“Time is a circle.”
“The sunrise, why the same sun? Who knows?”
“Truth? Why should one want truth? Truth is a thing we have invented.
An accurate statement of facts? But there is no accuracy except in
mathematics, and in mathematics there are no facts.”
Were they joking? Or were they serious? Both. I felt like a schoolgirl,
very ignorant, very crude, with a stiff blank mind like a piece of
cardboard. They slowed down to listen to Ludovic. I remember Ludovic
speaking to them all with his eyes smiling under their spiky grey
eyebrows. I think I remember what he said. It was the first time I had
heard him talk, as he talked to me so often afterwards.
“I sit in some old city of the past and look back upon the present
and still further back into the future. Why not? Time is an endless
circle, wheeling around one. Why trouble to imagine a beginning
or an end? Why these unnatural conceptions? The old legends are
more sensible. The ancient mystic symbol of matter, Ouroborro, the
tail-devourer, a serpent coiled into a circle, symbol of evolution, of
the evolution of matter. There is something there, something to think
of. Let us all think of molecules, and remember the Philosopher’s
Stone. Have you ever laughed at the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone
that can transmute metals and give the elixir of life? What if it were
discovered, this stone? Suppose radium were in the legend stone of long
ago. Wouldn’t that suggest to you that we have only just discovered out
of the long labour of our known cycle of civilization something that
was known before by another race of men? Who knows, perhaps that race
conquered its earth with this stone, turned it from a savage planet
like this of ours into a Garden of Eden, and then, surfeited with ease,
died of inertia, lapsed into darkness, fell from the Heaven it had
made. That is to say, Adam, the father of our race, may have been the
last survivor of a race of fallen gods, supermen.”
Clémentine took my arm as we went out of the dining-room.
“You find us a little mad?” she asked.
“Oh, no.”
“Tell us how you find us. You are different, big and strong and young
and strange. Your point of view about us would be something new.”
“I find you extraordinarily happy.”
“Oh yes, we are gay.”
The men had followed us.
“We laugh.”
“We find the world so funny.”
“But we’re serious too. There’s Ludovic as solemn as a trout. He’d be
dreary if we let him be.”
“Only we don’t. Why should one worry? One can’t change anything. You
must be one of us. It’s so amusing with us. You will see how amusing it
is.”
So it was that they adopted me. And that night as I drove home through
the moonlit streets I thought of St. Mary’s Plains with distaste and
impatience.
But what I remember best of all about that evening was the sweet funny
way you beamed down the table when you saw that your friends liked me.
You were, you know, just a little nervous about the impression I would
make on them. They were so much more brilliant than any one else that I
don’t wonder. But it all went off well, bless your heart, thanks to the
penetrating sweetness of your will that willed us to be pleased with
one another.
There followed years of power and pleasure. Your friends made good
their promise. They taught me to enjoy. Ludovic began to form my mind.
Clémentine gave me the daring to use it. I learned how pleasant it
was to follow one’s caprices, to indulge one’s tastes, to realize
one’s dreams. Do you remember the things we did? What indeed didn’t
we do, with our picture shows, our pantomimes, and our music? When
we wanted to do a thing we did it. When we wanted to go to a place
we went. What fun it was going off at a moment’s notice to Seville,
to Constantinople, to Moscow. Some one would say--“Have you seen the
_Place Stanislas_ at Nancy by moonlight? No? But you must.” “Let’s go
tomorrow,” and we went. Or--“I hear that at Grenoble there is a lady
who owns a glove shop and who has in her back parlour a Manet, let us
go and buy it, if it is true.” Of course we went and found it was true
and bought it. Felix it was who took us all the way to Strasbourg for
one night and day, to eat a pâté de foie gras and hear mass in the
Cathedral.
But we were happiest of all in Paris. Paris was inexhaustible. Not a
nook or cranny of interest and charm escaped us. Sometimes early in
the spring mornings we would walk through silvery streets or along
the quais or take the penny steamer down the Seine. We sampled every
restaurant known to our gourmet Felix. We sat in icy studios at the
feet of shy ogres. Even Dégas thawed to us, while rare spirits from odd
corners of the earth joined us in the evenings. And increasingly the
beauty of Paris was revealed to me. I cared for it intimately now, and
I loved its smooth pale historic stones with a delicate sensuousness.
I was happy. I was as happy as an opium eater. I lived in a continuous
mood of enjoyment that had the quality of a dream. All this was mine
to behold and delight in, and I was responsible for none of it. I was
passive. I was calm. The play played itself out about me, and I was in
no way involved. What people did and what they didn’t do had no real
significance. When Ludovic said: “A man has as much right to take life
as to give it,” I thought placidly, “Perhaps so, in this world.” When
he denounced property and capitalists and said we should all be poor, I
thought, of course, that is so, and when he pointed out to me a woman
who had killed her father because he was cross-eyed and got on her
nerves, I merely looked at her with mild curiosity. He said that she
was very sensitive and charming, and I believed him. It didn’t seem to
matter.
And if at times it occurred to me that I was becoming callous and
selfish, at others I felt that I was becoming intelligent and
charitable.
Jinny was my one responsibility, a little will-o’-the-wisp creature who
danced into my room of a morning to drop a kiss on my nose and dance
out again. Jinny, so entrancingly pretty, so ridiculously dainty, who
never soiled her hands or tore her frock or spilled her food, who said
her prayers night and morning to a silver crucifix that her father had
sent her from Italy, and who confessed her minute sins every Friday to
a priest but never confided in her mother.
My child baffled me. There was nothing in my own childhood’s experience
that threw any light on the little close mystery of her nature. She
didn’t like animals, she hated romping about, she was afraid of the
cold. What she liked was to be curled up on cushions in front of
the fire and listen to fairy stories. Her indolence was complete,
her capacity for keeping still, extraordinary in one who moved so
lightly when she did move. Sometimes when I looked up from the book I
was reading aloud to her, I would find her great brown eyes fixed on
me with a look of uncanny wisdom. She seemed to disapprove of me. I
wondered if this had anything to do with the teaching of her priestly
tutors that her father had prescribed for her, or whether it sprang
from a natural precocious feeling of the difference between us. We
were certainly a strange couple. Even in moments of my most anguished
tenderness, I could not but feel the incongruity. The idea that she was
much more her father’s daughter than mine was one that I tried not to
dwell on.
I had been going happily along, thinking that I could enjoy this
adventurous life of my new friends without being involved in it, when
I found out that I was much less free than I thought. Your mother did
not approve, I knew, and I gathered that she blamed you for leading
me astray, but it came nevertheless as a surprise when she gently
interfered.
“Aren’t you making yourself a little notorious, my child?” she asked
one day.
“Notorious _belle-mère_?”
“Yes. Dining in restaurants in the company of such strange men.”
“They are not very strange, dear, except in being so very intelligent,
and I never, at least scarcely ever, dine alone with men. There is
almost always Clémentine.”
“I know, that’s just it. For a chaperone, you couldn’t have chosen
worse.”
“But surely, _Belle Mère_, I need no chaperone, I am old enough to go
about alone?”
She closed her eyes wearily, opened them and spoke sharply.
“French women of good family never go about alone, and never dine in
public places.”
“But Clémentine--”
“Don’t talk to me of Clémentine.” I was startled by the sudden note of
sharp personal grievance in her voice. “Her conduct is scandalous. Her
mother was my first cousin and dearest friend. It is fortunate that
she is dead. How could she be blamed for that marriage, yet Clémentine
always blamed her and set to work deliberately to make her suffer.”
“I know nothing of Clémentine’s marriage.”
“Well, her husband--but no matter, there is no excuse for her making
herself an object of derision.”
“I scarcely think she does that, dear, she is in great demand you know,
in the very highest quarters.”
“At foreign courts, perhaps, not in her own country. If it weren’t for
the obligations of kinship no one, but no one would speak to her.”
“Just what is it that she has done that you so disapprove of?”
“She has made herself cheap. She has vulgarized her position, she plays
at being a bohemian, she has bartered away her dignity for a little
sordid amusement.”
“And I?”
“You are in danger of doing the same, but in greater danger.”