I
That was long ago. We were young then. What a haunting annoying phrase.
One meets it everywhere, in books, on people’s lips, or unspoken in
their eyes. The other day in the Grey House, sitting opposite Jane
in the shabby little parlour, there it was again. She spoke it, but
not wistfully, more with relief than regret. I stayed ten days in St.
Mary’s Plains and during those days she told me the rest of the story,
bit by bit, till she came to the end--I put it down now as she told
it--what follows are her own words as I remember them.
* * * * * * * *
That was the end of my youth and the beginning of life. Until then I
had been made use of, but after that I acted and I became responsible
for myself.
Fifteen years ago, we sat till morning waiting for Philibert. I no
longer remember what I felt. Have you tried to recall sensations of
pain, and by thinking very closely about all the little circumstances
surrounding them, to experience again the stab or the ache? One can’t.
I can’t feel again that agony. I suppose it was agony. You remember
it better than I do, for you saw it. One remembers things one has
seen and things one did, but not what went on inside one’s own dark,
impenetrable body and soul, invisibly. I remember what I did at
that time and what I said and what other people said and looked. I
remember your face, and Jinny’s fear of me, and her fretting for her
father, and Fan’s coming and saying that I looked like a mad woman,
and from these facts I deduce the other fact that I was suffering,
but I have forgotten the feeling. That is very strange when you come
to think of it, for how, then, can I know that it was so? I don’t
know. It is all merely conjecture. One would have thought, from the
way I behaved and the way it changed everything that my emotion of
that time was tremendous; was immensely important. But it wasn’t. It
had no substance. It didn’t stand the test of time. It has vanished
completely. Other things have lasted.
What are these feelings, emotions, passions that we make such a fuss
about? Nothing but sparks struck from an impact, a collision of some
kind. They seem to burn us up, to consume us for a moment, then they
vanish. They have no body, no staying power, no reality, but we mould
our lives by them.
I am a woman. My life has always centred about people. In tracing the
course of events, I find that their causes were invariably personal--My
life is a long strong twisted rope made up of a number of human
relationships, nothing more. There was first my mother, and my Aunt
Patience, then Philibert, Bianca and Geneviève. Philibert went away. I
did without him. One can do without anything,--everything. I am proving
it now. But Bianca kept coming back; I never got rid of her.
My life is a failure. It is finished. It is there in its dreadful,
unchangeable completeness spread out before me. I look at it, as I
would look at a map, and when I think that it is I who made it, this
thing called a human life, I am bewildered and ashamed. How did it come
about that I made so many mistakes, and did so much that was harmful to
others? There was no desire in my heart to hurt, no will to do wrong.
On the contrary I wanted to make people happy, I wanted to do right.
It is very strange. It is almost as if the intensity of my will to do
right forced me to do the wrong thing. Is there some explanation? Is
there a key to the problem of living that I never found? Or was it all
simply due to Bianca? My Aunt Beth used to say that the only way to
live rightly was to do the will of God. But what does that mean? How is
one to know what the will of God is? Often I wonder whether my failure
is due to my never having found out about God. Most of my people here
in America would not hesitate to say yes--but I am not sure. It seems
to me that I was even more eager to do His will than I would have been
if I had been certain of His existence. It would have been an immense
relief to me to have known that God was in His Heaven and that I did
not have to bother about my own soul. “Put your troubles on the Lord,”
our parson used to say in St. Mary’s Plains. Well--I don’t know. That
is a solution for many. If they do that--just shelve everything and go
by texts in the Bible for their order of daily conduct, living must be
very much simplified--but I couldn’t do that. Something stiff and hard
and honest in me wouldn’t allow it. I couldn’t believe that I could
talk to God and ask His opinion. I used to try--when I was a child and
when I was a woman. Praying was like whispering into a chasm, a void,
an echoing emptiness. My questions came back to me, unanswered, mocking
echoes of my own tormented soul.
So I floundered along.
I do not excuse myself. I am to blame. I am responsible. I know that.
I lived among charming people. I had, as people say, almost everything
heart can desire. My husband did not love me, but beyond that what had
I to complain of? I had money, health, power, friends. I was one of the
fortunate. Hundreds of women, no doubt, envied me.
I hadn’t the gift of living. Your mother has it, so has your sister. It
is common among French people, they are artists in life, but I was for
ever looking beyond life for its purpose, and thus missing its savour
and its meaning. The people I loved were too important to me and the
people I hated--but I can see now that Bianca wasn’t as interesting or
as important as she seemed. She was only a vain and selfish woman after
all. But she was for twenty years my obsession.
I must talk about Bianca. It was really in order to talk about Bianca
that I asked you to come, for I am not yet rid of her. She haunts me
here in this innocent old house. Enigmatic in death as she was in life,
her personality persists, exquisite and depraved and relentless. She
comes to accuse me. Having ruined my life, she accuses me of her death.
I did not kill her. Some of you thought that I did. You didn’t mind.
You didn’t blame me, but you thought so. Ludovic, I am sure, is
convinced of it, and if he does not precisely approve, he at least
accepts the fact as the inevitable outcome of our long exhausting
duel. More than once he told me that until I could rid myself of
the obsession of Bianca, I should be unable to understand the first
little thing about life. He was the one person who understood my
feeling for her and hers for me. In his uncanny wisdom, so devoid
of all prejudice, he knew that our hatred was based upon an intense
mutual attraction, and that we hounded each other to death because
under other circumstances we would have loved each other. The long and
dreary spectacle of two women hating each other for years with intense
sympathy, or if you like, loving each other with an exasperating
antagonism and hatred, was to him pitiful and contemptible. He would
have had me put an end to it somehow, anyhow, at any cost. Taking
another’s life is to him no crime compared to ruining one’s own. Well,
it is at an end now. Bianca is dead, and I am buried alive. We did each
other in, but it took twenty years, and I never touched her with my
hands, or did anything to bring about her death, save will her to die.
And her death came too late to do me or mine any good. Philibert was
finished. My life was in pieces. There was nothing left to patch up.
She had come between me and my husband and child, while living, but
her death cut me off from them, more absolutely than anything she
could have done alive. And, fiendishly, as if with consummate cunning,
she died mysteriously leaving with me the unanswerable question, as
to whether or not, I had made her kill herself. I go over and over it
all, day after day, week in, week out. I remember my last view of her
alive, in that hotel corridor, the look she gave me over her drooping
shoulder, leaning against the half open door, her hand on the door
knob, her long languid weight on it, one pointed foot trailing, and on
her grey face, a desperate vindictive longing, a wistful cruelty, a
question, a threat, a prayer. Was she at last imploring me? Did she in
that moment remember everything? Was she mutely and bitterly asking me
to come and hear her confession? Would it all have been put right by
some miracle had I gone to her before it was too late? I don’t know--I
shall never know. I only know that our wills clashed again for the
last time, that for the last time I resisted her, and let her drag the
incredible weight of her diseased and disappointed spirit out of my
sight, for ever.
And how am I to know that her death wasn’t an accident, and that her
look of desperate appeal wasn’t just such a piece of acting as she had
treated me to, at intervals for twenty years? Over and over again,
she had done the same trick. Invariably, after one of her pieces of
devilry, she would approach me with that wistful penitent masque, and
stir me to forgiveness and compassion. Repeatedly, she fooled me.
I could save her--I could influence her for good. I was strong and
balanced and sane. If only I would give her what she needed, what she
lacked, some relief from herself in some external thing, some faith,
some definite obstinate purpose, beyond the gratification of her own
vanity.
And each time I believed, each time I forgave, each time looking into
her wonderful face, I thought I saw there, a spiritual meaning. It
is enough to make one scream with laughter. It was all acting. It
must have been. It was all done for the purpose of tormenting me more
exquisitely afterwards. For years she fooled me--for years I wouldn’t
believe she was what she was, a woman of immense personality and no
character, but I am at last certain that this was so. Ludovic says
that it takes as strong a character to be really wicked as really
good. He used to rave over Bianca, to anger me, I suppose, call her
perversely--“_une femme admirable--la plus courageuse damnée qu’il
avait jamais vue_.” I don’t agree with him. I do not mean that Bianca
had a weak character. I mean literally that she had no character at
all. Where one feels in the average human being, the strong resisting
kernel, the stern spiritual centre that contains identity there in
Bianca there was nothing. At the middle centre of her being there
was emptiness. She had, morally, no core. She was as formless as
one of those genii in the Arabian Nights who came out of Ali Baba’s
earthenware pots.
I ought to know, for I loved her. She was my friend during the happiest
years of my life, when I believed in Philibert, and was confident.
I say it again, we were friends. I believe even now, in our early
friendship, in those days, Bianca was actually, and much to her own
surprise, fond of me. That she began being nice to me out of a spirit
of mischief is no doubt true. The idea of making Philibert’s wife, her
intimate, was the sort of thing likely to appeal to her but having
made the advances out of perversity, she found herself interested and
attracted. Why did she like me? It is difficult to say. Perhaps because
I was a new type and one that wouldn’t in the ordinary course of
events come her way. I puzzled her. To her I was something primitive,
savage, and dangerous. She used to call me her “_Peau Rouge_.” She
said I made her think of Buffaloes and Bison and prehistoric animals,
of black men round camp fires in jungles, of snake dancers and deserts
and the infantile magic of savage races. She wove stories about me and
hunted up old prints of queer outlandish people who she insisted had
my type of head. I was, she asserted, only half-tame, and being with
me gave her the same kind of pleasure as having a leopard about. She
was physically afraid of me. Not only at the beginning, but always to
the very end, but in those days, my losing my temper, she found, “_un
très beau spectacle_.” Her blue eyes would shine, her lips part in
amazement, and timidly she would stroke my shoulder, murmuring--“How
wonderful you are. What a volcano.”
She used to ask me endless questions about my childhood and appeared
greatly intrigued by my obstinate attachment to what she affectionately
termed, my ridiculous impossible background. She would make me tell
her about life in the Grey House, the baking of cakes in the kitchen,
the hymn singing on Sunday evenings, and the summer trips to the
wilderness, to the woods of Canada, or across the prairies of Omaha,
Dakota, and Arizona. She would lie on her couch in her boudoir making
patterns in the air with her lovely fingers and purring like a pleased
little cat while I described the plains, stretching endlessly under the
sky to the white horizon, the lonely wooden shacks blistered in the
sun, and infested with flies, the lazy cowboys on indefatigable loping
broncos--and she would murmur--“_Ah, je comprends cela--c’est grand,
c’est monstrueux, c’est beau._”
As for me, need I explain why I loved her? Who has not felt the quality
of her beauty? What man or woman that ever saw Bianca, failed to
respond to the peculiar penetrating charm of her personality? I see her
in memory, a vivid creature, perfect, compact, clear in the midst of a
crowd of blurred and colourless shadows. Her beauty was incisive, keen.
It cut into one’s consciousness sharp as a stab. It stamped itself on
one’s brain, indelible and certain. I see her face as clearly today as
I saw it the day I first laid eyes on her when she came up to me in
your mother’s salon and said--“You must like me, I insist.” It is there
close to me, rising out of the grave as pure, as firm, as precisely
drawn as if I held the perfect indestructible masque in my hand.
I see her eyes open lazily, wider and wider, and shine out suddenly,
bluest blue, so blue that they seem to send out a blue light through
their black lashes. Ah, how lovely she was! How could I not believe in
that loveliness? Blue, brilliant fire-blue eyes set far apart under
a fringe of black hair and pointed curving thin red lips. I could
model her now exactly--the cup of her small chin, her long round white
throat, flat bosom and shoulders flowing down thin arms to her narrow
beautiful hands. Her body was a fragile thing, strong as steel.
And women of Bianca’s breeding never give themselves away in ordinary
life. They are closed and secret books, open only to those who have
the key. No one can read them who is not of the initiated. I did not
know the language. There was nothing about her to convey to me that
she was anything more than she seemed, a remarkable and gifted woman
of great distinction, a creature so refined as to seem to me to belong
to another planet from the one on which I had been born. It seemed to
me extraordinary that such a person should notice me at all. I was
filled with gratitude. I was humble, devoted, flattered, and Philibert
gave no sign. If not actually enthusiastic about our friendship, he
still seemed content enough, and I was happy in the thought, that this
wonderful woman who had been his comrade from childhood was now, my
friend too.
And she was careful, as we grew more intimate, to show me, only those
aspects of herself that she knew would flatter and delight me. Never
did she mention subjects likely to frighten me. Her talk was all of
art shows and music and books and the ridiculous absurdities of “_le
monde_” and those things in her life that I couldn’t help noticing
with concern, she explained in a way to enlist my sympathy. She was
desperately unhappy, she told me, in her marriage, her husband’s
immorality was a great grief to her; the sorrow of her life was,
that she could have no children and so on, and so on. Once she even
confided to me that there was insanity in her family, and that she was
constantly haunted by the fear of going insane. I was, at this, in a
tumult of sympathy. I was prepared to forgive her a far greater number
of eccentricities than she ever showed me.
She was, she told me, of a mixed strain of southern blood, a Venetian
on her mother’s side, on her father’s a _Provençale_. From her I learnt
that the old Duke, her father, was descended from the _Comtes de
Provence_ of a line that had numbered kings in the middle ages. For
many generations they had been _Seigneurs_ of a wild and mountainous
region north of Avignon. Their fortress, the “_Château des Trois
Maries_” stands high against the sky on a spur of rock that reaches
out from the ragged hills, above the wide valley of the Rhône. This
was Bianca’s home. There in that sad and wonderful country of brown
sunlight, she was as nearly happy as she could ever be on earth. I went
to Provence with her one summer. And now that she is dead, I think of
her, not as she was in Paris, languid, perverse, and irritable, but as
she was in her own country. I see her against the swarthy background
of those ruined hills scarred by the hordes of invading Saracens. Her
little person seems to ride above that sunbaked land of blistered
roads and dry river beds, on the wings of legend through a burning
and sanguinary past of repeated invasions; of Barbary pirates from
across the sea to the south, and Visigoths from the north, of wandering
Bohemians, of steady marching Roman armies, of Popes flying from Italy
for refuge, of gentle saints stranded in tiny boats on the desolate
marshy shores of the _Camargue_ and I see her as she ought to have been
and as she was sometimes, down there, her face brown, her blue eyes
flashing, and her thin body, lean and hard, mounted on one of the small
fleet horses of the country, galloping at the head of the thundering
fighting bulls towards the arenas of Nimes or Arles. This was her
proper setting. It was here at the _Château des Trois Maries_ that she
showed herself to me, as she would have been had she not been accursed.
I remember one day in her room in the west tower of the Castle,
her talking of herself, as she never talked to me before or since,
honestly, as honestly as she could, and with light laughter breaking
into her short light biting phrases. From the high window we could see
the white dust of the road whirling down the valley before the hot
scurrying wind, groves of poplars bending their plumed heads, little
brown houses surrounded by close vineyards huddled behind screens of
cypress trees.
“I was born here,” she said, “of a woman who loathed her husband and
hated this country--but I wasn’t really born--I was made by witches
one hot windy midsummer day. They made me out of the burning sun and
the shrieking mistral and the hot white dust, in the black shade
of cypresses, and they added to the hot mixture, ice water from
that mountain stream; then they each laid on me a curse. One said,
the oldest and wickedest--‘She will covet the earth, but only love
herself.’ The second said ‘She will be haunted by the evil spirits of
dead men.’ The third said--‘Since the people of this country are fond
of wild jokes and pranks,--they are you know, _très blagueurs, les
Provençaux_, she will be much given to playing mischievous jokes that
will do others harm.’ Then they left me in the dark cypress grove,
where my mother who was wandering about and longing for the laughter
and music of her Italy, found me. She, poor darling, invoked the three
Marys for my protection, _les Saintes Maries de la Mer_ who are carved
in the stone over the great door, _Marie Salomé_, _Marie Jacobé_ and
_Marie Madeleine_; their shrine is in the grotto behind the house--but
they had been shipwrecked themselves and were too inefficient to cope
with my witches--and so that you see is what I am--burning hot and
icy cold, and with a dry wind, shrieking in my heart, and three times
accursed. I feel it. I know it. I have known it since I was a child--At
first I struggled, then gave in, took my curses in my arms and made
them mine, made them, I tell you--my religion--” She gave her dry
laugh. Her voice was high and sweet and careless. She spoke, without
passion, in her dry conversational tone. “If I could never love any
one but myself, never forget myself, try as I might in excesses of
every kind, then I would love myself utterly. If I was to be haunted
by the unfulfilled ideas of men and women long dead, then I would give
myself up to those ideas, and if my pranks were fated to do people
harm, well--what business was it of mine? I would enjoy doing people
harm--idiots that they are, why should I care for their thin silly
feelings?
“You think I am talking nonsense. If you believed me, you would be
horrified--_eh, bien_--be horrified--but you will never understand. You
will never believe that I am as bad as I am. That is the reason I like
you--that is the reason I talk to you. You are obstinate and faithful
and strong--and beside that you have demons too--I see them in your
awful sullen face that I like.
“I tell you--that I am used by ideas that are not my own--that do not
come out of my own head, that come to me from I know not where. They
come persistently--out of the sky, circling back again and again like
black birds coming out of the sky to this tower. For instance; an idea
comes to me that I must go to Nimes and see a certain matador and send
for him and make him love me--I know he will be stupid and coarse and
disgusting, and I refuse. Then things happen. Every day lines appear in
the papers--his name is everywhere, in every village on every stable
wall--I laugh--and give in--and it is all stale and horrid before it
begins, but the idea had to be carried out. That you will say is just
the stupid giving into caprice of any idle woman--but it is not always
so ordinary. Suppose that some day the idea comes to me that I must
entice my husband into the oubliette. I laugh at the idea and chase it
away. Six months later it comes back more insistent, a thing with a
voice. It says ‘Get him into the north tower. He is a mean creature. He
will fall down the oubliette’--and I say peevishly--‘But I don’t mind
his being alive--he doesn’t bother me, I am not interested in killing
him’ and again I drive away the idea--but it will come back, it will
keep coming back till it is satisfied. There have been many ideas like
that demanding of me to be satisfied. Sooner or later I carry them
out--do their bidding. Often in hours of lucidity I see how dangerous
they are. I fight against them, distract myself with some idiocy or
run away--take the train, go in the opposite direction--but almost
always I give in, in the end.” She stopped. I see her now against the
stone coping of the window, leaning out--her head in the sun--looking
down--the wall fell sheer--a hundred feet of masonry and rock.
“Sometimes I think I will throw myself down to get rid of them, these
ideas of men and women whose restless bones are the hot dust of these
mountains--but why should I--why give myself as a sacrifice? It would
be silly--the people I will hurt if I live aren’t worth it--”
She jerked back into the room and came to my side, laying a hand on my
shoulder, and standing so that I could not see her, a little behind
me, her lips close to my ear. “There are other things,” she whispered,
“worse things--ideas--that I couldn’t tell--” Her fingers clutched my
shoulder, tightening until they hurt me--“You help me, but sometimes
I am angry with you for being what you are and want to hurt you. Some
day, who knows, the idea may come to me to do you harm. You are safe
now because I don’t understand you, and feel you are stronger than
I--but if I ever detected a weakness in you--or if you ever bored me,
then I should hate you, then I would certainly do you a hurt. It’s a
warning--” she broke off with a laugh, kissed lightly the tip of my ear
and left me.
I was not afraid of her then--what she said did not disturb me. I
laughed at it; I was happy and confident. I had everything in the world
I wanted, and I lived in a daze of joy and excitement--Europe, Paris,
the miracles produced by my wealth, still dazzled and amazed me; going
to bull-fights with Bianca, or hunting wild boar, with the old Duke,
or attending the Courts of Rome, Vienna, Berlin or St. James’s with
Philibert, everything was marvellous. I had no time to worry, and no
reason to do so that I knew of.
But I remembered what Bianca had said, and in the light of what
happened, I understood that she had been speaking the truth. It was
simply her way of admitting that she was a supreme egotist. Put simply,
it meant that the one motive power in her, was her vanity. It was her
vanity that held her together and gave her an outline. And as she grew
older she developed it as other women develop a gift for music. She
worshipped herself, and she made of her egotism an elaborate religion.
Her adoration of herself grew into a passion and burned with the ardour
of a saint’s miraculously revealed inspiration. She would have gone to
the stake for it. It incased her in complete armour. No one and nothing
could touch her through it. She was the only woman I have ever known
who lived consistently and exclusively for herself, and she did so with
the sustained passion of a religious maniac. One can only compare her
to a Savanorola.
Her vanity was her power and her curse. It was an ogre. It had to be
fed. Human beings were thrown to it as to the devouring dragons in
fairy tales. We were all victims. I was, and you were, and Philibert
and Jinny, and Micky and Fan and all the others. Insatiable vanity,
that was all there was to Bianca in the last analysis. That was all the
meaning of her, but its manifestations, its results, its devious ways
of arriving at its own ends, these were infinite, would fill volumes.
You can see how the curse would operate. It operated through her
intelligence. Had she been stupid, all would have been well, but
concentrated on the study and care of herself, elaborating year after
year her attentions to herself, nursing her body, her face, her senses,
supplying to herself stimulants and soothing preparations, searching
for curious new sensations, she was aware of her own limited power to
please herself. Distinctly she perceived something beyond her reach,
a quality of experience outside her range, a beauty she could not
attain. She would have liked best to have been a queen of love, whom
all men adored, like the radiant Simonetta--fairy queen of Florence,
beautifully worshipped by an entire population, and she only succeeded
in being _la femme fatale_. With no gladness in her soul, she could
not inspire gladness--always in the faces of her victims she saw a
reflection of her own darkness. If occasionally, in the lurid light
of the excitement she could so easily evoke, she saw in a man’s face
a flash that resembled joy, ecstacy, delight, she as often saw it
fade to a dismal stupidity, or rage or disgust. Impossible for her to
create anything more than an imitation of bliss. Her egoism spoiled
its own gratification. It contained poison. Her touch was magical and
deadly. This, in the end, bored her. She used to complain exasperatedly
of people being afraid of her. The care with which they succumbed
disgusted her. Men grovelling at her feet, men writing sentimental
verses, men touching her with clumsy hands; she came to loathe them.
There was nothing in it; she wanted something else, something out of
the ordinary, something continually surprising, unexpected, dramatic.
Alas! Humanity goes its stolid way comfortably enough in spite of the
Biancas of the world. Men will “play up” to a certain point. They will
pretend to be dying of love to please a beautiful lady’s caprice, but
they won’t really die. One of the things Bianca longed for was to have
a crop of suicides laid to her account. She would have been pleased had
some of her victims blown their brains out, but somehow they didn’t.
They only threatened to do so. Once out of her sight, they recovered
the normal and sallied forth from her boudoir to enjoy fat beefsteaks.
Her tragedy lay in understanding what she missed. She observed that
inferior people experienced a range of feeling of which she was
incapable. Insignificant women inspired the passions she longed to
inspire. She envied and despised them. She envied every happy woman
her happiness, every lover his love; her eyes watched them all, with
curiosity, disdain and exasperation.
What in me began, after our three years of harmony, to get on her
nerves, was my monotonous and exclusive feeling for Philibert. That
such a sentiment should continue to absorb me and satisfy me, after
five years of marriage was too much for her. She became irritable and
teasing. She began to make fun of my love for my husband. She called it
stupid, vulgar, grotesque, indecent. I lost my temper, she grovelled,
enjoying that, but when next we met she began again, professing an
extraordinary merriment at the sight of my mawkish sentimentality.
With a sudden flash of insight I accused her of envy. She grew livid.
In a choking whisper, she told me that Philibert for his part was no
such idiot and that all I had to do was to look about me to find out
the truth. I left her in a rage and stayed away. I did not see her
again until the night of her ball, some months later, to which I went,
knowing that she had determined to take Philibert away from me. It was
the fact that Philibert as she believed had begun to care for me, that
made her finally act. She simply couldn’t bear to think that Philibert
and I should come to understand and truly care equally for each other.
I went to her ball to make a scene, to frighten her into giving him
back to me, but I did nothing. I didn’t speak to her. I didn’t go
near her. I simply stood and watched her. The sight of her paralysed
me. I realized that no man who had ever known and loved Bianca, could
care for me. And I came away, knowing that between me and Philibert,
everything was ended, and I came away terrified. As I left the house, I
remember muttering to myself “I must escape”--“I must escape.” Escape
from what? I don’t know. From them both, from what they had done, from
what they stood for, from the world of treachery and deadly pleasure to
which they belonged.
But I did not get away. I never got away. I never escaped from Bianca.
I never got out of range of the sense of her presence and of her
infernal charm. I still cared for her. Hating her, I still wondered
that she could have hurt me, still wept and called out to her in the
dark at night to know why she had done it, still felt her to be the
most fascinating woman I had ever known, and it was this that made
my jealousy of Philibert unbearable and fiendish. I had been twice
betrayed and I knew loving them both, and knowing them both, precisely
the quality of the delight they had in each other.
And I knew too, that Bianca was acting as she did because of me--even
more than because of Philibert. I was conscious and I was convinced
that she was conscious that the real meaning of the whole thing lay
in her feeling for me. There was between us, a relationship that had
become hateful, but that was still going on, a thing that was going to
endure, a mutual sympathy outraged and hideous now, but persisting. If
she had only wanted Philibert--well, she had him already. No--what she
wanted was to hurt me. And making all allowances for the attraction
between them, had it not been for me, he would not have inspired her
with a sufficient energy to bolt with him. The situation would have
lacked that something peculiar and curious which she wanted, had she
not felt as she did about me.
But I may be confused between what I knew then and what I know now.
It may be that I did not understand it all so well, then--I forget--I
cannot recall my actual state of mind. I give less importance to
my preoccupation with Philibert than I should do, and lay too much
emphasis on Bianca, because you see, I have got over Philibert, the
hurt he did me is long since past and I no longer care about it, but
from Bianca--I have never recovered. She never let me go--she never
finished with me. It wasn’t just one thing--it was a series of things
stretching over years, a continual coming back. You see--in the last
analysis it was because of me that she ran away with Philibert, broke
Fan’s heart and laid schemes for corrupting Jinny--and these things
took fifteen years to accomplish. There was war between us for fifteen
years.
The story of my life is the story of my duel with Bianca. Other people
played a part, other feelings absorbed me for long periods, other
relationships endured, but my relationship to Bianca was the long
strong rope that hanged me. You will see how it was.
Why did she go on with it? I don’t know. Unless it was that I never
gave in. Had I collapsed after Philibert left me, she might have been
satisfied--and satisfied, she would have lost interest in me--and I
should have been saved.