Chapter Twenty-Seven I
She was present, with the other principals of the Maison Paulette, the night that Robert arrived. Her heart beat faster when she set eyes on him again. He seemed perfectly collected (too perfectly collected!) though very cordial. How was she to tell, amidst so much handshaking and greeting that his heart was beating time with hers?
The thing she was most conscious of was that one look of his mobile brown eyes had given a strangely different twist to her adventure with Claude Fontaine. For the first time in her experience she felt uncomfortably on the defensive.
She resented this novel sensation. She regarded it with hostility, as though it were some treacherous thread that crossed her homespun integrity. To think that Robert should be its agent! Or could she be mistaken? No. It appeared that even the most charitable of human beings liked to see you in sackcloth and ashes, and looking remorseful, conscience stricken, punished. Well, she had not given Cornelia the satisfaction of looking so, nor Harry Kelly, nor Mazie Ross, nor anybody. And Robert should be no exception.
With defiant vigor she resolved that, as she had no cause to acknowledge remorse, fifty Roberts should not make her acknowledge it.
There was little time that night for an interchange of news. Next morning, the machinery of the Paulette establishment, too big to be suspended for a mere visitor, automatically began its daily grind.
In the course of the day Janet caught fleeting glimpses of Robert, little more. Cornelia kept him under her wing and guarded him as carefully as though he were a crown jewel. She went so far as to relieve Harry Kelly of the half-hour’s treat he had promised himself, the treat of showing Robert the sights of the great Maison.
Cornelia not only undertook the ceremony herself; she protracted the ritual far beyond her husband’s intentions. Cato’s complete mentor, that was what she blandly constituted herself. All that poor Hercules could do was to leave his work once in a while, dash hastily to whatever quarter of the building his wife had conducted Robert, slap the visitor gently on the back, and fling a gloomy monosyllable at him by way of showing his good will. He insisted that Robert was too thin, and trotted out his famous formula.
“You don’t breathe deep and down enough, old boy. Fill your lungs and your belly with good fresh wind, or you’ll never travel on asphalt.”
Cornelia had ceased to shudder at the inelegant word. But Mazie, happening to pop in at the moment, promptly caught it up and used the occasion to favor the two men with a fusillade of flippant, slangy phrases, not forgetting to add several thinly veiled impudences directed at the mistress of the house before the latter had time to expel her.
Cornelia herself suffered so many interruptions that even she had to postpone the confidential talk she had planned to hold with Robert before noon. After lunch, she allowed Robert to take his first stroll through Paris alone, reminding him to come back for an early dinner at half past six. According to her plan, the evening was to be spent in a general confab and merrymaking.
Unluckily, she forgot to announce this plan in so many words, but took it for granted that no move involving Robert would be made that day without first consulting her. Her overconfidence defeated her. In one of the few moments when she was off guard, Janet contrived to get Robert by himself and secured his joyful acceptance of an invitation to a concert in the evening, for which she chanced to have two tickets.
When Cornelia heard of it, she was in turn astounded and furious. Privately, to Harry and Mazie, she described Janet concisely as a selfish beast. In public, she kept herself commendably in hand.
The dinner passed off without much hilarity and with no incidents other than one or two casual allusions, on Cornelia’s part, to M. St. Hilaire.
As Janet went out with Robert, Kelly, full of mournful resignation, hoped that their purses would survive the brigandage, and their lives the epileptic locomotion, of the Paris taxi-cab drivers. Mazie called out:
“Janet, my gentle pet, don’t let Rob land by mistake into the Miroir de Venus.” (This was a cafe notorious for its high jinks.)
“Why not?”
“He might reform the joint, before the joint reforms him.”
II
They got into an Odéon bus.
On their way via the Boulevard des Italiennes to the Seine, she named a few of the sights they passed, such as the Théâtre Français and the Tuileries. Crossing the Pont du Carrousel, the bus jounced him against her and, as she thrilled to the touch, she felt his magnetic response.
Yet, outwardly, a year and a half had not changed him greatly, she thought. There was the same fire in his eyes (but wasn’t there perhaps a shade less of friendliness?). He listened as politely as ever to routine chit-chat, and exhibited the same impetuous candor when the conversation flung up a new idea.
“You haven’t changed much, either,” he said, rather suddenly, as though he had divined her reflections. “Your contours are a little rounder, that’s all, and I think your chin is much firmer.”
“And my big nose?”
He pretended to appraise it judicially.
“It’s a size smaller. Perhaps a size and a half.”
She laughed delightedly. It was a new thing for Robert to pay attention to such physical details.
“Well, as long as you say it’s a change for the better—”
“I don’t,” he said, affecting a stern tone. “Not in the least. Do you know what? I’m afraid you’re fast turning yourself into one of these popular Paul Helleu beauties, a Parisian version of the Penrhyn Stanlaws girl.”
“I wish I could. But I’m not a magician, Robert.”
“Oh, there’s no magic about it. Any girl can do it, if—”
“If, of course. Let’s hear the gigantic if.”
“If she has a very moderate allotment of brains and looks, and a single-minded passion for beautifying herself.”
“If this is praise, give me dispraise,” she said, with a mischievous gleam in her eyes.
His senses were assailed by the tone and timbre of her voice. In self-protection he somewhat rudely remarked:
“The fact is I didn’t come to Europe to tell you how beautiful you are.”
“No, you came over on business,” she said, drily. “You always do come on business. We all assumed that. You needn’t fear that we’re any of us flattering ourselves that you came specially to see him or her. You were sent as a delegate to some labor conference or other, weren’t you?”
“Not as a delegate, but as a staff correspondent of the Confederated Press.”
She learned that the Confederated Press was a new venture backed by several radical newspapers and designed to supply its clients with the news of the world, the straightforward news, before it was cooked or adulterated by the old established press services. Robert’s assignment gave him an enormously valuable experience, although his position was not a lucrative one.
“That’s what brought me to Geneva,” he concluded. “But I came to Paris to see you.”
Just before he left New York, he had seen Pryor, he told her. Of course Pryor had let out one or two startling bits of news gathered from the four quarters of the earth. About Hutchins Burley and Lydia Dyson—things he would tell her later. Pryor had all the town talk (Kips Bay talk) at his fingers’ ends. The man was a regular human wireless station. Did Janet recall how he always spoke of information drifting his way? Well, it was from Pryor that he first had heard that Cornelia and the famous Madame Paulette were one and the same person.
“You see I’d lost complete track of Cornelia after she left the model tenements,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that she wanted to sponge the Kips Bay connection clean off the slate. Naturally, my turning up now isn’t in the least to her liking. I can feel that, in spite of her tremendous surface cordiality. But I had to come. Finding her was finding you.”
(“A pity you didn’t look me up a little sooner,” said Janet, to herself, not stopping to enlighten him as to the subtle cause of Cornelia’s displeasure.)
“Look, here’s the Ecole des Beaux Arts,” she said aloud. “We’ll be in the Boulevard St. Germain in a minute.”
III
Whilst he obediently turned his gaze from the sparkle of the arc lights and the glitter of the shops and streets, his thoughts were preoccupied by her puzzling manner. She was friendly, of course. Janet was always that. An equable, agreeable temper was the very essence of her. But what was this disconcerting aloofness of hers which was cleaving the air between them! Her generous eyes and her low clear voice were sending out vibrations that penetrated to his very soul; yet her mind was stubbornly withholding the confidence which in the old Lorillard days she had given him without reserve. What did the paradox of her behavior mean? Was this a new Janet at the opposite pole to the candid, unaffected Janet of Barr and Lloyd? He supposed that the Claude episode might furnish the answer. Had it changed her spiritually for the worse as it had changed her physically for the better?
Well, that episode had certainly changed him, though not precisely in any way that he could have predicted. Changed him! For one thing it had opened his eyes to the fact that he had been a good deal of a prig, as his Outlaw acquaintances were so fond of intimating. He blushed to recall his ex cathedra pronouncements on the subject of free love. With what assurance he had asserted that he did not object to free love as a matter of prejudice but only as a point of expediency. Hypocrite! The very reverse had been the case. When Janet ran away with Claude, the Old Adam had risen within him and almost smothered him with possessive emotion.
Like any common jealous man! To be sure, he had stoutly told himself that the Claude adventure made no difference in his estimate of Janet’s worth. Absolutely none. She was, as always, a prize for any man. For any man? Well, he himself, on the sole ground that his life’s work might suffer, would not consider himself eligible for the prize. That was how he had put it. That was where the prig had shown the cloven hoof.
Still, he could say this for himself. When he had met Janet face to face again, all these piffling considerations of expediency had instantly, along with his vulgar prejudices, gone by the board. The moment he set eyes on her in Paris, he felt himself at one with her as he had never felt at one with any other human being (save perhaps a certain long-lost friend of his own sex).
The cause was not far to seek. Janet could pull the trigger that released and expanded his faculties as no one else had ever been able to do. In her presence, not merely his better self, but his more adventurous self, his more aspiring self, his more poetic self, and his more heroic self—the several Roberts that other people were too dull to perceive, or too futile, ignorant, or base to cultivate—all these craving selves came into their own and grew in stature. What was a previous love affair, what were a dozen previous love affairs, in the teeth of this miracle? Claude Fontaine! One look into the depth of Janet’s eyes, and all theories, prejudices, principles, expediencies, and conflicting emotions went up in smoke.
Meanwhile, Janet’s thoughts had been taking a very different shape.
She did not know that Robert had never seen the long letter to Cornelia in which she had described her journey with Claude and had given her European address. Cornelia had withheld this letter from Robert for reasons scarcely admitted to herself; and what Cornelia did not admit to herself she was little likely to admit to an interested friend. In fact, in her letter to Janet and in casual conversations since their recent reunion, Cornelia had so often allowed it to be inferred that Robert had had access to the letter, that she ended by making this convenient inference herself.
Not unnaturally then, Janet reasoned that Robert’s failure to communicate with her had been deliberate. What dovetailed with this conclusion was the memory of his dictum on free love. How well she remembered the relentless words: “I can never have anything to do with free love or with a woman who has had a free lover. It would defeat my purpose in life.”
His purpose in life! He was the sort of man who took more joy in finding and working that out than in loving any woman. True, she no longer concurred in Cornelia’s view that Robert was a fanatic. No. He just escaped fanaticism by the skin of his teeth. This view explained both his long silence and his sudden reappearance. That is, she knew quite well that he had borne her no grudge on account of the past, had indulged in no theatrical repudiation of her friendship because of her liaison with Claude. He had simply found it profitless to pursue a friendship with a woman in her situation. That would be enough to commit him to silence.
Nor did she take too seriously his assertion that he had made a special trip to Paris to see her. Why shouldn’t he pay her or Madame Paulette a visit if the ordinary course of his business brought him almost to their doorstep? After all, a representative of labor interests could hardly come to Europe without visiting Paris. Paris, where a lurid, underground drama of industrial insurrection, half smothered by gold dust, was going on!
Was there any sensible reason why Robert shouldn’t pick up the thread of an old friendship, if it was all in the day’s work? It might even be useful to a labor man to get in touch with people who knew the ropes of the French capital. Anyhow, Robert would be the last person in the world to abstain from such a course if it promised to advance his principles.
His hateful principles! The worst of it was, she was beginning to have sympathy for his conviction that the drudgery which served a purpose you believed in might be a real pleasure, compared with which the pleasure that served no purpose worth believing in would be an intolerable pain.
Well, all these speculations were as nothing against the fact of the moment. The fact of the moment was that the swaying of the bus crushed Robert’s arm against hers in an impact that was poignantly delightful. Nor was this all. Robert, his imperious principles notwithstanding, acted in every respect as if he liked having his arm against her; no as if he would like to have his arm around her. Robert Lloyd amorous? She gave him a sidelong glance. Her senses provided her with abundant evidence that her surmise was correct. But this was a world of sensory illusions as she had learned to her cost; and she reminded herself sharply that she had more than one decisive reason for trusting neither to his feelings nor to her own.
IV
“You’re not doing your duty,” she said to him. “We’ve just passed the church of St. Germain-des-Pres. Quick look back. Even darkness can’t subdue those imposing walls. Doesn’t it look solid and impregnable? Just like my mother and like your convictions. It’s a structure that commands your faith, though you have it not. You’ll miss the silhouette of St. Sulpice, too, if you don’t look out.”
“Janet, I didn’t come to Paris to look at churches. I came to look at you.”
“Well, you came, you saw, and—you conquered.”
“I saw more than you think,” he went on, smiling at her flippancy. “As I said before, you’ve changed physically. But the physical change is of no importance.”
“I knew it. Those fine compliments were all bunk.”
“Not at all. You’ve changed physically for the better. But what is more important is that you’ve changed spiritually—”
“For the worse, of course. Now we’re coming to it.”
“I didn’t say it. I’m not at all sure.”
“This may be candor, Robert. But it sounds like revenge.”
“You may as well be serious, Janet. I’ve got volumes to pour out to you, and pour them out I will. When I’m with you, I’m like the Ancient Mariner. I want to tell you everything.”
“Everything?”
“Well, almost everything, as they say in the comic opera. What do you suppose was the most wonderful companionship I ever formed?”
“I can’t guess.”
“Barr and Lloyd. Do you know why? Because, for one thing, there was nothing in reason that I couldn’t talk to you about, with the most unvarnished frankness. I still feel that way.”
“I’m glad you do. We were very good pals, weren’t we?”
“Yes, and I hope we still are. Anyhow, I want to speak of something I heard about you from Mark Pryor.”
“What was that?”
“Pryor seems to have kept in touch with Cornelia right along. You know Pryor.”
“Not a sparrow falleth but his eye doth see,” she quoted.
“Exactly. He has been keeping tabs on this rich Alsatian. And, by the way, I ought to mention that he repeated to me what you told him about Monsieur St. Hilaire.”
“That’s a nice way to treat my confidence,” said Janet, seriously annoyed. “Pryor of all people. And I took him to be the only original human clam!”
“Well, I think he was fully justified—”
“In what way, I’d like to ask?”
“Please don’t make me go into that now, Janet. The thing I’m driving at is this. Pryor heard that you were on the point of—of forming a free alliance with this Alsatian gentleman. Chiefly to escape Cornelia and this horrible business of clothes.”
“You’ve been misinformed,” she retorted coldly. “Not about the clothes. I do loathe them. But I’ve no intention of forming a free alliance with anybody. Certainly not with Monsieur St. Hilaire. Why should I? I don’t love him. But I don’t mind telling you that he has asked me to marry him.”
“Oh, then, that’s what you’re considering?”
“Yes,” she said concisely.
And “put that in your pipe and smoke it,” added a defiant glance from her half-parted long-lashed eyes.
If he had any notion of playing the medieval knight, plunging through fire and water for the damsel in distress, she would spoil that chivalrous pose in a jiffy.
“Janet, I don’t understand you,” he said, with quite unnecessary vehemence. “You said you wouldn’t marry Claude, your reason being that you loved him. Now you say you will marry Monsieur St. Hilaire, and your reason is that you don’t love him.”
His eyes added: “You are inexplicable, exasperating, maddening—and yet adorable: in short, you are Janet.”
The bus came to a full stop, and a few minutes later they were in the concert hall.
V
The concert was one of a special series given by an orchestra from Rouen. Janet’s attention had been drawn to the series by two circumstances. One was that a third of the members of the orchestra were women. The other was that the inclusion of women in a first-class orchestra had plunged musical circles into a controversy which the newspapers eagerly seized upon and played up with caricature or abuse, satire or eulogy, according to the partisanship, but never the merits of the case.
Robert knew nothing of this controversy until he ventured on a remark during the first intermission.
“The tone and workmanship of the orchestra are splendid,” he said. “I don’t feel qualified to judge, but it strikes me that the women are doing every whit as well as the men.”
“As well? They’re doing far better. Do you see that first violin in the front row, the third from the left? I could tell he was slacking all through the Cesar Franck number. And there were four or five others as bad. You couldn’t say that of one of the women.”
“No. Their performance is amazing, isn’t it?”
“Why amazing?” asked Janet, still detecting an echo of masculine superciliousness.
“Well, women don’t generally reach the top-notch in the fine arts, do they?”
“How can they,” said Janet warmly, “when the patronizing disparagement and merciless rivalry of men hold them back at every turn!”
“Well, they’ve managed to break into this crack orchestra. That doesn’t look like merciless rivalry.”
“Ah, but wait till I tell you the facts, Robert. As the war went on, managers found it impossible to deny women the privilege of playing in high-class bands. But the men are now recovering their monopoly as fast and as unscrupulously as possible. How? They have set up a hue and cry against the women and have won the musical pundits to their side. I am told that the management of this Rouen orchestra is almost certain to yield to masculine pressure, which means that the women will be dislodged at the end of the current series.”
Did Robert appreciate the injustice of this abominable proceeding? It was a fact that the women brought a fire, intensity and freshness to their work which improved the tone and effectiveness of every band they played in. They were twice as keen as the men and worked fifty times harder. Several of the younger, more liberal musical critics both in Paris and in London fully admitted this. Not so the old-timers who sat in the seats of the mighty. And yet the men who were doing their vicious best to elbow their rivals out of the way were the very men who fluttered about town and with crocodile regret assured the public that, no matter what equal chances the weaker sex received, the final incapacity of women to reach the top was beyond dispute.
Janet’s shot went home. But the resumption of the program made it impossible for Robert to offer a defense. He was annoyed at himself for having spoken tactlessly on a topic which Janet might well be touchy about. Still, he considered that her rebuke was far too severe to fit the crime, especially in view of his genuine equalitarian feeling toward women, a feeling that Janet ought to have been the last to deny him.
It occurred to him that, if she was capable of regarding him, of all men, with so much detachment (not to say indifference) as to make him the target for a sharp anti-hominist fire, she might be deeper in the M. St. Hilaire entanglement than he or Mark Pryor had suspected.
By the time the concert was over, Janet was sorry for the way she had pitched into her guest. Would he forgive her for letting the heat of argument carry her away? Not that she retracted a word she had said. Far from it. It was impossible to say too much on that score. Had he noticed the wide publicity which the Paris newspapers had given to an assertion appearing in one of Arnold Bennett’s recent books? It was the assertion that women are inferior to men in intellectual power and that “no amount of education or liberty of action will sensibly alter this fact.” This gesture of finality with which men, even men of genius like Bennett, invariably polished off the future of women and consigned them to an eternity of subordination! When would this superficial generalization ever stop, if avowed feminists like Robert fell to using the language of their opponents even while avoiding their errors?
“I’m only taking the words out of your mouth, Robert,” she concluded, in her softest pacifying tones. “I’m only repeating what you’ve told me a hundred times over in the past.”
He smiled at this sop to his vanity, which none the less helped to restore good feeling.
VI
Janet had taken him towards the river. They walked arm in arm along the Quai Voltaire and the Quai d’Orsay, the tranquil Seine and the starry skies almost their sole companions.
The dispute of the evening still fresh in his mind, Robert alluded to Janet’s former ambition to create a new profession for women of the middle class. A branch of law, wasn’t it? Authorship law, so to speak. Had she given it any thought of late? What a nuisance it was that money should have to be the root of all experiment as well as the root of all evil. In the absence of enough capital, it was probably just as well that she deferred another attempt to realize her dream. Still, it was a pity. She had made such a good beginning with the firm of Barr & Lloyd, humble though the scale of its operations had been.
“Well, Robert, are you ready to renew the partnership?” she challenged him.
“Is this a strictly business proposal?” he replied, in a hesitating manner.
She was chilled by his clumsiness.
“Barr & Lloyd was always a ‘strictly business’ affair, wasn’t it?” she said, in a cool, quiet voice.
He wanted to burst out with: “No, I never believed it was wholly that. If you’d had my sort of partnership in mind, I’d give a very swift and a very different answer.” But the words stuck in his throat. For two reasons. Her sudden return to the almost hostile manner that had baffled him earlier, was one. His knowledge that the limited and precarious means he disposed of would make an offer of marriage from him seem ridiculous, if not insane, was the second.
Had he voiced his thoughts, they might then and there have thrashed their differences out in half an hour. But he could not voice them. For the first time in their friendship, neither of them was candid when candor was the sensible course. “This comes of caring for a woman not wisely but too well,” thought Robert. He was amazed and incredulous to find that he cared so much; he was also a little indignant with himself, for he had vowed never to do that very thing.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he heard Janet saying. “I’m not going to impress you into the cause. You have bigger fish to fry than the feminist movement. As for me, I’ve had a very good offer from Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.”
She sketched a picture of this whimsical lady, and gave a short account of Mrs. Jerome’s interest in the organized effort to rid women of their professional disabilities. Robert learned that Mrs. Jerome had repeatedly expressed a desire to put Janet to some use in the cause she had at heart.
“The work would be quite in line with my old plans,” added Janet.
“Then why don’t you accept her offer at once?”
“I wish I knew,” she said, evasively. “Perhaps I can do all I’ve wanted to do, and more, if I follow the beaten track, if I buy cheap and sell dear in the marriage market; in short, give as little of myself as I can to the richest bidder that offers. What do you think?”
“I think a cynical step of that sort would do very well for Mazie, whose words you appear to be repeating.”
“Oh, don’t underrate Mazie’s cynicism. It has been hammered into a durable, serviceable instrument by some very hard knocks. Knocks that she got from men. Her flippant manner often obscures some very sound remarks, like the one that there’ll be no equality between the sexes until women exploit men as shamelessly as men exploit women.”
“Doesn’t the modern woman do this, already?” asked Robert, with a smile.
“How often does she get the same chance? It’s equality of chances that I’m aiming for, you know.”
“So am I for that matter,” said Robert. “I hope we’ll get your equality of chances before long. Then we can work together for decency.”
It was close upon midnight when they took a taxi back to the Boulevard Haussman.
Not a soul was stirring in the Maison Paulette. Robert and Janet walked through the corridor on the rez-de-chausée to the rear building, the one used for sleeping quarters. For a few minutes they stopped in the vestibule at the foot of the staircase.
Now, as throughout the evening, their instincts swayed them one way, their reason another. Each misunderstood the motives of the other; and, what with this misunderstanding and the economic insecurity of their circumstances, the scales were tipped in favor of discretion. Besides, Janet mistrusted her impulses far more than formerly. True, Robert mistrusted his far less. In spite of his better judgment, he was succumbing to her ensnaring voice and eyes, was surrendering to an intense longing to tempt her into a betrayal, an unambiguous betrayal, of her real feelings.
But he proceeded in a manner too inadequate.
“I’m no clearer about your plans than before,” he said, awkwardly. “You haven’t really taken me into your confidence.”
“About Monsieur St. Hilaire?”
“Yes.”
A marked pause. She did not interrupt it. Discouraged, he lamely continued: “Still, I’m glad you’ve changed your point of view about men and women. It’s something to find out that marriage, like adversity, has its uses.”
“Robert, what I’ve found out is that marriage, like honesty, may be the best policy. I’ve learned that woman cannot live by principle alone.”
“I protest I never urged it.”
“No. And if it’s the least satisfaction to you, I’ll admit that I don’t intend to repeat any of my Kips Bay experiments—free love, outlawry, and so on—you know the sort of thing. Why should I? There are few moments in the old Lorillard tenement life that I regret; yet there are none that I’d live over again.”
“None?”
“Not one. Wait. There is a single moment—it just occurs to me—it was so like this one—”
“Like this one?”
“Yes, ‘when my heart was a free and a fetterless thing, a wave—’”
The line was completed without words, Robert, swept away by her enchantment, having seized heir in his arms and kissed her.
“Don’t marry Monsieur St. Hilaire,” he said, beseeching rather than commanding her, “whatever you do.”
She disengaged herself almost brutally, and went up the stairs. Pausing a few steps up, she turned and, in a tone supremely dispassionate, said:
“Whatever I do! Well, whatever I do, I can’t marry a poor man, can I?”