The Last Time/Part 2
(PART II)
you told that I was a difficult woman, that I had a bad temper?”
The Important Points in Part One:
WHAT was the tragic secret of the beautiful white-haired woman who sat opposite him in the train-compartment? How did it happen that her impressive dignity, her perfect poise, were suddenly broken by a wild fit of weeping?
Something within himself kept Strickland from any action, any interference. He did not see her again for nearly three years. Then, during a country-house week-end, he found her placed next him at dinner.
She did not refer to their chance meeting. However, she seemed acutely uncomfortable in his presence. Indeed, she cut her visit unexpectedly short. Strickland was sure that he was the cause of her leaving.
He made careful inquiries about her. He discovered that for two years she had been a widow. In the old days, his hostess informed him, this Mrs. Armitage had been well-known for her volcanic temper and her quarrels with her husband, but since the death of Mr. Armitage, she had become a different woman. Now she was noted for her calm.
But what part could Strickland unwittingly have played in her life? He was piqued. Mrs Armitage, so he was informed, before her departure had told their hostess that she knew Jeanne, the girl-wife from whom Strickland had been separated some years before. And, further, she had asked for Strickland's London address.
Jeanne! How he had loved her! But they had misunderstood one another; they had quarreled bitterly, and separation had seemed the only answer. Since then life had been flat, stale, futile—a meaningless round of business and the innumerable sports and social activities at which Strickland excelled. Life had lost most of its interest.
But presently Mrs. Armitage brought back the savor to his dull existence. She notified him that she would like to see him. He invited her to tea. Alert with curiosity about the secret and the intentions of this fascinating, mysterious woman, he waited for her arrival.
Conclusion
“MRS. ARMITAGE, sir,” said Ellen's thin voice.
Mrs. Armitage came into the room, looking grave, self-possessed, austere, but still young under her crown of white hair.
“Bring up tea, Ellen.”
“Yes, sir.”
Strickland held out his hand.
“I am glad to meet you again. You went away from Denbury so suddenly—”
“That there was no time to say good-by.”
“Do sit here by the fire and take off your coat.”
She slipped out of her long dark fur and sat down.
“Did Mrs. Laparais tell you I asked for your address before I went?” she said, without looking at him.
“Yes, she did.”
“You must have been surprised.”
“I was, rather. But it made me hope we might perhaps meet again some day.”
The door opened and Ellen came in with tea. When she had gone out Strickland said, “We shall not be disturbed again.”
After giving her tea and helping himself, he sat down by the tea table and said, “May I ask you something?”
“Why I have come here, why I wished to see you?”
“No, it isn't that. What I want to ask you is this. Did you know that you and I had met before we met at Denbury?”
“Often I tried to provoke him into passion. I played, as it were, for scenes.”
“Yes.”
“I fancied you knew. But I wasn't quite sure.”
“I recognized you directly you came into the drawing-room at Denbury. That was really why I left on the Saturday morning. I—I tried to stand being with you, but I couldn't. It was too painful.”
There was a silence. He broke it by saying,
“But you are here!”
“Yes. I'm not so weak now. Besides, I have learnt a good deal since then. That is because I have suffered terrifically.”
“I know.”
“Yes, you know. You are the only one who does know, you, a stranger. You have seen the truth of me. I am generally too reserved. It's almost an illness with me. If you had spoken to me in the train I don't know what would have happened. But you were reserved that day—and now I shall speak to you. I have come here purposely to speak to you.”
She leaned forward in her chair. She had taken off her gloves, and her long narrow hands were clasped lightly together. She looked into the fire.
“How much do you know about me?” she asked.
“That you were married and lived in Paris, that your husband died suddenly—about two months, I suppose, before we met in the train.”
“Yes.”
“That—that” Strickland hesitated.
“Oh, don't hesitate, don't choose your words. I have come here to—tell you. So that you can tell me.”
“I was told that you and your husband hadn't got on at all well, that probably it was a great relief to you when he died.”
“Oh!”
It was almost a cry, and vibrated with irony. After a pause she said,
“Were you told that I was a difficult woman, that I had a bad temper?”
“Something of that kind.”
“They spoke the truth. I was a terribly difficult woman. I had a very bad temper. And I have been punished for it. I have been scourged for it.”
HER long hands twisted for a moment, gripped each other almost fiercely.
“I don't want anyone else ever to be punished as I have been.”
She was silent, still gazing into the fire. Then she said, looking up at him with steady, wide-opened eyes,
“Mr. Strickland, I know your wife.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Minnie Laparais told you?”
“Just that, nothing more. She did not say how well you knew her.”
“I did not tell her. But I will tell you. I know your wife very well. That is why I am here.”
“Yes?” said Strickland, feeling very uncomfortable, but trying to look quite unembarrassed and calm.
“Of course, at first I had no idea her husband and the man I met in the Paris-Calais rapide were one and the same. I only found that out when you walked into the drawing-room at Denbury.”
“Yes?”
“I knew you recognized me as the woman who had shown you herself though we had never spoken to one another.
“You—you behaved with true delicacy—like a gentleman if I may say so. You recognized instinctively that you couldn't help me, and you didn't try to. I shall always be grateful for that.”
“I—I felt like a brute.”
“I know—for being there. That wasn't your fault. But at Denbury, being full of egoism, I couldn't forgive you. And I went away as soon as I could. I didn't think I should ever see you again of my own accord. But I took your address. Even then I had some faint pushing instinct, I suppose. But now—here I am. Do please give me a cigaret, if you have one.”
“Please forgive me!”
HE HELD out a box. She took a cigaret quickly, lit it and went on:
“Mr. Strickland, you heard that I was probably relieved when my husband suddenly died. This is the truth: it broke my heart.”
Strickland looked away from her. In a moment he heard her say again,
“It broke my heart. You have heard that we didn't get on well together. That's true. We often quarreled. It was my fault. I loved him so much that I didn't care really at all for any one else. My love for him was so great that perhaps it exhausted my power of loving. I don't know. Anyhow, every one else was really indifferent to me. And yet we didn't get on. But no man can ever have been loved by a woman more than my husband was by me.”
She paused, and as the pause was prolonged, Strickland said,
“We cannot help our natures.”
“Yes, we can!” she said almost sharply. “We ought to. If we don't we may quite easily bring hell here on earth. Were you thinking of your own nature?”
“Perhaps I was.”
“Has it ever occurred to you how all through our lives we are perpetually being taken unawares?”
“Sometimes I have thought of that.”
“We are seldom or never prepared for the big things which happen to us. They come upon us as suddenly as bullets fired by enemies in ambush. And, too often, we aren't ready.”
IT SEEMED to Strickland that another woman was emerging in his companion, was coming out of the reserved, almost austere woman who, so few minutes ago, had entered his drawing-room. And she was strangely unreserved. There was something of the seer in her manner. She spoke evidently out of the depths of a heart-knowledge which rendered her passionately sure of herself. Beside this woman Strickland began to feel very ignorant
“Mr. Strickland, is there an afterwards for us, do you think?”
“I hope there is.”
“There must be!” she said, fiercely almost. “Otherwise we cannot ask for pardon, we cannot explain, we cannot— There must be! There is! I will believe it! If science could even disprove it by proving that all a man is and has dies with the body, ceases to function when the last breath is drawn, I would not cease to believe. I long so much for the hereafter that there must be the possibility of it. Such longings have their goal, or else God is the most absolutely merciless power in all creation.”
She laid down carefully the end of her cigaret, cast a swift glance at Strickland, and said in a quieter voice,
“Now I am going to tell you!”
And again he was conscious of almost rigid effort, of the almost hard exercise of will.
“I'm half American, half French; Southern American, Southern French. From Nice, my French ancestors were. I was brought up chiefly in France. I was born—at least I suppose so, as it manifested itself when I was a mere child—I was born with a terrific temper and a highly impulsive, nervous temperament. On some days I felt buoyant, joyous, full of hope, kindness, good nature; on others I was miserable, full of blackness, angry suspicious thoughts and imaginings, impulses to unkindness, intense irritability. On such days I was caged in darkness and nothing seemed right to me. I felt injured without reason, or even abandoned. I couldn't believe in the love of any one for me, and yet morbidly I desired love. But I felt unworthy of it, uncertain of myself, shrinkingly useless and incapable, and yet arbitrary and full of vehement yearnings.
“These violent and sometimes opposing feelings bred in me an impulse to be morally cruel—and always to those I loved. When I was in these moods I tried to hurt those I loved, and in hurting them I wounded myself. I thrust daggers into my own heart. For I thought I had made myself hated by them and that they could never tolerate me again. And yet somehow I was forgiven! I have often asked myself why. I think it must have been because, in spite of all, I knew how to love. I had a passionately warm heart, and was really loyal under all my almost infernal tempers and moods.
“Sometimes, Mr. Strickland, I am inclined to believe that there are possessions of the devil, even in these modern days, and that I was often possessed of the devil.
“Of course, I was punished sometimes for my tempers, but on the whole my parents spoiled me. I was often horrible to my father and mother, but I adored them both. They are dead now, but they died with me beside them, able to ask forgiveness of them for all the pain I must have caused them. They knew—before they died.”
ALL THE self-consciousness of which Strickland had been aware when Mrs. Armitage came into his room had vanished from her now; all reserve seemed to have died out of her. They sat by the fire, in the delicate light shed by the wax candles, like two intimates, and Strickland no longer had any acute sense of strangeness in listening to this revelation of moral defects by a stranger. He knew that she had a very definite purpose driving her on, and that presently he would know what that purpose was. Meanwhile, he was content to listen absorbed, undesirous of making the least interruption. But now she paused and looked up at him, almost expectantly, almost as if she were waiting for some comment, or some question from him.
“You—you—” he began, and hesitated. She was still silent and still kept her eyes fixed on him, with a curious half expectant and—he thought—half-inward look.
“I understand those moods of yours,” he said at last. “I have known something of the same kind myself. One day everything seems right; another day everything seems black and infernal.”
“Yes. But do you understand my horrible propensity for being cruel only to those I loved?” she asked, in an earnest low voice. “For picking them out as my victims? It is that, just that, which has ruined my life. Can you understand it?”
He thought of certain episodes in his life with Jeanne.
“Yes,” he said, reddening slowly. “I believe there are many people who are only really unkind to those whom they love.”
“Isn't that from the devil?” she said.
“I don't know. I don't think I believe in a personal devil.”
“Why is it then?”
“In some way—somehow, it doesn't seem worth while to be cruel to those who are nothing to us. It is those who are very close to us, whom we have wrapped up in our lives, who give out music when we touch the keys. And so I suppose we are moved to touch them.”
“But why should we, why do we deliberately strike horrible discords? Why won't we be contented with the beautiful harmonies of life?”
AGAIN Strickland thought of his life with Jeanne.
“I don't know,” he said. “It often seems as if we were driven.”
“That is our fault. We should not let ourselves be driven. Look at me, Mr. Strickland. Now I have absolutely complete control over my behavior to other people; not always over my own emotions, the emotions that are entirely mine, that I don't share with others, but over my actions in connection with others. People are safe with me now. I had a lesson which in one moment changed me—broke me. Do you understand—broke me?”
“What lesson?”
“It was this. I loved a man. I am thirty-two now, though of course I look much older. Then I was twenty-three. Although I believe my temper must have been notorious among my friends, although I was considered an alarming type of girl, several men had seemed to be attracted by me before this time. I had not cared for them—and with me it has generally been all or nothing. It isn't love or hate, but love or tremendous indifference, a dryness of the desert in my heart. Now, I met the man to whom afterwards I was married, and I loved him. Mr. Strickland, at first he didn't care for me. I was the first to love. It often is the woman, often she draws the man to her by that, by loving him desperately and wanting him desperately, and saying nothing about it, and acting, and pretending. But it oozes through all the acting and the pretending, and it drops on the man—drops—drops—and mysteriously, occultly almost, he feels wanted, desired, and it warms him, and it makes him know that he has been lonely in all his freedom, lonely, perhaps, in his intrigues and his vices, lonely with his bachelor friends—and he begins to want the woman who wants him so terribly. Often it's like that.”
“Is it?” said Strickland, wondering at this woman's amazing frankness, a frankness which seemed for the moment to free her from the bondage of sex.
“Yes. I think women want—much more than men. As a sex we are not, and never shall be, independent. Men often set out to conquer us when we are conquered already. I loved for nearly a year before I was loved. Often I thought I never should be loved. I believed the legend of my horrible temperament had gone before me to him, that it repelled him. And I was frightened, terrified. For the first time I looked my temperament in the face as it was, and saw it as a great danger, as a dragon in my path of life. For the first time I wanted to kill the dragon because I thought perhaps he knew of and hated it. My love grew for a year; side by side with it grew my first real moral effort. I don't know—I can't remember how far I succeeded in what I was trying to do, but one day he told me he loved me. He asked me if I could ever love him! That is how men know us! I was quite frank. I told him I had loved him for a whole year: and of my fears that he knew about my violent nature. I humiliated myself, perhaps. But I loved too much to mind. I made the very worst of myself. Something inside me warned me to do that. Something said to me—'Don't let him misunderstand you. Show your sores! If he can stand the sight of them and still wish to be with you, he loves you indeed.' And I was brave. But cowardice isn't my fault, I think. I am not often a coward.”
“I am sure you are not,” said Strickland. “And he—how did he take it? Had he known?”
“He had heard rumors, but he told me he had only half believed them. I assured him that they were true. I tried to let him in to the ugliest secrets of my temperament. You may say no woman would ever do that with a man she loved. But I did do it. I was so afraid of his finding out ugly things later and hating me because I had concealed them that I was frank as few women are ever frank. I told him that I couldn't govern myself, but that I would try to, that I would make the greatest possible effort to overcome my temper and banish my desperate moods. He said it would be all right, that he would help me. I must tell you that he was a man with enormous self-control, but a very, very sensitive man. I believe I told you at Denbury that his mother was French?”
“Yes, you did.”
“His father was English, but a great lover of France. My husband was in some ways more French than English. He had the Frenchman's sensitiveness to women, quick intelligence, swiftness of vision, and understanding of subtleties, but all the Englishman's sentiment, straightforwardness and loyalty. He had a splendid nature. I wasn't like many women. I loved something worth loving. He was incomparable, Mr. Strickland—indeed, indeed he was! People felt that he was. They loved him instinctively. But not as I did. I worshiped him. I think—and I am almost sure I am right—that it is only a few people who know how to love. Great love is, I am convinced, a very rare thing, unknown by most of us.
SHE looked at Strickland questioningly, then added, with a sort of diffidence,
“Jeanne knows it, I think: she is one of the few.”
Strickland flushed deeply, but kept his eyes on her. Before her amazing unreserve he scarcely dared to be reserved. When, he wondered, was this extraordinary interview going to end.
“Mr. Strickland, we were married, Andrew and I. We gave ourselves up to happiness as I think few people ever can have given themselves. My love had waited a year, had had to wait a year in absolute uncertainty. So I had to pay it back. At any rate, if I am a dead woman now, I haven't died without living. It wasn't enough for me to be happy—apparently. My love grew, and in growing it became destructive. At first I held my natural temperament—the bad, dangerous part of it, I mean—in check without difficulty. Happiness seemed to lay my nerves to rest, to smooth out my prickly irritabilities. Changing moods didn't beset me at first. I had no days of unreasoning depression. I had no impulses towards unkindness, or even cruelty. I was tender to Andrew then. I submitted myself to him with that wonderful happiness in submission which only a loving woman ever feels. But that perfection of being didn't last on my side. Presently, it was as if I swung back to my original temperament and way of being. I thought then it was inevitable, that I couldn't help it, that I had to be as God had made me. (That's the excusing phrase, the miserable cliché of the sinner!) I know now I simply didn't continue an effort I had made, and that I could have continued it if I had chosen. Mr. Strickland most of us don't try enough. We are morally lazy. We compound with our worst part. I have paid. I shall go on paying all my life long. But I don't want others to pay, That's why I am here to-day.”
“Yes. Yes. I—I begin to understand.”
“Do you?”
“I think, at least, perhaps I do.”
SHE sat very still for a moment. Apparently she was thinking deeply, profoundly. At last she said:
“In daily life with any one—I don't care who it is—there are many difficult moments when human forbearance only nothing else—can save the situation. And if one has a highly strung, naturally sensitive and irritable temperament, and is liable to lose control, those moments are terribly dangerous. And I was jealous—that is the curse of sensitive women—jealous without reason, and knowing really I had no reason. When he died I felt he had died absolutely true to me. I couldn't prove it. No woman can ever prove such a thing. But I just know it, Mr. Strickland—as I dare say you know a somewhat similar thing.”
“Yes,” said Strickland, in a low voice.
Without asking permission, mechanically almost as a man does an accustomed thing, he pulled his pipe out of his pocket, began to fill it with tobacco carefully. She sat watching him.
“We so often sat like this,” she said.
“What?”
He looked up from his pipe, startled almost by her intonation.
“So often I watched him doing what you are doing. I can see his hands now—just the movement of them and the shapes they took. When those we love are dead we often see their dear hands moving in the firelight, or in the candle-light. And then we remember their eternal stillness and—”
She broke off.
Strickland had paused. This woman moved him strangely by the depth of sincerity in her emotion, and by her extraordinary simplicity. Now, with an effort, he went on with what he had been doing Presently he lit his pipe. Then she spoke again.
“Those we love can irritate us as no other human beings can irritate us. Can't they?”
“Yes.”
“We want them to be perfect, I suppose, and so their imperfections strike us like little hammers. I criticized my husband, often and even bitterly. He bore with my hatefulness in that respect wonderfully, but not meekly. He wasn't a meek man, or I should never have loved him. He seldom, scarcely ever, criticized me. When I was intolerable, he would get up in silence and go out of the room, out of the house, stay away for a time, come back and meet me as if nothing had happened. Often I tried to provoke him into passion. I played, as it were, for scenes. Something in me at certain times seemed to demand a violent scene. He would not give me what I demanded. He thought it degrading for two people linked as we were to mingle love with its hideous opposite, anger, recrimination. There was a certain almost spiritual dignity about him—absolutely unostentatious—which sometimes provoked me almost to fever, I think, because I had none of it, and because his having it made me feel how inferior I was to him. And yet I loved him for it all the time—underneath. Really, I loved even his faults, his tricks, his little mannerisms. I know that now. I knew it directly I heard—”
SHE got up suddenly. For an instant Strickland thought that she was going to leave him, that she had suddenly repented of her frankness, and would not stay. But she only went to stand by the fire. For a moment she stayed with her back to him. Then she turned round. Her face was very pale, and her eyes were burning with emotion, and an energy of feeling such as he had never seen before, he thought, in a woman's eyes, except perhaps at moments in Jeanne's.
“Directly death comes, knowledge comes,” she said. “Probably few, or none, of us ever know exactly what we feel about another until death takes that other away. Mystery and nakedness are there together in one and the same moment, and we cry out the truth only when there is no voice to answer us. But—oh, if only we didn't wait for death! If we would only speak when there was still time for the answer!
“I said to you that all through our lives we are perpetually being taken unawares. That happened to me in a most terrible way, the most terrible way possible. Our married life went on—mine with Andrew—in the way I have tried to indicate. My jealousy made him very miserable. I scared him. But he would have his decent freedom, the freedom every man, married or not, ought to have. One thing in him, which sometimes irritated me to the verge almost of madness, was his marvelous self-control. I don't believe anything irritates an uncontrolled person so much as complete self-control in another. It is such a stinging rebuke. That rebuke he gave me many times, but not deliberately. Once he frightened me.
“We were in a château on the Seine. There was a little wood in the grounds near the house. It was in autumn, on an autumn afternoon. That day I was in one of my worst moods. Autumn is a season that always depresses me, that inclines me, I suppose, to morbidity.”
“I know—I know!” said Strickland, quickly breaking in upon her speech. “It seems to take away hope. One hears all the doors shutting against one. I, living here alone by the river, I know that.”
“Ah!”
She gazed at him.
“Yes—you who live here alone!” she said. “And—” she paused; he waited—“and need not live here alone!” she added.
Strickland looked down, and pulled at his pipe.
“God sends loneliness to some of us,” she went on. “I think it is one of the greatest punishments of God, perhaps the greatest of all. But why anticipate God?”
SHE was silent. Strickland said nothing.
“In Paris I know some one who is lonely,” she said, somberly, almost fatally. She bent her head a little. Then she lifted it and went on.
“That autumn day he and I were alone in the château. We had had some guests with us, but they had just left. They had been with us for shooting. One of them was a beautiful woman who was extraordinarily amiable, kind and gentle—the reverse of myself. She was almost universally beloved for her sweet disposition. While she had been with us, I had secretly compared her with myself. Then I had gone a step further. I had imagined her as the wife of my husband—women often give themselves to such imaginings. How different Andrew's life would have been with her! I had dwelt on that thought. At night I had lain awake with it. She would have surrounded Andrew with the warmth of endless kindness, delicate and unwearied tenderness. She was not a dull but a clever woman, clever in goodness—a rather rare combination. I had brooded over all this during the visit of our guests, until I had come to the horrible, morbid conviction that in very truth Andrew had been comparing me with our friend, and that he had been wishing that he had chosen differently when he married. I felt positive that the visit of this woman—she had never stayed with us before—had opened his eyes to facts, perhaps never clearly seen before by him, and that now, through her, he had realized the disaster of his life. I could not help almost hating this dear woman. And I bade her good-by conventionally, but feeling that I was bidding good-by to an enemy.
“That day blackness encompassed me. It was one of my terrible days. I felt hopeless, a slave of my hateful character, angry with the Creator who had made me as I was, totally impotent to change, or even to put up a fight against myself! Andrew, no doubt, noticed the condition I was in. He was but too accustomed to my black moods. But he said nothing and seemed as cheerful as usual. After lunch, however, he said he was going out shooting and would probably be back late. He would shoot till dark, he said.
“I scarcely know why, but this announcement of his suddenly brought my misery to a climax. I suppose I felt that, now we were left alone, he was longing to get away from me. I could not contain myself and I broke out into a torrent of reproaches with which I mingled the name of our departed guest I can't tell you what I said. I believe I launched contemptible and absurd accusations against him. In spite of his marvelous self-control, he was this time driven into real anger. He told me to be silent, and not to dare to malign the name of a woman who was above reproach. I persisted. He went quite pale. Finally he left me. He was away a long time. I did not know whether he had gone out shooting. At last, I went to ask. I found the keeper who usually accompanied him. The man told me that his master had left the house alone and without his gun, and had gone in the direction of the wood. I did not follow him. I did not dare to.
“Toward evening Andrew returned and came into the room where I was. He was still very pale, but his eyes were red and bloodshot. He looked terrible, I thought, as if—as if he had been crying. Then I broke down completely. I humiliated myself and begged him to pardon me. I asked him where he had been. He told me he had been sitting in the wood for hours, trying to make up his mind 'what to do.' This reply terrified me. I looked again at his eyes. I remember that I muttered, 'Why are your eyes so red?' He put his hand up to them quickly and turned his head away from me. Then I knew that he had been crying. Mr. Strickland, the knowledge that I had reduced such a man, a real man if ever there was one, to such a condition of despair, broke up all the hatefulness within me. And I—I showed him my utter contrition. But I had hurt him so much that he could only say, 'It must stop, Vivienne. From this moment it must stop. I find I can't bear it any more. I am losing control. And if I lose it, then the end will come quickly—I know that.
“Mr. Strickland, from that day I was a different woman. For I had been terrified I forced myself to govern my moods, to hold my temper in check. Things were better, much better between us. He knew the effort I was making and he helped me in every way he could. There were certain things in him which always irritated me, little habits, little ways. I needn't, I cant tell you. He tried to change them. He tried to change them. Oh, if only I could have them in my life now, every one of them! I should bless God for them! To me his faults, if they were faults, were really dearer than the greatest virtues of other men. I know that now. He did everything he could think of to make things easy for me. He was touchingly good to me. There is something so wonderful in the conscious effort of a man to be all that a woman wishes him to be. When I think—when I think—”
Sudden tears rushed to her eyes. She drew out a handkerchief quickly and wiped them away. Her face flushed, grew red to her temples. At that moment Strickland felt almost as if he were again in the Paris-Calais express.
“Oh, it hurts you too much!” he said “Don't let us—”
But she interrupted him quickly, impetuously.
“No. I came here to make you understand. I have nearly finished. It doesn't matter about me. Don't trouble about me and what I feel. I am on the other side of sorrow.”
SHE rolled up her handkerchief and put it on the mantelpiece.
“This is how the end came, Mr. Strickland. It was again autumn. The shooting season had begun and we were in the château. We generally had a few shooting parties every autumn. Andrew and I consulted together as to the people we would ask. Remembering the horrors of the preceding autumn he did not suggest asking that sweet woman about whom we had had that terrible scene. Her husband was a great shot. Our shooting was exceptionally good. It would have been natural to ask him and his wife. But Andrew made up the lists without alluding to them.
I said nothing at the time. But on the evening of the day on which we had decided whom we were going to ask, I remember thinking that it was cowardly of me to allow Andrew to be so far more magnanimous than I was. And I resolved to prove my absolute trust in Andrew, and in myself, by begging that Madame de V.—I cannot tell you her name—and her husband might be invited to come to us. Next day I told Andrew of my wish. He looked surprised, doubtful for a moment. 'I know what you are thinking' I said. 'You are wrong. Andrew, I have conquered myself. I want them to come, partly that you may know it.' He looked pleased, almost—almost as if he were a little proud of me. I wrote the invitation. It was accepted. They came to us.”
She came away from the fire slowly and sat down again in her chair. The flush had died out of her face, which looked now almost hard. “This is what happened,” she said. “I had miscalculated my own powers for goodness, for reasonableness. I thought I had changed. Really I had not changed. The effort I had made for so long a successful effort. instead of strengthening me, as thought, must really have tried me to the point of exhaustion.
“Our friends arrived on a beautiful autumn day. I welcomed them, as I believed, with genuine pleasure. Perhaps, really, it was only with a conscious, strong effort to be pleased, which for a moment deceived myself. Madame de V., who, of course, could have had no idea what my former feelings toward her had been, for I feel sure I had concealed them effectively while she had been in our house, seemed happy to be with us again. She was a radiant woman, getting, I think, light and warmth from the beauty of her own disposition.
“Even on the first night after their arrival, I was conscious that, for me, all was not going to be well. The sight of Madame de V. recalled to me in a strange and dreadful way my past jealousy. Again her serenity and charming good nature, which produced happiness all about her as light produces beauty in a landscape, marked for me the contrast between her temperament and disposition and my own, underlined for me, and as I fancied for others, my own defects. Whenever I saw my husband with her, enjoying himself in the beams of her clever kindness, I trembled. I—I—only a vulgarism can express what I felt. It seemed to me that Madame de V. showed me up.
SHE looked toward Strickland with a sort of shamed and almost wistful inquiry.
“I know exactly what you mean,” he said, in answer to her look.
“It was a cruel feeling. It ate its way into me. It made me almost hate her for being what she was, one of the most good and delightful women in the world. The love of others was her natural birthright. And, thinking that, I felt, as I had often felt before, that it was impossible that any one could really love me. Long ago, my husband's love for me must really have died, when he found out what I was. I imagined him acting what perhaps once had been reality. I remembered all the scenes I had made with him, all my attacks on him, all my sarcasm, all the bitter words I had spoken to him in bad temper, when my only desire had been to wound him. How he must hate me in his heart! Perpetual forgiving must wear out a man's love. Thinking back, I tried to fix the moment when my husband's affection for me must inevitably have died. And immediately I thought of the day when he had gone out alone into the wood and had come back to me with red eyes. I remembered his words, that he had been sitting in the wood for hours trying to make up his mind 'what to do.' I knew now exactly what they meant. He had been debating with himself how best to get rid of the burden that weighed him down—me. On that afternoon in the wood he had realized that his love for me was dead. My despair, my pleading, my promises of amendment had been effective on his sense of chivalry, and he had shouldered the burden again. That was what had happened. I knew it now. And Madame de V. had been the cause of this disaster to me. It was she who had wrecked my life.
“Something seemed to crash in me, as I said this to myself, bringing everything to ruin.
“This crash, as I can only call it, happened the second night of our house party, and not when I was alone. It occurred when I was sitting in the midst of our guests after dinner, listening to a pianist whom we had engaged to come out from Paris to play to us. I shall never forget that moment.
“My husband happened to be sitting on a sofa by Madame de V., who was herself a fine pianist and devoted to music. I was at some distance from them, but could see them both without turning my head. The pianist played first a sonata by Mozart, clear, gay, delicate, happy—full of spontaniety and sunshine, it seemed. Delight in it, and understanding of it, shone in Madame de V.'s beautiful face, and I saw her, from time to time, look at my husband, as if she were summoning him to share in her pleasure.
“'She is like that music,' I thought, as I sat in the midst of the ruin which nobody saw, which no one was aware of but myself.
“When the sonata was finished there was a short pause. My husband was talking animatedly with Madame de V. I saw him smiling, then laughing. It seemed to me that he looked almost boyish. Had I ever seen him look like that with me? Mr. Strickland, in my misery I told myself that I had never been able to bring such an expression into his eyes, such an emancipated expression. My whole body turned cold as I watched. Presently, the pianist began to improvise a short prelude and every one was silent. Then he played something of Liszt's. I can't tell you its name, but it was a stormy, passionate thing, with occasional bits of romance in it, fleeting moments of sweetness, but a great deal of violent ugliness. It showed off marvelously the great executive powers of the pianist, but it was tormented, lowering, full of thunder clouds, fierceness, unrest, the very antithesis of the piece which had preceded it.
“I thought to myself, 'And that is I!' Again I looked at Madame de V. and my husband. She was listening intently with a grave, almost puzzled expression on her face Her brows were drawn a little together. Her lips were pressed together. I felt that the music interested her, but that she disliked it. While I was feeling this I saw my husband steal a glance at me; a strange, furtive glance, I thought it. It was almost as if a stranger looked at me, but a stranger who knew, or had gathered by means of secret observation, much about me—to my detriment. Then he looked at Madame de V. I shut my eyes. In darkness I heard the remainder of that tempestuous music—music with no foothold anywhere for the soul that wants to rest. And in that darkness all power of moral control, of effort such as I had made during the last year, seemed to leave me.
“I don't know how I got through the rest of the evening. The end came at last. I was able to say good night to our guests. I pressed Madame de V.'s hand. I remember hearing her pleasant, clear voice say, concluding some discussion of the music, 'Mozart for me.' My husband added a comment that made me quiver. It was: 'One sees you reflected in Mozart as in a mirror. But in Liszt one sees only a stormy petrel.'
“'That is meant for me!' I thought.
“Then we separated, going up-stairs to our different rooms.
“My husband and I had a set of rooms in a tower. It was almost like a small flat, with a lobby, two bedrooms and a sitting-room, quite separate from the rest of the house. That night I went quickly up to my bedroom, sent away my maid, and then locked both the doors of my room. When my husband came up to change into a smoking-coat, he tried my door. Finding it locked he called out to me. I didn't move or answer. He called out again. Then, as no one replied, he went to his room. I didn't see him again that night. I didn't want to see him. I was afraid to see him. A savage was awake in me. I sat up nearly all night. I can't tell you all that passed in my mind. But I'll tell you this—I felt I hated my husband.”
HER eyes seemed to ask Strickland a searching question. At last she added,
“One can only feel as I felt then toward the man, or woman, one really loves best in the world. Mr. Strickland, do please forgive me—haven't you hated Jeanne like that?”
“I—I scarcely know,” he said.
He paused; then as if making a strong effort over himself, he added,
“Perhaps I have, now and then.”
“I remembered that look he had given me, and I hated him—or said to myself that I did. I summed up all my long love for him, all I had given him, all I had suffered because of him; not, I mean, because of any fault in him, but inevitably, because of my type of nature. And this was the end of it all—a look like that, the look of a stranger who knew bad things of me.
“Don't think that even then I believed that Andrew could ever be false to me with Madame de V. I was not so mad as to think that. What I believed was this: that he wished he had married such a woman as Madame de V., that she had made him long for such companionship as she could have given him; that she had unconsciously taught him to hate such a woman as I was. That was all, but that was enough.
“In the morning I came down just before the men went out shooting. I saw Andrew only when I saw him among our guests. thought he looked at me anxiously, as if he were almost in dread of something. But I smiled at him and managed, I believe, to hide what I was feeling.
“'Of course, you'll be with us at luncheon,' he said.
“I said I would. But when the brake was starting for the rendezvous agreed on for lunch, I didn't go. I made an excuse to the two or three women who were driving, said I wasn't feeling very well, and stayed behind by myself.
“That day I had a horrible feeling which I suppose is very rare in a woman brought up as I had been among refined people, always taught to hide their passions, to behave in a certain way whatever happens. I felt as if I were losing hold of the conventions, as if the shell, as it were, in which the so-called 'lady' lives had been smashed, as if the naked human being that was I must emerge. All these people whom I was entertaining—what were they to me? Why should I eternally act before them? I hated them. I dreaded their return to the château, because I didn't know whether I should be able any longer to be ordinary, civil, agreeable to them. I imagined myself breaking down under the strain I was enduring and doing something terrible before them all.
“The afternoon wore on. My guests and Andrew would soon be home. Presently I heard the grinding of wheels on the gravel, the sound of horses' hoofs, then, a moment later, the note of a motor horn, of laughter and gay voices—a barking of dogs.
“Mr. Strickland, at that moment I couldn't stand the routine of civilized life. I knew I could no longer rely on myself, and I went up-stairs and hid myself in my room. I got into a dressing-gown, quickly made all dark, and lay down on my bed.
“Presently I heard a knock at the door. It was my husband. Finding me in the dark he asked what was the matter. I told him I had a violent sick headache and felt feverish. I begged him to make my excuses to our guests, to send up my maid and then not to disturb me again. I said my nerves were all to pieces from the pain in my head. We spoke to each other in the dark. But I felt energy, cheerfulness, the open air had come into my room with him, and I bitterly compared my misery, my almost madness, with my husband's sanity and poise. I was a moral wreck.
“He stood there filling the dark room with an atmosphere of health and strength. Mr. Strickland, in less than a week from that moment he was dead.
“Our guests had been invited to stay for four days. During the rest of their time I did not face them. I never went down-stairs. But I saw one of them. Madame de V., in the most charming way, I believe, insisted gently on coming up. This was on the evening before she left the château. She sent up a message begging to be allowed to see me. And my husband also brought a word from her. I remember he said to me,
“'Do see her, Vivienne. She is so calm, such a sweet woman, she can only do you good. I often wish you knew more of her.'
“That's how men are with us, Mr. Strickland! But how often I long to be misunderstood by Andrew now! We love men partly because they haven't got our horrible subtleties.
“I consented to see Madame de V., and she came up to my room. It wasn't quite dark. There were two shaded candles lighted. She sat down by my bed, and stayed perhaps for half an hour. But it seemed a very long time to me.
“I couldn't ever tell a man what I lived through during that little visit, Mr. Strickland.
“At last she left me. I have never seen her again.
“That day the house party broke up. All our guests left the château. They went away in the morning. My husband had some business to attend to in Paris. He came to my room to bid me good-by. Somehow—he only stayed a few minutes—I managed to seem calm and casual while he was with me. As he was going out of my room, he said, 'I shall motor up with the de V.'s and come back by train.' With an effort—for I felt as if I had received a blow over the heart—I asked him when I should expect him. 'To-morrow morning in time for lunch,' he answered. 'What—not to-night?' I said. My throat felt all dried up as I spoke. 'No; I'm afraid I can't get through all I have to do in time to get back to-night,' he answered. I remember I opened my lips to beg him not to spend the night in Paris. But I shut them without speaking. He bent to kiss me, but I turned my head brusquely away. At that moment I felt I would rather be touched by a snake than by him.
“I can't tell you much about the following night. I didn't sleep. In the dark hours I reviewed my life and its utter failure, and in my madness I attributed its failure to my husband. I no longer blamed myself. I blamed him. My tortured nerves drove me into fierce condemnation of him. Everything was distorted by my imagination that night. Evil boiled up in me—evil.”
SHE stopped abruptly. Strickland could see in her face that in imagination she was literally living through again that bit of her past life. She stared before her while he waited, not moving. His pipe had gone out, but he still kept it between his lips. At last she looked at him as one who again sees the reality of the moment.
“I told you that when my husband was going to kiss me I turned my head away brusquely. I told you that at that moment I would rather have been touched by a snake than by him—”
She paused.
“Yes,” Strickland said.
“That was the last time he ever bent down to kiss me.”
“Do you mean—didn't you ever see him again?”
“Oh, yes. We had a last interview, but there was nothing but hatred in it—what seemed hatred, I mean—on my side. No man could have wished to kiss, no man could ever have even thought of kissing, the woman I was in that last interview. Oh, Mr. Strickland, the last time—the last time—and not to know it, not even to suspect it! With one you love, always say to yourself, 'It may be the last time!' And put your true heart, your love, the best part of you into it.”
For a moment her face was tormented.
“Let your last time be sweet and tender. Otherwise you go into hell here on earth. I have done that.
“In the morning I got up. I was restless, like a driven fury. I waited for him to come back. I did not know what I was going to do. But I knew I was going to do something drastic, perhaps horrible. I knew I needed to do something horrible as one needs to eat when starving Because I was tortured, I longed to torture—not any friend, or casual acquaintance, not a servant, not some stranger, but the one I loved.
“I came down-stairs. I went out. I walked in the garden. I went into the wood where he had once stayed so long—thinking 'what to do.' I thought, 'I'll bring him here. I'll torture him here, for wishing to get away from me, to rid himself of me, who have loved him exclusively.' I can hear the leaves falling now, and the shrill cry of birds in the coverts. Presently I looked at my watch. It was nearly noon. I returned to the château.
“I found a telegram there. It told me that he was delayed in Paris for a few hours, but would be down by an afternoon train. I thought, 'I don't care. When he comes, I'll take him into the wood. Even if it's night, I'll take him into the wood.' The idea of the wood obsessed me.
“Twilight was beginning to fall when at last he came back. It was cold that evening, cold with the strange earthy chill characteristic of autumn, compounded, I always think, of the differing coldnesses of many things dead or fading rapidly into death. I was dressed for walking, when he came into my sitting-room. He seemed surprised at seeing me up, still more so at seeing me dressed for going out. He came toward me, perhaps intending to kiss me. But something in my look must have stopped him. For, when he was near me, he stood still. He asked me if I was better. I said I was quite well, and wanted him to come out with me. He said of course he would come if I wished it, but added a doubt as to the wisdom of my going out at such a late hour after my illness. I told him I wished to talk to him and preferred to do it in the open air. He asked me why. I said, imperiously, even violently I believe, that I wished it and that was enough. He said nothing more, and we went out together. I led the way toward the wood. Mists were beginning to rise from the Seine, which flowed not far from the château. We walked in silence side by side. When we drew near to the trees, he said that we had better remain in the garden, on one of the terraces where it would be dry underfoot. I said that I wished to go into the wood. 'It is madness in your condition,' he said. But I persisted and we followed a winding grass path among the trees till we came to a clearing. Woodcutters had been at work there, several trunks of poplar trees, stripped of their branches and leaves, lay on the damp ground. Here I stopped and stood still.
“'Do you remember coming into this wood last year?' I asked. 'After Madame de V.'s visit to us?'
“He answered 'Yes.'
“'Was it here you sat and for hours considered what to do?' I asked.
“'It may have been here,' he answered. 'I can't remember exactly. But what does it matter?'
“'I only wanted to tell you here in this wood,' I said, 'that this time I shall not humble myself. I shall not beg forgiveness. You can do what you like. I understand the whole situation now clearly. Last year you wanted to get rid of me. You were hoping to get rid of me. But I didn't let you. I didn't give you the chance. Because then I still loved you. But now it's different.'
“Mr. Strickland, I can't tell you any more of the words I said. But I poured forth all the bitterness in my heart. Instead of humbling myself and showing my love, I called pride to me in my jealousy. I pretended that it was I who was weary of him, that it was I who longed to get rid of him. Always I saw before me the face of Madame de V. like a smiling vision in the mists—”
SHE stopped speaking and stared before her for a moment. Then she got up and again stood by the fire with her hands gripped tightly together.
“Mr. Strickland, do you know how in such moments of madness, of love, intense love, turned, twisted all awry, the tongue finds instinctively all the most horrible words, all the words that are like spears to lacerate and draw blood? Do you know?”
“Yes,” said Strickland.
“In such moments, we turn love inside out, we show the side that is hideous. I did. You know what the intimacy of marriage is, how it arms one with knowledge that others haven't got, knowledge of the little human failings, of the secret weaknesses, that everyone has, however dear, however noble. Tricks, mannerisms of body and soul, physical things—who knows them quite as the husband does, or the wife? Every wife has weapons which, perhaps, no other living woman has against the husband. I used all mine. I can't tell you more than that. And all the time I loved every hair on his dear head. That's how a woman can be!
“He didn't speak—not a word. He just stood there looking absolutely stricken—with a sort of terrific surprise in his eyes. But the terrible, the frightful thing is, that I know at that moment he believed that I hated him. Men can believe such a thing! At last, when I had emptied myself of hatred and bitterness—hatred of the moment, false hatred—I stopped speaking. He stood for a moment. Then he turned. I heard his feet trampling on the brushwood. The trees and the mists took him.
“When I went back to the château, night had fallen and his servant came to tell me his master had left in the motor for Paris.
“'Who went with him?' I asked.
“He told me no one. Andrew had gone alone, driving himself. Mr. Strickland, that same night he was killed on the road to Paris, near a village. Two villagers saw it. They said he was driving fiercely, at something like seventy miles an hour. A dog ran out. He tried to avoid it. The car struck a bank. It was the end.
“It was the end for him.
“I received his dead body, Mr. Strickland—that was all.”
Strickland, without knowing why, had instinctively got on to his feet. She held out her hand, put it on his arm.
“They laid him down before me, and I couldn't tell him the truth. Can you understand what that meant to me?”
"Perhaps—partly,” he almost whispered.
“That's all I can tell you. Mr. Strickland, don't be false to your heart. That is death. Jeanne loves you. She is ill—”
“Ill!” said Strickland.
“Yes—because she is starving, I think That's why I came. That's why I have told you. I don't know, of course, how much you love her, or if you love her. But I thought I would just give you the chance to profit by my tragedy, if you care at all. That day, in the Calais express, before you, I went down into the bottom of understanding of what I had done, and what it meant. I wonder now whether you had anything to do with that. I don't know. All I know is that till that moment, since Andrew's death, I hadn't shed a tear.”
She went to the sofa and picked up her fur coat. Strickland helped her to put it on.
WHEN she said good-by she gave him a slip of paper.
“Jeanne's address in Paris,” she said.
Those were her last words to Strickland.
On the following morning Strickland started for Paris.
(The End.)