Chapter XV: Part II: I (8)

I went into the bedroom. A number of bottles, a small aluminum saucepan and a hypodermic syringe were on the night table beside her. She was breathing heavily and noisily, drawing quick, regular, snoring breaths. It was obvious that she was drugged; the noise of her breathing was very ugly. Her face was sharp and pinched and evil. An extraordinary disorder prevailed in the room. I remember now being astonished by it. Untidy heaps of underwear about, not very clean, dragged lacey things on the floor, a high-heeled slipper on the centre table, a litter on the toilet table that reminded one of an actress’s dressing room, a tray with a champagne bottle and a plate of oyster shells on the end of the chaise longue. And pervading every thing that horrid odour of drugs and the sound of snoring.

I stood for a moment looking down at the woman in the bed. The sight of her filled me with loathing. How unclean she was! She was like a corpse. Already she was half dead. She was something no longer human, scarcely alive. Her sleep had the quality of a disease, her breath was poisonous.

Suddenly I felt some one beside me. It was Jinny, wrapped in her dressing gown. White as a sheet, she stood staring down at that dreadful face. “I heard you open the door,” she whispered, “I followed you. What is it? What is the matter?”

“Nothing,” I murmured. “She is drugged, that is all.” I pointed to the bottle of ether, the syringe in its little box. “Come,” I repeated nervously, “come away.” It was horrible to have Jinny in that room.

“But, Mummy, can’t we do something, oughtn’t we to do something?”

“No--come--it’s nothing--I mean she’s used to it.” I dragged Jinny away.

The next morning, the people in the hotel were informed that the Princess was dead. She had died in the night of an overdose of morphine.

It was Marie, Jinny’s maid, who burst in on her with the news, while she was having her café au lait in bed. I heard Jinny give a shriek and ran in to her--she had fainted.

Isn’t it strange the way it all happened? One would think that God had a hand in it, but if there is a God, why should He want my child to believe that I had committed a murder? It is that that I do not understand.

Jane’s narrative was ended with those words. She had talked that last night of my visit to her in St. Mary’s Plains, until nearly morning. Her forehead grew damp as she talked and her lips dry and her words carried along the sustained note of her voice like little frightened sounds.

And during all those hours that she talked, I remember hearing no other sound. I heard no voice in the street, nor the sound of trams going by nor of dogs barking. In our concentration we were as cut off from contact with the living world as if the whole city of St. Mary’s Plains had been turned to stone.

That was just a year ago today. I suppose she is still there in that meagre faded room, I can see her there, sitting in the high wooden chair that belonged once upon a time to Patience Forbes. The wind is hurrying across the immense prairies of her awful wide empty country. It rattles the windows of that frail wooden house. She is alone there.

Last night we talked of Jane in Ludovic’s rooms. Clémentine was there and Felix, we had been to Cocteau’s ballet. Jane would have enjoyed it, they said; she would have understood the joke, and perceived the beauty.

Clémentine moved restlessly about. “What is she doing now, I wonder? Surely she is doing something--”

“She is thinking things out.”

“Good God!” groaned Felix. “Our Jane--our great haughty creature--she wasn’t meant to think. She was meant to be looked at--she ought never to have had an idea in her head. What a waste--what a wicked waste.”

Clémentine on a footstool by the fire nursed her knees. “She did really think we were immoral. We took life as a joke. She couldn’t understand. She believed in the Bible--all the part about being wicked. She didn’t know it, but her creed was the ten commandments. She is a victim of the ten commandments.”

Ludovic shook his head. “She was right,” he said, “all her life she wanted to do right--now she has done it. She has gone back to her people. She should never have come here. There was nothing for her here, but ourselves.”

“And were we nothing?” cried Clémentine, “didn’t we love her well? Didn’t we understand?”

“No, we didn’t understand. And we didn’t count. We didn’t count for her.”

Ah, Jane, Jane, it was true. We didn’t count. In all your story, you scarcely alluded to us. We were just your friends who loved you, and we didn’t count. If only you could know what we know about yourself; if only you knew how we cared for you beyond all the differences of conduct; if only you could have realized that life is not a thing to fear, that it is a little trivial thing, or again, just a thing like food, an element like air, to be eaten, or breathed or enjoyed. But you thought it a mysterious gift, a terrible responsibility, a high and serious obligation, with a claim on your soul. You thought it a thing you could sin against. You confounded life with God.

This little street is so quiet tonight, so quiet and small. It shuts me in. It shuts me comfortably in, but beyond it there is a great distance--a great land--a great sea--a high and terrible sky.

THE END