IX
“I didn’t think you’d come,” said Jane.
“Of course I came,” said André.
They were sitting side by side in a taxi that was rolling down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Half an hour before Jane had seen Cicily depart for her honeymoon with Albert Lancaster. The parting with the children had been painfully emotional. Cicily herself had been very much moved. Little Jane had wept, and John had clung to his mother, and Robin Redbreast had tried to run after her as she paused on Albert’s arm, in the doorway of Flora’s apartment, to toss one last tremulous kiss to Jane.
“Well—that’s over!” Stephen had said, when she had vanished. Personally Jane felt that it had just begun. The summer stretched before her with the children to watch over—the autumn with its inevitable parting—the years ahead with their adjustments and compromises. Then André had spoken.
“Are you really going tomorrow?” he had asked.
Jane had nodded.
“Then won’t you come back with me, now, to my studio? I want to talk to you.”
“Oh, go, Jane!” Flora had cried. “André’s studio is awfully interesting.”
“I think,” Jane had said rather slowly, “I’d better go back to the Chatham with Stephen. The children are dining with us, so Molly can pack.”
“Won’t Stephen come, too?” said André, a little hesitantly.
“No,” said Stephen abruptly. “I—I think I’d like to be with the kids. But why don’t you go, Jane?”
And André had picked up his hat. That was how Jane had come to be with him in the taxi. She was still trying to realize that he was really himself. It was a great waste of André, she reflected, to have to meet him after thirty-four years at Cicily’s wedding. Her thoughts were with the grandchildren. It was hard to concentrate on André, after all she had just been through. Perhaps at fifty-one, however, it would always be hard to concentrate on any man. At fifty-one, you were perpetually torn by conflicting preoccupations. Meeting André’s gaze with a smile, Jane observed, a trifle whimsically, that he, at least, had achieved concentration. His wise, sophisticated brown eyes were bent earnestly upon her.
“You didn’t really think I wouldn’t come, did you?” said André.
“I didn’t know,” said Jane. Then added honestly, “I didn’t want to hope too much that you would.”
“Why not?” smiled André.
“For fear of being disappointed,” said Jane promptly. “I like to keep my illusions.”
“Am I one of your illusions, Jane?” asked André, with a twinkle.
“You always have been,” said Jane soberly.
André laughed at that. “The same honest Jane!” he said, as the taxi drew up at the curbing.
As André paid the cabman, Jane stood on the sidewalk and wondered where she was. She stared up at the grey stone façade of the building before her. She had not noticed where the taxi was going. It had crossed the Seine. That was all she knew. She felt a pleasing little sense of adventure as she followed André through some iron gates, across the corner of a crumbling courtyard, and in a tall carved doorway that opened on the court. A curved stone stairway stretched before her, leading up into comparative darkness. Jane’s sense of adventure deepened.
“It’s three flights up,” said André, “and there is no lift.”
Jane tried not to catch her breath too audibly as she plodded up the stairs, her hand on the iron rail. Her sense of adventure had faded a little. How ignominious, she was thinking, how fifty-one, to have to puff and pant on a staircase at André’s side! On the third landing he unlocked a door.
“Come in,” he said.
Jane found herself in a large light whitewashed room, the walls of which were hung with charcoal sketches and lined with bronze and plaster and marble figures. A frame platform occupied the centre of the floor. On it were placed a high stool, a box of sculptor’s tools, and a tall ambiguous form that was draped in a white cloth. A grand piano stood in one corner. Near it were clustered a divan, two comfortable armchairs, and a tea-table. Above them a great square window looked out over the rounded tops of an avenue of horse-chestnuts, down a curving vista of narrow grey street to the Gothic portico of a little hunchbacked church. One of the tourist-free, nameless old churches, Jane thought, that you always meant to visit in Paris and never did!
“Well, how do you like it?” asked André.
“I love it,” said Jane.
She sat down in an armchair and smiled up at André. She was beginning to feel that this bearded gentleman was really the boy that she had loved. The grandchildren seemed very far away. She felt a tremulous little sense of intimacy at the thought that this was André’s very own studio and that they were alone in it together.
“I do all my work here,” said André.
Jane gazed about her. The place looked very businesslike.
The armchairs were worn and the divan was covered with a frayed Indian rug and a heterogeneous collection of cushions that had seen better days. The tea-set was a little dusty. Jane felt, absurdly, that she would like to wash that tea-set for André!
“Would you like some tea?” he asked.
Jane shook her head.
“I can get it,” said André. “I live here, you know, a great deal of the time. I’ve a bedroom and a kitchen on the court.”
“I thought,” said Jane, “you had a house in Paris.”
“I have,” said André, “but my wife’s not often in it. I live there, usually, when she’s in town.”
His words made Jane think instantly of the older Duroys. Of Mr. Duroy, looking just like André, riding that tandem bicycle with his wife!
“André,” she said, “where is your mother?”
“She lives in England,” said André soberly. “Father died twenty years ago in Prague. Mother went back to my grandfather’s house in Bath.”
“The one you told me about,” smiled Jane, “in the Royal Crescent?”
“The same,” said André, answering her smile. “Mother’s seventy-three, you know. She’s very active. She breezes in here every few months and washes up those teacups!” He broke off abruptly. “Are you interested in sculpture?”
“I’m interested in yours,” said Jane.
Her eyes were wandering over the bronze and plaster and marble figures. They were charming, Jane thought. It was absurd of Cicily to call that Eve vieux jeu! It was absurd of Cicily to say—Jane rose suddenly from her chair. Her gaze on the bronze and plaster and marble figures had grown a little more intent. She walked the length of the room in silence. André’s nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas drooped on every pedestal. Soft limbs and clinging draperies met the eye at every turn. The charcoal sketches on the walls vaguely revealed the grace of feminine curves. There was a certain harem-like quality to André’s studio! Would she have noticed it, Jane wondered, if it had not been for Cicily’s cynical words in the Luxembourg Gallery? Why—it was an absolutely Adamless Eden! Except for André, of course.
“I must show you what I’m doing now,” he said suddenly. He turned toward the frame platform. “It’s a war memorial,” he explained, as he removed the cloth from the ambiguous form. “Isn’t she charming?”
She was charming. She was just that. Jane stared in silence at the unfinished figure—a lovely girlish angel, sheathing a broken sword over a young dead warrior. Angels should be sexless, thought Jane quickly. Over young dead warriors their wings should droop in pity, not in love.
“Isn’t she charming?” repeated André. “My angel?”
Who was she? Jane could not help thinking. It was one of those thoughts that you despised yourself for, of course.
“Yes,” she said doubtfully. “Yes, but—”
“But what?” smiled André.
“Not awfully—angelic.” Jane wondered, as she spoke, just why she felt that she must make her criticism articulate. It was part of the old fourteen-year-old feeling of intimacy, perhaps. The feeling that she always owed André the truth. He was smiling again a trifle ironically.
“A little earthy, you think, my angel?”
Jane nodded soberly.
“Perhaps you’re right,” said André cheerfully. “Some of my angels have been a little earthy, you know.”
Jane looked at André. She still had that funny feeling that she owed him the truth.
“That’s too bad,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said André. “I’ve liked them earthy.”
Jane could not quite respond to his comical smile.
“Wasn’t that—rather foolish of you?” she said slowly. She was beginning to feel a terrible prig! André was looking at her with a very amused twinkle in his shrewd brown eyes.
“Qui vit sans folie n’est pas si sage qu’il croít,” he said. “La Rochefoucauld said that, Jane. He was a very wise old boy.”
Jane’s glance had dropped before André’s twinkle.
“Yes,” she said slowly, “but—”
“But what?” said André again.
Jane’s eyes were on his hands. She had felt a little shock of recognition when she looked at them. Hands did not change as faces did, she thought. André’s were still the strong sculptor’s hands of his boyhood. Prig or no prig, Jane felt an inexplicable impulse to give André good advice.
“André,” she said solemnly, “you ought to snap out of all this. Leave Paris. Go out to the provinces and forget the earthy angels. You’ve still got twenty years ahead of you.” André was smiling at her very amusedly, but Jane was not abashed. “You ought to come back to the corn belt, André. I know that seems ridiculous, but it’s true. Come back to the corn belt and do a bronze of Lincoln. Spend a winter in Springfield, Illinois, and get to know the rail-splitter. It would do you good.”
He shook his head. “It’s not in my line,” he said. “I tried a bronze of Foch last year. I had a good commission, but I couldn’t get interested.”
“You would get interested,” urged Jane, “if you really worked at it. You get interested in anything you actually experience.”
Again André’s smile was very much amused. But rather tender.
“It’s thirty-four years since I last saw you, Jane,” he said. “What have you experienced?”
He had dismissed the subject. He spoke as if to a child. Jane suddenly felt very young and virginal, but just a little irritated.
“I’ve experienced Stephen,” she said briefly.
“That all, Jane?” asked André. Under his ironic eye Jane felt far from confidential. She succumbed to an impulse to dismiss a subject herself.
“Of course,” she said.
“I wonder,” said André gallantly. But the gallantry was not very convincing. He did not seem incredulous. Jane was not surprised. She knew, of course, that she did not look any longer like the kind of woman who had ever experienced anything very much.
“But if it’s true,” continued André lightly, “don’t let it trouble you. L’amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer l’amour. It all comes to the same thing in the end, Jane, whatever we experience.”
Jane stared at him, appalled. He was pulling the cloth back over his earthy angel. He seemed quite unconscious of the significance of his utterance. Of the significance of the lesson that he had learned from life. Jane did not feel young and virginal and irritated any longer. She felt fifty-one years old and quite stripped of illusion. But very sorry for André.
“I must go,” she said. “I must go back to Stephen.” The grandchildren seemed much nearer than they had twenty minutes before. André smiled pleasantly at her as she preceded him out of the studio.
“I loved seeing your angel,” said Jane politely.
They descended the stairs together in silence. They crossed the crumbling courtyard and went out through the iron gates. André whistled for a taxi. Jane could not think of anything more to say to him. She was thinking of the faith that she had kept with the lover of her girlhood. “L’amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer l’amour.” Jane wished very sincerely that André had stayed in the French Alps. She wished that she had never come to his studio. The taxi rolled up to the curb. André handed her into it.
“Goodbye,” said Jane.
“Au revoir,” said André. He did look exactly like his father—in spite of the earthy angels! “It’s been great to see you, Jane!”
“Goodbye,” said Jane again. She smiled and nodded gaily. The taxi rolled off down the curving vista of the narrow grey street. It tooted its horn and turned abruptly at the Gothic portico of the little hunchbacked church. The quai, the Seine, the Isle Saint-Louis and the towers of Notre Dame swung quickly into view. The day was fading into a sunset haze. But Jane was not thinking of the view. She was thinking of how things turned out. Of the inevitable disillusion of life.
“It all comes to the same thing in the end, Jane, whatever we experience.” But that was not true. That was a very fallacious philosophy! For, obviously, you did not come to the same thing in the end, yourself. You were, eventually, the product of your experience.
Jane’s mind returned to the problems of her children. If she had had Cicily’s courage of conviction, she reflected with a dawning twinkle, she might have married André and remarried Stephen and run away with Jimmy. Her life might have been the more interesting for those forbidden experiments. But she would not have been the same Jane at fifty-one. Not that Jane thought so much of the Jane she was. Or did she? Did you not always, Jane asked herself honestly, think a little too tenderly of the kind of person that you had turned out to be?
Cicily had been right about one thing. You had to choose in life. And perhaps you never gave up anything except what some secret self-knowledge whispered that you did not really care to possess. But no, thought Jane! She had made her sacrifices in agony of spirit. She had made them in simplicity and sincerity and because of that curious inner scruple that Matthew Arnold had defined—that “enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.” But to what end?
For Cicily had been right about another thing. You did not know—you could not ever tell—just where the path you had not taken would have led you. Cicily and Albert, on their way to Russia, were very happy. Belle and Billy were happy in Murray Bay. Jack, stringing his telephone wires and building his bridges down near Mexico City, was well on the road, perhaps, to a more enduring happiness than he had ever known before. The six children, Jane was prepared to admit, would probably fare quite as well at the hands of five affectionate parents as they had at the hands of four. Jane could not conscientiously claim that the world was any the worse for Cicily’s bad behaviour.
To what end, then, did you struggle to live with dignity and decency and decorum? To play the game with the cards that were dealt you? Was it only to cultivate in your own character that intangible quality that Jane, for want of a better word, had defined as grace? Was it only to feel self-respectful on your deathbed? That seemed a barren reward.
“I have lived and accomplished the task that Destiny gave me, and now I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade.” Dido had said that. Across the years Dido had said that to Jane and Agnes on the Johnsons’ little front porch “west of Clark Street.” Jane could remember thinking it was “nice and proud,” Dido’s niceness and her pride had illumined the difficult hexameters of Virgil’s Aeneid. They had burned with a brighter light than the flames of her funeral pyre.
The reward, however, still seemed a trifle barren. To pass beneath the earth no common shade. That romantic prospect was not as inviting to Jane at fifty-one as it had been at sixteen. A place in the hierarchy of heaven seemed rather unimportant. Jane felt a little weary, facing an immortality that would prove in the end only one more social adventure. She would prefer oblivion.
But André had not been right about experience. If André had married Jane and settled down in Lakewood, he would not have been the bearded cynic he was at fifty-three. Wives had a lot to do with it. It was Cyprienne—and the earthy angels, of course—Jane thought indulgently, who had made André what he was today. “L’amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer l’amour!” What words to hear from the lips of the man whose romantic memory you had been tenderly cherishing for thirty-four years! From the lips of the boy who had walked so bravely, so proudly out of your youth down Victorian Pine Street! Jane was thinking again of the inevitable disillusion of life. Was it inevitable, she wondered? If Jimmy had lived, would he be as dead as André?