively interested

in personalities. I speak now of Paris, the lovely capricious

creature that has existed for centuries, that has kept the special

quality of its bland sparkling beauty through invasions, revolutions

and massacres, and is still elegant under the dominion of the most

bourgeois of governments. I speak of the Paris that seems to me to

possess a soul, the soul of an immortal yet mortal woman, seductive

pliable, submissive and indestructible. Do I sound fantastic? I have

communed with my city for years, at night and in the morning and at

mid-day. I have been a lonely man wandering through its streets and

it has confided to me its secrets. Most often at night, when all the

little people that inhabit its houses are asleep, I have listened,

and like a sigh breathing up from its silvery bosom, I have heard its

voice and understood its whispered confidences that carry a lament

for days that are gone and are full of the tales of its many amours.

Ah, my worldly-wise beauty, mistress of a hemisphere, what you do

not know of men is indeed not worth knowing. And still they come,

covetous, lustful, enamoured. What crimes have they not committed, what

birthrights not denied, what fortunes not wasted, what fatherlands not

repudiated, to win your favour?

It was this Paris that took part in the affair of Jane and Bianca. Why

not? How could it have done otherwise? It has always been attracted by

intrigue. It has a taste for drama. I repeat it dotes on personality;

any personality that is striking, that catches its attention. The type

matters little. Having long ago substituted taste for morals it has no

ethical prejudices. It does not dislike a bandit; it adores a _farceur_

such as Philibert. It delights in demagogues and artists and men of

intelligence whether they are criminals or saints. Once in a hundred

years, like a woman surfeited with pleasure and sensation, it will

respect a person of character.

Bianca and Philibert were true children of Paris. They were its spoiled

and petted darlings and they knew this and laid store by it. At bottom

it was Paris that Philibert was continually making love to. He had a

quite inordinate liking for his city, a jealous proprietory affection.

I believe that had he been exiled from it, he would have died, and I

believe that his desire to curry favour with it was the motive of most

of his actions. It was for Paris that he gave his wonderful parties and

concocted his fanciful amusements. He treated it literally as if it

were his mistress. He cajoled, he flattered, he bullied, he caressed,

and he spent on it millions, Jane’s millions. It was not merely an

ordinary vanity that impelled him. He saw himself as the benevolent

despot of Paris, its favourite lover and its protector. To add to its

brilliance he enticed to it princes and celebrities from every country

of Europe. Europe was to him nothing more than a field to be exploited

for the amusement of Paris. He would have beheld every city in Germany,

Austria, Russia or Italy razed to the ground without a twinge of regret

or horror, but when in 1914 the Germans were marching on Paris, then

he was like a man possessed. I can remember him, white to the lips,

rushing in from Army Headquarters to see the Archbishop. He had had

long before any one else the idea of piling sandbags round Notre Dame

to protect the stained glass windows. He was like a maniac.

As for Bianca, she was unique and Paris wore her like a jewel. The

fact that she was half Italian seemed strangely enough not to mitigate

against her, though her mother, the wonderful bacchante who had become

in memory a legendary figure, had found it at first none too easy to

please, according to Aunt Clothilde. The Venetian had been a woman of

quick passions and child-like humours. She was remembered for her many

love affairs, the garlands of bright flowers she wore in her hair, and

the habit she had of sticking pins into little wax effigies of people

she wished would die. An impulsive, playful, improvident creature, with

the beauty of a peasant and the naïveté of a child. She had died when

Bianca was a child of six, died of home-sickness so they said, for her

beloved Italy. I don’t know, I imagine that François her husband had

something to answer for there. It was said that he had found a wax

effigy of himself in her room, containing no less than three hundred

pins, and had laughed delightedly. He was a cynical devil. Aunt Clo

says that he used to lock up his wife in their dismal château in

Provence and keep her on bread and water for days at a time. In any

case he did not lock up Bianca, nor did Bianca seem to have inherited

any of her mother’s aptitude for getting into scrapes. One could not

easily detect in her the Italian strain, one only noticed that she was

a little different from French women, with a different timbre of voice

and an occasional mannerism evocative of something foreign, something

lazy and sly and mysterious, and if she had inherited secret affinities

with that warm romantic southern country of intrigue and superstition,

she kept them hidden, together with all manner of other things, strange

things, violent obsessions, curious tastes, dark obscure desires, and

knowledge of a dangerous kind. She chose to appear at this time, I

allude to the period covering the first years of Jane’s marriage to

Philibert, as merely the supreme expression of the elegant world of

Paris.

It is curious to watch the rise and fall of women in society. Women

loom on the horizon; suddenly for no apparent reason. A gold mine, a

rubber plantation, a motor-industry, suddenly looms into prominence.

It takes the fancy, it is advertised, it becomes popular, people

buy shares in it, the shares go higher and higher, the rush to buy

becomes a scramble, and then perhaps a fraud is discovered, there is a

collapse, and a large number of people find they have been expensively

fooled. So it is in society. Women loom on the horizon; suddenly

for no apparent reason they take the popular fancy. Comparatively

plain women or women we have all known for years and have considered

insignificant, become all at once conspicuous and important. Some one

calls her, the plain woman, a beauty. Some one else repeats it. People

become curious. They look at her with a new interest. A number of men

who were before indifferent to her charms begin to pay her marked

attention. The boom begins. Every one agrees that they have heretofore

been mistaken. Her nose is not a snub nose. She is a beauty. It is

whispered that so-and-so is _très emballé_. She is the success of the

season. And after, when her day is over, she still retains something,

once having been acclaimed a beauty she remains a beauty. Only the men

who dubbed her nose Grecian look at it now with the same indifference

that it inspired when they called it “snub.” They have been engaged in

a little flurry in the social stock market. They do not admit having

been fooled, but being inveterate gamblers they turn their attention

elsewhere. The boom of the gold-mine is over, they go in for rubber.

The men, i. e. the gamblers, are always the same in these affairs; it

is the women who come and go.

Bianca was not one of these. She was no shooting star in the social

heaven, she was a fixture, the little central shining constellation in

a firmament of lesser planets. As a child she had been an institution.

Strangers were taken to the Bois to look at the beautiful little girl,

who, all in white, white fur coat and white gaiters, and followed by a

white pom, walked there with her governess. She never sought the favour

of Paris. She laid her will upon it and it submitted. As she grew older

she made few women friends and tolerated no rivals. She was nice to old

men and old ladies, people like my mother adored her, but most young

women were afraid of her. Jane was an exception. Jane loved her. The

two as I say used to go about together. The intimacy was shocking to

me--I loathed Philibert for allowing it.

Jane had no suspicions. Her confidence in Philibert was such as to make

us as a family quite nervous. What would she do, we asked ourselves,

when she found out? Paris took little account of Jane. After the

first flurry of excitement over her wedding, it lost sight of her.

She disappeared behind Philibert. Curious how such a little man could

hide from view a woman so much bigger than himself. It was a case of

perspective. He stood in the foreground. To the more distant public she

was invisible; to those who came nearer she appeared as nothing more

interesting than a large fine piece of furniture. Philibert sometimes

in moments of good humour alluded to her as his Byzantine Madonna.

I should defeat my own object in telling this story if I did not do

Philibert justice. Yet how do him justice? If he were a centipede or a

rare species of bird my task would be easier. But he lived on the earth

in the guise of a human being, and he was not quite a human being. And

it is difficult to be just to a brother such as Philibert. He always

loathed the sight of me. I don’t blame him for that. I loathe the

sight of myself. I am an ugly object. But Philibert found it amusing

to hate me and to make me constantly aware of my deformity. My twisted

frame seemed to produce in him a kind of itching frenzy, to tickle him

to dreadful laughter, to irritate him to nervous cruelty. And I was

unfortunately never able to grow a thick enough skin to protect me from

him.

I suppose that I have always been jealous of Philibert. I loved

life, but it pushed me aside. I wanted it, I wanted it in all its

fulness, but it was Philibert who had it. And my incapacity to taste

so many of its pleasures has only made me regard it with a closer,

more wistful attention. I was like a ragamuffin in the street with

his nose plastered against the pastry-cook’s window, a ragamuffin

who dreamed that his pockets were full of gold, but who always found

that the bright coins he jingled so lovingly in his fingers were not

accepted over the counter. After repeated rebuffs, I gave up trying

to get anything, but I could not take my eyes from the feast and so,

even in my childhood, I resorted to the fiction of considering myself

an invisible spectator of other people’s doings, and I helped along

this little game by sitting as much as possible in dark corners or

behind the kindly screen of some large piece of furniture such as the

schoolroom piano. All that I asked of the world that so prodigiously

attracted my interest was that it should not notice me, and thus leave

me free to notice it, and I came at last to feel when some one out of

kindness or cruelty dragged me out of my corner, a sense of outrage.

So it was when Philibert, taking me by my collar, exposed me to kicks

and to laughter. So it was years later when Jane, taking me by the

hand, exposed me to the responsibilities of a friendship that demanded

action. I used to dodge Philibert when I could. I would have avoided

Jane’s confidence had I been able. Philibert’s tormenting in no way

involved me. I could just let him kick and was when he finished as free

as before to subside into my corner; with Jane it was different. Jane

involved me in everything.

And now that I am obliged to think of my own personal relation to Jane,

I have as I do so, a feeling of pain that is like the throbbing of some

old hurt or the recurrence of an illness. Jane was magnificent and

healthy and whole. She was half a head taller than I. I am cursed with

a visualizing mind. As I set myself to the business of remembering her

life, I see her constantly moving before my eyes, visibly acting out

her drama, and I see myself, a wizened little man looking up at her

from a distance. I have an acute sense of an opportunity lost for ever,

of precious time wasted. For years I refused to sympathize with her as

her friend. For years I would not talk to her because I was afraid she

would complain to me of my family. How little I knew her!

Slowly she imposed herself. Like a woman coming towards me in a fog, I

saw her grow more clear and more definite, until at last I recognized

her for what she was.

Was I merely in love with her? Was it that? Was that all? If so she

never suspected it. If so I did not recognize the feeling. It is, of

course, the accusation my brother brought against me. He spoke of my

criminal passion for his wife. It is very curious. The cleverest men

are sometimes very obtuse. Philibert’s intelligence was of the kind

that made it impossible for him to understand simple things.

In love with Jane? I find that I have no idea what the phrase means

and cannot apply it. It is as if I were trying to fit a little paper

pattern to a cloud floating off there in the heaven. My tenderness

for Jane does remind me a little of a cloud. It has changed so

often in shape and hue. At times it has seemed to me a little white

floating thing of celestial brightness, at others it has enveloped me

in darkness and always it has been intangible, vague, unlinked to the

earth.

And yet, even to me, she did seem at first very queer. It seemed to

me that she was really too different to be innocent of all desire to

make trouble. She often annoyed me by remaining so silent when any one

else would have burst out with a flood of protest, and by going pale as

death when a moderate flush ought to have expressed a sufficient sense

of disturbance. The excessive emotional restraint evidenced by those

sudden mute pallors of hers used to worry me with their exaggeration.

I understood how this sort of thing, displeased my mother. I can

remember moments when I expected to see her bound across the room and

go crushing through the mirror, so tense was her physical stillness.

Claire used to look at her then with lifted eyebrows and turn away with

a nervous shrug of impatient disdain. I felt with Claire. I understood

this sort of thing little better than she did. We were accustomed to

people whose gestures were used to enhance the fine finished meaning of

spoken phrases, not to dumb creatures whose eyes and quivering nostrils

and long strong contracted fingers betrayed them in drawing rooms. I,

caught up in the fine web of my family’s prejudices, had found myself

from the midst of those delicate meshes seeing her as they saw her,

as some gorgeous dangerous animal who was tearing the very fabric of

their system to pieces with its many gyrations. As I say, I doubted her

innocence. I suppose like every one else in the family I was affected

by the glare Mrs. Carpenter’s obvious ambition threw over her. It

didn’t seem to me possible that Jane had married Philibert simply and

solely because he fascinated her. Not that I didn’t know Philibert

to be capable of fascinating any one he wanted to, but because such

fascinations had never seemed to me to contain in themselves any

basis for marriage. The truth involved too great a stretch for my

imagination. I had to find it out gradually. It necessitated too,

the admission on my part that for Jane the name of Joigny counted for

absolutely nothing. I couldn’t be supposed to know that Jane didn’t

care a straw about marrying our family, when her mother so obviously

laid great store by her doing so.

But I started to explain Philibert, and suddenly it comes to me; I

believe that at the bottom of everything he did was the controlling

impulse of his hatred of life. Undeniably he despised humanity. It

exasperated him to tears. Its stupidity put him in a nervous frenzy.

He was animated by a kind of rage of mockery. Everything that humanity

cherished was to him anathema. He had been born with a distaste for all

that men as a rule called goodness, and was nervously impelled towards

that which they called evil. And yet the evil he courted didn’t do him

any harm. I mean that it didn’t wear him out or spoil his digestion or

stupefy his intelligence. On the contrary it agreed with him. He had

begun to taste of life with the palate of a worn out old man. The good

bread and butter and milk of the sweetness of life was repulsive to him

and disagreed with him. He could live to be a hundred on a moral diet

that would have killed in a week a child of nature. Sophistication can

go no further. His equipment was complete, and he had, I suppose, no

choice. His nature was imposed on him at birth. His punishment was that

he lived alone in a world that bored him to extinction.

Seriously, he appears to me now, as I think of him, as a man living

under a curse. I believe him to have been haunted by a sense of

unreality. To get in contact with something and feel it up against

him, that was one of the objects that obscurely impelled him. His

extravagances of conduct were efforts to arrive at the primitive

sensation of being alive. He did not know this. He only knew that

he hated everything sooner or later. He was conscious merely of an

irritating desire for sensation and amusement. His fear was that he

would run through all pleasure before he died and find nothing left for

him to do. It may have occurred to him at times that the world minus

human interest did not provide endless sources of amusement. The things

one could do to distract oneself were not after all so very many. Even

vice has alas, its limitations, and it was not as if he were really in

himself vicious. He had an absolute incapacity for forming habits good

or bad. Could he have saddled himself with one or two the problem would

have been simpler. Could he have become a drunkard how many hours would

have been accounted for! If women had only had an indisputable power

over him, what a relief to let himself go. But no. He was the victim

of no malady and no craving. Drink as he might, his head remained

excruciatingly clear, debauch himself as much as he would, he remained

master of his passions, and day after day, year after year, he was

obliged to plan what he would do with himself.

He found in the world only one kindred spirit. Bianca was the one

creature on earth who was a match for him. She was more, and he knew

it; she was in his own line his superior. Many people have been

astonished at Philibert’s _liaison_ with Bianca. They have considered

the intimacy of these two people strange. I believe that Philibert’s

feeling for Bianca was as simple as the feeling of a good man for a

good woman, and as inevitable as if he and she were the only two white

people in a world of black men. I believe that Philibert turned to

Bianca in despair and clung to her out of loneliness. He and she were

alone on the earth, as alone as if they had been gods condemned to live

among men. She was his mate, moulded in the marvellous infernal mould

that suited him. _Voilà tout._

But she was a more refined instrument than he was. She filtered

experience through a finer sieve. She had a steadier hand. Hers was

the great advantage of being able to wait for her amusement and her

effects. She was economical of her material. Philibert was afraid of

running through the whole of experience and exhausting too soon the

resources of life. Bianca was not afraid of anything, not even of

being bored. She meted out pleasure with deliberation. She calculated

her capital with fine precision, she measured the future with a

centimetre rule, and poured out sensation into a spoon, sipping it

slowly.

Philibert was a spendthrift. Bianca was as close as a peasant woman.

And on the whole Philibert was honest. He did not try to deceive the

world. He was too impatient and despised it too much. When he fooled

it he did so openly and if people found him out he laughed. But Bianca

was deep as a well and as secretive as death. What Philibert was so he

appeared, but no one knew what Bianca was.

During the summer that Jane spent alone at Joigny with her child,

Philibert and Bianca saw a great deal of each other. Bianca had musical

evenings that summer, in her garden, and little midnight suppers that

were quite another variety of gathering. Philibert never drank too much

at these suppers, neither did Bianca; as much cannot be said of some

of the others, if Philibert’s own account of these graceful orgies was

true. It was at one of them that poor Fan Ivanoff’s husband threw a

glass of champagne in her face, cutting her cheek. Neither Fan nor her

wretched Russian were asked again. Bianca did not like that sort of

thing.

Jane has told me that she did not go to America that summer because

she hoped that Philibert would come to her at Joigny. She had found it

impossible after the first shock of his revelations to believe that

they were true. She told herself that he had been carried away by one

of his fine frenzies of talk and had said things he had not meant. It

was incredible to her that he should really mean that he cared nothing

for her. He had, to her mind, given her during those years of marriage

too many proofs to the contrary. Thinking it over alone she came to the

conclusion that there was some mystery here that only time would make

clear to her, and she therefore determined to wait. For a month, for

two months, for three, she believed he would come and if not explain,

at least put things on some decent footing, but he did not come for

the simple reason that Bianca wouldn’t let him.

One has only to stop a moment and remember what he had at stake

to realize the extent of Bianca’s power over him. He was entirely

dependent on Jane for money. There was no settlement of any kind and

he had none of his own. With her enormous income pouring through his

hands, he had not a penny to show if she left him, and when people

accused him later, as some did, of having put aside a portion of that

revenue for himself they were wrong. His code of ethics, morals,

what you will, his idea anyway, of what was permitted and what was

not, allowed him to spend all her income and even run into debt; but

not keep any of it for the future. It did not shock him in the least

to spend Jane’s dollars on his various mistresses but it would have

disgusted him to find any of these coins sticking to his palms. As long

as he poured them out he was satisfied with himself; had he hoarded it

he would have been ashamed.

In any case he knew the risk he ran, for he understood Jane, and knew

that the fear of scandal would not keep her if she once decided to

break with him. Nor could he have diminished the magnitude of the

catastrophe that this would mean. His sensational reign had only

begun, but it had already become vital to his happiness--I use the

word happiness, for lack of another. He had done great things, but

nothing as yet to compare with what he intended to do. The fame of his

entertainments had already reached the different capitals of Europe,

he had seen to that, but this was mere advertisement, preparatory

work necessary to the realization of his ultimate purpose. He was in

the position of a company promoter who had sent out his circulars and

gathered in a certain amount of capital, but had not yet founded his

business, and was still far from holding the monopoly he aimed at. He

was certain of success but he must have time. If his plans miscarried

now he would be his own swindler.

Jane, he realized perfectly, felt little interest in his schemes. It

was one of the grudges he had against her. Her attitude from the

first had been galling in its simplicity. When on the eve of their

marriage he had proposed to her building a house, she had suggested

that perhaps one of the beautiful old ones already existing in Paris

might do, but on his insisting that none could compare with the image

he had in his mind, she had given in with a sweetness and promptness

that had taken his breath away. It is characteristic of him, in this

connection, that though he wanted his own way and intended to get it,

his pleasure in doing so would have been very much greater had she made

it more difficult. Her pliability seemed to him stupid and when she

merely said, looking over the plans he proudly spread out before her,

some weeks later, “It’s dreadfully big, but if you like it I shall,” he

came near to gnashing his teeth. It was equally galling to him neither

to impress her nor to anger her, but he was obliged to contain himself,

for after all, as he put it to Claire, he couldn’t go and tear the

thing up just to spite himself. She would calmly have put the bits in

the waste-paper basket.

When it came to arranging the house she had said--“I want one room at

the top for my own. No one is to go there. I shall arrange it myself,”

and the rest she left to him. I believe he never entered that room and

never knew what she had done to it. If he thought about it at all,

he doubtless thought she had arranged it as a chapel. He probably

imagined an altar and candles and photographs of the dead. Jane never

told him about it. Some obscure instinct of mistrust must have been at

the bottom of her shyness. She had furnished it quite simply like a

room in the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains. Her Aunt Patty had sent

her a rocking chair, an old mahogany dresser, the window curtains from

her old room, and some of her special belongings that she had left

behind when she came away. It was the strangest room at the top of that

mansion. I remember well the day Jane took me to it. She had come in

from some function and was looking more worldly than usual. I remember

gazing beyond her outstretched silken arm with its jade bracelets

into what seemed to me the most pathetic of sanctuaries. The window

curtains were of faded cretonne. The worn rocking chair had a knitted

antimacassar. Two battered rag dolls sat on an old spindle-legged

dresser against the wall. A spirit dwelt there that I did not know.

But I am wandering away from my subject. What I started to say was that

Philibert’s life hung by the thread of Jane’s belief in him and he

knew it. If he thought that thread was an iron cable then that fatuous

belief alone might explain his putting such a strain upon it, but I

don’t believe it was so. However far he thought he could try Jane,

there was no sense in doing so, and he wouldn’t have done so had he

followed the dictates of his own wisdom. It would have been so easy

to have gone for a week to Joigny. Two days would have sufficed. A

three hours’ journey in the train, two days away from Bianca, and Jane

would have been reassured and his own future secure. So he would have

reasoned it out had he been left alone, but Bianca did not leave him

alone.

Her motive was quite simply to make mischief. She wanted Jane to

suffer. She loved Philibert but she wanted him to suffer as well. There

was nothing more in it than that. The most subtle people have sometimes

the simplest purposes. Bianca’s subtlety often consisted in doing very

ordinary things in a way that made them appear extraordinary. Her

cleverness in this instance lay in the fact that Philibert did not

suspect her motive. It is even doubtful whether he knew that it was she

who prevented his going. Certainly she never did anything so stupid

as to tell him not to go. It was rather the other way round. If they

discussed it at all it was Bianca who urged upon him the advisability

of his doing his duty as a husband. I can imagine her lying back on her

divan with her lovely little spindly arms over her head and saying with

a yawn, that really he was too negligent of his wife. His wife adored

him. She was ready to fall into his arms. She was probably very sulky

now, but once he appeared she would welcome him with all the ardour

she was saving up during her _villégiature_. I can see Bianca looking

at Philibert through half-closed eyes, while she touched up for him a

portrait of Jane calculated to make him shudder.

Bianca herself was going yachting in the Mediterranean. She wanted to

be hot, to soak in enough sunlight to keep her warm for next winter.

They were to laze about the Grecian islands. G---- the historian was to

be one of the party. While she was giving her body a prolonged Turkish

Bath and taking a course in Greek history, he would be free to bring

in the cows with Jane. No, he couldn’t come with her, it would be too

compromising for him. American women began divorce proceedings on the

least provocation.

And Philibert, of course, did go on that yacht to the Grecian isles,

but to judge from his humour when he returned, he did not get out of

the trip what he had expected. Bianca having lured him out there seemed

to forget that he had come at her invitation. She left the party at

the first opportunity and went off inland on a donkey, and didn’t come

back, merely sent a message for her maid and her boxes to meet her at

Athens.

Nor did Philibert find Jane waiting for him in Paris as he had

expected, nor any message from her. It was the butler who informed him

that Madame had gone to Biarritz with the Prince and Princess Ivanoff,

and it was to Biarritz that Philibert was obliged to go to fetch her

home.