Part 38

She took out the mirror from the side of her motor and fell to examining her face. Here at least the twelve years had not taken the toll that might have been expected. There was no gray in the brick-red hair that lay under the small, chic gray hat. The narrow intelligent eyes, set close together, were as bright as they had ever been, and the white skin, like the thick petals of a camelia, was as perfect as ever beneath the superbly disguised powder and rouge. She touched the tip of her long nose with an immaculately gloved finger, and it occurred to her that the face which looked out of the tiny rectangle of glass was a mask, really,--an admirably fashioned mask which concealed effectively a turbulence none would ever have imagined lay beneath it. They managed things better in these days: once she would have been expected to retire from the field with a broken heart, to exploit, as it were, her own suffering; to swoon and weep ... like Lady Byron.

She looked, she felt, remarkably young; but not young enough. She could not, she thought, begin all over again; there was not time. She was past forty now. She might marry again ... a man her own age or older, but that would not be the same. She had given what youth she possessed (beneath that hard, controlled exterior) to Callendar and Thérèse. There was not a chance of her ever being young in the way she had once been, of loving with a fierce abandon that her pride had forced her to conceal. (She fancied that they had never discovered how much and how shamefully she had loved him, yet she could not be certain. Probably he knew this too.)

She put away the mirror and, leaning back, fell to thinking, with all her cold honesty, that she would even return to him now if he so much as lifted a finger in her direction. There had been in all their life together no memory of a violent scene, no memory of blows or accusations ... nothing about which she could build up a hatred or sense of repulsion. There had been nothing since little Thérèse was born save that aloof, courteous indifference which it had been impossible to shatter. And for a time she tried to imagine what would have happened if once--only once--he had for a moment melted and behaved toward her as if she had been more than a mere institution, more than a wife whom one protected and to whom one was always courteous.

And old Thérèse.... Once Sabine had fancied that they were friends. They had been, she remembered, congenial, almost alike in their point of view, in the angle from which they looked out upon the world. And then Thérèse had slipped away, slowly, imperceptibly in a fashion that it was impossible to define. There had been no quarrel, no bandying of words, yet they had come somehow to hate each other, coldly and with an ironic polish. She knew what it was that had come between them. It was that fortune and the need of an heir. And now in the end Thérèse was becoming slowly an untidy, disgusting old Levantine woman helpless in the power of her obsession.

If she had not married Callendar she might have been a friend even now, not alone of Thérèse but of Callendar himself. But that would have been unbearable ... much worse than this. At least in this there was a sense of finality.

So she tried as she had tried many times before, to pull those twelve years apart and pick from among the ruins the elements which had been the heart of her passion for him; but she found it impossible. She could not say why she would have returned to him now if he had asked her. Over all the years there hung a faint aura of evil (an evil which she told herself was not evil at all, but simply seemed so because she had been brought up to believe that sort of love was evil). It was desire which she felt, perhaps nothing more than that; yet it was, she was certain, not such a simple and uncomplicated thing. It was sinister, perhaps entangled in all her passion for _knowing_ what people were, for taking them apart (she smiled to herself) to look at the works. No, this mystery was quite beyond her....

So (she thought) in the end she had not been able to compete with Ellen Tolliver. He would have her now, as he had always wanted to have her. She (Sabine) had then not been so wrong in the instinct that led her, years before, to call at the house in Rue Raynouard. There had been nothing to discover, and yet everything. What was true now of Callendar and Ellen Tolliver was true then, as they sat in the long beautiful drawing-room, just as true as it had been in the days when the girl had come to the house on Murray Hill. It was only that they themselves had changed and here (she thought almost with satisfaction) might lie the seeds of one more disaster. For Lilli Barr could not possibly be the same as the awkward, obscure Ellen Tolliver, and Callendar had hardened slowly in all the qualities which made him impossible. Ellen Tolliver would not submit to the unhappiness she herself had known; Ellen Tolliver would not wait patiently to achieve her own desire. She was capable of stormy scenes; she had clearly a genius for success, for having her own way. He had, perhaps, in all his watching never discovered this. And yet, as she thought it over and over on the drive to the Rue Tilsit, it occurred to her that it might be just this and nothing more that was the very core of that inexplicable, persistent attraction between them.

Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr.... She kept repeating the name to herself. She still felt no resentment. If she herself could not have Callendar, there was no reason why Lilli Barr should not have him. There was, she knew, nothing more to be done.

The voice of Amedé, the driver, roused her as he opened the door. She stepped out, bade him wait for orders, and turning, she saw little Thérèse standing in the window with the governess. It reminded her that she must see Thérèse’s friend Ella Nattatorini about the lease for the house at Houlgate.... The sea would do little Thérèse good. And there were servants to be engaged and the packing to be done....

The ocean of small things which made it possible to endure unhappiness rose and swept over her.

63

The news of the wedding came to Sabine the following autumn while she was staying in Newport. Even the war had not crowded out of the journals an event of such interest. The bride, she read, was well known to the public as a pianist. She had described herself as Ellen Tolliver, American by birth, age thirty-four years. (It was the first time that the world knew Lilli Barr was American, for Rebecca and the forgotten Schneidermann had done their work well.) The bridegroom was prominent and the member of many clubs, the last of his family, and had not lived in America for more than ten years. He was a captain in the French army and would be stationed in Tunis where they were to spend the honeymoon.

Laying aside the _Times_ and resuming her breakfast, she discovered that her only response to the news was one of shock at the haste with which the wedding had followed the divorce. It was almost as if they said that all these years she had stood between them, and now that Callendar was free, they must lose no time. Vaguely she felt that she should feel insulted. It was not until evening, when she drove over to dine with Mrs. Champion at The Cedars, that the sense of depression abated a little.

It was a gloomy place--the Cedars--built in the Seventies in the ornate style in favor at that time, and the presence of Mrs. Champion and the Virgins did nothing to raise the tone. Janey and Margaret (it seemed to her when she saw them in the dark cool rooms that she had known them always) were, as she calculated it, now forty-two and forty-five respectively and had reached the stage in which any spark that may have dwelt within their narrow-chested frames was now sublimated into an interest in garden clubs and work among the sailors. Things had changed ... enormously, but Janey and Margaret had gone on and on, living in the gloomy Cedars with their mother, perpetually shocked and stimulated by the stories of the oil magnates and financial adventurers who had taken possession of the Casino. It was these stories which provided the opening barrage of conversation at dinner.

“There is one woman who they say gives enormous parties,” Janey told her at dinner, “who was once the cook for a cousin of Mrs. Mallinson.”

They assured her, although she knew it well enough, that Newport was not the same. It had lost its tone; and in losing it (thought Sabine) it had left Mrs. Champion and the Virgins far behind. Bishop Smallwood, the Apostle to the Genteel, who came sometimes to spend a week with his “wa’am friend” Mrs. Champion, shared their disgust on Sabine’s right and expressed properly outraged sentiments.

If America were anything, Sabine thought, over her guinea fowl, it was change ... change ... change. And God help those who didn’t keep up with it! All the conversation gave her a curious sense of having passed poor Janey and Margaret and the Apostle and left them far behind. They seemed very far away. She felt that she was being kind to them in having come to dine at The Cedars. And once Mrs. Champion’s word had been law in that tight little world which was now exploded, leaving them stranded, remote and helpless and pitiful, pretending all the while that it was _their_ world, after all, which really counted.

She knew that they would find a bitter triumph in the news that had come with the morning _Times_, for they could not have forgotten how she stole Richard Callendar (by the lucky turn of events which they would never know) from under the noses of all of them. There had been so little excitement in their lives; certainly they had not forgotten, certainly they would not miss an opportunity for which they had waited so long. Yet they seemed so remote and negligible to her that she did not even wince when at last Mrs. Champion sidled up to the subject.

She was able to tell them and Bishop Smallwood, who in the decline of the season was fairly panting for gossip, that Lilli Barr _was_ the same girl who had played at that scandalous party of Thérèse Callendar’s. (Did they remember the naked Javanese--or was it Senegalese--dancer? asked Mrs. Champion. She had commanded Janey and Margaret to shield their faces with their fans). Lilli Barr _was_ the same girl with whom Richard Callendar had lunched so many times in the open window at Sherry’s. She saw fit to pass over the implication, thrust in slyly by Mrs. Champion, that he was making the girl, after so many years, an honest woman. Because she herself did not really know.

And speaking of the divorce, she remarked brazenly, “It was all settled without difficulty. I knew that he was planning to marry her. We talked it over and thought it the best solution.”

At which Mrs. Champion shook her head and made a clucking sound to indicate, as clearly as she dared, that the cold-blooded behavior of Sabine’s generation in such matters was obscene and immoral. And the Apostle to the Genteel, in obeisance to his high church opinions and his disapproval of divorce, looked gravely and silently into the depths of his sherbet, but with an air of believing that there was much to be said on both sides. (It would not be wise to offend so rich and fashionable a woman as Sabine Callendar.) Janey and Margaret only stared at her, with the round, stupid eyes of little girls.

And when she left (a little after nine when she could endure the party no longer) Mrs. Champion was able at last to deliver the blow which she had held in reserve all the evening. As they stood in the porte cochère waiting for Sabine’s motor to come up, she murmured under the protection of the darkness, “I could have warned you long ago, my dear. You should never have married Richard Callendar. If you had a mother--” She sighed and continued. “I should never have allowed Janey or Margaret to accept a proposal from him.”

Such a speech would have made her angry once and have aroused the sharp tongue for which she had been famous; but it made no difference to her now, save that it amused her to think of Janey or Margaret standing there, a pair of Alices in Wonderland, as the wife of Richard. And she reflected that she possessed an experience which they would never know. It was better to have been the wife of Callendar than to have dried up in the pale, shriveled fashion of Janey and Margaret (and they had been pretty once, in a silly, pink and white fashion). And she knew, with a curious pang of pity, that as they stood there in the shadow of their powerful mother, they too were thinking the same thing. They had never escaped that dowdy, stupid old woman....

“Good night,” she said. “I shan’t see you again. I am sailing on Friday.”

And then for the first time in her life, the wall of cold common sense collapsed and she exposed herself deliberately to the peril of boredom. “If you do decide to come to Paris, Janey, you must pay me a visit.” For there was something unbearable to her in the thought of Janey, free for the first time from the dominion of her mother, alone in Paris. It would be like a bird set free which no longer knows how to fly....

In the darkness Janey stammered and gushed like a girl of seventeen (Janey who would never see forty again), “It’s kind of you, Sabine. It’s wonderful. You see I’ve never been in Paris before without mother ... and I wouldn’t know just what to do ... I’ll come.” And she subsided into a chaos of maidenly gurglings.

But as Sabine drove away from the barren shadows of the Cedars, she reproached herself for having succumbed so weakly. Something had happened to her. A year ago she would not have done such a stupid thing.... “Perhaps,” she thought, above the distant roar of the surf, “I am growing old....”

* * * * *

As the months passed and she returned to Paris--a Paris gay and gaudy with the excitement of the last days of the peace conference--she came to understand the satisfaction which lies of knowing that a thing is finished. She would no longer go through the torture of seeing Callendar day after day, always at hand and yet remote as the summit of a cold mountain peak. All that was over, finished; and in the sense of finality there was peace. Until now she had never known how terribly the monstrous house in the Avenue du Bois had oppressed her. It was only since she had her own house in the Rue Tilsit, a house filled with all the exquisite things she cherished and which meant so much to her, that she understood completely the torture of the house which she had called “a sort of World’s Fair exhibit.”

For she had never, in all the years of their life together, been able to escape from it. Always Callendar had resisted silently, quietly in the way he had, until she had come in the end to accept the place without complaint. She had been silent in the hope that he might appreciate her silence and her virtue in submitting to his will. But he had simply taken it as a matter of course. She had never been able properly to entertain because the house was so awful that one could not even forget its shame in the hollow pretense that it was bizarre and consequently chic. And she knew now beyond all doubt that he liked the house. It satisfied him in the way it satisfied his mother. And she understood that he belonged in it just as Thérèse belonged there, more than ever since her Levantine blood had come into its own.

There in the Rue Tilsit, in her own house, among the things chosen by her own fastidious taste, she began once more to take up her own life, to descend from the unreal, extravagant level of the Callendars to a plane where she might exist in her proper relation to all about her. For more than twelve years, she came to realize, her life had not been her own, even for a moment. It had been Callendar’s to do with as he chose.... She had been his possession. It was only now that she was beginning again to be free....

In the beginning, after that day when she had said good-by so formally to Richard and his mother, when all the arrangements had been completed and Thérèse had stuffed all her papers back into her reticule, she could not bring herself to reënter the house, even to return for the possessions--pictures, bits of jade and silver and silk--which she had left behind her. It was only now, long afterward, when she had come to feel the full sense of her freedom that she considered going to fetch them.

At last, after she had been in Paris for weeks, she rang up the house and learning from Victorine that it was empty and that no one was expected (Thérèse was in London, Victorine told her, and Richard and Ellen still in Tunis) she arranged to call for the things late that afternoon.

64

It was a cold gray afternoon in the spring when the sun, breaking through the clouds, picked out for brief moments the faint green on the trees of the little park in the Avenue du Bois. Side by side the white houses stood, withdrawn a little from the street, flamboyant yet cold, ornate but barren. Sabine, watching them from the window of her tiny motor, was thankful again in a comfortable indefinite fashion that she had escaped from their insufferable pomp into the tiny, exquisite house in the Rue Tilsit.

Of late she had come at times to forget all the secret misery of the twelve years; she had been almost happy, as nearly happy as it was possible for her to be. It seemed to her now that circumstances had been cruel. She should have been born a man; and as a man, with a freedom from all the world of Mrs. Champion and her Virgins, she would have turned her mind to science. It was that sort of a mind; and it was only recently that she had come to believe it wasted ... frittered away on tiny, nonsensical things, things which in the end only ate into her own chance for happiness. In all her life there had been nothing which had taken possession of her--nothing save the barren, futile passion for her husband. Her life, she reflected, had been a wasted one. As a man, she would have been free ... free in the same fashion as Ellen Tolliver. She could have done as she liked, waiting upon no one. It seemed to her that her whole life had been spent in going from place to place, always in a tiny, expensive motor, arriving nowhere in the end. She was neither one thing nor the other; she had fallen somewhere between the sterility of Janey and Margaret Champion and the fierce activity of Ellen Tolliver.

Ellen Tolliver had been free, without background, without friends, alone, an adventuress (not at all in the evil sense) but one who had gone unhindered toward the thing which possessed her. Perhaps Ellen Tolliver would succeed now where she had failed. None, thought Sabine, knew the perils which lay ahead so well as herself and the old curiosity began to assail her; she wanted passionately to see Ellen Tolliver, to find out from her in any fashion possible, scrupulous or otherwise, what had happened in those months since she said good-by to Callendar and Thérèse. Perhaps Ellen saw him more clearly than herself; perhaps she had discovered his secret ... the nature of him. She had come to respect Ellen Tolliver.

The car halted. Amedé, neat and mustachioed, stood holding the door for her. With an effort of will she wrapped her fur cloak about her and stepped on to the pavement.

“Wait for me,” she said. “I may want you to carry some things. I’ll send Victorine when I want you.”

The big ornate house had the look of a place closed and deserted; the shutters were up and the shades drawn save in the entresol. At the door, Victorine, who had been clearly watching for her, stood waiting with a gleam in her eye which Sabine, from long association, was able to read. It was a look with which Victorine triumphantly announced household calamities. As Sabine stepped into the great hall, the housekeeper put her finger to her mustachioed lips and murmured, “Madame Callendar is here....” And then, with the air of turning the morsel about, she added, “The _young_ Madame Callendar.” And again, when her former mistress seemed not to be sufficiently shocked, she continued, “The _new_ Mrs. Callendar.”

For a moment Sabine stood hesitating, as if deciding whether to turn and run; it would have been an excellent excuse for never entering the house again. But far back in her consciousness, the old, insatiable curiosity gnawed and gnawed.

“Why has she returned?” she asked. “Where is Monsieur Callendar?”

Victorine shrugged her fat shoulders. “I don’t know, Madame. None of us knows anything. A cable came at noon to-day with the news that she was arriving ... to make things ready. I telephoned you.... I sent messages. The word came that you did not return for lunch and no one knew where you were.” With an air of drama, she said again, “The new Madame Callendar came in an hour ago.”

Sabine stood biting her crimson lips. If Ellen Tolliver had returned from Tunis, it was not likely that she would be going away soon, and it would be awkward to ask her permission to enter the house. Why had she returned? Why had Callendar not come with her? She turned to Victorine.

“Where is she now?”

“Resting,” replied Victorine, “in the boudoir.”

(That terrible room with the bearskin rugs and the mirrors sending back and forth innumerable reflections, as if the place were filled with a host of people ... a host of personalities all of whom were in the end contained within the flesh of the on-looker.... Many persons in each of us, thought Sabine. It was comic to think of Ellen Tolliver, so distinguished, so self-possessed, so cold, in the midst of all that cheap demi-mondaine splendor.)

“Are my things ready?”

“I was not sure, Madame, how many things you wished to take away with you. I got ready the things I _knew_. There may be others.”

Sabine made her decision. “I will come in and get them now. Say nothing to Madame Callendar. If she’s resting, I’ll hurry away without her knowing that I’ve come.”

She slipped a ten franc note into the insinuating palm of Victorine who promptly said, “It’s good to see you again, Madame,” in a voice which carried another meaning--“We would much prefer you to the new Mrs. Callendar.”

Sabine ignored her. “And Monsieur Callendar?” she asked again.

“He did not return, Madame. Nothing was said of him.”

* * * * *

In the boudoir everhead Ellen lay, with her black dog by her side, staring resentfully at the reflections. She was unable to rest. Lying on the Egyptian chaise longue she surveyed the room and decided that she would have the indecent mirrors taken down to-morrow. She was certain that Sabine was not responsible for them; she suspected, out of the knowledge that had come to her in the past six months, that they were perhaps an idea of Callendar. They were unhealthy, she thought; all the house, for that matter, was unhealthy, even the hall and the glimpse of the darkened drawing room she had been able to snatch on her way up the marble stairs with the red plush rail. It was unhealthy to be stared at, accused day in and day out by these innumerable stupid reflections. It was, truly, an amazing house, and so like Thérèse. Why, she wondered, had Sabine not changed it? Sabine, with her faultless taste, her reserve, her ironic shell, must have hated it, always. Perhaps ... perhaps she had not dared to oppose him. Perhaps he too, like his mother, had been fond of the house. Perhaps he had looked at Sabine (smiling with his mouth but not his eyes) and said, “We will let it rest for the present. Some day ...” and so slipped away in that inexplicable, unconquerable fashion he had revealed in the villa at Tunis. Perhaps.... She began to understand a little of what Sabine’s life had been. Out of her own short, vivid experience, she was able to reconstruct bits of it, here and there. And Sabine had endured it for more than twelve years....