Philibert’s family had shown up to this point, a remarkable restraint.
As long as I went about as if nothing had happened, they left me alone,
but after my scene with Fan I allowed myself a revulsion of feeling. I
stopped going out. I shut myself up and sent for my lawyer. Philibert
had been gone two months. I saw no reason to put off any longer, the
action that I was determined on; I would start divorce proceedings,
leave things in professional hands and go home. What else could I do?
July was drawing to a close. The season was ending in a languid dribble
of belated garden parties. Fan, with a characteristic spurt of energy,
had recovered and gone off to the Austrian Tyrol with the de Greux,
leaving me with a last bit of reiterated advice about not being a fool.
I observed that I had no place to go, and nothing to do. Biarritz,
Trouville, Dinard, would mean carrying on the sickening pretence under
an even closer scrutiny than in Paris. The Château de Ste. Clothilde
had no charms for me now. I had liked the place, but Philibert had
spoiled it with his endless improvements. It was now, his creation
stamped with him. Sitting alone in my room at the top of the house with
the shabby relics of the Grey House, I thought of him as he had been
there in the country, strutting about directing his army of workmen,
cutting down trees, pulling up whole lawns to replace them with
gravelled terraces, and sinking into the reluctant earth marble basins
for the lovely vagrant waters of the park. He had always professed to
be the enemy of nature. It was true. What he called--“_Les bêtises de
la nature_,” filled him with disgust. Spreading trees and green fields
dotted with buttercups and bubbling streams tumbling through thickets
got on his nerves. “_Regardez donc le laissez-aller de tout cela_,”
he would cry. “How ugly it is. How stupid. It has no form, no design.”
Clumps of trees in a meadow he would liken to pimples on hairy faces.
He called grass the hair of the earth, and couldn’t endure it unless it
was close cut. He never saw a stream of water without wanting to use it
up in elaborate fountains. Gardens he regarded as “salons” in the open
air. One should use the shrubs and trees and flowers as one used silks
and brocades in an interior. Everything in a garden must be “_voulu_.”
Nothing must be left to go its own way, not a vine, not a rosebush, not
a tree should be allowed a movement of its own. Nature must be bound
and twisted into a work of art. “Ah,” he would exclaim, “how it amuses
me to torture nature.” You know what he did. The result was very fine
of its kind, certainly very grandiose. He would lead people out on the
terrace and, standing a minute, a shiny dapper little manikin, five
foot four in high heels above that great design of gravel walks and
fountains and squares of water, with their little parquets of green
grass closed in by hedges, like a series of drawing-rooms, he would
sparkle with enthusiasm. “You see,” he would say, “what I have done,
you see how these gardens _s’accrochent au château_, how it is all a
part of the house. The château could not exist without the garden,
nor the garden without the château. One would have no sense without
the other. Before I restored the grounds and elaborated on the old
designs of Lenôtre, the house was horrible.” He had placed complicated
machinery under his fountains that made the waters when they were in
play take a dozen varied successive shapes. Nothing amused him more
than watching all those waters playing, twisting, turning, tracing
strange designs in the sunlight, designs that he himself had imagined.
It gave him a peculiar joy to see his own idea produced in crystal
drops of water. He had worked in sunlight and limpid flowing water as
a painter works in colours, and had in a way produced for himself the
illusion of the miraculous.
He couldn’t understand why I suffered when he had all those magnificent
trees uprooted and when later on I complained that there was no shade
anywhere and no place to lie down with a book: “But, my poor child,
you’ve your bed for that, or your ‘_chaise longue_.’ This garden is
neither a bedroom nor a boudoir, it is a ‘_salle de fêtes_’.”
I remembered all this. Certainly for many reasons Ste. Clothilde was
out of the question. I would take Jinny home with me to St. Mary’s
Plains. The moment had come. A strange excitement came over me as I at
last wrote out the cablegram to Patience Forbes announcing our sailing
on the first of August. On the same day I had a talk with my solicitor.
_Maître_ Baudoin was a jaded, dry man, I believe honest, and rather
dull. He was eager for a holiday and very bored, I could see, at the
idea of being kept in town. He gave me little sympathy.
I wished to divorce my husband. That might or might not be possible.
It depended, of course, to a certain extent, to a limited extent, on
whether I had sufficient grounds, and whether _Monsieur le Marquis_
contested the suit. I intimated briefly that I believed I had
sufficient grounds. He eyed me gravely through half-shut deferential
and sleepy eyes. Did I think my husband would defend the suit, because
if he did, no matter what my grounds were, the case might last five
years. He told me this as a matter of conscience. Such a case would
be lucrative to him, of course, but it might prove fatiguing to the
parties more directly concerned. Five years? Yes, or even ten. That
was the way in France. A divorce against a man who fought it was very
difficult to obtain, and of course the Church did not recognize it.
That was not his affair save in so far as if I had the intention of
re-marrying, such a marriage would of necessity be considered bigamous
by all good Catholics. I had, I said, no intention of marrying a second
time. He seemed at that rather mystified. I desired, then, nothing more
than legal separation? That was much simpler. It was all a question of
property. Was there a settlement? He supposed I wished “_séparation
des biens_.” I told him that I had no wish to leave _Monsieur de
Joigny_ in financial difficulties and that that question might be left
until later, but he proved obstinate and kept on talking on the same
subject till my head ached. Finally I gathered that he was suggesting
as delicately as he could that Philibert might be bribed. “But I can’t
settle on him a large sum,” I objected wearily, “the fortune is tied up
for my daughter.”
“Ah, a trust?”
“Yes.”
“It all goes to your child on your death?”
“Yes, to my children or child, by my father’s will.”
“I see. She becomes, then, the important factor.”
“What do you mean?”
“You would lose her.”
“Why?”
“The law courts would not deprive her father of her custody.”
“But if he doesn’t care for her?”
“Are you sure he doesn’t?”
“He has left her.”
“For a time, perhaps, but she is his, and if, which would be most
unnatural, he did not care for her, he might still care for what she
represented.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that he cared for nothing but
his mistress, but I left the vulgar words unspoken. After all, I was
not sure that Philibert did not care for Geneviève. His moods of a
doting father might be genuine. He might indeed fight for her. My will
hardened as I wearily dismissed the tiresome discouraging man of law.
It was all more complicated than I had thought.
He had scarcely got out of the house before it was invaded by
relatives. With a startling promptitude, they bore down on me. They
must have had spies in the house. My secretary must have telephoned the
alarm, or the Governess or the Butler, any one, or all of the staff
may have been keeping them informed. In any case, there they were,
miraculously ushered into my presence without warning one by one,
or two by two, or in groups, aunts, uncles, cousins, first, second,
third cousins, cousins by marriage once removed, some of them people
whom I scarcely knew, strange old women in wigs with withered faces
and ragged feather boas, unearthed for the occasion out of their old
grand sealed houses; shrivelled old men with stiff knees and watery
eyes; it would have seemed funny, had my nerves not been on edge, had
their visits not appeared to me so exceedingly misplaced. I soon found
that no hinting on my part would make them take this view. They meant
business. They were the family. They were acting for the family and as
a family. Some of them constituted that sacred thing the “_conseil de
famille_” and they were acting in accordance with the rights and duties
of a French family in harmony with and under the protection of the law
of the French state. With correct and concise politeness they gave me
to understand that I was not free to do as I liked, that I was one of
them, bound as they were bound, and that if I chose to go against their
will, and defy my obligations, then I would do so at my own peril and
at the cost of what I held most dear. I saw what they were driving at.
They meant to keep Jinny whatever happened. If I declared war, I would
lose my child.
I put it brutally. They didn’t. They were charming. They beat round the
bush. They asked after my health. They drank tea and smoked cigarettes
and patted Jinny’s head and said charming things to her and gave her
bonbons but they made their meaning clear and the more diplomatic they
were, the angrier I became.
This kind of thing went on for three days. I remained obdurate. I
refused to commit myself, but gradually I was becoming frightened.
What frightened me was that I saw that they all, every one of them,
even those that I had thought most human, even your Aunt Alice who
was a saint and your Uncle Stanislas all sided with Philibert, all
stood solid behind him, all would stick to him no matter what he did,
before the world and against the foreigner who threatened the close
fabric of their community; and I took it as a sinister portent that
those of the immediate family, whom I knew best, your mother and Claire
and Aunt Clothilde, stayed away. In despair I went to Aunt Clothilde.
What, I asked her, did it all mean? She gave me no comfort. It meant
simply that things were so in France. French families were like that.
They clung together, and they did not admit divorce. If I tried to
divorce Philibert I would fail and would in the attempt lose my child.
Philibert, of course, was a rascal, but what would you, I ought to
have known it from the beginning. American women thought too much of
themselves. There was no modesty in the way I was behaving. Why should
I suppose that the whole scheme of the social state should be upset
because my husband liked another woman better than he did me? She
liked me, of course she liked me--for that reason she had refused to
take part in the family’s councils of war. But she was disappointed
in me, she had thought I had pluck. Here I was, behaving like a fish
wife who has been knocked into the gutter, screaming for my rights,
for vengeance. I had better go home and say my prayers. I went, and
as if in answer to the dreadful old woman’s bidding found a bishop in
the drawing-room. My nerves by that time were in such a state that the
suave and polished prelate soon had me in tears. He mistook them for
tears of repentance. He talked a long time about the consolation of
religion and the comfort of confession and rejoiced to find that I was
less inimical to the benign influence of Rome, than he had thought. I
scarcely heard what he said, but his fine ivory face and glowing eyes
and thin set mouth, gave me a feeling of uncanny power. I remembered
that I belonged to his Church, that I had been solemnly married at the
High Altar of Rome, that there I had taken vows, had professed beliefs,
and I felt a sudden superstitious terror. What if it were true, their
truth? What could they do to me, these mysterious ministers of the
Pope? What could they not do? In my fever, I saw myself tracked to
St. Mary’s Plains, followed up the steps of the Grey House by sallow
figures in black cassocks, and suffering, labouring for the rest of my
days, under the mysterious blight of an ecclesiastical curse.
When one lives in a country that is not one’s own, among strange
people whom one knows only superficially, surrounded by customs and
conventions that one does not understand, one finds it difficult to
decide moral issues. I felt bewildered and at a loss. It still seemed
to me at moments inevitable and right to divorce Philibert. At other
moments I felt less sure. The disapproval of the organized compact
community was having its effect. The antagonism of the family acted on
me with incessant pressure, however obstinately I repeated to myself
the words “I don’t care.” I did care. I was alone. I could not even be
certain that my Aunt Patience would approve. She might say in her terse
way, “Quite right, Jane. He’s forfeited your respect, get rid of him,”
or she might say, “You married him before God, you can’t undo that,” I
did not know what she would say. And the problem of Geneviève tortured
me. The fear of losing her if I divorced her father was no greater
than the fear of seeing her gradually slipping from me as the years
passed, if I remained his wife. No one knew better than I how charming
he could be if he chose. I watched him in anticipation stealing her
heart from me, turning her against her own mother. I saw her becoming
more and more like him, becoming his pupil, his work of art. Philibert
made things his own so easily. He had a genius for conquest. Everything
that he touched became his. How different from me! There was nothing
in Philibert’s house that belonged to me, except the few sticks of
furniture that I had hidden away in that room upstairs. The lovely
things in the great rooms troubled me. They affected my nerves as if
a chorus of small muffled voices were calling out to me in strange
tongues that I could not understand. I realized their beauty, but was
conscious of not appreciating them as they deserved. There was no
sympathy between us. They affected me but I did not affect them. I
could never make them look as if they were a part of my life. I was
loath to handle them, but no amount of touching with my fingers would
have given them a familiar look; the tables and chairs and tapestries
remained there around me, enigmatic, permanent, unresponsive. My life
spent itself, throbbing out among them, beating against their calm,
smooth surfaces without reaching them. There was no trace in that house
of the tumult of my own life. It continued cold, inexorable and strange.
It remained for your mother to seek me out in my loneliness and show me
what I should do. I thought at the time that I recognized her words as
words of truth. I do not know now whether I was right or wrong.
Claire never came. She sent her husband instead, not so much as a
messenger, more as an object lesson, a mute reminder--I caught her
idea--I was to look at him and realize what she was putting up with
and draw from the spectacle of his awfulness the moral. Unexpectedly,
his awfulness, appealed to me. There was something about this keen
little stolid French bounder that was a relief. His oily head, his fat
brown face, his monstrous nose and little bright beady eyes, these
unattractive things made up a hard compact entity. He was solid and
complete, round paunch, tight trousers, plump hands fingering a gold
watch chain, smell of bayrum and soap, aura of success, of materialism,
of industrial jubilance and all the rest of it. But he showed me
for the first time that day something more, himself smarting under
his thick skin with the innumerable de Joigny slights stinging him,
controlled enough not to let on, determined to get out of them in
exchange what they could give him, but not counting it much, a shrewd
downright kind little rascal, with a good old middle-class self-respect
strong in him, strong enough to make him feel himself their superior.
It didn’t take him long to make his point. He talked quickly and neatly.
Claire was unwell, she had sent him to add his voice to the family
howl. Claire never howled. When there was trouble, she withdrew. It
wasn’t her _genre_, to mix herself up in a fuss. Well--he wasn’t at all
sure that he had anything to say. Firstly because, after all, it was
none of his business. He wasn’t a member of the de Joigny family and
never would be. They had made that perfectly clear, years ago. So why
should he interfere?
I smiled. “Why indeed?” He smiled back, his hands crossed on his
stomach; his smile took a cynically humorous curve.
“If on the other hand, Madame, my sister-in-law, you want an outsider’s
opinion, it is at your disposal.”
“Two outsiders, confabing together,” I ventured.
“No,” he spoke abruptly, in a light sharp staccato, a nasal voice,
not unpleasant, the voice of the phenomenally intelligent French
bourgeoisie. “You are not as I am. You are a woman. They won’t let you
in--but they won’t let you out. You belong to them. I don’t--beside
I am of their people. I am French--I have my own backing. They don’t
like what I represent but they are obliged to admit its importance. It
is the backbone of France that I represent, the bread they eat, the
stones they walk on, the nation they ground under their heels in the
old days. They stamp on me now, but only in play, only to save their
faces--not seriously--they can’t. You, Madame, are different. You are a
foreigner, and ‘_sans défense_.’ _La famille de Joigny_ have a contempt
for foreigners. Your protectors are in America. They snap their fingers
at them. You are helpless--”
It was true. Well then?
He eyed me, humorously. “It depends on what you want out of them. I
take it they can’t give you much of anything. You didn’t marry one
of them, as I did, to ameliorate your situation in society. Putting
aside the charm of the son and daughter, why did we do it? I did it
as a bit of business. For me it was ‘_une affaire_--’ how it turned
out is neither here nor there. I can look after myself. For you it is
different, I repeat you are helpless. They are too many for you.” He
chuckled good-naturedly.
Again it was true; I assented meekly.
“Ah ha--_Voilà_, you see it. Then, my advice is--‘_Filez_’--get out.”
“And Geneviève?”
“Bribe them.”
“You think--?”
He ruminated, his nose in the air--“Yes, I think--if you make it
enough.” He laughed again, rose briskly, took up his hat, his
cream-coloured gloves, his gold-headed cane. For an instant his bright
little eyes scrutinized me--he seemed about to speak, his thick lips
formed, I saw them there, grave words, a confidence perhaps, a lament,
a plea for sympathy, I know not what. He didn’t speak them; he was very
intelligent; he had a delicacy as fine as theirs, when he cared to show
it. There was a nicer compliment to me in this clever little bounder’s
attempting no understanding with me, than any I had received in many a
long day.
He left with me a pleasant feeling of my own independence, he left me
invigorated and more sane than I had been, but your mother wiped out
the impression he had made, with one wave of her hand.
I remember the sight of her in my doorway. I was so little expecting
her that I had a chance to see her quite clearly during one instant,
before I realized who she was. A small black figure in a stiff little
ugly black hat and short cape, a dumpy forlorn little figure of no
grace or elegance, and a worn nervous face, out of which stared a
pair of very bright determined dark eyes. She might have been a very
hard-driven gentle woman, determined to brave insults and apply for
the post of housekeeper. This in the flash before all that I knew of
her covered her like a veil, and before she spoke.
I did not want to see her. I knew in an instant why she had come. I
remember wondering if I could get out of the other door before she
spoke, before I really looked at her, and all the time I was looking
and she was looking, we were staring at each other.
I had always had a deep regard for her. The fact that she did not like
me, made no difference. That was where Claire’s husband had fallen
short in his putting of the case. He didn’t know that I cared for
Madame de Joigny; he didn’t know that I wanted the family to love
me, because I loved them. Now in your mother’s presence, I felt the
immense disadvantage of this. She cared nothing for me and I was bound
to give in to her. I knew I would give in. I knew that I was about to
make one last attempt to win her. I tried to rouse myself. I recalled
and went over in my mind the opinion I knew she had of me. I knew that
physically I was repulsive to her. Often when I approached her, I had
seen her shudder. She thought me _outrée_. Once she had said, “Why is
it Jane, that you can never look like other people? Everything you put
on becomes gorgeous and exaggerated. It is most unfortunate.” And she
was afraid of my feelings, my violent enthusiasms and my deep longings.
Oh, I knew, I knew quite well. Instinctively she felt my hot blood
pounding in my veins--and recoiled from contact.
Most of all she hated me because of what I had done to Philibert. I
had made him nouveau riche; I had made him ridiculous; I had made him
unhappy, and worst of all, I had made him appear to her, cruel and
vulgar. When he was unkind to me, she hated me for being the cause of
his unkindness. You thought her love for Philibert a blind adoration
but it was not blind. She understood him, she knew him to his bones,
and she spent her life in shielding him from her own scrutiny. Her
relief was in submitting herself to his charm. She delighted in him,
but she hated his conduct. It seemed to her that he was a victim
of what she most hated. She accused him in her own heart of being
faithless to her faith, the faith of his ancestors. She saw on him the
stains and distorting marks of the vulgar world that amused him, but
she was continually falling in love with him and losing herself in
his charm, seeking solace, suffering, being disappointed. I believe
Philibert made your mother suffer more than he made me suffer, far, far
more, for you see she couldn’t stop loving him, she could never be free
from him. He was her own, her first-born, the child of her passionate
youth. He was her self that she had projected beyond herself, he was
her great adventure, he was the gauge she had thrown down at the feet
of fate, and it took all her courage to face calmly the travesty he
made of her miracle.
My existence, you see, added immeasurably to the difficulty of her
task. If he had married Bianca, Bianca, she believed, would have kept
him in order and would have presented him to her soothed eyes in the
light of a gallant gentleman. In marrying me he committed a serious
error in taste to begin with, and having married me he behaved to
me like a brute, and this was almost more than she could bear. The
interesting thing to notice was that though she suffered horribly she
made no attempt to remedy matters, did not try, I mean, to help us, and
never gave me even as much as a hint as to how I should wisely have
treated him, but limited her energy to just bearing her mortification
without giving a sign of it. It did not seem to her worth while
interfering to try and put things right when they were bound to go
wrong, but it did seem necessary to keep up the make-believe that they
were not going wrong. Almost everything in the world was going wrong.
One couldn’t face it. One must shut oneself up. One must ignore ugly
facts.
Philibert’s going off with Bianca in that spectacular fashion did,
I know, very deeply hurt your mother. The horror of it to her must
have been unspeakable. Here, at last, was an ugly fact of monstrous
proportions that she could not ignore. She was bound at last to do
something. She saw her son disgraced, her name dragged through the
divorce court, she heard her world echoing with the clanging noise of
scandal. She felt around her the brutal heaving of the foundation of
her life. In her little tufted silken drawing-room that reminded me
always of the inside of a jewel case, she had sat listening, shivering
with apprehension. News came to her of the runaways. They were in
Bianca’s palace in Venice giving themselves up to curious orgies of
pleasure. People told strange tales of their doings. They seemed to
have gone mad. News came then from another quarter. I had consulted
my solicitor. Claire was thoroughly frightened. Your mother did not
hesitate then. She was old, she was tired, she was without hope or
illusions. She saw her son as he was, and she saw Bianca at last as
she was, and she believed that for her there was no happiness to be
derived ever again from those two people. But she loved Philibert, she
loved him with anger and contempt and a breaking heart, and she was
determined to save him the last final ignominy, and so she put on her
bonnet and came to me. And as I thought of these things I was drawn out
of my chair toward her in spite of myself.
I begged her to be seated. I told her that I was touched and distressed
by her coming to me, and that had she sent me word I would have gone
to her. She smiled wanly with her old infinite sweetness. That smile
was the most consummate bit of artistry I have ever beheld. It denied
everything. It assumed everything. It fixed the pitch of our talk, it
indicated a direction and a limit. It outlined before me the space
in which I was to be allowed to move. It gave her the leading rôle
in the little drama that was about to be played out between us, and
it established her position once and for all as that of a great lady
calling upon an awkward young woman. But I saw beyond her smile. I saw
what she had been through, and was suffering. The combined play of
her terrible reddened eyes and that lovely unreal smile impressed me
profoundly.
For any other woman the beginning of such a conversation would have
been difficult, but your mother, opened up the subject that lay before
us with ease and delicacy. Her phrase was finely pointed. She used it
as she might have used a silver knife to lift the edge of a box that
contained something ugly.
“I do not know,” she said, “whether or not you have ever loved my son,
but I have felt that his sudden departure must have seemed to you very
shocking, so I have come to reassure you.”
I recoiled at this. It seemed to me that I was being attacked and that
was the last thing I expected. I was startled and puzzled by those
opening words. What difference did it make whether or not I had loved
her son? For a moment I felt angry. After all it was he that had left
me; why then, should I be accused? As for reassurance, I did not want
any. This was no time for reassurance. An ugly spirit stirred in me. I
was about to answer abruptly, when I saw that the purple-veined hand
that lay across the table before me was trembling. It was animated by
some painful agitation that shook it even resting as it did on that
strong surface. The withered palm was rubbing and quivering against the
polished wood, the worn finger tips were tapping spasmodically. My eyes
smarted at the sight of it. I spoke gently.
“Yes, _belle-maman_, I thank you for coming.”
“Ah, my poor child--and the family--I hear the family has been at you.”
“They have been here.”
“You must not mind them. They do not understand. In our world women,
you know, take things differently, they do not expect what you expect.”
There was a pause. What could I say? She seemed very reasonable and
very kind. I had never felt her so near to me before.
When she spoke again it was even more simply. “I have had no news of
Philibert,” she said sadly. “Have you?” The tone of her voice was
intimate and more natural than I had ever heard it when addressed to
me. It implied that we were both unfortunate together. I responded to
it with a flicker of hope.
“No,” I replied, “I have no news, but I have reason to believe that he
will not come back.”
“Ah,” she cried. “What makes you think that? But it is impossible.”
“No,” I continued, “it is not impossible. It is true. He gave me to
understand that himself.”