Jinny liked to wear silks and velvets when she was quite a little girl.
Her taste for pretty clothes was something more than childish vanity.
I used often to find her in the room lined with cupboards where my
dresses were kept, sitting on the floor amid a heap of soft shining
garments, that she had dragged from their hooks, stroking the fabrics
lovingly, and purring to herself like a blissful kitten. She couldn’t
bear the touch of wool or starched cambric, and screamed herself into
hysterics when in obedience to the doctor’s orders, I tried one winter
to put her into woollen combinations. Her father humoured her in
this. I think it rather pleased him that she should be so delicately
fastidious. He found in it a proof of an exquisite sensibility and
likened her to the fairy-tale princess of the crumpled rose leaf.
Unfortunately he told Jinny the story and she immediately accepted it
as illustrative of herself, acted it out literally in her nursery,
obliging her nursemaid to make and remake her little bed, to smooth
and stroke and smooth again until every imaginary wrinkle in the soft
sheets was gone, before she would consent to get into it. This habit
lasted for some weeks until she read one day in her “_histoire sainte_”
of a saint who had acquired great spiritual blessing by sleeping on
the floor of her cell, whereupon she took no more interest in the way
her bed was made. The nurse was delighted until she discovered that as
soon as she had turned down the light and left the room, Jinny hopped
out of bed and lay down on the floor, choosing fortunately a spot near
the radiator. The harassed women, governess, nurse and nursemaid said
nothing to me the first time, nor the second that they found her asleep
on the floor, but finally came to me explaining that Mademoiselle was
very determined to die of pneumonia.
Jinny looked at me with grave shining eyes when I asked her what such
naughtiness meant.
“It is not naughtiness at all, Mamma, you misunderstand, it is the
saintly life, ‘_la sainte vie_.’”
Fortunately I was sufficiently aware of her romantic absorption in the
lives of the saints, and of her habit of applying everything that she
read or heard to herself, to guess what influence was working on her.
The “saintly life” had come up before. She had already had periods
of fasting that had given way before her great liking for bonbons,
and periods of prayer, that had given way to sleepiness, and had even
attempted at one time to beat her little shoulders with a strap off
a trunk, all of which things had worried me considerably, but none
of which had been immediately dangerous to her health, so I entered
straight upon the subject in as sympathetic a tone, that is on as
high a moral ground as I could find, using all my wits to adapt my
conversation and my thought to her mind, as if, as indeed may have been
the case, her idea was more lucid than my own.
“Darling,” I said in a tone as grave as the one she had used to me, but
with a certain timidity that she in her exaltation of the young devotee
had certainly not felt at all, “the saintly life is a beautiful thing
when rightly understood; it is too beautiful to be entered upon easily
and capriciously. If you have a true wish to model your life on that of
the saints who gave up every comfort for the salvation of their souls,
then I will help you. I will do it with you. We will change everything.
We will take away all the pretty things, and empty these rooms, yours
and mine, of the pictures, and the rugs, keeping only the strict
necessaries. We will sleep on hard beds, floor, we will eat bread and
water every day, nothing more; we will wear no more nice clothes, we
will each have a serge dress and very plain underwear, of some strong
cotton stuff, we will--”
But poor Jinny had grown quite pale. “Oh, Mummy, Mummy, you are cruel.
Don’t you see I can’t do all that? Don’t you want me to want to be
good.”
That you see ended well. She cried a little in my arms, and listened
quietly as I explained that being good was quite another thing to
the saintly life as she had understood it, and that this latter was
not vouchsafed to children, and we arranged between us that it would
be much more truly good, to take a great many baskets of toys to the
little poor crippled children in the big hospitals than to jump out of
bed when no one was looking, but I was not immeasurably reassured by my
victory. With Jinny it was always a case of its being all right till
the next time, and the next time was never slow in coming.
I take it that my own feeling for Jinny needs no explanation. I am
a simple woman, and I was her mother; she was all that I had. But
Philibert loving her so much was curious, don’t you think? It seemed
so inconsistent of him! I don’t even now understand it. Perhaps
the most obvious explanation is the real one. Perhaps it was just
because she was so very attractive. Had she been ugly I believe that
he would have disliked her. She was never ugly, she had never had an
awkward age. At fourteen she had already that look of costliness, of
something luxurious, sumptuous and precious that she has today. She was
slender and fragile and smooth. At times she suggested a child Venus
by Botticelli. Her mouth had the delicate drooping curve of some of
his Madonnas, her hands were full and soft and dimpled with delicate
tapering fingers. Sensuous idle hands, they were to her instruments of
pleasure. Touching things conveyed to her some special delight; with
her finger tips she enjoyed. I know for I have watched those hands for
years, moving softly and deftly over lovely surfaces, and following the
contours of flowers, of porcelain vases, but she never did anything
practical with them. Even embroidery, she disliked. But jigsaw puzzles
amused her--she and Philibert always had one somewhere spread out on a
table. They spent hours together fitting in the innumerable tiny bits,
their heads close together, excitedly comparing, fitting, exclaiming.
Philibert liked the idea of his daughter’s distaste for doing anything
useful. He encouraged her laziness and her absurd little air of languid
hauteur. When she dropped a glove or handkerchief and waited for a
servant to pick it up for her, he laughed.
Sometimes I tried to reason with him.
“You are spoiling her,” I said on more than one occasion, but he only
shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t you see, Philibert?” I would insist, “that it is bad for her to
live in this atmosphere?”
“What atmosphere?”
“The atmosphere of this house, of Paris, of the world we live in.”
“Well, my dear, it is her house, her Paris, her world--she’s born to
it, and belongs to it, so she may as well grow up in it. What would you
have for her--something more like your own home over there, eh?--the
place that turned you out, so admirably fitted for our European
life--you want her to be as you were, is that it?”
“God forbid.”
“Well then--”
I couldn’t argue with him. I couldn’t tell him what I really felt and
feared, or explain to him how I hated for Jinny, all the things that I
now accepted for myself, for he was one of those things, the principle
one; I had accepted him. I had even grown to understand him, and if
it hadn’t been for Jinny, I felt that we might become friends. His
extravagances, his cynicism, his fondness for women were things that I
now took for granted. They no longer bothered me. For me, he would do
now, I no longer asked anything of him, but for Jinny he wasn’t half
good enough. As a father to my child, I found him impossible.
One often hears of estranged couples being brought together by their
love for a child. With Philibert and myself, it was the contrary. We
were both jealous of Jinny. We were afraid, each one, that she loved
the other best, and our nervousness on this point acted to keep us in
each other’s company while it made friendship impossible. Neither of
us liked to leave the other alone with her for any length of time. I
had stayed with Fan for three months and had come back to find Jinny
hanging on her father’s every word, and to find what I imagined was a
coldness between her and myself. This may have been my imagination,
or it may have been true; I don’t know, but I suspected Philibert
of working to alienate her from me, and he suspected me of the same
thing. If I suggested taking Jinny to Ste. Clothilde for a fortnight,
he either found a way of keeping us in Paris or accompanied us, and if
Philibert wanted for some reason to go away, to London or Berlin or
Biarritz, he was haunted by the idea that in his absence I might steal
a march on him with Jinny, so really bothered I mean, that nine times
out of ten, he would give up going unless I went with him. The result
was that we were more constantly together than we had been since the
first year of our marriage.
Looking back now to that winter of 1913-14 I see it as a season of
delirium, of fever, of madness. Paris glows there, at the eve of
war, in a lurid blaze of brilliance, its people giddy, intoxicated,
dancing over the quaking surface of a civilization that was cracking
under them. A period in the history of the human race was drawing to
a close. The old earth was rushing towards the greatest calamity of
our time, carrying with it swarming continents that in a few months
were to seethe and smoke like beds of boiling lava--and the people of
the earth as if aware that the days of pleasure were numbered, were
possessed by a frenzy. I say the people of the earth, but I mean of
course, the rich, the idle, the foolish, the so-called fortunate who
make up society and of whom Philibert and I were the most idle, the
most foolish, as we were perhaps the richest.
That winter marked the height of our folly and of our worldly
brilliance, and for me it marked at the same time the deepest depth of
futility and cowardice.
Philibert and I were like two runaway horses harnessed together,
and running blindly, with the smart showy vehicle of our empty life
rattling and lurching behind us, and poor little Jinny inside it.
His extravagance that winter was colossal. I did not try to restrain
it. He felt the inertia of old age coming on him, and was having a last
desperate fling: I felt sorry for him. His parties were fantastic. He
bought the servants’ under-linen at Doucet’s; I only laughed when he
told me. Money? Why not spend it! The more he spent, the less would be
left for Jinny, and that, I argued, was all to the good. If only he
could manage to run through the whole lot, then Jinny and I would be
free. Dinner succeeded dinner, dance followed dance. We received half
Europe and were entertained in a dozen capitals. London, Brussels,
Rome, Madrid, we took them all in. It was very different from my picnic
trips with you and Clémentine when we travelled second-class, carried
paper bags of sandwiches and had literary adventures in old book shops
with ancient scholars in skull-caps and spectacles. Philibert and
I travelled in Rolls Royces or in private trains. We had maids and
valets and couriers to smooth away every discomfort and every bit of
unexpectedness. Philibert never missed his morning bath and massage,
his Swede, too, travelled with us.
It was not very interesting. One glass of champagne is like another.
Royal palaces are as alike as cabbages. Everywhere we met the same
people and did the same things. We danced, we gambled, we gossiped, we
ate and drank and changed our clothes, and I was often bored, and often
gloomy. Too much brilliance has the effect of darkness.
In my dismal moods I told myself that I hated it, but probably I
didn’t. No doubt it had become necessary to me to be surrounded by a
crowd of flatterers. We are all fools--And I had no precise idea of
myself. Even at night, when I was alone, and when I should have been
stripped naked to my soul in the dark, I was still wrapped about to my
own eyes, in the flattering disguises of the world’s adulation.
In Jinny’s eyes alone did I seem to see myself as I really was. I
trembled as I looked into them.
I wonder if all women are afraid of their children? Perhaps not, the
woman who has the love of her husband and a clear conscience and a sure
hope of heaven. I had none of these things, and I was afraid. I had
staked everything on Jinny, but my conscience was not clear about her.
Instead of a hope of heaven, I had the hope of her happiness and yet
I knew that I was not doing what was necessary to realize it. What I
was doing was, when one thought it out, futile and ridiculous. I was
wasting my life to save hers; because of her, I had been involved in
this endless round of futility and I was behaving as if I believed that
if I were wretched enough, she would be happy.
What I wanted most of all was to save her from an experience like my
own. For her, there were to be no wretched sordid compromises with
life, no unclean pleasures, no subterfuges, no lying, no fear. She was
to remain good and brave and lovely and I was to find a true man for
her who would love her as I longed to have her loved, reverently.
And in the meantime, she was growing up surrounded by slavish servants,
by doting relatives, by luxury and dissipation and all that I did to
protect her, was to shut her up as much as possible in the schoolroom.
I had always been in the habit of talking to her of Patience Forbes,
her great aunt in America. It had seemed to me important for Jinny to
understand and value my people. I wanted her to love the woman who had
so loved me. To secure for that distant lonely admirable character the
respect and affection of my child was, it seemed to me, my duty. And
as a little girl Jinny had been interested in hearing about the Grey
House in St. Mary’s Plains, the waggon slide down the cellar door,
the attic full of old trunks, crammed with faded panniered dresses
and poke-bonnets, and the back garden full of hollyhocks and bachelor
buttons, and larkspur. She liked to hear of the great river that one
glimpsed between the houses at the bottom of the street behind the
garden, and of the ships that came smiling down laden with lumber from
the great forests, and she would climb into my lap and say--“Now tell
me more about when you were a little girl”--but as she grew older she
lost interest in these stories, and was more and more unwilling to
write to her great aunt and one day, when I finished reading to her a
letter from Patience, she gave a sigh and said petulantly,
“What a boring life--‘_Quelle vie ennuyeuse._’”
“Jinny!” I exclaimed sharply.
“But it is, Mummy. It must be. I see her there. Ah, Mon Dieu, so
dismal. ‘_Une vieille--vieille._’ An old old one--in dusty black
clothes, in a horrid little room. All her stuffed birds round her
in glass cases--so funny! But the atmosphere is cold. It sets the
teeth on edge, and she is ugly, like a man, with big feet and hands.
There--look!” She took up poor Aunt Patty’s photograph from the table.
“Look--what has that old woman to do with me? Why does she write to me
‘My darling little Geneviève’--I’m not her darling, I don’t love her at
all. I don’t want to think of her.”