Chapter VIII: Part II: I (1)

That was long ago. We were young then. What a haunting annoying phrase. One meets it everywhere, in books, on people’s lips, or unspoken in their eyes. The other day in the Grey House, sitting opposite Jane in the shabby little parlour, there it was again. She spoke it, but not wistfully, more with relief than regret. I stayed ten days in St. Mary’s Plains and during those days she told me the rest of the story, bit by bit, till she came to the end--I put it down now as she told it--what follows are her own words as I remember them.

* * * * * * * *

That was the end of my youth and the beginning of life. Until then I had been made use of, but after that I acted and I became responsible for myself.

Fifteen years ago, we sat till morning waiting for Philibert. I no longer remember what I felt. Have you tried to recall sensations of pain, and by thinking very closely about all the little circumstances surrounding them, to experience again the stab or the ache? One can’t. I can’t feel again that agony. I suppose it was agony. You remember it better than I do, for you saw it. One remembers things one has seen and things one did, but not what went on inside one’s own dark, impenetrable body and soul, invisibly. I remember what I did at that time and what I said and what other people said and looked. I remember your face, and Jinny’s fear of me, and her fretting for her father, and Fan’s coming and saying that I looked like a mad woman, and from these facts I deduce the other fact that I was suffering, but I have forgotten the feeling. That is very strange when you come to think of it, for how, then, can I know that it was so? I don’t know. It is all merely conjecture. One would have thought, from the way I behaved and the way it changed everything that my emotion of that time was tremendous; was immensely important. But it wasn’t. It had no substance. It didn’t stand the test of time. It has vanished completely. Other things have lasted.

What are these feelings, emotions, passions that we make such a fuss about? Nothing but sparks struck from an impact, a collision of some kind. They seem to burn us up, to consume us for a moment, then they vanish. They have no body, no staying power, no reality, but we mould our lives by them.

I am a woman. My life has always centred about people. In tracing the course of events, I find that their causes were invariably personal--My life is a long strong twisted rope made up of a number of human relationships, nothing more. There was first my mother, and my Aunt Patience, then Philibert, Bianca and Geneviève. Philibert went away. I did without him. One can do without anything,--everything. I am proving it now. But Bianca kept coming back; I never got rid of her.

My life is a failure. It is finished. It is there in its dreadful, unchangeable completeness spread out before me. I look at it, as I would look at a map, and when I think that it is I who made it, this thing called a human life, I am bewildered and ashamed. How did it come about that I made so many mistakes, and did so much that was harmful to others? There was no desire in my heart to hurt, no will to do wrong. On the contrary I wanted to make people happy, I wanted to do right. It is very strange. It is almost as if the intensity of my will to do right forced me to do the wrong thing. Is there some explanation? Is there a key to the problem of living that I never found? Or was it all simply due to Bianca? My Aunt Beth used to say that the only way to live rightly was to do the will of God. But what does that mean? How is one to know what the will of God is? Often I wonder whether my failure is due to my never having found out about God. Most of my people here in America would not hesitate to say yes--but I am not sure. It seems to me that I was even more eager to do His will than I would have been if I had been certain of His existence. It would have been an immense relief to me to have known that God was in His Heaven and that I did not have to bother about my own soul. “Put your troubles on the Lord,” our parson used to say in St. Mary’s Plains. Well--I don’t know. That is a solution for many. If they do that--just shelve everything and go by texts in the Bible for their order of daily conduct, living must be very much simplified--but I couldn’t do that. Something stiff and hard and honest in me wouldn’t allow it. I couldn’t believe that I could talk to God and ask His opinion. I used to try--when I was a child and when I was a woman. Praying was like whispering into a chasm, a void, an echoing emptiness. My questions came back to me, unanswered, mocking echoes of my own tormented soul.

So I floundered along.

I do not excuse myself. I am to blame. I am responsible. I know that. I lived among charming people. I had, as people say, almost everything heart can desire. My husband did not love me, but beyond that what had I to complain of? I had money, health, power, friends. I was one of the fortunate. Hundreds of women, no doubt, envied me.

I hadn’t the gift of living. Your mother has it, so has your sister. It is common among French people, they are artists in life, but I was for ever looking beyond life for its purpose, and thus missing its savour and its meaning. The people I loved were too important to me and the people I hated--but I can see now that Bianca wasn’t as interesting or as important as she seemed. She was only a vain and selfish woman after all. But she was for twenty years my obsession.

I must talk about Bianca. It was really in order to talk about Bianca that I asked you to come, for I am not yet rid of her. She haunts me here in this innocent old house. Enigmatic in death as she was in life, her personality persists, exquisite and depraved and relentless. She comes to accuse me. Having ruined my life, she accuses me of her death.

I did not kill her. Some of you thought that I did. You didn’t mind. You didn’t blame me, but you thought so. Ludovic, I am sure, is convinced of it, and if he does not precisely approve, he at least accepts the fact as the inevitable outcome of our long exhausting duel. More than once he told me that until I could rid myself of the obsession of Bianca, I should be unable to understand the first little thing about life. He was the one person who understood my feeling for her and hers for me. In his uncanny wisdom, so devoid of all prejudice, he knew that our hatred was based upon an intense mutual attraction, and that we hounded each other to death because under other circumstances we would have loved each other. The long and dreary spectacle of two women hating each other for years with intense sympathy, or if you like, loving each other with an exasperating antagonism and hatred, was to him pitiful and contemptible. He would have had me put an end to it somehow, anyhow, at any cost. Taking another’s life is to him no crime compared to ruining one’s own. Well, it is at an end now. Bianca is dead, and I am buried alive. We did each other in, but it took twenty years, and I never touched her with my hands, or did anything to bring about her death, save will her to die.

And her death came too late to do me or mine any good. Philibert was finished. My life was in pieces. There was nothing left to patch up. She had come between me and my husband and child, while living, but her death cut me off from them, more absolutely than anything she could have done alive. And, fiendishly, as if with consummate cunning, she died mysteriously leaving with me the unanswerable question, as to whether or not, I had made her kill herself. I go over and over it all, day after day, week in, week out. I remember my last view of her alive, in that hotel corridor, the look she gave me over her drooping shoulder, leaning against the half open door, her hand on the door knob, her long languid weight on it, one pointed foot trailing, and on her grey face, a desperate vindictive longing, a wistful cruelty, a question, a threat, a prayer. Was she at last imploring me? Did she in that moment remember everything? Was she mutely and bitterly asking me to come and hear her confession? Would it all have been put right by some miracle had I gone to her before it was too late? I don’t know--I shall never know. I only know that our wills clashed again for the last time, that for the last time I resisted her, and let her drag the incredible weight of her diseased and disappointed spirit out of my sight, for ever.

And how am I to know that her death wasn’t an accident, and that her look of desperate appeal wasn’t just such a piece of acting as she had treated me to, at intervals for twenty years? Over and over again, she had done the same trick. Invariably, after one of her pieces of devilry, she would approach me with that wistful penitent masque, and stir me to forgiveness and compassion. Repeatedly, she fooled me. I could save her--I could influence her for good. I was strong and balanced and sane. If only I would give her what she needed, what she lacked, some relief from herself in some external thing, some faith, some definite obstinate purpose, beyond the gratification of her own vanity.

And each time I believed, each time I forgave, each time looking into her wonderful face, I thought I saw there, a spiritual meaning. It is enough to make one scream with laughter. It was all acting. It must have been. It was all done for the purpose of tormenting me more exquisitely afterwards. For years she fooled me--for years I wouldn’t believe she was what she was, a woman of immense personality and no character, but I am at last certain that this was so. Ludovic says that it takes as strong a character to be really wicked as really good. He used to rave over Bianca, to anger me, I suppose, call her perversely--“_une femme admirable--la plus courageuse damnée qu’il avait jamais vue_.” I don’t agree with him. I do not mean that Bianca had a weak character. I mean literally that she had no character at all. Where one feels in the average human being, the strong resisting kernel, the stern spiritual centre that contains identity there in Bianca there was nothing. At the middle centre of her being there was emptiness. She had, morally, no core. She was as formless as one of those genii in the Arabian Nights who came out of Ali Baba’s earthenware pots.

I ought to know, for I loved her. She was my friend during the happiest years of my life, when I believed in Philibert, and was confident. I say it again, we were friends. I believe even now, in our early friendship, in those days, Bianca was actually, and much to her own surprise, fond of me. That she began being nice to me out of a spirit of mischief is no doubt true. The idea of making Philibert’s wife, her intimate, was the sort of thing likely to appeal to her but having made the advances out of perversity, she found herself interested and attracted. Why did she like me? It is difficult to say. Perhaps because I was a new type and one that wouldn’t in the ordinary course of events come her way. I puzzled her. To her I was something primitive, savage, and dangerous. She used to call me her “_Peau Rouge_.” She said I made her think of Buffaloes and Bison and prehistoric animals, of black men round camp fires in jungles, of snake dancers and deserts and the infantile magic of savage races. She wove stories about me and hunted up old prints of queer outlandish people who she insisted had my type of head. I was, she asserted, only half-tame, and being with me gave her the same kind of pleasure as having a leopard about. She was physically afraid of me. Not only at the beginning, but always to the very end, but in those days, my losing my temper, she found, “_un très beau spectacle_.” Her blue eyes would shine, her lips part in amazement, and timidly she would stroke my shoulder, murmuring--“How wonderful you are. What a volcano.”

She used to ask me endless questions about my childhood and appeared greatly intrigued by my obstinate attachment to what she affectionately termed, my ridiculous impossible background. She would make me tell her about life in the Grey House, the baking of cakes in the kitchen, the hymn singing on Sunday evenings, and the summer trips to the wilderness, to the woods of Canada, or across the prairies of Omaha, Dakota, and Arizona. She would lie on her couch in her boudoir making patterns in the air with her lovely fingers and purring like a pleased little cat while I described the plains, stretching endlessly under the sky to the white horizon, the lonely wooden shacks blistered in the sun, and infested with flies, the lazy cowboys on indefatigable loping broncos--and she would murmur--“_Ah, je comprends cela--c’est grand, c’est monstrueux, c’est beau._”

As for me, need I explain why I loved her? Who has not felt the quality of her beauty? What man or woman that ever saw Bianca, failed to respond to the peculiar penetrating charm of her personality? I see her in memory, a vivid creature, perfect, compact, clear in the midst of a crowd of blurred and colourless shadows. Her beauty was incisive, keen. It cut into one’s consciousness sharp as a stab. It stamped itself on one’s brain, indelible and certain. I see her face as clearly today as I saw it the day I first laid eyes on her when she came up to me in your mother’s salon and said--“You must like me, I insist.” It is there close to me, rising out of the grave as pure, as firm, as precisely drawn as if I held the perfect indestructible masque in my hand.

I see her eyes open lazily, wider and wider, and shine out suddenly, bluest blue, so blue that they seem to send out a blue light through their black lashes. Ah, how lovely she was! How could I not believe in that loveliness? Blue, brilliant fire-blue eyes set far apart under a fringe of black hair and pointed curving thin red lips. I could model her now exactly--the cup of her small chin, her long round white throat, flat bosom and shoulders flowing down thin arms to her narrow beautiful hands. Her body was a fragile thing, strong as steel.

And women of Bianca’s breeding never give themselves away in ordinary life. They are closed and secret books, open only to those who have the key. No one can read them who is not of the initiated. I did not know the language. There was nothing about her to convey to me that she was anything more than she seemed, a remarkable and gifted woman of great distinction, a creature so refined as to seem to me to belong to another planet from the one on which I had been born. It seemed to me extraordinary that such a person should notice me at all. I was filled with gratitude. I was humble, devoted, flattered, and Philibert gave no sign. If not actually enthusiastic about our friendship, he still seemed content enough, and I was happy in the thought, that this wonderful woman who had been his comrade from childhood was now, my friend too.

And she was careful, as we grew more intimate, to show me, only those aspects of herself that she knew would flatter and delight me. Never did she mention subjects likely to frighten me. Her talk was all of art shows and music and books and the ridiculous absurdities of “_le monde_” and those things in her life that I couldn’t help noticing with concern, she explained in a way to enlist my sympathy. She was desperately unhappy, she told me, in her marriage, her husband’s immorality was a great grief to her; the sorrow of her life was, that she could have no children and so on, and so on. Once she even confided to me that there was insanity in her family, and that she was constantly haunted by the fear of going insane. I was, at this, in a tumult of sympathy. I was prepared to forgive her a far greater number of eccentricities than she ever showed me.

She was, she told me, of a mixed strain of southern blood, a Venetian on her mother’s side, on her father’s a _Provençale_. From her I learnt that the old Duke, her father, was descended from the _Comtes de Provence_ of a line that had numbered kings in the middle ages. For many generations they had been _Seigneurs_ of a wild and mountainous region north of Avignon. Their fortress, the “_Château des Trois Maries_” stands high against the sky on a spur of rock that reaches out from the ragged hills, above the wide valley of the Rhône. This was Bianca’s home. There in that sad and wonderful country of brown sunlight, she was as nearly happy as she could ever be on earth. I went to Provence with her one summer. And now that she is dead, I think of her, not as she was in Paris, languid, perverse, and irritable, but as she was in her own country. I see her against the swarthy background of those ruined hills scarred by the hordes of invading Saracens. Her little person seems to ride above that sunbaked land of blistered roads and dry river beds, on the wings of legend through a burning and sanguinary past of repeated invasions; of Barbary pirates from across the sea to the south, and Visigoths from the north, of wandering Bohemians, of steady marching Roman armies, of Popes flying from Italy for refuge, of gentle saints stranded in tiny boats on the desolate marshy shores of the _Camargue_ and I see her as she ought to have been and as she was sometimes, down there, her face brown, her blue eyes flashing, and her thin body, lean and hard, mounted on one of the small fleet horses of the country, galloping at the head of the thundering fighting bulls towards the arenas of Nimes or Arles. This was her proper setting. It was here at the _Château des Trois Maries_ that she showed herself to me, as she would have been had she not been accursed.

I remember one day in her room in the west tower of the Castle, her talking of herself, as she never talked to me before or since, honestly, as honestly as she could, and with light laughter breaking into her short light biting phrases. From the high window we could see the white dust of the road whirling down the valley before the hot scurrying wind, groves of poplars bending their plumed heads, little brown houses surrounded by close vineyards huddled behind screens of cypress trees.

“I was born here,” she said, “of a woman who loathed her husband and hated this country--but I wasn’t really born--I was made by witches one hot windy midsummer day. They made me out of the burning sun and the shrieking mistral and the hot white dust, in the black shade of cypresses, and they added to the hot mixture, ice water from that mountain stream; then they each laid on me a curse. One said, the oldest and wickedest--‘She will covet the earth, but only love herself.’ The second said ‘She will be haunted by the evil spirits of dead men.’ The third said--‘Since the people of this country are fond of wild jokes and pranks,--they are you know, _très blagueurs, les Provençaux_, she will be much given to playing mischievous jokes that will do others harm.’ Then they left me in the dark cypress grove, where my mother who was wandering about and longing for the laughter and music of her Italy, found me. She, poor darling, invoked the three Marys for my protection, _les Saintes Maries de la Mer_ who are carved in the stone over the great door, _Marie Salomé_, _Marie Jacobé_ and _Marie Madeleine_; their shrine is in the grotto behind the house--but they had been shipwrecked themselves and were too inefficient to cope with my witches--and so that you see is what I am--burning hot and icy cold, and with a dry wind, shrieking in my heart, and three times accursed. I feel it. I know it. I have known it since I was a child--At first I struggled, then gave in, took my curses in my arms and made them mine, made them, I tell you--my religion--” She gave her dry laugh. Her voice was high and sweet and careless. She spoke, without passion, in her dry conversational tone. “If I could never love any one but myself, never forget myself, try as I might in excesses of every kind, then I would love myself utterly. If I was to be haunted by the unfulfilled ideas of men and women long dead, then I would give myself up to those ideas, and if my pranks were fated to do people harm, well--what business was it of mine? I would enjoy doing people harm--idiots that they are, why should I care for their thin silly feelings?

“You think I am talking nonsense. If you believed me, you would be horrified--_eh, bien_--be horrified--but you will never understand. You will never believe that I am as bad as I am. That is the reason I like you--that is the reason I talk to you. You are obstinate and faithful and strong--and beside that you have demons too--I see them in your awful sullen face that I like.

“I tell you--that I am used by ideas that are not my own--that do not come out of my own head, that come to me from I know not where. They come persistently--out of the sky, circling back again and again like black birds coming out of the sky to this tower. For instance; an idea comes to me that I must go to Nimes and see a certain matador and send for him and make him love me--I know he will be stupid and coarse and disgusting, and I refuse. Then things happen. Every day lines appear in the papers--his name is everywhere, in every village on every stable wall--I laugh--and give in--and it is all stale and horrid before it begins, but the idea had to be carried out. That you will say is just the stupid giving into caprice of any idle woman--but it is not always so ordinary. Suppose that some day the idea comes to me that I must entice my husband into the oubliette. I laugh at the idea and chase it away. Six months later it comes back more insistent, a thing with a voice. It says ‘Get him into the north tower. He is a mean creature. He will fall down the oubliette’--and I say peevishly--‘But I don’t mind his being alive--he doesn’t bother me, I am not interested in killing him’ and again I drive away the idea--but it will come back, it will keep coming back till it is satisfied. There have been many ideas like that demanding of me to be satisfied. Sooner or later I carry them out--do their bidding. Often in hours of lucidity I see how dangerous they are. I fight against them, distract myself with some idiocy or run away--take the train, go in the opposite direction--but almost always I give in, in the end.” She stopped. I see her now against the stone coping of the window, leaning out--her head in the sun--looking down--the wall fell sheer--a hundred feet of masonry and rock. “Sometimes I think I will throw myself down to get rid of them, these ideas of men and women whose restless bones are the hot dust of these mountains--but why should I--why give myself as a sacrifice? It would be silly--the people I will hurt if I live aren’t worth it--”

She jerked back into the room and came to my side, laying a hand on my shoulder, and standing so that I could not see her, a little behind me, her lips close to my ear. “There are other things,” she whispered, “worse things--ideas--that I couldn’t tell--” Her fingers clutched my shoulder, tightening until they hurt me--“You help me, but sometimes I am angry with you for being what you are and want to hurt you. Some day, who knows, the idea may come to me to do you harm. You are safe now because I don’t understand you, and feel you are stronger than I--but if I ever detected a weakness in you--or if you ever bored me, then I should hate you, then I would certainly do you a hurt. It’s a warning--” she broke off with a laugh, kissed lightly the tip of my ear and left me.

I was not afraid of her then--what she said did not disturb me. I laughed at it; I was happy and confident. I had everything in the world I wanted, and I lived in a daze of joy and excitement--Europe, Paris, the miracles produced by my wealth, still dazzled and amazed me; going to bull-fights with Bianca, or hunting wild boar, with the old Duke, or attending the Courts of Rome, Vienna, Berlin or St. James’s with Philibert, everything was marvellous. I had no time to worry, and no reason to do so that I knew of.

But I remembered what Bianca had said, and in the light of what happened, I understood that she had been speaking the truth. It was simply her way of admitting that she was a supreme egotist. Put simply, it meant that the one motive power in her, was her vanity. It was her vanity that held her together and gave her an outline. And as she grew older she developed it as other women develop a gift for music. She worshipped herself, and she made of her egotism an elaborate religion. Her adoration of herself grew into a passion and burned with the ardour of a saint’s miraculously revealed inspiration. She would have gone to the stake for it. It incased her in complete armour. No one and nothing could touch her through it. She was the only woman I have ever known who lived consistently and exclusively for herself, and she did so with the sustained passion of a religious maniac. One can only compare her to a Savanorola.

Her vanity was her power and her curse. It was an ogre. It had to be fed. Human beings were thrown to it as to the devouring dragons in fairy tales. We were all victims. I was, and you were, and Philibert and Jinny, and Micky and Fan and all the others. Insatiable vanity, that was all there was to Bianca in the last analysis. That was all the meaning of her, but its manifestations, its results, its devious ways of arriving at its own ends, these were infinite, would fill volumes.

You can see how the curse would operate. It operated through her intelligence. Had she been stupid, all would have been well, but concentrated on the study and care of herself, elaborating year after year her attentions to herself, nursing her body, her face, her senses, supplying to herself stimulants and soothing preparations, searching for curious new sensations, she was aware of her own limited power to please herself. Distinctly she perceived something beyond her reach, a quality of experience outside her range, a beauty she could not attain. She would have liked best to have been a queen of love, whom all men adored, like the radiant Simonetta--fairy queen of Florence, beautifully worshipped by an entire population, and she only succeeded in being _la femme fatale_. With no gladness in her soul, she could not inspire gladness--always in the faces of her victims she saw a reflection of her own darkness. If occasionally, in the lurid light of the excitement she could so easily evoke, she saw in a man’s face a flash that resembled joy, ecstacy, delight, she as often saw it fade to a dismal stupidity, or rage or disgust. Impossible for her to create anything more than an imitation of bliss. Her egoism spoiled its own gratification. It contained poison. Her touch was magical and deadly. This, in the end, bored her. She used to complain exasperatedly of people being afraid of her. The care with which they succumbed disgusted her. Men grovelling at her feet, men writing sentimental verses, men touching her with clumsy hands; she came to loathe them. There was nothing in it; she wanted something else, something out of the ordinary, something continually surprising, unexpected, dramatic. Alas! Humanity goes its stolid way comfortably enough in spite of the Biancas of the world. Men will “play up” to a certain point. They will pretend to be dying of love to please a beautiful lady’s caprice, but they won’t really die. One of the things Bianca longed for was to have a crop of suicides laid to her account. She would have been pleased had some of her victims blown their brains out, but somehow they didn’t. They only threatened to do so. Once out of her sight, they recovered the normal and sallied forth from her boudoir to enjoy fat beefsteaks.

Her tragedy lay in understanding what she missed. She observed that inferior people experienced a range of feeling of which she was incapable. Insignificant women inspired the passions she longed to inspire. She envied and despised them. She envied every happy woman her happiness, every lover his love; her eyes watched them all, with curiosity, disdain and exasperation.

What in me began, after our three years of harmony, to get on her nerves, was my monotonous and exclusive feeling for Philibert. That such a sentiment should continue to absorb me and satisfy me, after five years of marriage was too much for her. She became irritable and teasing. She began to make fun of my love for my husband. She called it stupid, vulgar, grotesque, indecent. I lost my temper, she grovelled, enjoying that, but when next we met she began again, professing an extraordinary merriment at the sight of my mawkish sentimentality. With a sudden flash of insight I accused her of envy. She grew livid. In a choking whisper, she told me that Philibert for his part was no such idiot and that all I had to do was to look about me to find out the truth. I left her in a rage and stayed away. I did not see her again until the night of her ball, some months later, to which I went, knowing that she had determined to take Philibert away from me. It was the fact that Philibert as she believed had begun to care for me, that made her finally act. She simply couldn’t bear to think that Philibert and I should come to understand and truly care equally for each other.

I went to her ball to make a scene, to frighten her into giving him back to me, but I did nothing. I didn’t speak to her. I didn’t go near her. I simply stood and watched her. The sight of her paralysed me. I realized that no man who had ever known and loved Bianca, could care for me. And I came away, knowing that between me and Philibert, everything was ended, and I came away terrified. As I left the house, I remember muttering to myself “I must escape”--“I must escape.” Escape from what? I don’t know. From them both, from what they had done, from what they stood for, from the world of treachery and deadly pleasure to which they belonged.

But I did not get away. I never got away. I never escaped from Bianca. I never got out of range of the sense of her presence and of her infernal charm. I still cared for her. Hating her, I still wondered that she could have hurt me, still wept and called out to her in the dark at night to know why she had done it, still felt her to be the most fascinating woman I had ever known, and it was this that made my jealousy of Philibert unbearable and fiendish. I had been twice betrayed and I knew loving them both, and knowing them both, precisely the quality of the delight they had in each other.

And I knew too, that Bianca was acting as she did because of me--even more than because of Philibert. I was conscious and I was convinced that she was conscious that the real meaning of the whole thing lay in her feeling for me. There was between us, a relationship that had become hateful, but that was still going on, a thing that was going to endure, a mutual sympathy outraged and hideous now, but persisting. If she had only wanted Philibert--well, she had him already. No--what she wanted was to hurt me. And making all allowances for the attraction between them, had it not been for me, he would not have inspired her with a sufficient energy to bolt with him. The situation would have lacked that something peculiar and curious which she wanted, had she not felt as she did about me.

But I may be confused between what I knew then and what I know now. It may be that I did not understand it all so well, then--I forget--I cannot recall my actual state of mind. I give less importance to my preoccupation with Philibert than I should do, and lay too much emphasis on Bianca, because you see, I have got over Philibert, the hurt he did me is long since past and I no longer care about it, but from Bianca--I have never recovered. She never let me go--she never finished with me. It wasn’t just one thing--it was a series of things stretching over years, a continual coming back. You see--in the last analysis it was because of me that she ran away with Philibert, broke Fan’s heart and laid schemes for corrupting Jinny--and these things took fifteen years to accomplish. There was war between us for fifteen years.

The story of my life is the story of my duel with Bianca. Other people played a part, other feelings absorbed me for long periods, other relationships endured, but my relationship to Bianca was the long strong rope that hanged me. You will see how it was.

Why did she go on with it? I don’t know. Unless it was that I never gave in. Had I collapsed after Philibert left me, she might have been satisfied--and satisfied, she would have lost interest in me--and I should have been saved.

II

It is very difficult for me to recall my state of mind during the days that followed Philibert’s going off with her.

I’ve an idea that I was in a kind of stupor, not much noticing anything. I must have given orders that no one was to be admitted, for I learned afterwards that Claire and your mother both called, and a number of other relatives. I think I remained in my room for a day or two lying on the bed with my clothes on and refusing to open the door to my maid. It was Jinny who roused me. The servants were frightened. The nurse brought her down and she pounded on the door with her little fists till I opened it, but when she saw me she gave a shriek and ran away from me and hid in her nurse’s petticoats. That brought me to my senses, my child’s fear and the servants’ faces. I had a bath and something to eat. They brought me my letters obsequiously, and with furtive curiosity. I could hear the servants hanging about whispering. I imagined them talking, talking, endlessly talking it over downstairs. They were strangers to me, Philibert’s servants, servants of that great, horrible house that I disliked. I had no reason to stay there now. Nothing kept me--I would go home to St. Mary’s Plains.

I started a letter to my Aunt Patience, what was I to say to her? “My husband has run away with another woman. He never loved me. My mother married me to him for her own purposes. Now that she is dead there is no more reason to go on with this horrible farce. I am coming home.” Something of that kind? No, I couldn’t. I stared at the words I had written--“My dearest Aunt Patty.” I seemed to see her sitting off there, at the end of that great distance, adjusting her spectacles, opening my letter with expectant fingers. I saw the shabby room, the sunlight on the worn carpet, the littered writing desk, the piles of books, the stuffed birds in their glass cases. I saw my aunt an old woman, facing old age alone, with equanimity, following year after year the pursuit of knowledge, not afraid of time, not oppressed by solitude, going up to bed night after night in the empty house and kneeling down in her flannel dressing-gown beside her narrow white counterpane to pray to God, and remembering me always, never forgetting me, never leaving me alone.

Once she had said, “When you’re in a hole, Jane, and don’t know what to do, you can always do the thing you hate doing most and you’ll probably not be far wrong.”

Looking out of the window I became aware of Paris and I thought of those words. Paris! There it was streaming by, to the races. Was it aware of what had happened to me? I wondered. Did people know that Bianca and Philibert had run away together like a couple of actors, like a pair of quite common people? I imagined society agog with the scandal. I saw them gloating pitying. I heard women saying--“_Cette pauvre femme, elle était vraiment trop bête._” It seemed to me that every one in the street must be looking up at my windows with curiosity and derision. They were invading my privacy, pulling off from me the last decent covering of my dignity. Well, why sit there and bear it? Why suffer public humiliation? My eyes fell on my engagement book. I observed that Philibert and I were due for dinner that night at your Aunt Clothilde’s. I rang for my maid and told her to telephone _Madame la Duchesse_ and say that although Monsieur, having been called out of town, would not be able to present himself at her dinner, I would come with pleasure, as had been arranged. My face in the glass seemed much as usual. I had done all my weeping with you, my poor Blaise, three nights before. Having made up my mind to go out I now experienced a certain relief. The coiffeur was summoned and the manicurist. Aunt Clo’s dinners were very special affairs, so I chose a nice dress, white, and put on an extra rope of pearls. As you know, my appearance created something of a sensation. I saw that at once. They had thought me already dead and buried, and were gossiping as I suspected, over my remains. My business for the moment was to show them that I was alive.

Ah, but how dreary and trivial it all seems now. Why? Why? What earthly difference did it make what they said or thought? But I am telling you about it, just as it was. I wanted, I needed desperately at that moment, the sense of my own dignity. It was all I had left. So I went out to that dinner party and defended it.

Aunt Clo was nice. She was pleased with me and put me opposite her. It was a vatican dinner, semi-political. I had, I remember, the Italian Ambassador on my right and the Foreign Minister on my left. Your aunt was between the Archbishop and the Duc de B---- recently arrived from Rome. The talk was brilliant, I believe. I heard it in a daze, but managed to keep my end up somehow. Clémentine was there, at her best, in wonderful form. She must have known all about Philibert, for she came up to me after dinner and said--“Blaise de Joigny is my great friend. You must come to see me. We have much in common.” Our friendship dates from that night.

But when I reached home I felt more tired than I had thought it possible to be. I went up to the nursery. Jinny was asleep in her cot, hugging a white woolly dog. I knelt beside her and sent out my spirit in search of God, but I did not find Him. I could not pray. I heard my baby’s breathing, blissful, trustful breathing. I knelt listening. She was so small and sweet. Above her was an immense blackness. She made now and then happy little sounds in her sleep, and lying there so still I saw her moving on and on, invisibly, into the future to the ticking of the nursery clock, carried along as she lay there on the current of life, life that was an enormous dupery, an ugliness and a lie.

The days passed, separate and distinct, moving in a procession, each one to be watched and endured separately, moving by their own volition, taking no account of me, having nothing to do with me, answerable to some mysterious power that started each one rolling like a bead dropped from the end of a string, and in each one, as in a crystal, I saw the pageant of Paris revolving, but I was outside, drifting in empty space.

The longing to get away from it all was unbearable. I would go--I would go--I must go--Patience Forbes was the only person in the world who could help me--and yet I went on working out my idea that took me about among people, and you, dear Blaise, went with me. Your attitude was of a delicacy rare even in your world of delicate adjustments and sympathies. You understood, you constituted yourself my escort. Do you remember those days, how we went from one place to another, luncheons, dinners, private views, official receptions, and how we tacitly agreed on just the amount we were bound to do for our purpose? I scarcely realized at the time all that it meant for you to do this, and how the family would resent your attitude. I know now that they never quite trusted you after this. As I remember we talked nothing over and did not, I think, mention Philibert save once, when I asked you if you knew where he was. You did know, of course. Every one knew, I suppose, except myself. They had been seen, those two, boarding the Simplon express. They were in Venice, you told me, I had wanted to know for convenience. Having adopted a line, it seemed best to follow it consistently. One was to assume that my husband had gone away for a holiday. I was there to make his excuses to suffering hostesses deprived of his society. The note to be struck was light and commonplace, as if his absence were like any other of his many past absences. The pretence deceived no one, but then the consistent lying made for decency. I was marking time. It was particularly difficult because I was not acting in accord with my nature. Had I been natural at that time I should have been horrible; I should have smashed things. But I was not behaving like myself. I see now what it was; I was behaving like one of you, behaving as Claire, for instance, would have behaved in my place. I was adopting your methods and your standards. Not to give myself away, not to let any one suspect what I was feeling and thinking, not to make a false step, not to make above all a public fuss, that seems to have been my idea. To preserve appearances as beautifully as possible, that was what you and I were working at, as we trailed drearily round from one place to another saying suave things with smooth faces.

And there was another influence working on me, even more subtle and far more pervasive. You will smile, perhaps, when I tell you that my quiet behaviour came from looking every day across the Place de la Concorde to the austere and reserved façade of the Madeleine, or across a silver distance of pale houses to the far alabaster pinnacle of the Sacré Coeur high above the city, but it was so. Paris exercises upon its inhabitants a fine discipline of taste. Those who love it change unconsciously. The long, wide, symmetrical avenues, the formal gardens, with their slim fountains, single waving sprays of crystal water, the calm façades of long rows of narrow, uniform houses, palest yellow in sunlight, pearl white towards evening, these things have an effect upon one’s manners that is imperceptible and profound. They spelt to me harmony and restraint and Plato’s idea of beauty. My high falsity was at the best only less futile than a good, noisy bout of hysterics. What comforted me in these hours of doubt was that I knew you were no more certain than I. You did not represent your family. You were neither a go-between nor a spy nor a jailor, you were a friend. Positively I believe there were moments when you wanted me to break out, break away, throw caution and carefulness to the winds. Sometimes there was so much compassion in your face that I almost cried out to you not to care so much. I wanted to warn you that it was only for the moment that I was keeping my head up, that I wouldn’t be able and didn’t intend to go on with it indefinitely and that the thought behind all my smooth social words was; “He has gone for ever. Soon I’ll be free to say so.”

I did really believe Philibert had left me for good. It never occurred to me that he would ever come back, and that belief was in a way my refuge. I was rid of them both; Bianca, I told myself, would be satisfied now and would leave me alone. She would carry on her mischief elsewhere, not in my life. My life was, I believed, my own, separated for always from hers and from Philibert.

Then one day Fan turned up. She came in jauntily, her head in the air, as if nothing had happened. She looked very smart, her hat set at a rakish angle, her short, pleated skirt flippant above her neat ankles. From across the room she called out “Well,--Jane, we’ve married a nice pair of men. Here’s Philibert’s skipped and I’ve had to send Ivanoff packing. He’d taken to beating me, I’m black and blue all over. Some people like it--I don’t.” She gave me a peck on the cheek. “Poor old Jane, you’re taking it hard, I suppose.” She turned back the sleeve of her dress. Her arm had welts on it. “You should see my back.” I shuddered, but at sight of my emotion she twitched away from me with a nervous laugh. “Between my Slav and your Frenchman I don’t know that there’s much to choose. God, if it were only an occasional beating I shouldn’t mind.” She did a waltz step across the room, twirled round on her tiny feet, lit a cigarette standing on tiptoe, and collapsed into a chair in a spasm of coughing.

“I had it out with Ivanoff, my dear, about you, and I know all about it--just the exact sums you gave him for me, bless your baby heart, and everything. At first I doubted you. I was a fool. I’m sorry. Unfortunately I found out other things. There are other women in the world who don’t love me at all, but who pay for my shoes. Do you hear? Do you get what I mean? I find I’ve been paying my bills with their money. What do you say to that? I ask you simply. And we’re on the streets now--at least he’s gone--I’m staying with Madeleine de Greux, and the bailiffs have got our furniture.” And she went off into a wild scream of laughter. It was incredibly painful. She sat there as neat and smart as a pin. Her small cocked hat on one side of her head, her pretty little legs crossed, one high-heeled patent leather slipper dangling in the air, the other tapping the floor, she puffed smoke through her little tilted nose and looked at me desperately out of her hard, level eyes, while she yelled with laughter just as if some one were tickling her till she screamed with pain.

I went to my desk and got out my cheque book. “Let’s pay off the furniture first,” I said as prosaically as I could, but she jumped up irritably.

“God! Jane, what a fool you are. Put that cheque book away. Do you think I’d touch another penny of yours? There--don’t be hurt. Of course I would if I needed it, but what good will money do? I can’t go and hunt out Ivo’s mistresses and pay them back, can I? Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!--I did like him. Men are devils. Even now I’m worried about him. I imagine him locked up somewhere or dead drunk in the gutter lying out in the dark--whereas he’s probably at Monte having a high old time. By the way, your French family is in a great state about you. Claire says their position as regards you is very delicate. I suppose it is. They don’t know whether to come here or to leave you alone. They wonder what you’re going to do. They’re frightfully cut up about Fifi, and they’re afraid you’ll do something final like getting a divorce.”

“Well, my dear, that’s just what I do think of doing.”

“I see.” She ruminated, chewing her cigarette that had gone out. “They’ll never forgive you if you do.”

“I suppose not, but I don’t see that that matters.”

“Oh, but it does. They’re so perfectly charming. They’d make Paris impossible for you.”

“That sounds charming, I must say.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jane. You know what I mean. You know how clever they are. They’re the most attractive people on earth. But if you set them against you, the whole clan, you’ll find life here very different.”

“I don’t propose to live here.”

“Where then?”

“In St. Mary’s Plains.”

“Heaven help you, my poor misguided lamb.”

“I’m homesick,” I persisted obstinately.

“Of course, for the moment, because you’re unhappy.”

“No, not only because I’m unhappy. I like the Grey House. I belong there. It’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s real, it’s the place I know best in the world.”

“Nonsense. It’s a dingy little shanty.”

“You can call it names if you like. I don’t care what you say. I’m going back there.”

“For good?”

“I don’t know--perhaps.”

“Well, you won’t stay, so you’d better not risk it.”

“Risk what?”

“Having to eat humble pie and come back to be forgiven.”

It was my turn to get up with a fling of exasperation and walk about. She followed me with her bright, piercing gaze.

“Think a little, Jane. Use your brains, if you can. Think of the difference between your life here and your life at home in that Godforsaken hole of St. Mary’s Plains. Look at this room. Look out of the window and remember. Don’t I remember? Wooden sidewalks with weeds growing between the boards, boys playing marbles in the street, women hanging out their washing in backyards, Sunday clothes, oh, those best Sunday clothes, revival meetings, Moody and Sankey in tents on the lake shore, picnics, bicycle rides, dances at the Country Club, freckled youths kissing you on the verandah, great news--Ethel Barrymore is coming in her new play that’s been running a year in New York. Excursions on the lake, fifty cents a round trip and soft drinks, sarsaparilla, ginger ale, buggy rides, shopping down town, talking to old women--cats who gossip about somebody’s new red silk petticoat, too flighty, indecent. All going to church and shouting ‘Hallaleluja’ and eating blueberry pie afterwards till their mouths are all black inside.”