Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 37
THE world of Lily had its center in a house which stood in that part of Paris beyond the Trocadero in the direction of Auteuil and the Bois. Here she had lived for years, since the moment when she had found it agreeably necessary to live abroad. For her purposes the house possessed every advantage; it resembled, after a curious fashion, those convents of the eighteenth century to which ladies of fashion retired at the moments when they desired solitude and rest and yet wished not to be cut off entirely from the gaiety of the world. As the Baron had once observed, Lily herself belonged to the eighteenth century; there was about her always so much of luxury and indolence, so much of charm and unmorality.
The house stood in the Rue Raynouard a short distance from the place where it rushes down a slope to join a half dozen other streets in a whirlpool known as the Place Passy surrounded by magasins, cafés, and tobacconists' shops. It was, in all truth, an eighteenth century house, built in the beginning as a château in the open country on the outskirts of Paris between the city and the Grand Trianon of Versailles. Here in the open fields the Marquise de Sevillac, an ugly, clever and eccentric woman, held a court of her own, a court indeed which in some respects outshone the splendor of Versailles. In her house were to be found the poets, the wits and the philosophers of the day. She corresponded with Voltaire, and the Encyclopedists came frequently to work in the rooms which overlooked the little park and the sheep pastures beyond. Indeed the Sage of Ferney on his triumphant return to Paris had planned a visit to the Marquise and was only prevented by the fatal illness which overtook so swiftly his skinny old body.
The Marquise had been the last of her family. There is a Marquis de Sevillac living to-day but the title is Bonapartist and has nothing to do with the ancient splendor of the true family. As an old woman, the Marquise clung to her house even with the approach of the revolution. During that cataclysm, which she faced in a bold and cynical fashion, she was allowed to survive because the people remembered her as the friend of the radicals and the philosophers who plagued their stupid King. She allied herself with the Girondists and took Madame Roland perilously to her bosom, and when the débâcle came at length her bony old body would have been dragged off to the guillotine along with the others save that she was so old and that Danton and Terezia Tallien intervened. So she died at last in her bed and the château became the property of the Directory.
Since her death it has known many occupants. For a time it served as a museum; it housed the American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, who gave his name to a street nearby; it passed through a period of neglect and emptiness and at last fell into the possession of a wealthy manufacturer of soap and chocolate. It was during his day and the day of his son that the château came to be pressed upon by other houses and by apartments in the florid German style, until there was left at length only the house itself and the little park designed by Le Nôtre which still remained the largest private garden in all the city of Paris.
The house turns to the world a deceptive face, for on the side facing the Rue Raynouard it is but one story high with a commonplace door and a single row of shuttered windows. It is this side which in the days of the Marquise faced the stables and dovecote; so the house now turns its back upon the world and preserves for its friends the glory of its three story façade of Caen stone. The façade, broken by rows of tall windows, looks upon a high terrace lined with crumbling urns carved in the classic Greek manner and a garden with a reticulation of paths laid out by Le Nôtre to center upon the pastry-cake pavilion erected to the God of Love. Inside the high wall which shuts out the noise and dust of the Rue de Passy there are great plane trees with trunks mottled like the backs of salamanders, and laburnums that cluster close about the Temple of Eros.
One could live forever within the boundaries of the ancient house and garden, surrounded by luxury and beauty, receiving one's friends, seldom going into the world. It was an admirable house in which to live discreetly, almost secretly, and it was an admirable house for one of so indolent a nature as Lily's. For Lily had succeeded the chocolate manufacturer, and the château of the Marquise de Sevillac with its ghosts of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, the wanton Terezia Tallien and the clever Madame Roland, was tenanted now by a rich American out of a country which in the days of the Marquise had been no more than a howling wilderness—a woman the world knew as a widow, beautiful, charming, discreet and indolent, living under the guardianship of the most respectable and stuffy of Bonapartists, the ancient Madame Gigon.
On a dripping morning of December, of the sort which makes Paris a wretched city in midwinter, a carriage drew up before the door of this house and out of it stepped Ellen Tolliver, pale from traveling but unusually handsome in the black of her widowhood. There was with her a small thin young woman, trimly dressed rather in the practical style of a professional traveler, with red hair and pretty bright eyes which had a way of observing the slightest things which occurred in her vicinity. The stranger (after haggling with the driver over the fare) paid him and then, changing her mind, bade him wait for her. She pulled the bell with a swift, energetic jerk.
"It is a modest house," she observed to Ellen in short, ironic syllables colored by an accent that was indefinable. "A modest house for a rich American. Usually they are more flamboyant."
Impatiently she pulled the bell a second time and presently the commonplace door was opened by a Breton maid in a white cap who bade them enter. Inside, away from the dripping cobblestones of the Rue Raynouard, it was clear that the stranger succumbed to the magic of the house. For an instant, she remained silent, staring in astonishment at the long sweep of stairs and the array of glittering crystal. Then she made a grunting noise and addressed the maid in French.
"Madame Shane. . . . Is she in?"
"No," replied the girl. "She is at Nice. . . . She has been gone since two weeks."
The stranger translated the speech and for a moment there was a silence in which the face of Ellen, pale and handsome in her mourning, was shadowed by a sudden look of terror. It vanished quickly and she said to her companion, "Ask for Madame Gigon."
Madame Gigon was in. She never went out any more. At the moment she was in the drawing room. Should she ask if Madame Gigon would see them?
"This," observed the bright ferret, to the maid, "is Madame Shane's cousin. She has come to pay her a visit."
The stairway before them led downwards in the most unexpected fashion. Between panels of satinwood adorned with plaques of gilt and rock crystal and filled with candles, it swept down for the depth of two stories, past a gallery which led away on both sides, into a dim vista of polished floor at the end of which there was a high window with small panes of glass that gave out upon a garden. At the sight, a faint touch of color appeared on the cheeks of Ellen and her eyes grew bright with interest. It was all far grander than she had ever imagined, more magnificent than she had hoped. In such a house she might stay quietly, interfering with no one. It was possible to remain hidden in its depths for weeks at a time.
"Shall I stay?" asked her companion.
"I can manage. . . . It's my affair. There's no use troubling you any further. It was good of you to have bothered."
"But what about speaking French?"
"Madame Gigon speaks English. She once had a school for English and American girls. . . . My great-aunt went to it."
Up the long stairs, remotely, the maid was returning now.
"Bien," she said. "Madame Gigon will see you."
"Au revoir," murmured the stranger. "If you want me, I shall be at the Ritz until the end of the month. . . . Miss Rebecca Schönberg. . . . You have my card. . . ."
And with that she vanished through the rain into the waiting cab.
At the foot of the long stairs Ellen found herself suddenly in the great drawing-room. Beyond, through the tall window draped in blue brocade, she had a vista of dripping trees and a wet garden dominated by a white pavilion that resembled a pastry. The room was long and rectangular, for all the world like the drawing room at Shane's Castle, save that it was not, even on this wet winter day, a gloomy room. There was in it far too much color. Even the satinwood paneling appeared warm and soft. At the far end before a neat fire of cannel coal she discerned among the shadows the figures of a tiny old woman and a small boy, sturdy, handsome and red haired. He sat at the feet of the crone, reading aloud to her in English and nearby lay two fat and elderly dogs, an Aberdeen and a West Highland. It was not until she had come quite close to them that they realized she had entered the room. The boy stood up and the old woman turned toward her with a curious dazed look in her eyes.
It was the old woman who spoke first. She peered, apparently without seeing her, in the general direction of Ellen and asked, "Are you Mees Tolliver?"
The boy regarded her, frankly, with a pleasant friendliness.
"Yes," replied Ellen, "I am Madame Shane's cousin."
In an instant, as she watched the child and faced the sharp old woman, she grasped the identity of the boy. It came to her quickly, as a revelation out of all the mystery of the past. Of course she knew all about Madame Gigon; it was the boy for whom she was not prepared. About him there could no longer be any doubt. He was Lily's child and the old story was true. It gave her a quick, inexplicable feeling of relief, as if after so many years she stood in the open, knowing at last the truth. It did not produce any shock, perhaps because she had been for so long prepared for the knowledge. So she had said without hesitation Madame Shane, just as a little while before in order to take no chance in protecting Lily, she had said Madame Shane to Miss Rebecca Schönberg.
The old woman coughed and said slowly, "I don't speak English very well any more. I'm so old. . . . I almost forget. . . . Est-ce que vous parlez français?" And then, "Asseyez vous."
Ellen simply stared at her, and in the emergency the boy, polite and eager, said in a piping voice, "She wants to know if you speak French. . . . She wants you to sit down." His English was colored by an accent which struck Ellen with a remote sense of unreality. Lily's child! Her own cousin! Speaking English as if it were a foreign tongue!
"I don't," said Ellen. "Will you tell her that I know no French?"
It was the old woman who answered in labored English. "Oh, I understand. . . . I know what you say. . . . I can no longer speak English. . . . Asseyez vous. . . . Sit down."
It was only then that Ellen understood the peering look in the eyes of the old woman. She had been sitting down, all the while. The old woman, who peered at her so earnestly, was blind.
"Did Madame Shane know you were coming?" asked Madame Gigon.
"No, I had no time. . . . I left America in haste." She held back the truth. She did not say that she had come, deliberately and without warning, because she could take no chances on being refused. Sitting there, with only a few francs in the world, she felt secure. She was in Paris now in a house that was big and beautiful. The rest could be managed.
"She did not tell me. . . . She would have been here," continued Madame Gigon. Then, as if her brain were fatigued by the strain of speaking English, the old woman addressed a torrent of French to the little boy. When she had finished he advanced to Ellen, shyly, and held out his hand.
"She says," he repeated in the same piping voice, "that I must welcome you as master of the house. She says you are my cousin." He smiled gravely. "I never had a cousin before. And," he continued, "she says that if Maman had known she would have been here."
He stood regarding her with a look of fascination as though so strange and exotic a thing as a cousin was too thrilling to be passed over lightly. Touched by the simplicity of the child, Ellen drew him near to her and, addressing both him and Madame Gigon, said, "You are good to believe that I am Madame Shane's cousin. How could you know?"
Madame Gigon smiled shrewdly. She was withered and had a little black mustache. Again the boy translated her speech. "She says," he repeated, "that you have . . . une voix honnête." He hesitated. . . . "An honest voice . . . and that she knows the voice because she taught my mother in school and before her my grandmère. She says it is like my grandmère's voice."
As he spoke the old woman smiled again and wagged her head with extraordinary vigor. "Je connais la voix. . . . Je la connais bien."
Then she addressed the boy again and he translated her speech. "She says she is blind and will you come near so that she may touch your face?"
Ellen drew her chair closer so that it disturbed the fatter of the two dogs and allowed Madam Gigon to pass her thin hands in a fluttering gesture over her handsome throat and the fine arch of her nose.
"Ah," said the old woman triumphantly. "Le nez . . . the nose. . . . C'est le nez de vôtre tante . . . le même nez . . . précisement. C'est un nez fier . . . distingué."
"It is a proud nose," echoed the interpreter gravely. . . . "A high distinguished nose. . . . A nose like your aunt's."
And the old woman, wagging her head, fell suddenly into a silent train of old memories.
"My name is Jean," said the boy shyly. "I am ten years old. Would you like to see my book? It is in English. I can read English just as well as French." And he brought her Tom Brown's School Days and showed her the picture of the boys climbing the tree to rob the rook's nest. Ellen, leaning over his shoulder, was softened and showed a warm enthusiasm over the other illustrations. She even listened while he told the long story of Tom Brown.
Presently Madame Gigon joined their talk and for a long time they held a conversation, translated always by the boy, that was animated and illumined by a warm friendliness. It was this which presently filled Ellen with a passionate desire to weep. She took off her hat and sat on the floor with Jean and the dogs, while Madame Gigon and the boy asked questions about America and old Julia Shane whom Jean called "grandmère" and whom he had never seen. And presently the Breton maid appeared with tea (for Madame Gigon, though she was French, had learned the custom of tea among the English) and over Ellen there swept slowly a strange feeling that, at last, after having been away a long time, she had come home. It was here that she belonged, here that she would be happy, in this great, beautiful house that was so friendly.
Jean was allowed one gâteau and the fat dogs devoured two apiece.
"She says," translated Jean, "that Maman told her you would come some day . . . just as you have come. She says she is not surprised . . . your great-aunt, my grandmère, would have done the same."
After tea, she was led away by the Breton maid up the stairs and along a gallery into which opened an endless procession of doors, until she came, at length, to the end, where a door was opened which revealed a square room dominated by a great bed hung with a canopy of brocade. The tall windows gave out upon the park which, lying now in the fog that succeeded the rain of an hour or two before, appeared blue and mysterious. In the heart of the mist the white pavilion showed vaguely, and beyond it, above the top of the garden wall, yellow globules of light from the lamps in the Rue de Passy cast the trunks of the old plane trees into sharp black shadows.
When the maid had left, she sat down before the bright small fire and without moving regarded the room closely, point by point, detail by detail. It was large and warm and beautiful, but the quality which moved her most profoundly was its elegance . . . the same quality that was so evident in the great drawing-room belowstairs. She had never dreamed that there could be such warm, old beauty. There was nothing here of the barren, gas-lit pomp of Mrs. Callendar's dining room out of the Second Empire, and nothing of the vast Callendar drawing-room lined with grim Dutch ancestors and gilt cabinets of tear bottles and Buddhas. This room . . . this lovely house . . . had been there always. It had been like this in the days of the ugly Marquise de Sevillac. The chaise longue on which she sat, the gilt chair that stood before the writing desk, the very mirror, with its dim rectangular panes of glass, had the effect of softening her. Indeed, for a time, these things made her dimly uneasy; far back in her consciousness there rose a grotesque fear that if she once succumbed to the splendor of that great bed, she might never rise from it again, that it might weaken her by its very luxury. She regarded it almost with suspicion, touched by an actual fear of all that was too beautiful and too splendid. She might become, like Lily, indolent and idle and charming. And slowly the realization swept over her that she was changed. She became aware that she was a woman now; she no longer wanted to be like Lily. She was strong, as she had never been before, strong as Lily would never be. Luxury, idleness, charm were not the things she desired. It must be something stronger than that, more heady, more challenging.
Dimly she understood the appeal of the room and of the dark misty garden with its white pavilion. It was insidious and peaceful, like an enchanted palace that swam mirage-like in the blue fog. And again she was overcome by a sense of returning home after having been away for a long time. The white squares of Paris, seen through the rain-spattered cab-windows on the way from the Gare du Nord, had moved her deeply; they had given her a wild sense of freedom, of escape. But this was different, more languorous, more intimate. It was the thing for which she had been born, the thing which, all her life, she had struggled to attain. It lay on the opposite side of the earth from the black Mills and the plain houses of the Town.
And then, pathetically and slowly, there came over her the wish that, as once she had planned, Clarence might have known this old splendor . . . the splendor he had talked of seeing, "some day when they were rich enough." There was that white villa at Nice. . . .
She had understood, well enough, while she sat on the deck of the City of Paris, damp and chilled by the fog, that Clarence was not gone forever, simply because he was dead. She understood (indeed she thought of it constantly, even in the hours when she had listened in fascination to the talk of Rebecca Schönberg) that since his death he was more real to her than he had ever been in life. While he had lived there had never been time to consider him. There was only time, now, when he was gone. The very affection she had for him in life was nothing to the affection she now experienced, and in this new emotion there was no pity, because pity had been effaced by self-reproach. The one desire which obsessed her was a desire to see him, to explain, to justify herself . . . Ellen, who had never bothered to justify her faintest whim. The power of the weak over the strong was still stirring. It had not altogether died.
Mingled with these very thoughts was the knowledge that somewhere in this strange city that was so familiar, Callendar and Sabine were living. They must be there quite near her; she was sure of it. They were moving about, dining, going to the theater and the opera, all the while in ignorance of what had happened to her, knowing nothing of her presence. For them, her reason told her, she was forgotten; yet something stronger than reason, a belief which beyond all doubt had its roots in the memory of Callendar's face upon his wedding day, told her that she was not forgotten. She had been there, with them, all the while, . . . perhaps, she thought triumphantly, even upon their wedding night. It was a thought utterly free from any desire to hurt Sabine; indeed, toward Sabine she had no feeling at all. Callendar was the one who roused her malice; she wanted to torment him, to be herself the one who dominated. The thought would have appeased her vanity save for the fact that she could never capture the whole truth; it was impossible because, in the months that had separated them, she had returned again to the old feeling that she did not know Callendar at all, that there was a part of him beyond her understanding, which escaped her always. She was afraid of him.
She dressed to the accompaniment of water dripping from the high roof on to the white terrace of the garden and, under the stimulus of physical activity, she came presently to forget both Clarence and Richard Callendar. Her thoughts turned to Miss Schönberg, that small, good-natured, ferrety creature who was so kind to her. The encounter had occurred, by chance, on the City of Paris when the stranger, watching Ellen as she paced in her tireless way round and round the deck through the fog and the blowing rain, finally offered her a book to read. Ellen did not, as a rule, read anything, but she accepted the book, gratefully enough, more as a symbol of the stranger's friendliness than for its own qualities. She could not, now, even remember what it was, nor anything about it save that it was bound in green and was written by a man called de Morgan. She was, at that time, engaged in thinking of her own story, which was indeed quite as good as anything concocted by a novelist. For the sense of rôle, the awareness of herself as a dramatic figure "living by her wits," had grown upon her steadily, until in her mind there had been born a suspicion that such a rôle possessed a value. She was not, after all, commonplace. Already, though she was but twenty-four, tremendous things had happened to her . . . things which were romantic and even tragic, but things in which she found satisfaction. She had wished, as far back as she could remember, to have a life that was eventful. She wanted not to die until she had known her share of life, and in life she did not seek, like Lily, simple happiness and contentment. She desired experience, and so she resembled greatly old man Tolliver.
It may have been a sense of all this which attracted the stranger, for Miss Schönberg despite all her fine clothes and her habit of wandering from one spot to another, lived vicariously. She searched breathlessly for excitement. At thirty she was a confirmed and passionless virgin who lived on the fringes of life, perpetually stimulated by her sense of the spectacle. She had no real home nor any real nationality, unless one might identify as a nation that army of restless wanderers which moved from hotel to hotel across the face of Europe. Her best friends, or at least those who knew her most intimately, were the proprietors of such establishments as the Hotel Negresco and the Beau Rivage, the Royal Splendide, Claridge's, the Cavendish, the Adlon, the Ritz and sometimes, for the sake of atmosphere, such a place as the France et Choiseul. She was an orphan and rich. In Vienna she had an aunt; in Trieste a handful of cousins; in New York an uncle who traded in diamonds. She was a Jewess and an emancipated woman, regarded with suspicion by the orthodox members of her tribe. And her emancipation had the fierce quality which envelops Jewish virgins who have determined at all costs to be free. It was a sort of aggressive freedom. She had never succumbed to or even understood love and it was extremely unlikely that her bright, shiny mind would ever be weakened by an emotion so sentimental.
All this Ellen had learned from her, either by intuition or by her own confession, for Miss Schönberg was much given to conversation, especially of the self-revelatory variety. From Ellen, in turn, she had learned what the girl chose to tell her, fragments of the truth strung together in such a fashion that the whole seemed an honest but rather dull and erratic tale. Yet she knew more of Ellen than the young widow ever guessed, for if Ellen had been as dull and uninteresting as the story she told, Miss Schönberg would never have bothered to address her a second time.
And now Ellen, as she dressed to dine alone with the blind old woman belowstairs, wondered why Rebecca Schönberg had been at all interested in her. She had, it was true, faith in her own star; she knew that she would one day be famous. That any one beside herself could have any intimation of this appeared on the surface preposterous.
When she descended, she found that Jean had gone to bed and before the fire there was only Madame Gigon with Criquette and Michou, the dogs, who had not stirred from their places but lay fat and lazy, basking in the warmth of the blaze. With the eager interpreter gone, Madame Gigon, under the stress of necessity, cudgeled her old brain into speaking a very passable sort of English. At dinner, she told Ellen that Lily was stopping in the white villa at Nice. (It was not in Nice proper but Cimiez, high up on the hill beside the ruined Roman arena with a magnificent view overlooking Villefranche and the Bay of Angels. It lay just above the statue of Queen Victoria carven with a very realistic reticule and an umbrella.) She had telegraphed Lily to come home and greet her cousin properly.
After dinner they went, followed by the dogs, back again into the drawing-room to the luxurious chairs by the fire, and after a time Ellen rose and played at the request of the old woman some Brahms, an air from La Belle Hélène and finally a waltz or two of Chopin. It was a beautiful piano, for Lily respected music, and the sound of its low, mellow beauty led Ellen into playing more and more passionately. When at last her hands dropped into her lap and she sat listening to the distant sound of the boat whistles along the Seine, Madame Gigon began to talk.
She had seen George Sand once a long time ago when, as a bride, her husband, M. Gigon (who had been a curator at the Musée Cluny and had been dead now for more than half a century) had taken her one night to dine at Magny's where he might show her the celebrities of the town. She had seen George Sand, she repeated, come in with no less persons than Flaubert, yellow and bent, and the exquisite Théophile Gautier, to dine in a private room before the répétition generale of her play Le Batard, at the Odéon. The writer was an old woman then, come up from her farm, and bedizened with cheap jewelry, but every one noticed her. She had vitality. She was a sensation. . . .
And she could remember too the funeral of Jules de Goncourt and how they stood in the rain quite near to this same Flaubert. . . .
But Ellen had never heard of George Sand and knew, beyond his music, very little of Chopin, so it merely confused her to hear Madame Gigon call a man "she." Lest she betray her ignorance she kept silent, and sometimes she did not listen at all, because this ancient talk did not interest her, though it seemed to be the very core of all the life that remained in the blind old woman.
Madame Gigon talked far into the night, with the air of one who had long been shut in solitude, and as she talked her English became more and more clear. She spoke almost as easily as she had spoken in the days, half a century earlier, when she had taken Lily's mother and the other girls of the school on pique-niques in the woods along the Seine at Sèvres. And after a time as the dull glow of her memories took fire, she fell to talking of old Julia Shane herself. But she talked of a Julia Shane who was still a young girl and not the sick old woman who, lying ill in her house among the black mills, was the last link in the chain that held Hattie Tolliver from her children.
And as Madame Gigon talked on and on to the accompaniment of the distant sounds from the misty river, there swept over Ellen a consciousness, new but unmistakable, of a delicate unity running through all of life. It was bound together, somehow, in an intricate web composed of such things as love and memories, hopes and sorrows and sentiment, but it was a web without pattern, without design, a senseless, crazy and beautiful thing. She saw then that she could never exist apart, in isolation, from all these others; there were filaments which bound her even to so remote and insubstantial a creature as this blind old woman. It was the web which made her uneasy. She must be free of it, somewhere, sometime. . . .
Criquette began to wheeze and Madame Gigon prodding him with her toe said, "Heigh-ho! . . . We must go to bed. . . . Even the dogs have begun to snore."