The years passed, crowded with incidents, colourful, varied, gay. I saw
them going by, like gaudy pleasure boats, richly panoplied and filled
with graceful merry-makers, floating down a sullen river. Sometimes I
seemed to be alone, watching them go by, sometimes, beyond them, a long
way off, I heard a sound that was like the sound of waves breaking on a
distant beach.
You wince at what you feel to be my poor attempt at poetic imagery--I
am not trying to be poetic, I am trying to express to you my
experience, as precisely as possible. It was like that. In the middle
of a crowded place, at the Opera where women in diamond tiaras nodded
from padded cages, on the boulevards where a thousand motors like
shining beetles buzzed in and out of rows of clanging trams, in a
drawing-room ringing with staccato voices, I would find myself,
suddenly, listening to a sound that seemed to come from an immense
distance; a faint far rhythmic roar that was audible to my spirit, and
that I translated to myself in terms of the sea because it affected me
that way, like a booming murmur, regular as the booming of waves. I
knew what it was.
I seemed at such times to see Patience Forbes, standing on the other
side of the Atlantic, like some allegorical figure of faith, a gaunt
weather-beaten old woman, her strong feet planted firmly on the shore,
the wind whipping her black clothes about her, her brave old eyes
looking out at me, under shielding hands, across that immense distance.
The distance between us was growing greater. I no longer wrote to
her every week. There seemed so little to say. I found a difficulty
in telling her of my occupations and amusements. When it came to
describing to her the people I associated with, they appeared suddenly
trivial and peculiar. There was no one about me, whom she could have
understood. Clémentine with her genius for amorous-adventure, Ludovic
with his nihilistic philosophy, Felix the intellectual mischief-maker;
when I wrote to her of these people, I found that I misrepresented
them, made up for them colourless characters that did not exist and
would not distress her. Her innocence cut her off from us. The recital
of my life was like telling a story and leaving out the point. I gave
it up, disgusted by my feeble insincerity, and limited my letters to
news of Jinny and comments on public events. And she understood, of
course, that I was keeping everything back. She was no fool. I can see
now, when it is too late, what a mistake I made, and what a pity it
was. Now that she is dead, I think of her sitting alone in the Grey
House, waiting for my letters, opening them with old trembling fingers,
reading the meagre artificial sentences; her face growing tired and
grim at the meaningless words, then putting away the disappointing
sheets of paper in the secretary by the door. I found them there, all
of them afterwards arranged in packets with laconic pencilled notes
on their wrappers--“Jane doesn’t tell me much. She’s not happy.” “A
bad winter for Jane, she’s taken to gambling; she says nothing of her
husband.” “Jane was coming but can’t. I’m disappointed.” That note was
made the summer Fan died--I had determined to go to St. Mary’s Plains.
Fan’s illness stopped me.
I had been seeing very little of Fan. She had established herself in
a flat near the _Étoile_ where she lived alone, but where her husband
paid her an occasional visit. Ivanoff was pretty well done for in
Paris. There had been a scene at the Travellers’ Club, and afterwards
his old victims had refused to play cards with him. So he had gone
elsewhere. Men like Ivanoff can always pick up a living at Monte Carlo.
He spent most of his time there, but when he came back, Fan always took
him in. I never saw him on these occasions, nor apparently did any one
else, but Fan would announce his arrival bluntly, and with a sort of
defiant bravado, would put off her dinners and lunches to be with him.
She lived from hand to mouth. People who accused her of accepting his
ill-gotten gains were wide of the mark. Ivanoff contributed nothing to
Fan’s keep. It was the other way round. He came back to her when he was
on the rocks, came back to beg from her and to recuperate. Once she
said to me, “Ivan’s been asleep for thirty-six hours on the sofa in the
drawing-room. I swear to you it’s true. He has only waked up twice to
eat a sandwich and have a drink.”
But when I asked why she put up with him, she flung off with a laugh,
and--“God only knows.”
She lived from hand to mouth in a state of extravagant luxury. Her
stepfather had died, leaving her four thousand dollars a year, that
gave her twenty thousand francs before the war. One would have said
that she spent at the least five times as much, but she didn’t. She
had resources, and little arrangements that made it unnecessary for
her to pay for a good many things; and she earned a good deal. Her
reputation as one of the smartest women in Paris, and her popularity,
represented her capital, a very considerable sum. New and ambitious
dressmaking houses clothed her for nothing, and in return she brought
them the clientele they wanted. She had a standing account at certain
fashionable restaurants, where she was allowed to lunch for five francs
and dine for ten, and where to “pay back” she was the centre of many a
cosmopolitan dinner party. For ready cash she wrote social notes in a
fashion paper and occasionally launched a South American millionaire in
society. Every one knew about all this; no one minded. She never gave
any one away or presumed on her friendships and her frankness about her
own affairs which was dry and desperate and funny disarmed criticism.
“My dear,” she said one day to Claire over the tea table, “I’ve had
a letter from Buenos Aires from a man who offers me forty thousand
francs if I’ll take his wife about next spring, and a five thousand
franc tip extra, each time she dines at an embassy. Isn’t it a perfect
scream? I wrote back asking for a photo of the wife. It came yesterday.
I’ve turned down the offer.”
She borrowed from no one and accepted no gifts of money from her
friends, men or women, and I take the last to be the more to her credit
because half the people in her world assumed that she did and the other
half wouldn’t have blamed her if she had done so. Virtues, that you
all held so lightly, have at least a relative value. Fan was incurably
extravagant; she adored luxury, and I consider that her having married
a poor man, and having refused to procure for herself in a manner so
accepted by her world, the ease and comfort she craved, proves her to
have been an interesting person. I see that you don’t believe what
I say, but I know that it is true. Men did not pay her dressmaker’s
bills. As for her little motor brougham that created so much comment,
she bought that after an extremely lucky venture in rubber. She gambled
on the “Bourse” of course. Old Beaudoin the banker gave her tips.
Sometimes he invested her money for her. She would give him a few
thousand francs and a month or two later he would perhaps sends her
back twice the sum, but it is not exact to say that he always arranged
to double her investment. And if he did take her wretched pennies and
speculate with them and pretend that he had won when he lost, what harm
did that do him with all his millions? It was all by way of repayment
anyhow. Fan had got him and his fat wife asked to a lot of nice
houses. He owed her far more than he ever paid. And when she crowned
her services to him by making his daughter’s marriage, surely she had
earned the cheque he sent her or the block of shares, whichever it was.
To have a good time, to be happy, a more sentimental woman would have
put it, that was her idea. Who of us all had a better, or a different
one? Weren’t we all looking for happiness, always?
Once I saw a street arab playing in the dirt with bits of mica,
constantly threatened in his game by horses’ hoofs, wagon wheels,
policemen and hooligans. Fan reminds me of him. I remember his tiny
eager hungry grimy face, intent on his game. Fan was like him, I
watched her playing with bits of worthless brightness in the crowded
muddy streets of life, jostled, buffeted, knocked about, a little
rickety gutter snipe, fighting for the right to play, that is the way I
see her. It had a beauty! you’ll admit that, I suppose.
But we quarrelled. I bored her. She didn’t like having any one about
who couldn’t keep up the farce of treating her as the happiest of
women, and she made fun of my taking the intellectuals so seriously.
When I wanted to see her I had to go to her flat where luxury and
poverty and dissipation and folly were mingled together in an unhealthy
confusion. It was a curious place, very bare and new and totally
lacking in the usual necessities of housekeeping, such as cupboards and
carpets, table linen and blankets, but there were flaming silks thrown
about, and a good many books and heaps of soft brilliant cushions. A
grand piano stood in the empty drawing-room on a bare polished floor.
The dining room table held always a tray of syphons and bottles. There
might be no food, there were always cocktails and ragtime tunes to
dance to. Sometimes the electric light was cut off because the bill
wasn’t paid, but there was a supply of candles for such emergencies,
and if creditors were too pressing, Fan would take to her bed and lie
under her cobwebby lace coverlet on a pile of white downy pillows all
frills and ribbons, smoking endless cigarettes while weary tradesmen
rang the door bell, and her friends sat about on the foot of the old
lacquer bed telling each other questionable stories, and going off into
muffled shrieks of laughter.
Her friends were many and various. Among them were people like Claire
and Clémentine and the wife of the Italian Ambassador, but her own
small particular set, the group that she went about with most, had its
special stamp.
A cosmopolitan lot who had seen better days, and were keeping their
heads up, by grit and bluff; they were I suppose the fastest set in
Paris. The men didn’t interest me, but the women did, rather. There was
something hard and dependable about them that I liked. They bluffed the
world but not each other. Their talk was terse and to the point, their
language coarse and brutal. They made no gestures and seemed always to
be looking very straight at some definite invisible thing that occupied
their cold attention. It may have been the ugliness of life that they
were looking at. If so, it didn’t make them wince. It may have been the
past, if so it didn’t make them shudder or creep. They wasted no time
in remorse or regret.
At times they reminded me of tight-rope walkers crossing a dizzy abyss.
There was something tense and daring about their stillness, as if a
chasm yawned under them. No doubt it did, but it was not their worldly
position that was precarious, it was their actual hold on life. They
would go on with their old titles and ruined fortunes leading the
dance till they dropped, but they might drop any time. People in their
entourage did, they were accustomed to violence. One had had a lover
who called her up one morning and shot himself while she listened over
the telephone. Another had tried twice to kill herself. Most of them
drank and took drugs. Their hard glittering eyes gave out a glare of
experience, but their faces were cold, calm, non-commital, and if they
were worried by the caddishness of the men they loved, by debts and the
torments of passion, they gave no sign and held together and helped
each other. For damned souls, they made a good show, and I admired them.
They thought me a fool, however, and made a hedge around Fan, shutting
her off from me.
One morning I rushed round to her flat on an impulse. I had had no
message from her but a curious feeling of nervousness had bothered me
in the night. Some one had mentioned Ivanoff at a dinner table. I had
heard the words--“wife-beater”--“card-sharper.”