“Well, my dear, when humanity has nothing more to recommend it than the
fact that it cares for its young, I shall be ready to depart to another
planet.” She sat down on a high stool, one knee over the other, a foot
hung down, dangling a shabby shoe. Her face was full of merriment.
She chuckled. Her eyes danced. She gave me, as she always did, the
impression of containing in herself an immense fund of interest and
gladness and of finding life much to her taste.
“You mustn’t destroy my belief in my love for my child,” I said, half
laughingly.
“Your belief in it?” She wondered.
“Yes, in its being--worth something.”
“To which one?”
“To us both.”
She puffed at her cigarette. “If I had had a child I should have loved
it terribly, and stupidly,” she said seriously. “I should probably have
been worse than any of you. Maternity is a blinding, devouring passion,
is it not? I don’t know, but so I imagine. A mother’s love for her
child, what is there more admirable in that than in any other fact of
nature? Only when it is strong, so terribly strong as to become wise
and unselfish is it interesting. Even then, no, it is not interesting,
it is only natural and necessary, and often, very often, it is a curse
to the children.” Her face had gone dark and intense. She jumped down
from her stool, gave herself a shake, laughed, turned to her work--“No,
your mother-women are dreadful. I prefer those who love men. Sexual
passion is good for the feminine soul. It makes us intelligent. Tell
me, is it true that in America sensuality is considered a bad thing?”
“Yes. We--they--admire chastity, purity.”
“How do you mean--purity?”
“One man for one woman, love consecrated by marriage.”
“All one’s life?”
“Yes.”
“How strange. Love, you say, consecrated by marriage. How very funny.
You mean then seriously, not just social humbug? In their hearts do
intelligent women, women like yourself, feel love, love as the interest
and savour of life, coming unexpectedly, perhaps often, to be a bad
thing?”
“Many do.”
“And you--what do you think?”
“I? Oh, for me, I can’t generalize about it. I have no ideas on the
subject.”
“I see.”
She was silent a while. I watched her clever thumbs pressing and
smoothing the soft clay. She was no sculptor, but the head she was
modelling had a mischievous ugliness. Though badly done, it expressed
something. Watching her I realized again her immense capability, her
command of herself, her understanding of the elements of life. What was
she thinking of now, her sensitive witty face blinking sleepily with
half-closed eyes like a cat’s? Inwardly I felt that she was faintly
smiling at some pleasant memory or prospect. She was neither young
nor beautiful. Her wiry little person suggested nothing voluptuous or
alluring. She was dry and spare and untidy, yet her success with men
was unequalled. Impossible to imagine her in an attitude of amorous
tenderness, yet men adored her. And her lovers remained her friends.
She puzzled me. There was something here that I would never understand.
The high game of sex as a life occupation of absorbing interest and
endless ramifications, a gallant and dangerous sport at which one
became a recognized expert, in some such way I felt that she looked at
it. As an Englishwoman gives herself up to hunting, I reflected, and
exults in knowing herself to be a hard rider, just so Clémentine would
go at the biggest jumps, keep in the first field. Riding to hounds
or playing the daring game of love, the same sporting mentality, the
same ecstatic sense of life, all our faculties sharpened by danger. Why
not? Clémentine was sane, healthy, full of zest and delight. Impossible
to think of her in terms of maudlin sentimentality or sordid secret
pleasures. And yet for myself, I felt a loathing of men, a disgust at
the vaguest image of the contacts of sex. It was very puzzling. There
must be some deep racial difference between us, or some tenacious
effect of my upbringing that held me in a vice, or was it only that
Philibert had poisoned for me the sources of all emotion?
I moved about the dirty studio, brought back my mind to the subject I
had come to discuss. “We have forgotten about Claire, haven’t we?”
“Well, yes, what of Claire?” She yawned.
“Philibert says that Ludovic could arrange it.”
“No doubt he could. The President of the Council is you know his
greatest friend.”
“Yes, I know, but surely giving away secretaryships--”
“Oh, la la! Why not? Don’t worry about that. Madame de Joigny’s
son-in-law will make quite a respectable under-secretary as far as that
goes. I only wonder he’s not got what he wanted long ago.”
“What shall I do then?”
She looked at me, her head on one side, screwing up her clever
mischievous eyes.
“That, my dear, depends entirely on what you want to do.”
“Do you think Ludovic would mind my approaching him on such a subject?”
She laughed. “Do you?”
“No, I don’t. I should put it quite brutally, he would only have to say
no.”
“Quite so.” She continued to watch me with her funny intelligent grin.
“And that wouldn’t spoil our friendship, would it?” I asked again.
“No, I should say not, certainly not.” She laughed again and somehow,
frank as was that bubbling sound, I didn’t like it coming in at that
moment.
“Why do you laugh?” I asked, looking at her keenly.
Her face grew gradually grave, her eyes opened. We stared at each other
and in hers I saw a light, a flash, something keen and swift and bright
that made me warm to her, value her, exult in her friendship.
“_Vous êtes--vous êtes--_” she turned it off, waving a handful of clay.
“_Vous êtes admirable._” But I didn’t understand then, only long after.
I wonder what Claire would say if she knew that her fate hung on the
thread of Clémentine’s charity? For Clémentine saw it all, saw quite
clearly her opportunity for revenge. She had only to suggest what they,
unknown to me, were all thinking, namely that Ludovic, for the simplest
of reasons, would never refuse me anything, and their whole little
scheme would be undone. But she didn’t suggest it. There was nothing
spiteful in Clémentine.
So I went to him and told him the whole thing quite bluntly, and
he, without any fuss or without giving me any feeling of doing me a
favour, said that of course he would put in a word with the Premier.
They, he and the Premier, were going to the country together for a few
days. They were going to see Ludovic’s mother in her little farm on
the Loire. They would fish and sit in the garden. Perhaps over their
fishing rods on the banks of the lazy, reedy river, something could be
arranged. He then went on to tell me of his mother, who was very old,
nearly eighty-five, and who would not come with him to Paris because of
the noise. She was, he said, just a peasant woman, and had no interest
in his career. But she sent him baskets of apples from her orchard and
socks that she had knitted. She could not write. The _curé_ kept him
informed of her health. They had been very poor. As a child he had
always been hungry and he and his mother had worked in the fields.
Sometimes they had been so poor that they had had to beg for bread. His
father, who had been of a different class, had done nothing for him. He
had made his own way. The _curé_ had taught him to read and write. His
mother was content now. She had a cow and pigs and chickens, an apple
orchard and a garden. But she could not accustom herself to having a
servant in the house and did the cooking herself. He did not allude
again to Claire’s husband, neither then nor later. In time, as you
know, the matter was arranged, and I like to think that it was settled
in that _chaumière_ where Ludovic’s little old mother in her white
cap and coarse blue apron sat knitting, while the hens scratched and
cackled beyond the farm door. There is something humorous to me in the
fact that Claire’s luxurious home was secured to her in that place of
poverty and courage and contentment.
In the meantime Philibert had recovered his health and his looks. His
doctor and his masseur and his hairdresser and his tailor had in six
months restored to him a very good substitute for youth. He had gone at
the business methodically and with the utmost seriousness. Seeing as
little of him as possible at home, I nevertheless was aware of what was
going on. He lived by a strict régime. His rubber came every morning at
eight o’clock, his fencing master at nine. At ten he dressed. At eleven
he walked or rode in the _bois_. Faithfully he stuck to the diet his
doctor had ordered for him. He drank only the lightest wine. He gave
up smoking. His hand no longer shook. His face was smooth and rosy, he
had put on weight, he walked with his old springy impudence. He looked
almost the same, almost, but not quite. No beauty doctor on earth could
wipe away from his face the mark Bianca had put there. The droop of
the eye-lids, the sag of the lower lip, gave him away. To the crowd
he might seem the same Philibert, the leader of fashion, the joyous
comedian, the perennially young, but not to me, and not to himself.
We both knew that he was an old man now, and this fact formed a sort
of bond between us, a cold, grim, precise understanding that linked us
inevitably together. And for a time I didn’t quite hate this because
I felt secure, I felt that I had the upper hand. He was afraid of me,
and in a curious way depended on me. He depended on me, not to give
him away, not to let on to any one that he was, or had been, in danger
of breaking up. His vanity thus kept him at my mercy, while another
part of his brain found relief in the fact that I saw him as he was.
Sometimes I caught a look in his eyes that seemed to say--“I really
wouldn’t have the endurance to sustain this enormous bluff if I had to
bluff you as well.” I never answered his look. I couldn’t bring myself
to reach out to him in even the most impersonal way. All I could do
was to remain there beside him, in public sharing his life, in private
withdrawn, impassive, stolid, non-committal, and do him no harm.
And so it might have gone on indefinitely, the atmosphere of our house
coldly harmonious, calm as an icy lake, had not Jinny introduced an
element of hot, surging, dangerous feeling.
He loved her, too. At first I wouldn’t believe it, but I was bound
at last to admit that it was so. When I first began to notice the
increasing attention he gave her I had thought that he was “up to
something.” I suspected him to be playing the part of devoted father
with motives that had to do with myself, and as I could not conceive of
his wanting to make me like him, I imagined the reverse, that he wanted
to make me jealous, and I set myself to conceal from him the fact that
he had succeeded. I was terribly jealous, for whatever the meaning
of his apparent feeling for her, there was no doubt of her affection
for him. The child was obviously delighted to be with him. Repeatedly
when I asked her if she would like to go with me for a drive, she
would ask if “Papa” were coming too, and when I said no, her face
would change from pleasure to a curious expression of boredom that
was like an absurd imitation of his own. She would turn away quickly
and put out her hands to the empty room in a funny, hurting gesture of
exasperation, then suddenly, feeling my disappointment, would assume
a polite cheerfulness and say, with a quick, tactful insincerity that
reminded me all too vividly of her grandmother, “It is a pity Papa
cannot come, but of course, Mamma, I like best being with you alone.”
And I would cry out in my heart, “My poor, precocious infant, where did
you get such intuitions?”--but I knew where she got them.
There was between them a very striking resemblance. I looked sometimes
with horrid fascination from one to the other. She would come in with
him, swinging to his hand, twirling about, clasping it in both hers,
and laughing up in his face. Her light, exaggerated grace was his,
also the fineness of her little features. No one would ever at first
sight take her for my child, no one seeing them together could mistake
her for his. They disengaged the same brightness, the same chilly,
sparkling charm. How was it that in one it displeased me and in the
other so tormentingly appealed? Why, I asked myself, did I not hate her
too, since she so resembled her father? But the muttered question was
answered only by an inaudible groan. I had given him all my love, and
had now transferred it all to her, a stupid, elemental woman, I felt
that I was destined to be their victim. Strange thoughts, you will say,
for a mother to have about her child. Why not? I was afraid of her,
far more afraid than I had ever been of him. In the days of his power
over me I had been young, ignorant, insensitive; now I knew what I was
capable of suffering, knew only too well what little Geneviève could
do to me, did she take it into her head to become as like him as she
looked.
I tried to hide all this, but I felt that he saw. His manner changed.
He was at once more attentive to me and more careless, less formal,
more talkative, in a word more sure of himself. He took to dropping in
on me in the evenings before dinner, bringing Geneviève with him and
holding her beside him in the crook of his arm, while he unconcernedly
chatted, and all the while her great shining brown eyes were fixed on
me with their meaning lucidity. I was obliged to prevaricate, to seem
pleased, to lay myself out in an elaborate assumption of happy intimacy.
One night she came running back alone after going with him to the door
of his room, and threw her arms round my neck. I gathered her close.
Her caresses were so rare that I held her, positively, in a breathless
delight, with a sense of yearning tenderness so exquisite that it
frightened me. “So sweet, so sweet,” I murmured to myself, straining
her to me. Then I heard her say intensely, “It’s not true, it’s not
true, tell me it’s not true.”