Mary Borden

“ 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. ”

“ There is no room here for American Puritanism. Paris is too old, too wise to harbour such things. Was it that that haunted Jane? Did she always see herself measured up to a fixed fine standard like a flagpole, the flagpole of American idealism, with a banner floating over her head, casting a shadow, purity, honesty, fear of God, written on it in shining letters? Payment, atonement, the wages of sin is death—old Mrs. Forbes reading out the words, believing but not worrying, but Jane making them terribly personal, questioning, puzzling, burying them in her mind. ”

“ I used to dodge Philibert when I could. I would have avoided Jane’s confidence had I been able. Philibert’s tormenting in no way involved me. I could just let him kick and was when he finished as free as before to subside into my corner; with Jane it was different. Jane involved me in everything.
And now that I am obliged to think of my own personal relation to Jane, I have as I do so, a feeling of pain that is like the throbbing of some old hurt or the recurrence of an illness. Jane was magnificent and healthy and whole. She was half a head taller than I. I am cursed with a visualizing mind. ”

“ There were men in the world and women. When one reduced things to their last simplicity all women were bound together in the same bundle, dealing with the same problem. She, the older woman, was wise, I was foolish; but we were sisters in disappointment, we were weak, we must be proud. We had both loved Philibert, but even I had never loved him as she loved him. And he had broken her heart. The dignity of our life depended on our pride, to hide our hurt, to make no sound, no complaint, to arrange silently to make things bearable, to influence men without their knowing it. ”

“ I felt very sorry for her. I understood that she was afraid of the invasion of a horde of big noisy strangers. I tried to comfort her. She seemed to me for the first time pitiful, and I saw that her youthfulness was after all, just one of the illusions she cast by the exercise of her will. It fell from her that evening as if it had been some gossamer veil destroyed by her tears.
Claire remained silent. Only once during all my mother’s broken lament did she speak, and then she said without turning—“I should have thought one such marriage in a family was enough.” ”

“ I am not at all sure that I have a just feeling for that American life of Jane’s. I have put down the facts as she told them to me and have described the people there as they came into being for me, from her talk, but how am I to know that they were really like that? Perhaps had I seen them with my own eyes I should have found them quite different: narrow, dull people with shrill twanging voices and queer American mannerisms. It may be that they would have bored me as they bored Mrs. Carpenter. St. Mary’s Plains I have seen for myself, but what did I see? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now that you are back there at last alone, now that we have lost you for ever, now that you have gone, irresistibly drawn out of your splendour to the little shabby place you loved, what is there to torment you? Philibert, Bianca? What have they to do with you now? They hated you. How can you be beholden to people who did you nothing but harm? But Jane, there were some of us who adored you, and if you had told us everything, as you at last told me, we would have loved you only the more. ”

“ I had liked the place, but Philibert had spoiled it with his endless improvements. It was now, his creation stamped with him. Sitting alone in my room at the top of the house with the shabby relics of the Grey House, I thought of him as he had been there in the country, strutting about directing his army of workmen, cutting down trees, pulling up whole lawns to replace them with gravelled terraces, and sinking into the reluctant earth marble basins for the lovely vagrant waters of the park. He had always professed to be the enemy of nature. ”

“ And the golden carpet thrown down on the marble stairs, and Jane standing alone at the top of that fantastic staircase, like an emerald column, her train arranged by Philibert’s own clever hands sweeping down the steps beneath her to add supernaturally to her height, her strange face under its diadem of jewels looking as small in the distance as the carved image cut out of a coin. Do people not talk even now of that night, and allude to Philibert as the last of the benevolent despots? “He was unique,” you can still hear them say it, “there will never be any one like him. ”

“ Not that Philibert ever intended to do anything so silly as spoil a site in Paris by such a freak of humour. He was a farceur if you like, but he had too much taste for that. He intended having his palace, and it was to be of such supreme beauty as to draw pilgrims from all over the world, but it was to be in harmony with its surroundings. The allusion to the House of the Doges was just his little happy joke. He was very cheerful in those days. People used to say—“Fifi does have luck. Look at him. Who is it now that adores him? Was ever a man so blatantly successful in his love affairs?” ”

“ Born with a gnawing consciousness of his own genius, he had for years been as exasperated as a Michael Angelo or a Paul Veronese forced by lack of space and a sufficiency of paints to spend his time doing little water-colour sketches: but he now saw himself on the way to realizing his inspirations in all their splendid amplitude, and of displaying before the eyes of men the finished gigantic masterpiece of his art. For Philibert was an artist: even Ludovic and Felix and Clémentine recognized that. He was an artist in life on a grand scale. ”

“ Her eyes grew more enormous. She stared into mine and her thin pointed lips curved into a smile. “Not since Deauville, after the death of poor Fan Ivanoff—four, five, six years—is it not? Before the war. I have been so little in Paris.” Her eyelids fluttered, her eyes deadened, a curious lassitude spread over her suddenly. She drooped in her chair, she was like a bruised soiled faded plant, almost to me she seemed to exhale the odour of decay. “I have travelled—I have wandered—Spain—Portugal—America—Buenos Aires—I am so restless, I go anywhere—” her voice trailed off. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Wonderful Patience Forbes, taking me to task for the frivolity of my world, sitting on the back verandah, her spectacles on the end of her nose, her knitting on her lap, her heelless slippers comfortably crossed, her little modest volume tucked away on a shelf in the Bibliothèque Nationale. She seemed to me very remarkable, and she seems even more so now. Time for most of us is just a process of disintegration, old age is often pitiful and ugly, but at the age of sixty-five Patience Forbes had the heart of a child and the robust enthusiasm of a student. ”

“ The sight of myself, always unpleasant, set me wandering. I turned on lights here and there. All was still and smooth with the vast ordered beauty of a cold enchanted palace. The thought of Philibert’s success as a house decorator passed through my mind without engaging my attention, that seemed somehow to be fixed on something else, something deep and elusive that had a meaning could I but find it. What did they stand for, those high polished walls with their lovely panellings? What did they enclose beyond so many treasures of art? ”

“ Bianca had come back to Paris; she had been, so gossip related it, travelling about Spain with a famous matador. Some people said she had joined his troupe disguised as a boy and had, more than once gone into the arena in a pink suit embroidered in silver and had planted once, the banderillas, in a bull that had five minutes later run his horns through her paramour. I neither believed nor disbelieved the story. José had seen her in the Stand at Seville looking marvellous in a lace mantilla, a black dress high throated and a string of pearls which she flung to the popular hero. ”

“ I can see the grim face of Patience Forbes while she searches her memory for pleasant things about her heartless prodigal sister. She sits in a bay window looking out into the back garden where there is a sleepy twittering of birds. The trams thunder past up Desmoine’s Avenue. The milkman comes up the path; the white muslin curtains billow into the peaceful room that smells of lavender and mint. There is sunlight on the old mahogany. Jane’s great-grandmother, in an oval frame, looks down insipidly, her eyes mildly shining between the low bands of her parted hair. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He made a better impression in their hour’s talk than Jane’s uncle wanted to admit to himself. The good man was obliged to fade away as he had come, and float off like some wistful porpoise across the Atlantic leaving behind him only light ephemeral bubbles of amused disapproval. All the same he had done enough to make Jane very angry and obstinate and produce from her hand a long letter to her Aunt Patty in which she inveighed against the obtuse narrow-mindedness of the entire American nation. Patience Forbes seems not to have answered this letter. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Paquin and Chéruit and Philibert did that for her almost at once, but her looks, even without their aid, were always a disguise, never a revelation of her self. Some women are all of a piece with their charming exteriors, Jane was a child cased in armour. As she grew older she learned to use it, she made it answer, but she used it to become something she was not. I call up her image as I write. I evoke Jane as she was that last year in Paris, the most elegant woman in Europe, the most stared at, and the most indifferent. ”

“ The haemorrhage had thoroughly frightened him. It was a fortnight later that Philibert, one brilliant afternoon announced himself at the Palace Hotel Biarritz. Fan was better and Ivanoff had recovered from his terror. Philibert found the two women in an upstairs sitting-room overlooking the sea. Fan was on a couch, her little wizened face screwed into a smile of bravado under her lace bonnet, and a cigarette between her rouged lips. Jane looked the more ill of the two. Her usual glowing pallor had turned to the whitish-grey of ashes, there were purple circles under her eyes. ”

“ But of course I know that Maman and Philibert and Blaise and Tante Marianne are no different from other people, but that does not matter, they are different for me. It’s not that I believe in my brothers as men, it’s that I believe in their relationship to me, and that, is the only thing I do believe in. Philibert may be the most selfish man in Paris; nevertheless he would not be selfish to me. That’s all, and that is enough. I don’t believe in men. I don’t believe in women. ”

“ I thought how strange women are, seeing things that we none of us notice. I followed Bianca, Jane and Claire in imagination, moving about Paris in smooth rapid motors, slipping in and out of crowded streets, shops, drawing-rooms, theatres, watching each other. But how could Claire see one pursuing the other with all those people round them, all the music, the waiters, the footmen, the lights scattered along dinner-tables, the obstructing tables and chairs, the endless engagements? ”

“ Like a woman dying of thirst, she flung herself at the child’s feet. I see it all now in retrospect. Poisoned, diseased, tired to death, addled and excited by drugs, sick of men, unutterably bored with herself, here was the one thing to appeal to Bianca, the one charm capable of distracting her from the nightmare that possessed her. It is the usual tale of such women. The cycle is completed. They all end that way. And add to her corrupt affection for the child the impetus of doing me a final and deadly hurt and you have the situation before you. ”

“ My dear daughter Jane: It is time for me to go. A man is free to choose his time. This I believe, not much else. I am sorry to leave you, but you are only five years old and you will be better off with your grandmother in St. Mary’s Plains than you would be with me. Your grandmother and your aunts will take care of you. They are good women. It’s not their fault that they don’t like me. The truth is, Jane, that I’m not their kind. I’m nobody’s kind and I’m awful tired of being alone in a crowd. This world is getting too full of people for me. ”