Part 17

These four ... Lily, Madame Gigon, Criquette and Michou ... were the permanent tenants of Numero Dix. There were two others who came and went, spending now a week’s holiday, now a whole month or more. They even paid visits frequently to the lodge at Germigny l’Evec in the park of the Baron, where Lily spent the spring and the autumn of every year, taking a house during the summer at Houlgate where she lived as a Frenchwoman in the very heart of the small American colony. The transients in the establishment of Madame Shane were her son Jean and her cousin Ellen Tolliver. They flitted in and out like birds of passage, less regular in their arrival and departure, though no less spirited and noisy.

The Ellen Tolliver of the pompadour and starched shirt waists had become the Lilli Barr whom crowds packed concert halls to see and hear, whom music critics found themselves bound to commend--the same Lilli Barr whose photograph seated beside a great composer appeared in the Sunday supplements of American newspapers. This of course, the public never knew. It knew only that she was a fine pianist with a sensational presence and a vitality which reached out and engulfed them through the medium of surging music. It knew nothing of her past. Indeed there were few who knew she was an American. Her name might have been Russian or Austrian, Hungarian or German. It carried with it the glamor sought by the public which will receive the most sublime artist with indifference if her name happened to be Mary Smith and her origin Evanston, Indiana. This she realized. She shrewdly explained to Lily the evolution of her name.

“Barr,” she said, “is the name of my grandfather. I have a perfect right to it. Alone and unadorned it is not thrilling. Therefore I have chosen Lilli. That, my dear, is a tribute to you, because if it had not been for you I should probably be an old maid giving music lessons at fifty cents an hour to the daughters of mill clerks.” She laughed noisily. “Lilli Barr.... A great name, don’t you think? It will suit everybody. It will suit those who believe American musicians should be encouraged and it will suit those who must have a little exotic European sauce with their fowl. Lilli Barr.... It might be anything at all.”

“Lilli Barr” was a name which betrayed nothing of a rather materialistic elopement with a traveling salesman called Clarence Murdock. It betrayed nothing of Clarence’s quiet passing out of this life from a weakened heart too greatly tried by life with a robust and ambitious wife. It had nothing to do with a father, ruined by honesty, who wore away his middle age as clerk in an industrial bank. It gave no hint of a mother who, in an effort to follow her ambitious, migratory offspring, had kept a Manhattan rooming house for five years past. Decidedly, emphatically, it was an exotic name. There were even people who believed that she was the protegee of a German Baron named Unschaff (they had his name and the history of his amours) whom she repaid in the usual way. And this story Ellen would have been the last to deny, for she knew its value. She understood that the people who paid money for concerts must have something beside music. And she understood the value of money in a fashion never imagined by Lily. The critics might call her playing sensational, bordering even upon charlatanism, she would not deny it. The public liked an artist who understood the value of a gesture, who came upon the concert stage with air of a queen, who played with gusto and the sweep of a hurricane. She understood all that. It was not that she was insincere. There were those for whom she played exquisitely and with all the distilled beauty of a sensitive artist, with the same curious passion which had engulfed her music on that last night in the drawing-room at Cypress Hill. She was a clever woman, far more intelligent than Lily, and having been nourished in the midst of poverty and failure, her one God was success, a sort of embittered success which played upon the silliness and affectation of the world.

Certainly she had kept the promise made to Lily. She fitted no pattern, least of all the pattern of the Town. She had her own ruthless law, founded upon consideration for friends alone. She had her own thoughts and beliefs. Indeed she hated the pattern bitterly, so bitterly that she made a vow never to play in the Town no matter what the fee offered her. In appearance she resembled curiously her grandaunt, Lily’s mother. About her features there was the same bold carving. Her face was too long and her eyes a shade too green. Her figure held none of the voluptuous curves that softened her cousin’s beauty; on the contrary it was slim and strong. She walked with a fine free swing that carried in it a hint of masculinity. Beside Lily she was not beautiful at all; yet on the concert stage under the glow of the lights her beauty was infinitely more effective than Lily’s would have been.... Her energy was the energy descended directly from Hattie Tolliver. It crackled through her whole being. She was not like Lily, a woman of the world; there was a quality of directness and naivete, a breeziness springing from her background and her ancestry, which all the courts of Europe might never overcome. She was, above all else, herself, incapable of affectation or pretense. And this, she also understood, was a thing of great value because one expected it of the artistic temperament. An artist made no compromises.

LVII

One late afternoon in April, nineteen thirteen, when the trees in the garden were all feathery and soft with the first green of the Gallic springtime, Madame Gigon sat in her chair by the door of the long drawing-room bidding her guests good-by, one by one, as they left her usual Thursday _salon_. The drawing-room, owing to the sharp slope of the ground upon which the house was built, lay below the surface of the Rue Raynouard on the garden side of the house so that the guests leaving were forced to climb a long flight of stairs that led up to the street door. The stairway, opening directly into the drawing-room, provided a long, high vista leading up to a door, itself noticeable by its very insignificance. It was one of the charming features of the house that on the street side it was but one story high with a single door and a row of high windows which betrayed no hint of the beauty and space within its walls. On the garden side, however, the house presented a beautiful façade some three stories high, constructed of Caen stone and designed in the best manner of the eighteenth century. Lenôtre himself was said to have had a hand in the planning of the terraces and the pavilion that stood at a little distance completely embowered by shrubs and covered by a canopy made of the broad green leaves of plane trees. The house, after a fashion, turned its back upon the world, concealing its beauties from the eye of the random passerby, preserving them for the few who were admitted by the humble and unpretentious door that swung open upon the cobble stones of the Rue Raynouard. To the world it showed the face of a _petite bourgeoise_. To its friends it revealed the countenance of an eighteenth century marquise. And this fact had influenced for more than a century and a half the character of its tenants. The prosperous chocolate manufacturer abandoned it for the German palace in the Avenue de Jena for the very reason that Lily Shane seized it the moment it fell vacant. It was no sort of a house for one who desired the world to recognize his success and the character of his life, but it was an excellent house in which to live quietly, even secretly. It stood isolated in the very midst of Paris.

Madame Gigon sat in a high-backed chair, her small, withered body propped among cushions, her feet resting on a footstool. Since her eyes had grown dim she used her ears as a means of watching her guests; and these, after the fashion of such organs, had become sharper and sharper with the failure of her sight.

A fat and dowdy woman dressed all in white and wearing an extravagant white veil moved up to her.

“Good-by, Madame Gigon,” she said. “You come to me on Friday. Don’t forget. The Prince himself will be there.”

Madame Gigon, instead of peering at the white lady, leaned back. “Ah, it’s you, Héloise.... Yes, I will be there on Friday. But you are leaving early.”

“No,” replied the white lady, who was a countess and possessed a fine collection of armor. “No. Others have gone before me. I am dining out in the Boulevard St. Germain.”

Madame Gigon smiled. “With your Jewish friends?”

“Yes. It is a long way.”

“They say her eldest daughter is to marry a rich American ... millions. He is called Blumenthal.”

“Oui ... a very nice gentleman and the Good God alone knows how rich.”

“Well, money is a great thing ... the foundation of everything, Héloise.”

“Yes ... Good-by ... On Friday then. And fetch Madame Shane if she cares to come.”

And the plump white lady made her way with effort up the long polished stairway to the unpretentious doorway.

Madame Gigon, holding Michou on her lap, began fondling the dog’s ears. She leaned back and listened. Most of the guests had gone. Her sharp ears constructed the scene for her. A shrill and peevish voice in the far corner betrayed Madame de Cyon. The old woman saw her, fat, with dyed black hair and a round face well made up to conceal the ravages of time. A Russian woman, married to a French diplomat ... Bonapartist of course. She translated American novels into French to amuse herself and to help keep up the household in Neuilly. Yet she was rich, for her fat pig’s hands were covered with rings and the sable of her cloak was the best.

A man’s voice, ill-tempered and gruff, rose through the shadowy room. Captain Marchand, who did not get on with his wife. Tactless of Madame de Cyon to have led them to the bridge table to play with each other. Bridge-mad ... was Madame de Cyon ... bridge-mad, and she hated like the Devil to lose. To lose five francs was like losing one of her fat legs. Strange game ... this bridge. It put every one into a bad temper. Not at all like piquet.

“Deux pique!” announced Madame de Cyon.

“Passe!” ... “Passe!” ... “Passe!”

From the dining-room issued the sound of two voices in dispute, the one high-pitched, old and somewhat shrill, and the other rather deep and gentle, almost conciliatory. They drifted to Madame Gigon across the murmurous spaces of the drawing-room. Madame Blaise and “Mees Ellen’s” friend, Schneiderman. Madame Blaise was a Gasconne, old, shrill and vituperatory, yet somehow amusing and stimulating ... a little cracked perhaps but still full of spirit, and mysterious in the fashion of those whose existence has its foundations in a world of fanciful, half-mad unreality. She was tall and thin, with a mass of dyed red hair (it must have gone gray ten years earlier) under an old-fashioned purple bonnet trimmed with purple plumes and perched high on her head in the fashion of the eighties. Madame Gigon knew she was by the gateaux ... eating ... eating ... eating ... as if she starved herself at home. Yet she too was rich.

“Ah, you don’t know the Germans as I do!” came the high-pitched voice. “My fine young fellow! I tell you I have lived with them. I have been on business for the government. They are capable of anything. You will see....”

And then the voice of Schneidermann, mild and a little amused by the old lady. “Ah ...,” gently. “Perhaps ... perhaps. But I do not think that war is any longer possible.”

“Nevertheless,” persisted the voice. “One fine day you will go marching away like the rest.”

LVIII

Schneidermann was Alsatian, and Jew on his father’s side, rich, for his family owned steel mills at Toul and Nancy and in the very environs of Paris, as well as coal mines in the neighborhood of St. Quentin and La Bassée. Schneidermann, tall, handsome, swarthy ... was beautiful in an austere, sensual fashion as only Jews can be beautiful. He came sometimes to play the ’cello with “Mees Ellen,” choosing queer music they called “modern” that had none of the beauty and melody of Offenbach and Gounod.

The voice of “Mees Ellen” joining the pair in the dining-room.... “War!... War!... Nonsense! There can’t be any war. I must play in Berlin and Munich next season.” Her voice rang with genuine conviction, as if she really believed that war itself dared not interfere with still more amazing successes. Madame Blaise’ cynical laugh answered her.

“Ah, you young people ... you young people. What do you know of war and politics? I have been through wars, through revolutions, you understand. I know about these things. I am as old as time.”

The old woman was talking in her most fantastic vein. It was her habit to talk thus as if she were wise beyond all people. She was, as Madame Gigon said, a little cracked on this side of her.

“I know ... I know,” she continued to mutter in the most sinister fashion until an unusually large madeleine put an end to her talk.

“How much did you say ... eight francs?” It was the peevish voice of Madame de Cyon settling her bridge debts.

“Eight francs,” came the gruff reply of Captain Marchand. “Eight francs, I tell you.” And then the tinkling of the Russian’s woman’s innumerable gold bangles as she thrust her fat bejeweled hand into a small purse to wrench loose from it the precious eight francs. “I had no luck to-day ... no luck at all,” she observed in the same irritable voice. “No cards at all. What can one do without cards? Now last week I won ...” And she fell to recounting past victories while Captain Marchand’s chair scraped the floor savagely.

And then the voice of Madame Blaise quite close at hand, bidding Madame Gigon good-by.

“On Tuesday, then, Louise. I shall expect you.”

“On Tuesday,” repeated Madame Gigon.

“And bring Madame Shane if she wishes to come. But not ‘Mees Tolliver.’ I can’t bear her and her American ways.” The old harridan bent lower, her reticule shaking with the aged trembling of her thin body. “That Schneidermann!” she observed scornfully. “He is a fool! The men I knew when I was young were interested in revolutions and politics ... not music. Music! Bah!” And to show her disgust she spat on the bare floor.... Then she made a hissing noise and swept up the long dim stairway, her boots squeaking as she walked.

Then the confusion of farewells as the last guests departed, Madame de Cyon passing by, still in bad humor over her losses.

“On Friday, Madame Gigon,” she said. “My husband will be there. He is home from the Balkans and full of news.”

“Of the wars I suppose.... On Friday, Madame.”

“And tell Madame Shane she is expected also.”

Then Captain Marchand and Madame Marchand, also in a bad humor because they got on badly. Madame Marchand’s day fell on Monday and she too asked the old woman to bring Madame Shane. Her invitation was made in the same oblique fashion as the other. “Bring Madame Shane if she cares to come.”

At last there remained no one save those whom Lily, in her vague, lazy fashion called “the family.” These were old Madame Gigon, Ellen Tolliver, Jean, herself and the Baron.

As the blond little Captain Marchand, pompously clanking his spurs as he walked, disappeared up the darkening reaches of the long stairway, Jean, who had been reading in a corner reserved for himself, sprang up with the bound of a young animal and ran across to Ellen and Schneidermann.

“Alors! Viens donc ... la musique!” he cried, seizing her by the hand while she struggled against his youthful strength, and Schneiderman laughed at his exuberance. She resisted, bracing her strong slim body and indulging in a mock struggle.

“Not a sound from me,” she replied. “Unless we talk English. I can make no more effort with this waiter’s chatter.”

It was a price which she exacted frequently, for she spoke French badly, though with great vigor, and with an accent so atrocious that it seemed quite beyond hope of improvement. Her English carried the drawling tang of the middle west. She called “dog” _dawg_ and “water” _watter_.

Jean resembled his mother. His hair, like hers, was red though less soft and more carroty. His nose was short, straight, and conveyed an impression of good humor and high spirits. He was tall for his age and strongly built with a slim figure which gave every promise of one day growing into the bulky strength of the Governor. He possessed a restless, noisy, energy quite incomprehensible to Lily. To-day he wore the uniform of a cadet at the cavalry school at St. Cyr. It was the idea of the Baron, himself a cuirassier, that Jean should be trained for the cavalry. “If he does not like it, he may quit,” he told Lily. As for Jean, he appeared to like it well enough. He was as eager for a war as Madame Blaise had been certain of one.

“Come along, Nell,” he cried. “Be a good cousin, and play that four-handed stuff with me.”

Madame Gigon, with Michou and Criquette waddling amiably after her, stole quietly away to her room to lock her door against the hideous sounds which Ellen, Schneidermann and Jean made when they played what they called modern “music.”

From the shelter of a divan placed between two of the tall windows, Lily and the Baron watched the three noisy musicians. On the verge of middle-age, her beauty appeared to have reached its height. There are those who would have preferred her as a young girl, fresher, more gentle and more naive. But likewise there are those who find the greatest beauty in the opulent women of Titian, and it was this beauty which Lily now possessed. She wore a black tea-gown, loosely and curiously made with a collar which came high about her throat and emphasized the ivory green tint of her skin and the copper red of her hair. She lay back among the cushions watching Jean with the triumphant, possessive look which strayed into her dark eyes whenever her son was with her. It was an expression so intense as to be almost tragic.

The Baron smiled too, but his smile was concealed somewhat by the fierce black military mustaches that adorned his face. They were the mustaches of the French army, very long, very luxurious, and purposely rather ill-kempt. There was nothing silky about them. On the contrary they were the mustaches of an _homme de guerre_--stiff, bristling and full of vitality. He was a dark, wiry Frenchman, with strong, nervous hands and very bright black eyes which clouded easily with anger. He was perhaps four or five years older than Lily and did not look his age. Indeed his figure was youthful and muscular with the hard, fierce masculinity which belongs to some men of the Latin race.

Whenever he regarded Ellen, it was with a stern glance that was almost hostile. They did not get on well. Even Lily, indifferent and unobservant, must have seen the hidden clash of their two strong natures. It appeared that he resented Ellen’s wilfulness and even the masculine simplicity of her clothes. On this evening she was at her best. Her dark hair she no longer wore in the manner of Lily. It was drawn straight back from her high forehead with an uncompromising severity and done in a knot low on the back of her strong, well-shaped neck. Jean dragged her by sheer force of strength to the piano where the two sat down noisily, the boy searching through the music while Ellen played the most amazing, delicate and agile roulades and cascades of notes on the polished ivory keyboard. Schneidermann, thrown a little into the background by the wild exuberance of the pair, drew up a chair and waited quietly until it was time for him to turn the pages.

And during these preliminaries Lily and the Baron rose and made their way silently through one of the tall windows on to the terrace and thence into the garden. Lily herself confessed that she could not abide the new music.

“I do not understand it,” she told her cousin. “And I do not find it beautiful. It is beyond me, I confess. I cannot see what you and Jean find in it. I suppose it is because I am growing old. You and Jean belong to the same generation. I am too old for new ideas.” And for the first time her laugh was not all geniality and warmth. It carried a fine edge of bitterness, scarcely to be discerned but none the less unmistakable.

And now in the soft spring twilight of the garden she and the Baron walked along the neat gravel paths until they reached the wall shutting out the Rue de Passy. Here they sat for a time on a stone bench saying nothing, remaining quite still and silent. And at last as the darkness grew more heavy they rose and wandered off again, aimlessly and slowly, until in the shadow of a laburnum tree, the man seized her suddenly and kissed her, long and passionately. And after a little while when it was quite dark they entered the pavilion hidden by shrubbery where Jean lived when he was home on a holiday.

The garden lay breathless and silent. Even the rumbling noises from the street beyond the wall had died away with the coming of darkness. From the distant Seine arose the faint whistle of the St. Cloud steamer, and through the tall window drifted in wild fragments the savage, barbaric chords of Stravinsky’s music.

LIX

Day in and day out Lily’s life followed its easy, happy course. Always there were diversions, always gaiety, always people. Yet there were times now--indeed they seemed to have begun upon her return from America following her mother’s death--when a cloud of sadness descended upon her, times when she would withdraw suddenly to her own room as if some tiny thing, a word, a gesture, an intonation, had set fire to a train of secret memories. Frequently she kept her room for the rest of the day, seeing no one, lunching and dining alone on a gilt table placed before her chaise longue by the window.

These sudden fits of melancholy disturbed Ellen who remarked on them gravely to old Madame Gigon.

“She was never like that before. I can’t see what it is that disturbs her.”

Madame Gigon saw no cause for alarm. “It’s true,” she said. “She was never like that before. But it may be that she grows tired. You see she is growing older, my dear Mees Ellen. All of us, as we grow older, like moments of solitude and quiet. It gives one time to reflect on life. You don’t understand that yet. You’re too young. But some day you will understand. As you get older you begin to wonder what it’s all about ... (_pourquoi le combat_).”

“Perhaps,” replied Ellen with a vigorous shrug. “I’m sure it can’t be her mother. It might, of course, be Irene.”

And they fell to discussing for the hundredth time the case of Irene, whom Madame Gigon had not seen since she was a little girl. They talked of her strange behavior, Madame Gigon wagging her old head, staring before her with sightless eyes.

“It is tragic ... a life like that,” she would say. “A life wasted. You know she was a pretty little girl.... She could have married.”

They spoke of her as if she were dead. It was true that to them ... to Ellen, to Madame Gigon, she was forever lost. Perhaps they were right, with that instinctive knowledge which underlies the consciousness of women chattering together over the strangeness of human behavior. Perhaps Irene _was_ dead.... Perhaps she had been dead since a certain night when the last traces of her faith in humanity were throttled. It was true that she had left the world and turned her faith toward God alone, as if she were already dead and in purgatory.

“She was always queer,” Ellen would say.

And then Madame Gigon, as if she were conscious of toying with thoughts of blasphemy, would say piously:

“But she is a good woman, who has given her life to good work and prayer.”

But she spoke as if trying to convince herself, as if she did not quite believe what she said.