III Elizabeth in Paris
She wisely delayed her departure for three weeks. Should not the days fall like spadefuls of earth upon a coffin, after a separation which had been cruel? Philippe Lagier, whose rôle she did not suspect, had come to tell her of Albert’s useless voyage to London.
“It will not be long before he returns,” he assured her in a tone of mingled bitterness and irony. “Leave him the customary time for half-mourning.”
But she did not confide any of her plans to him. As the days passed, she began to fear, and her hesitation took hold of her again. Was it not better to wait? Could Anne de Sézery be so quickly forgotten? The memory of Mme. Derize, the future of her children, an overwhelming desire for sacrifice and her love, drove her on, impelled her to go. Yes, she would spare her husband the first step, she would go to find him, she would bring him back. That magnanimous decision affected her like a fever, and so completely filled her mind, that she did not think of conjecturing the welcome she would receive.
At the end of May, fearing some new journey of Albert’s, or the negative influence of solitude, she determined to go. Old Fanchette, sharing the secret, looked with terror at the open trunk.
“Paris! Paris!” she muttered, as if she were naming some beast of the Apocalypse.
“Sh!” said Elizabeth, not having told Marie Louise and Philippe, who chattered too much about the object of the journey, on which she was taking them as useful allies. The two were just disputing about the matter.
“I tell you we are going to Saint-Martin.”
“Certainly not. We are going by train,” stated the more competent little girl.
And their mother, as she listened, was laying her finest black dress in the top tray, arched so as not to crush it.
Once in the compartment, a second class carriage, the little ones could not restrain their joy.
“It is Paris!” cried the big boy, as if he had solved a delicate problem. And the magic syllables fell from his little round mouth like a golden ball.
Marie Louise looked attentively at her mother, and then came and laid her face against hers. Their cheeks were of the same delicacy, and their fair hair mingled.
“Shall we see papa?” asked the child.
“Yes.”
“And we shall stay with him?”
“No, darling. We shall take him away.”
“Ah, all the better.”
And the little one added:
“Jeanne and Renée de Crozet will not be able to make fun of us at school now.”
“Make fun of you?”
“Yes, because we had no papa.”
Elizabeth passed her hand through the childish curls.
“Be calm. They won’t make fun of you when he is there.”
She smiled. She was sure of her victory. The fact of being active, the movement of the train as it proceeded, gave her a foretaste of heroism like that which a sheltered troop feels in war, before passing through the firing-line.
In Paris she settled with her children in a boarding-house on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, almost opposite Saint Germain des Prés.
“And the Luxembourg garden?” asked Marie Louise, who, after two years, still remembered her walks.
Trembling, Elizabeth took the children there. He crossed it every day, no doubt, and they might meet him there. She hastened to return to the hotel. The day after her arrival she dictated this letter to her daughter:
“My dear Papa:
“I am in Paris with mamma, and Philippe too. We are here to see a doctor. But you will come to see us. We must go away soon, so you must hurry.
“I send you kisses. Your daughter,
“MARIE LOUISE.”
The excuse about the doctor had not been invented. The young woman had wished to take advantage of her trip to consult a specialist about the nervous temperament of the little girl, who was strong, but too impressionable, perhaps because she had understood her mother’s sorrow, and the peculiarity of her childish life. The doctor had comforted her, advising the fresh air of the country and very little study. Then he turned abruptly to her:
“But you yourself, Madame? Take care; you must take care of yourself.”
“Oh, I...” Elizabeth said indifferently.
“Yes, you. Let me examine you.”
After the examination he said:
“Nothing wrong with the heart. But no regularity in the pulse. One minute it is flying along, and the next it stops, and one no longer feels it. You have changed very much. I know, I know. The cure? It does not depend upon me.”
“On me, then?”
The old man, who knew something about the Derize separation, concluded with these words.
“Hurry up and be happy....”
Albert received his daughter’s letter in the Rue Bara. He had not changed his apartment. Before Anne’s mysterious flight he went to dine every evening at Rue Cassini, and every morning she came to lunch with him. He often took her to the restaurants on the Boulevard Montparnasse, which look like tea gardens in the suburbs, and are much frequented by artists. When spring came, he rented at Ville d’Avray on the Sèvres, a little villa hidden among the trees and covered with clematis, and there their intimacy was more complete. It was when he came in on the evening of the 6th of May to see about their future establishment, that he found this brief farewell left with the porter of the Rue Cassini.
“My life belonged to you as long as it could give you happiness. Now that it can no longer do so, and that I am quite sure of it, forgive my taking my liberty once more. Good-by forever.
“ANNE.”
He was prostrated by this departure. The silent discords which since his mother’s death had slipped between them, certain disillusioned looks which he had noticed in the drooping corners of the lips and the long narrow eyes of his lost love, without attaching much importance to them, and that want of confidence which she had always expressed regarding happiness, even at the time of their most ardent passion, warranted him in imagining the worst catastrophes. He was able to reach the Gare du Nord in time to jump on an evening train. The next morning—and what a rough crossing he had—he arrived at Charing Cross and drove immediately to Bladen Lodge, Miss Pearson’s home. If Anne were alive, she must have taken refuge there. In her hours of sadness, she was always homesick for English life. When he ran up the doorstep, he thought he could divine her presence from the other side of the walls. At the door, he parleyed in very bad English. Miss Pearson was not up at that time, had given no orders. He presented his card, and waited for a long time in a drawing-room, whose windows looked out on a miniature park. He seemed able to recall there the presence of his Anne to whom Bladen Lodge was home.
“She is here, I shall see her,” he repeated with a beating heart.
At last Miss Pearson came to join him. After a few polite remarks and explanations, he at once asked for Mlle. de Sézery, as if he had a right to her and all hypocrisy was out of place, under the circumstances.
“She is not here,” said Miss Pearson, whose frank determined face was severely set this morning.
“I beg of you, Madame, to tell me where I can find her.”
“But I do not know.”
“You do not know? But you have seen her.... Where is she hidden? I have the right to know. You have not seen her?... Well... But you understand that I have everything to fear.”
Miss Pearson realized the anguish which the man was suffering, and putting aside her reserve, she betrayed as much of her secret as she could:
“You need have no fear for her life, Monsieur. Now it is useless to ask me any more. I shall not answer you.”
He tried, however, eloquently, passionately, despairingly, but obtained no information. The momentary pity of Miss Pearson had not affected her loyalty. He left without any further information. But what he had heard agreed with his expectations. Anne had fled from France. Anne was in England—perhaps at Bladen Lodge, but he could not be sure. Every day he used his intelligence and his strength, which was exhausting itself in the unprofitable rôle of detective; he had the surroundings of Bolton Gardens watched; visited M. Portal, who knew nothing, asked about Lord Howard, who was shooting on his estate in Scotland: in his distress, he imagined that Mlle. de Sézery, in leaving him thus, and not revealing her whereabouts, must have tired of her irregular living, meant to take up her life alone and live it according to her own fancies. Broken down by fatigue, he rested only a few hours in the evening, having gained nothing from his search. The next day he took it up again, assisted by a French detective, and setting out in another direction, he took the train for Liverpool. He looked on the registers at the steamship offices, through the lists of passengers going to America or India, but Anne’s name was not to be found among them. She had been able to disguise herself. He questioned the clerks. How could they recall a face, a woman’s figure in such a crowd? However, there was a Miss Lewisham with auburn hair. And golden eyes? They did not know at the offices whether or not she had golden eyes. He went back by way of Southampton, began the same questioning with as little success. Anne was lost to him.
By a phenomenon, usual in the history of passions, he restored to the absent one all the attributes which, little by little he had taken from her. Their last months together had not been pleasant. Anne had been tired and generally sad after her illness. She reproached herself everlastingly about her youth and her complexion, which were fading. He patiently bore these complaints, which were the result of an excess of sensitiveness and of that melancholy natural to those who, too early in life and without preparation, have endured the miseries and humiliations of fate. But no man who is at work can entirely suppress the boredom he meets with in his home, nor the displeasure he experiences in listening to lamentations. Their intellectual life alone retained the power of a mutual bond. A chapter of the “History of the Peasant,” the biography of some great man, provided material for endless discussions. Still he did not relinquish any of his ideas concerning the social order, nor did he know how to convince her of his view-point. Pure lines of classic art, the positive force of experience attracted him, when, on the contrary, she was enthusiastic about elaborate forms, and avoided realities for all Utopias. At intervals, wearied by their useless clash of opinion, they appealed to each other through their former love, and grew tender, not daring to admit to themselves that it was a compromise. And too often Albert absently went off in a direction where she could not follow him, and which she very well knew. Now, deserted by her, he did not wish to owe to her his freedom for which he had often longed, and he fancied himself linked to the memory of Anne.
The Avenue of the Observatory and the mysterious little Rue Cassini, the Allée de Mortemart at the Bois de Boulogne, the road which runs along the pond of La Reine Blanche to Chantilly, saw him pass on his pilgrimage. In these appropriate frames he could better call to mind the long golden eyes, the sorrowful mouth, and the step, light and weary at the same time. In place of spring which was blooming everywhere, he wished for autumn, whose pathetic grace had so often caressed them. Thus do our emotions crush us as they die away, and he mistook the sweetness of having loved for love itself.
Marie Louise’s letter came as an untimely interruption in his sorrow. For six months or perhaps a year, his thoughts had never been so far from his own family, who had selected a very bad time to come to him. Why did they worry him in his solitude? He could not ignore this call, but it was against his will to reply to it. He asked for Mme. Derize at the boarding house. He was shown into the drawing-room on the ground floor, which overlooked Saint Germain-des-Prés, whose pointed steeple and old gray stones he could see between the branches of the chestnuts, already in full bloom. It was a peaceful retreat from the noise of Paris. Elizabeth sent her two children in as scouts. How could he receive them badly? Marie Louise told him about the visit to the doctor, and Philippe informed him of his interest in the botanical gardens. When, in her turn, his wife appeared, with a dismayed expression, he cruelly assumed his unresponsive manner.
“She knows I am deserted,” he thought with irritation. “She is coming to seek me. She is triumphant.”
In seeing him again she experienced neither exaltation nor the hope of departure. She was conscious of that impression of failure which all know, who, full of their subject and eager to express it, meet with indifference or hostility; their tongues are no longer persuasive, and their words grow weak. She explained this journey as well as she could.
Although he evidenced that he was distant and that this intrusion into his life displeased him, he was more struck than he showed with the change he saw in Elizabeth’s features and the thinness of her body. One would have thought, with her flexibility and pallor which made her appear taller, that she was going to break at the slightest blow of fate. He was angry with her for that frailty which attracted him irresistibly, and at the same time alarmed him. In his masculine selfishness, still making her suffer, and already foreseeing her in his future, he preferred her to be faithful at a distance. After a few insignificant words, he could not refrain from asking her:
“Have you been ill?”
“Yes,” interrupted Marie Louise. “The doctor scolded her.”
“Not at all,” answered the young woman. “I am quite well.”
She sent her children to play at the other end of the room, but the little girl often came back to them.
With his bitter tone he put her at variance with herself:
“You refused to receive me last month in Grenoble and you come to surprise me here.”
Confusedly, she murmured:
“The circumstances are not the same now.”
“What circumstances?”
Having once declared herself, she was no longer shy or afraid. She did not hesitate to tell the truth. Since he was voluntarily silent, had she not to remind him of her rights as a woman, and the obligations which children impose? She thought she had opened his heart, but he had brutally shut it again. With what reserve and modesty she justified her step, and how well the exigency of the case helped her with a proposition that she had not prepared in advance, and which her mind hit upon with the first words.
“I have come because you are free now. Then, it seemed to me that we ought to be reconciled at least outwardly, for the sake of the future of Marie Louise and Philippe, and your future too. I am always your wife. I was a very poor one before. I understood that too late. But I have suffered much. I am not reproaching you with anything. Some day perhaps I shall forget, we shall forget.—I do not know.... Perhaps you might take your mother’s flat in the Boulevard des Adieux for the summer. Saint Martin is not far from Grenoble. You could come up and see us sometimes in the daytime. Is it impossible?”
What dignity she preserved in this humiliation which she so little deserved, and which must have cost her so much. Albert had not been entirely able to lose her from his memory except in the first months of his infidelity, and since he had seen her again in circumstances in which one’s sensibility becomes more deeply impregnated with impressions, the refined and purified charm which he had found in her recurred to him too often in comparison with Anne. But a man’s heart has so many complicated recesses: free, he puts from him furiously the solution he ardently wished when he was not free. The romantic pride of his liaison and the thought of submitting for the second time to lessons of love, the antipathy which is inevitably aroused in us by the clear understanding of a reality which imposes itself like a fatal and logical order of things, made him retire with himself, and separated him from all outside influence.
“I am detained in Paris,” he said after a short silence.
From the beginning of the scene she had had an intuition of her failure, but nevertheless, she suffered keenly.
“All the summer?” she implored to satisfy her conscience.
“I fear so.”
He turned his head toward the children who were looking out at the neighboring chestnut blossoms, and he immediately digressed: they were, moreover, old recriminations, which he had often analyzed critically:
“Why did you prevent my helping you to educate the children? I could do only that for them and you have deprived me of it.”
She replied gently:
“I had taken charge of it. You had deserted me. Have they been badly looked after?”
“I have not deserted you: you went away and you have taken our children. Do you think I did not love them as much as you? If I did not ask to take care of them, at least for a part of the year, it is only on your account, so as not to increase your loneliness and it is because my mother begged me to leave them to you. Did you not know about it? Did you not guess it? You thought that I had no interest in them? In refusing my support you gave me back my rights. Now I am free, now I mean to see them again, to share them.”
He had grown more and more excited, rambling on because of the disorder of his heart and his brain.
“Marie Louise, Philippe!” called Elizabeth terrified.
The two children hurried to her; Marie Louise had already cried from afar:
“Naughty papa!”
The young wife pressed them both to her.
“For more than two years they have been mine—mine only. Dare to take them from me! I will not share them.”
He stopped short, like a horse whose spirit is broken and whose gallop is suddenly brought to a standstill.
“I am unjust, Elizabeth!”
He spoke her name for the first time. In spite of her fear, she thrilled. He fell into an armchair beside a table on which he was leaning. His anger spent itself.
“Marie Louise is right. Nobody ever wished to give more happiness than I, and I spread suffering everywhere. It is a fatality. At least I am not happy. What shall I do? How should I know it? Elizabeth, it would be better that you should leave me, forget me, start your life anew.”
She pushed the children towards him, but they obeyed her unwillingly. This confession of weakness was touching on the part of a man who had always extolled the importance of will power, the spirit of continuity and energy in both general and individual life. She felt it and wanted to hold out her arms to him; a secret instinct warned her not to show her tenderness yet.
“Oh,” she murmured simply, “I am not one of those who begin life anew.”
She had begun it over again, however, but in the same straight path. He pulled himself together with an effort to pay her homage.
“Yes, you have already; alone, you helped my mother; you have brought up our children alone. And I, I can do nothing for you but pity you.”
This word separated them still farther.
“It is not your pity that I came to seek. Your mother formerly wished to take this journey. So I have done it.”
Their good-bys were distressing. He kissed his children twice. Then he wished to offer his hand to Elizabeth, who had let hers fall down at her sides.
“Later”... said he, “some day... but it will be too late. Your patience has limits.”
She thought: “Love has none,” and said nothing, since he hesitated about her and his heart was elsewhere. Albert’s last word was an “Au Revoir” which escaped him, and which she noticed. How long would she have to continue greater and greater self-sacrifice, and how long would she be kept on the brink of despair?
He had come in the morning, and in the evening she left.
In the afternoon various packages were sent to her address, containing all sorts of toys for Marie Louise and Philippe, as well as picture books chosen with care to give them some ideas of history and art. Albert had never forgotten to send New Year’s presents to Grenoble, but this time he had stripped the shops and had applied himself to the task of conquering from a distance.
“It is not little Christmas,” the little boy explained to his sister; “it is big Christmas.”
And the little girl agreed that papa was kind. And for herself Elizabeth found in a jewel box, a ring set with a black pearl.
“Is it an engagement ring?” asked Marie Louise, who often talked about marriage to her dolls.
But Elizabeth did not answer.