Part II
I
On the day after our departure the whole town knew that Baroness X had eloped with one of the librarians of the Royal Library.
This was only what was to be expected, to be dreaded! After all my efforts to save her good name, we had forgotten everything in a moment of weakness.
She had spoiled all our plans, and all that remained for me to do was to take the responsibility on my own shoulders and grapple to the best of my ability with the consequences which threatened to ruin her theatrical career; there was only one theatre where she could possibly appear, and loose morals were not likely to increase her chances of an engagement at the Royal Theatre.
On the morning after my return I made an excuse to call on the chief librarian, who was slightly unwell and unable to go out. The sole object of my visit was the establishment of an alibi. After leaving him I strolled through the main streets and thoroughfares and arrived at my office at the usual hour. I spent the evening at the Press Club, and deliberately set the rumour afloat that there was but one reason for the divorce, and that was the Baroness’s determination to enter the theatrical profession. I maintained that husband and wife were on the best of terms, and that their separation was but the inevitable result of class prejudice.
If I had only known what harm I was doing myself by spreading these rumours and proclaiming her innocence!... But no, I should not have acted otherwise.
The papers scrambled eagerly for the smart society scandal, but the public scoffed at this irresistible love of art, a more or less doubtful phenomenon always, but more especially when the stage is concerned. The women in particular were sceptical, and the forsaken child remained an ugly fact which nothing could explain away.
In the meantime I received a letter—a perfect howl of anguish—from Copenhagen. Tortured by remorse, by a yearning for her deserted child, she asked me to come to her at once, complaining bitterly of her relatives who, she asserted, were making her life one long drawn-out agony. She charged them with having suppressed, in collusion with her husband, an important document, which was essential for the final decision in the case.
I refused to leave town, but wrote a few angry lines to the Baron. His reply was so insolent that it led to a complete rupture between us.
One or two telegrams passed, and peace was re-established. The document was found, and the proceedings went on.
I spent my evenings in writing long letters to her, giving her minute instructions how to comport herself in the circumstances. These letters were intended to cheer and encourage her. I advised her to work, to study her art, to visit the theatres. In my anxiety to supplement her income, I urged her to write on anything which she found interesting, and undertook to get her articles accepted by a first-class paper.
No answer. I had every reason to believe that her independent spirit resented my well-meant interference.
A week passed; a week full of care, unrest and hard work. Then, early one morning, before I was up, I received a letter from Copenhagen.
The tone of her letter was calm and serene; she seemed unable to hide a certain pride on account of the quarrel between the Baron and myself. (She was in a fair position to form an opinion, since she had received the respective letters from both of us.) She found the “duel” not without style, and admired my pluck. “It is a pity,” she concluded her letter, “that two men like you and the Baron should not be friends.” Further on she gave me a detailed account of what she was doing to while away the time. She was evidently enjoying herself; she had made her way into second-rate artistic circles, a fact which I did not like. She described an evening spent at some assembly-rooms in the company of a number of young men, who paid her a great deal of attention; she had made the conquest of a musician, a youth who had sacrificed his family to his art. “What a strange similarity between our two cases!” she remarked. Then followed a detailed biography of the interesting martyr and the request not to be jealous.
“What did she mean?” I wondered, taken aback by the half-sarcastic, half-familiar tone of her letter, which appeared to be written between two entertainments.
Was it possible that this coldly voluptuous madonna belonged to the class of born wantons, that she was a coquette, a cocotte?
I sat down at once and indited a furious scolding; I painted her picture as she then appeared to me. I called her Madame Bovary; I entreated her to break the spell which was leading her to a precipice.
In reply, “as a proof of her absolute faith in me,” she sent me the letters which the young enthusiast had written to her. Love letters!
The same old use of the term friendship, the inexplicable sympathy of the souls, and the whole list of the trite and to us both so familiar words: brother and sister, little mother, playmates, and so on, cloaks and covers under which lovers are wont to hide, to abandon themselves ultimately to their passions.
What was I to think? Was she mentally deranged?
Was she an unconscious criminal who remembered nothing of the terrible experience of the last two months, when the hearts of three people were on fire for her? And I who had been made to play the part of a Cinderella, a scape-goat, a man of straw, I was toiling to remove all obstacles from her way to the irregular life of the theatre.
A fresh blow! To see the woman whom I adored wallow in the gutter.
My soul was filled with unspeakable compassion, I had a foreboding of the fate which awaited her, perverse woman that she was, and vowed to lift her up, to strengthen and support her, to do everything in my power to shield her from a fatal catastrophe.
Jealous! That vulgar word invented by a woman in order to mislead the man she has deceived or means to deceive. The hoodwinked husband shows his anger, and the word jealous is flung in his face. Jealous husband—husband betrayed! And there are women who look upon jealousy as synonymous with impotence, so that the betrayed husband can only shut his eyes, powerless in the face of such accusations.
She returned after a fortnight, pretty, fresh, in high spirits, and full of bright memories, for she had thoroughly enjoyed herself. She was wearing a new dress with touches of brilliant colouring, which struck me as vulgar. I was puzzled. The woman who used to dress so simply, so quietly, with such exquisite taste, was adopting a colour scheme which was positively garish.
Our meeting was colder than either of us had expected; there was a constrained silence at first, followed by a sudden outburst.
The flatteries of her new friends had turned her head; she gave herself airs, teased me, made fun of me. She spread her gorgeous dress over my old sofa, to hide its shabbiness. Her old power over me reasserted itself, and for a moment I forgot all resentment in a passionate kiss; nevertheless, a slight feeling of anger remained at the bottom of my heart, and presently found vent in a torrent of reproaches. Subdued by my impetuosity, which contrasted so strangely with her own indolent nature, she took refuge in tears.
“How can you be so absurd as to imagine that I was flirting with that young man?” she sobbed. “I promise you never to write to him again, although I’m sure he’ll think it rude of me.”
Rude! One of her favourite catchwords! A man pays her attention, in other words makes advances to her, and she listens politely, for fear of being rude. What a woman!
But fate was against me. I was lying at her feet, her beautiful little feet, encased in tiny shoes. She was wearing black silk stockings, which added to my confusion; her leg was a little fuller than it had been; the black legs in a cloud of petticoats were the legs of a she-devil.
Her constant fear of motherhood irritated me; I lied to her; I told her that she had nothing to fear from me; that I knew how to cheat nature. I repeated my assurances until I finished by believing in them myself, and in the end succeeded in setting her mind at ease by promising to be responsible for all consequences.
She was living with her mother and aunt in the second story of a house in one of the main thoroughfares. As she threatened to visit me in my own room if they prevented me from seeing her, I was allowed to call. But the thought of the supervision of these two old women, whom I knew to be watching us through the keyhole all the time, was almost beyond bearing.
The divorced husband and wife were beginning to realise how much they had lost. The Baroness, once a respected married woman, mistress of an aristocratic establishment, had returned to the conditions of her childhood. She was under the control of her mother, almost a prisoner in one room, kept by two old women, who were themselves in needy circumstances. The mother never lost an opportunity of reminding her of her careful bringing up and how she had been fitted to take an honourable social position, and the daughter remembered the happy days following her release from the parental yoke. Bitter words were spoken on both sides, tears and insults were all too frequent, and I had to pay for them when I called in the evening... to visit a prisoner under the eyes of a warder and witness.
When the strain of these painful meetings became unbearable, we ventured to meet two or three times in the park. But we only jumped from the frying-pan into the fire, for now we were exposed to the contemptuous stare of the crowd. We hated the spring sunshine which illuminated our misery. We missed the darkness, we longed for the winter, which made it easier for us to hide our shame. Alas! the summer was coming with its long nights, which know no darkness.
Our former friends dropped us, one after the other. Even my sister, intimidated by the now universal gossip, grew suspicious and estranged when the ex-baroness, at a little supper party, tried to keep up her spirits by taking too much wine, became intoxicated, proposed a toast, smoked cigarettes, and generally behaved in a way which excited the disgust of the women and the contempt of the men.
“That woman’s a common prostitute!” said a respectable married man and father of a family to my brother-in-law, and the latter took the first chance to repeat the remark to me.
When on the following Sunday evening we arrived at my sister’s house, where we had been invited to supper, the servant informed us, to our consternation, that her master and mistress were out.
We spent the evening in my room, a prey to anger and despair, seeking comfort in the thought of suicide. I pulled down the blinds to shut out the daylight, and we sat together in misery, waiting for night and darkness, before we ventured out again into the street. But the summer sun did not set until late, and at eight o’clock we both felt hungry. Neither of us had any money, and there was nothing to eat or drink in the cupboard. These moments were some of the most wretched moments of my life, and gave me a foretaste of misery to come. Reproaches, cold kisses, floods of tears, remorse, disgust.
I tried to persuade her to go home and have supper with her mother, but she was afraid of the daylight; moreover, her heart sank at the thought of the necessary explanation. She had eaten nothing since two o’clock, and the melancholy prospect of going to bed supperless aroused the wild beast hunger in her.
She had grown up in a wealthy home, and had been used to every kind of luxury; she had no idea what poverty meant, and consequently she was completely unstrung. I, who had been familiar with hunger from childhood, suffered torture to see her in such a desperate position. I ransacked my cupboard, but could find nothing; I searched the drawers of my writing-table, and there, amongst all sorts of keep-sakes, faded flowers, old love-letters, discoloured ribbons, I found two sweets which I had kept in remembrance of a funeral. I offered them to her just as they were, wrapped in black paper and tinfoil. A distressing banquet indeed, these sweets in their mourning dress!
Depressed, humiliated, apprehensive, I raged and thundered furiously against all respectable women whose doors were closed to us, who would have none of us.
“Why this hostility and contempt? Had we committed a crime? Surely not; it was but a question of a straightforward divorce; we were complying with all the rules and requirements of the law.”
“We have been behaving too correctly,” she said, trying to comfort herself. “The world is but a pack of knaves. It winks at open, shameless adultery, but condemns divorce. A high standard of morality indeed!”
We were agreed on the subject. But the facts remained. The crime continued to hang over our heads, which drooped under its weight.
I felt like a boy who has robbed a bird’s nest. The mother had flown away, the little ones lay prostrate, chirping plaintively, bereft of the protecting warmth of the mother’s wings.
And the father? He was left desolate in the ruined home. I pictured him of a Sunday evening, an evening like this, when the family assembles round the fire-place, alone in the drawing-room, with the silenced piano; alone in the dining-room, eating his solitary dinner; alone always....
“Oh, no, nothing of the kind!” she interrupted my musings; “you are quite mistaken! You would be much more likely to find him lounging on the comfortable sofa at Matilde’s brother-in-law’s; he has had a good dinner with plenty of wine, and is gently squeezing the hand of my poor, dear, libelled little cousin, laughing at the outrageous stories told of his wife’s ill-conduct—his wife, who refused to countenance his infidelity. And both of them, surrounded and upheld by the sympathy and applause of this hypocritical world, are eager to throw the first stone at us.”
Her words set me thinking, and after a while I expressed the opinion that the Baron had led us by the nose; that he had schemed to rid himself of a troublesome wife, so as to be able to marry again, and had managed to secure her dowry, in spite of the law.
She became indignant at once.
“You have no right to say anything against him! It was all my fault!”
“Why have I no right to say anything against him? Is his person sacred?”
One might almost have thought so, for whenever I attacked him she took his part.
Was it the freemasonry of caste which prompted her to stand up for him? Or were there secrets in her life which made her fear his enmity? I could not solve the riddle, nor discover the reason of her loyalty to him, which no disloyalty on his part could shake.
The sun set at last, and we parted. I slept the sleep of the famished; I dreamed that I was making desperate efforts to wing my way heavenwards, with a millstone round my neck.
Misfortune dogged our footsteps. We approached one of the theatrical managers with the request to give us a date for her first appearance. He replied that he could not, in his official position, have anything to do with a runaway wife.
We left no stone unturned, but all our efforts were doomed to failure. A year hence her resources would be exhausted, and she would be thrown on the street. It was my business, the business of the poor Bohemian, to save her from that fate.
To avoid every possibility of a misunderstanding, she called on an old friend of hers, a former tragedienne, whom up to quite recently she had constantly met in society, and who had cringed like a dog before the “golden-haired Baroness,” her “little fairy.”
The great actress, a notoriously unfaithful wife, grown grey in vice at the side of her husband, received the honest sinner with insults and closed her door to her.
We had tried everything!
There remained nothing but revenge.
“Very well,” I said to her, “why not try writing? Write a play, get it produced at this very theatre? Why descend when there is a possibility of rising? Put your foot on that old woman! With one stride rise far above her head! Show off this lying, hypocritical, vicious society, which opens its houses to prostitutes, but closes them to a divorced wife. It’s good stuff for a play.”
But she was one of those soft natures, very susceptible, very easily impressed, but unable to strike back.
“No, no revenge!”
And cowardly and revengeful at the same time, she left vengeance to God; it came to the same thing in the end, but it put the responsibility on a man of straw.
But I persevered, and at last fortune favoured me. I had an order from a publisher to edit an illustrated book for children.
“Write the text,” I suggested; “you will be paid a hundred francs for it.”
I supplied her with reference books; I made her believe that she had done the work unaided, and she pocketed the hundred francs. But I paid a heavy penalty. The publisher stipulated that my name, which had come before the public as that of a playwright, should appear on the title-page. It was literary prostitution, and my enemies, who had predicted my incapacity of distinguishing myself in literature, triumphed.
After that I persuaded her to write an article for one of the morning papers. She acquitted herself fairly well. The article was accepted, but the paper made no payment.
I wore myself out in trying to raise a sovereign, and, succeeding after endless efforts, I handed it over to her with the white lie that it represented her remuneration from the paper.
Poor Marie! She was delighted to give her small earnings to her old mother, who supplemented her income by letting furnished apartments.
The old ladies began to look upon me as their saviour; copies of translations, unanimously rejected by theatrical managers in bygone days, appeared from drawers, where they had long lain forgotten. I was credited with the wondrous capacity to effect their acceptance, and burdened with futile commissions which interfered with my work and caused me no end of trouble. I had to fall back on my small savings because I wasted my time and used up my nervous energy; I could only afford one meal a day, and reverted to my old habit of going to bed without supper.
Encouraged by her few little successes, Marie undertook to write a play in five acts. I seemed to have sown into her soul all the sterile seed of my poetic inspirations. In this virgin soil it germinated and grew, while I remained unproductive, like a flower which shakes out its seed and withers. My soul was lacerated, sick to death. The influence of that little female brain, so different from the brain of a man, disturbed and disordered the mechanism of my thoughts. I was at a loss to understand why I thought so highly of her literary gifts, why I kept on urging her to write, for with the exception of her letters to me, which were mostly personal and frequently quite commonplace, I had no proof that she could write at all. She had become my living poem; she had taken the place of my vanished talent. Her personality was grafted on mine and was dominating it. I existed only through her; I, the mother-root, led an underground life, nourishing this tree which was growing sunwards and promising wonderful blossoms. I delighted in its marvellous beauty, never dreaming that the day would come when the offshoot would separate from the exhausted trunk, to bloom and dazzle independently, proud of the borrowed splendour.
The first act of her play was finished. I read it. Under the spell of my hallucination I found it perfect; I loudly expressed by sincere admiration and heartily congratulated the author. She was herself astonished at her talent, and I prophesied for her a brilliant future. But all of a sudden our plans were changed. Marie’s mother remembered a friend, an artist, a very wealthy woman with a fine estate, and, what was of greater importance still, closely in touch with one of our leading actors whose wife was the rival and sworn enemy of the great tragedienne, Marie’s former friend.
The artist, a spinster, vouched for the high moral standard of this couple, and they expressed themselves ready to undertake the guidance and supervision of Marie’s studies until her first appearance in public. Marie was invited to stay for a fortnight with her mother’s friend to discuss the matter. There she was to meet the great actor and his wife who, to fill her cup of happiness, had used their influence with the manager of the theatre on her behalf with very satisfactory results. His former reported refusal was thereby entirely contradicted, and turned out to have been a fabrication of her mother’s, invented for the sole purpose of keeping her daughter off the stage.
Marie’s future appeared to be safe. I could breathe freely, sleep undisturbed, work.
She stayed away for a fortnight. To judge from her scanty letters she was anything but dull. Her new friends, to whom she had given proofs of her talent, had told her that she would do well on the stage.
On her return she engaged rooms in a farmhouse and arranged with the farmer’s wife to board her. She was free of her warders now, and we could spend unchaperoned week-ends together. Life was smiling at us, a little sadly, it is true, for a certain melancholy, the effect of her divorce, always remained. But in the country the burden of convention weighs less heavily than in town, and the summer sun soon dispelled the gloom which hung over our lives.