VII
“I think,” said Stephen, “I’ll try to take a nap.”
“Why don’t you, dear?” said Jane.
Jane herself was far from feeling sleepy. She had been sitting in silence for the last half-hour on the Empire sofa in the little green sitting room, watching Stephen turn over the pages of the Paris Herald and the London Times. She rose, now, and followed him into their bedroom. It was rather a relief, she was thinking, to have something definite to do, even if that something was only pulling down three window-shades and raising one window and tucking a light steamer rug over Stephen’s recumbent form. Stephen was looking very grim and tired. They had had a hard day, though nothing much had happened in it. At eleven in the morning Cicily had telephoned. She had telephoned to announce that her lawyer had just called her up from the courtroom to inform her that her decree had been made final. There had been no complications and the last requirement had been complied with. That was all there had been to the formal proceedings that Jane and Stephen had tragically prepared themselves to witness. Two months ago two foreign lawyers had spoken in an alien tongue. Cicily had murmured a few French words of acquiescence. A judge had entered an interlocutory judgment. Today that judgment had been entered on the records of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. And a marriage had been dissolved.
Cicily had planned to have a little lunch with Albert. She had arranged for Jane and Stephen, however, to join Muriel and Ed Brown at the Ritz. That luncheon with Muriel, Jane reflected, had been rather like the first meal after a family funeral. Though, of course, you did not usually have to take the first meal after a family funeral in a public restaurant and you did not usually have to talk through it about prohibition with Ed Brown. Jane and Stephen had returned very early in the afternoon to their rooms at the Chatham.
Jane closed the bedroom door and reentered the green sitting-room. She sat down on the Empire sofa. From behind the heavy green curtains of the long French windows the sharp, staccato uproar of the traffic on the rue Daunou rang in her ears. The shrill, toy-like toots of the French taxis punctuated the sound. Cities had voices, thought Jane. Chicago rumbled and New York hummed and Paris tooted. Jane glanced at the London Times and the Paris Herald. She felt curiously empty-handed, but she did not seem to want to read the papers. Reading the papers, Jane reflected, was the eternal resource of men. It offered no distraction to women. She had at last her hour alone in Paris and she did not know what to do with it. She wondered what Cicily and Albert were doing. She thought of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. The Catholics were right. Metaphysically speaking, there was no such thing as divorce. Marriage was a mystical union of body and spirit. It was a state of being. It could not be dissolved by legal procedure. The past could not be denied. The present was its consequence. The future—but as far as the future went, though Cicily seemed to Jane as much Jack’s wife as she had ever been, she was going to marry Albert Lancaster in Flora’s apartment in three days’ time. After that, Jane reflected hopelessly, she would be two men’s wife! It was frightfully complicated, metaphysically speaking.
Just then Jane heard a knock on the door.
“Entrez!” she cried, with a curious sense of relief. But it was only a bellboy. He had a letter on a little silver tray. “Merci,” said Jane and fumbled for a franc. The letter was from Isabel.
Jane opened it before the bellboy had left the room. Isabel’s letters were always good reading. This one contained a surprise, and Jane felt, as she read it, exactly as if Isabel were sitting beside her on the little Empire sofa. Her sister’s very accents clung to the sixteen closely written pages.
“Dearest Jane,
“I haven’t written, but I’ve been awfully busy. I’ve been thinking of you, of course, and of Stephen, too. I sometimes feel that all this has been harder on Robin and Stephen than on you and me. In a way, I think, fathers care more than mothers what happens to daughters.
“I care most about Jack. But, Jane, I’m beginning to feel much happier about him. He loved his work at Tech, and as soon as he left there this June, he took a summer job with the telephone company down near Mexico City. I’ve just had his first letter. He’s stringing wires and building bridges, just as Cicily said he would. He misses the children fearfully, of course, but he could not have taken them to Mexico, in any case. Nevertheless, they are the insuperable problem.
“At any rate, work is the thing for Jack to tie to, just now. It can’t betray him, as a woman might. It’s so much safer to love things than people.
“This brings me to Belle’s news. It’s what I’ve been so busy over these last two weeks. It’s still a great secret, but I know it will make you and Stephen happier to know it. She’s engaged to Billy Winter. She’s not going to announce it, but just marry him quietly here in the apartment some afternoon and slip off to Murray Bay for her honeymoon. Robin and I are going to keep the babies while she’s gone. Billy’s rented a Palmer House on Ritchie Court for the winter.
“Belle has no misgivings about anything and almost no regrets. And to hear Billy talk, you’d think everyone was divorced and remarried. Of course, in a way, I hate it and so does Robin. But we like Billy and he’s sweet with Belle’s children. She’s so glad, now, they’re all girls. She’s going to give them Billy’s name. She’s really in love again, I think, and if she’s happy, perhaps it will all work out for the best. But I can’t get used to this modern idea that you can scrap the past and wipe the slate clean and begin life over again.
“I haven’t told Mamma anything about it and shan’t, until after the wedding. She keeps right on saying she doesn’t want to see Cicily or Albert ever again. But she’ll get over that, of course.
“Her blood pressure has been flaring up and she’s had some dizzy spells that have worried me. She fusses a lot about the house, and Minnie quarrels with all the other servants. She just made Mamma dismiss an excellent waitress I got her—such a nice girl who didn’t want her Sundays out—because she thought the pantry cupboards weren’t very clean.
“Of course they aren’t as clean as they were when Minnie used to keep them. But the neighbourhood’s so dirty now. That factory on Erie Street always burns soft coal. I don’t blame the waitress—and, anyway, Jane, you know what I mean, what difference does it make? The main thing is to keep Mamma tranquil, and she’d never know about the pantry cupboards if Minnie didn’t tell her.
“She ought to move, of course, into some nice apartment that would be easy to live in, but she won’t hear of it. They’re going to pull down the house across the yard and put up a skyscraper. It will take away all the south sun and the blank north wall will be hideous to look at. I hate to think what Minnie will say when the wreckers begin. The plaster dust will sift in all the windows and the noise will be frightful. After that steel riveting, I suppose, all summer and fall.
“If you were here, I’d really advise trying to move them at once, but I honestly don’t feel up to all the argument alone. And, after all, perhaps it wouldn’t be worth while. Mamma’s seventy-seven and she’d never really feel at home anywhere else. She doesn’t do anything any more. She never goes out. Just walks around that empty house, rummaging in bureau drawers and boxes, going over her possessions and trying to throw things away. You know Mamma always kept everything, and the closets are all full of perfectly worthless objects. She doesn’t accomplish a thing, of course, and it tires her fearfully. But she won’t stay quiet.
“She’s always very sweet with me when I drop in, and I think she’s quite happy. But Minnie says she talks a lot about how she wants to leave things. She mentions that to me, sometimes, and I just hate to hear her. It’s queer—you’d think it would make her feel so sad, but she seems rather to enjoy it. I think it makes her feel important again—you know, something to be reckoned with. Perhaps at seventy-seven that’s the only way you can feel important—by disposing of your property. That would account for lots of startling wills, wouldn’t it, Jane?
“She told me last week that you were to have the seed-pearl set and I was to have the amethyst necklace. It really made me cry. She says she wants that opal pin that she always said was Cicily’s to go to Belle, now, along with the cameos. But she’ll change her mind about that, of course, when she hears of Billy Winter.
“Minnie reads the paper to her every night in the library. They’re always sitting there together when Robin and I drop in. Reading the paper or talking over old times. In a way it seems awful—Mamma talking like that with Minnie—But Minnie’s really the only one, now, who remembers the things that Mamma likes to talk about. She always stands up very nicely when Robin and I are there, but I know when we’ve gone she just settles down in Papa’s armchair, and she doesn’t wear her apron any longer. I think I ought to try to make her, but Robin says to let her alone.
“I wouldn’t write Mamma much about the wedding if I were you. Not even about the children. It would only upset her. Her great-grandchildren don’t seem to mean much to her any more. They’re just things that make the general situation worse. I dread telling her about Belle. She keeps saying she’s glad that Papa was spared all this. And Mrs. Lester. She always speaks as if they had died just last week. And, after all, it’s nine years now.
“Of course, Jane, I think we really feel just as badly about it as Mamma does. But we have to carry it off. Old people are just like children. They have no mercy on you. I get so sick of trying to defend the situation to Mamma and Minnie, when I think, in my heart, there’s no defence for it.
“Well—when Jack’s a full-fledged engineer and Belle and Billy have settled down in Ritchie Court and Cicily and Albert are living in Peking, I suppose we’ll all shake down in some dreadful modern way and accept the situation and not even feel awkward about it. Cicily’s children are still my grandchildren and Belle’s children are Muriel’s grandchildren as well as mine. We’re all held together by the hands of babies, which, I suppose, are the strongest links in the world. Nevertheless, Cicily and Albert won’t live in Peking forever, and I just can’t bear to think of the Christmas dinners and Thanksgiving luncheons that are ahead of us! It all seems so terribly confused and sordid.
“But I’m fifty-six, old dear, and you’re fifty-one and Stephen’s turned sixty and Robin’s sixty-three. The children will all have to live with the messes they’ve made a great deal longer than we will. So I suppose it’s none of our business—how they work out their own salvation. I wish I could really think so.
Jane read the letter through three times and then sat staring at it in silence. She was thinking of Cicily. Of Cicily, sitting at her side on the sofa of her little French drawing-room in Lakewood and saying courageously, “In two years’ time we’ll all be a great deal happier. A great deal happier than we’ve been for years.” It was, however, “a dreadful modern way” to find your happiness. Jane had no sympathy with it. She did not even feel sure that Belle’s engagement made matters any better. It made them worse, perhaps. More trivial, more meaningless, more like the monkey house. She would not tell Cicily, she reflected firmly, about Belle’s engagement. She would not give her that satisfaction.