The Green Muse

by Jessie Prichard Hunter

  “And yet when you used it—­”

  “It was my will I used. My will and my heart. I do not think he expected that. Even though he was proud of my ability to argue against his views, I truly believe that he expected, once it became time for me to choose, that the male qualities he thought he had instilled in my mind would bring me to the logical conclusion that he was, in fact, right, and that I would realize that my highest good lay in acquiescing to live as the wife of a landed blockhead that my male intellect would realize that my womanly nature could not, and should not, be denied.”

  “You certainly don’t sound as if you think like a man, Augustine!”

  “I don’t. I never have. I’ve never pretended to, either. I am deeply grateful for the education my father has given me. We have studied astronomy, botany, history, politics, Latin, religion, in addition, of course, to the things our mothers teach us: piano, singing, recitation, sewing and tatting, cooking. I am the most dreadful cook, Adelaide, whoever I do marry is going to be quite dissatisfied with me.”

  “Have you studied poetry, Augustine?”

  “A bit.”

  “I have lived for poetry,” said Adelaide. She seemed suddenly lit from within. “Poetry is apparently the tool of the devil, although how something so exalted, so noble—­forgive me, but this is my passion, and this is what brought me here, as much as anything else. Of course there was a man—­nobody ever seems to notice that there’s always, always a man involved in the downfall of a young girl, nobody insists a man be sent away for loving. There was a man—­a boy, really. I sent my poetry in to the weekly L’Illustration, and oh, Augustine, they printed it! My father was enraged, but my mother felt that perhaps this small success would diminish my need, that such an accomplishment would suffice for a woman. And it did, for a time, and although I doubt it really would have, I did not have a chance to find out because he wrote to me. François Nanet. A fine poet in his own right, and impressed that I had the courage to send my poetry in for publication, where he had not. And he loved my poetry! He understood every nuance, he traveled in the same atmosphere in which I lived. We corresponded. It was heaven. We fell in love . We exchanged photographs and arranged to meet. I felt as if my life, my true life, my intellectual, spiritual, and romantic life, was just beginning.”

  Her voice softened almost to a whisper. “I met him twice before my parents found out. Twice.”

  Everything I would never have asked was in that word twice. She was silent then, staring into the fire too far away to warm us, lost to a sweet reverie of what had brought her here. Finally she said, so quietly that I barely heard her, “It was worth it.”

  “I was in love, too,” I said, perhaps too quickly. “Nothing would ever have come of it. He was married. I dreamed, but that was all I did. My parents found my behavior strange. I would not concentrate on my piano, I dreamed over my lace and tatted peculiar patterns, unaware of my work, then . . .” I paused, and felt myself burn red, that curse I’ve always had, my skin not my own and now my body is not my own, either.

  I found I had spoken those last words aloud. My body is not my own.

  But Adelaide only laughed. “That’s true,” she said cheerfully. “We belong to Dr. Charcot.”

  “I meant—­”

  “I know what you meant. They try to control our minds and our wills by controlling all of our actions, don’t they? I understand it when we are small, but we are women now! The way I see it, if I am old enough to marry, I am old enough to love. And if I am old enough to love, oughtn’t I be trusted to choose my love? And oughtn’t you be free to feel? I cannot imagine, even on our short acquaintance, that you would be the sort of girl to ruin a marriage! If I ever find that my daughter is loving inappropriately, I hope that I will be able to believe in her goodness as I believe in yours, and to help her through her pain instead of condemning her to a place like this!”

  I said nothing.

  I had never met anyone like Adelaide. I felt that already I was a fully formed character in the adventure that was her life. That she had made up her mind about my character on such short notice, that she had shared the most intimate details of her emotional life with almost a total stranger. Well, it was a strange place we were in, and there was something endearing in her earnest need to see the best in me. I had never met such a lively intellect, such an open countenance, such an enthusiastic acceptance of the vagaries of love and life. It was why I gave her my story. Her openness invited openness and erased caution. Adelaide lived life at a pitch that few of us could ever hope to reach.

  She was looking at me with kind and expectant eyes.

  “The worst thing,” I said slowly, “is that now that I am here, Louis is completely gone. I cannot remember anything. I have lost his eyes. I have lost the smell of his hair.” These were things I did not think I would ever say to anyone. And I looked at her face and saw only gentleness and interest, things I had not experienced since I got here. I felt an urge to cry and saw with surprise that Adelaide’s eyes were moist.

  And I knew I had found a friend in this place.

  I came here determined not to lose hope, and God has sent me a girl who does not know how to lose hope. So I will remain Augustine, and not define myself as some ill and broken creature. I will remain the hopeful girl who dreams of one day dancing on the stage in Paris, the city of her dreams.

  Chapter 21

  Charles

  I WAS NOT surprised at what she asked of me next. “A woman,” she said. Her eyes glowed in the light of the candle next to our bed. Our bed—­in that dirty garret that had been a whore’s office.

  Her eye glowed like a cat’s.

  “A woman. To be found naked by the Seine.” V didn’t have to woo me with her body, her arts. I would have killed for her anyway. But I let her woo me. I lay exhausted in that narrow bed as rain hit the roof and the skylight, and when she asked me we both knew what I would say.

  V’s apartment contained no second entrance, which had rather disappointed me. But that night she surprised me by opening a cabinet that I had assumed to be meant to hold clothing. She said, “Hold my hand. It is dark,” and we descended a narrow, closed stair. The air was so close and hot that I could hardly breathe. I did not like close spaces, and was distinctly relieved when we exited at the ground floor into the back courtyard of the building. We were to use that staircase many times, finding that it lent our doings an enjoyable, if somewhat immature, feeling of getting away with something. And sometimes I would go around to the back, let myself in with my key, and walk very slowly up the stairs in the dark, no matter that mounting them discomfited me: I knew that as I lingered, V was arranging something for my pleasure, something unexpected, something hotly anticipated. The little leather cat-­o’-­nine-­tails to whip her pussy and her tits; ice water dripping onto the sugar cube on a slotted spoon; other things I try to think of seldom, to keep them fresh in my memory.

  It was raining outside, and it was windy, and chilly for the season. She wore a fox-­fur stole around her shoulders and hid her hands in a fox-­fur muff. Her hood was edged in fur; her face was hidden. The hem of her long, light pelisse was dirtied, the hem of her silk dress. The streets were barren; it wasn’t a good night for business, apparently. But V knew where to go. She led me around corners and through narrow alleys.

  I held my new knife in my pocket.

  Then she stopped so suddenly that I blundered into her. She moved ahead of me; she held her arm slightly out, fingers raised in warning that I be silent and follow her lead. We were almost abreast of a deeply recessed doorway. She released my arm; she nodded; that was all.

  I felt a visceral horror then, a shudder through my body and my soul. In that instant it seemed that what I would find in that dark womb would be too hideous to bear. Something worse than the dead woman V and I had determined to create tonight. I hesitated; I sensed a very great danger. I was acutely aware of V at m
y back; I could feel her excited breathing, although I could not hear it. She had not asked me for the knife. Standing there I realized the hideousness that awaited me: I was going to have to speak to the woman in that doorway, to ask her price and name my fancy. To notice whether she was fair, young, or tall; whether she spoke with the words of an educated woman; whether she was drunk. The man had been nothing to me. He had not uttered a sound. And to my V he was just another man. It was the living woman I recoiled before, not the dead one.

  She stepped out of the dark, and I swear I almost bolted. And she did the oddest thing: She smiled at me. She wasn’t drunk. She was very young, and not pretty. But her smile was genuine, or at least it seemed so to me. The smile played about her lips, as if she saw something of the absurdity of her situation, here in the rain on a solitary street, about to put herself at the mercy of a stranger. She looked me straight in the eye, as if she had nothing to fear.

  “Good evening,” I said stiffly. I had never done this, not on the street like this, greeting each other as though we had just been introduced at a musical evening.

  “Would you like to take me out for a drink?” she asked. She spoke with a British accent; she was not afraid at all.

  “Here,” I said. “I have this.” I took out my flask of absinthe. I drank, and I passed the flask to her. I handed her a small cube of sugar, and when she did not know what to do with it I pushed it gently between her lips. She let me pour absinthe through her lips parted by sugar; she shuddered and coughed, then she laughed.

  “That was our drink, then? Come with me. I live only two doors down.”

  I knew I had to kill her in that doorway. Her dead body would do us no good in a room that could identify her, in a place where she might not be found until she was unrecognizably foul. And although the street was empty of traffic, at any moment someone could walk or drive by; there were many men who would brave the weather for a girl like this.

  “What is your name?” I asked suddenly, and I took her shoulder and pushed her gently back into the doorway.

  “Tabby,” she said. “Is it to be here, then?” With the same frank, unafraid humor as before.

  “Here,” I said, and I forced her up against the door, which was farther back than I expected and caused an awkward, half-­falling embrace; and I kissed her. She started against the vehemence of my mouth, then opened hers. I was on fire. She felt nothing. I wanted to force myself on her, to take her hard against the hard glass of the door, but I did not. What was for me a monstrous conquest and betrayal both of love and of self was nothing for her but her daily bread. I stopped; I reared back so I could see her face.

  “Tabby,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.” She regarded me. She was waiting for further instructions.

  “Have you ever wanted to die?”

  “No,” she said without hesitation. How old was she? Seventeen, eighteen? I could see her measuring: how tall I was, and how close to her; how far to the opening of this recess, how far to the street, to the corner. Her face was calm.

  “Neither have I,” I said, and laughed.

  Her calm, watchful expression did not change.

  “I won’t hurt you,” I said.

  “No, sir,” she said, and I saw the knife in her hand. “No, you won’t.”

  I was so startled I nearly bolted. But I did not. V was waiting only a few feet away, with the same calm, watchful expression, I knew, as this girl made beautiful by her bravery.

  “I am sorry,” I said gently. “I seem to have given quite the wrong impression.” I sounded stiff. Had I been this young girl I would not have believed me.

  But apparently she did believe me. She put the knife back in the pocket of her skirt.

  “My room is just two doors down,” she said again. She indicated the direction with a tip of her head.

  “You can do what I want right here,” I said. I realized how coarse this girl’s life was and felt pity for her. But I could feel V’s impatience: She wanted her blood.

  “No, sir,” said the girl. Tabby. “It will be my room.” Again,she tipped her head; she intended that I go before her. No doubt there was something or someone there that made her feel safe.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I drove my knife into her.

  And she fought me. She was ready. She lunged sideways even as my knife found her flesh.

  She screamed, a long, harsh cry like an animal’s. My knife slipped, and my hand slipped in her blood. I grabbed her waist and felt a sharp regret: she was slender, and my hand had found the curve of flesh at her hip; I wanted to be holding her in her room, drinking absinthe and caressing her shapely waist and hip while something or someone nearby made her feel safe.

  I slammed her back against the recessed door. I caught my grip upon my knife and stabbed again, and her knife cut me. I was looking into her eyes; she’d cut my left arm, deep. She was staring sightless into my chest, so deep in concentration that she didn’t need to see. She didn’t seem afraid now, and she had gone quiet. She was strong, and she was fighting for her life.

  Her blood made her slippery as a fish. My arm was singing with pain. How could she keep fighting? My own pain was slowing my knife. She cut me again, at the shoulder this time; and she ducked and kicked me hard in the shin, and was past me.

  I jerked away from the sting in my leg. The girl stopped short and screamed, high and loud. I saw arms open, and I saw the girl fall into them. I heard V’s voice, low, fast, and smooth. Her arms surrounded the girl, and as those arms tightened into steel I grabbed the girl by the hair, pulled back her head, and slit her throat.

  She fell, that was all. I looked at her body a long time. My shoulder and arm throbbed with a steady beat. I could feel blood flowing down and dripping from my hand. The girl’s body lay as though it had never been capable of movement. Her face was turned away from me; I was glad of that. Her waist was still slender, the curve of her hip still pretty. I would stand here looking at her body forever; there would never be a moment after this one.

  I lifted my head. Laughter as free as a child’s. I looked up to see my beloved with her head thrown back against the sky. Her face was covered with blood that had spurted from the girl’s neck as she died. Blood ran down her bosom; there was blood in her mouth and she was smiling at me.

  Chapter 22

  From the Journal of Augustine Dechelette

  I HAVE JUST gotten back from a session with Dr. Charcot. The Great Dr. Charcot. I don’t think I have ever met a more frightening human being. Nothing in my girlish existence, nothing even in the depraved works I have read by Huysmans, by Baudelaire, could have prepared me for Dr. Charcot.

  An attendant appeared in my room this morning; first the door was closed and I was by myself, then the door had opened and the attendant was standing in my room, looking at me with no interest whatsoever.

  “You will be going to see Dr. Charcot now,” he said, with no more inflection than if he were reading from a list of sundries. I had the wild idea of screaming, of jumping about—­anything to put an expression on that flaccid face.

  I restrained myself. I have these very thoughts because I am mad, I know. I went, a compliant patient, pretending I wasn’t afraid. But I wished there was a woman there to comfort me. I missed Maman acutely. But then I thought of how frightened Maman would be herself and almost smiled.

  But I will remember the doctor’s office until the day I die. It was like entering Night. Black furniture. Black walls. On the heavy, glass-­topped desk, a black lamp with a black shade. Black velvet curtains drawn against the day. A black rug on black-­painted floorboards. I heard the click of the door lock. I stared around the room: no books, even the flagstones in front of the hearth were black marble, and the andirons black. Nothing to relieve the darkness except the puddle of electric light from the lamp.

  The doctor sat quietly in his high-­topped black-­leather chair behin
d the desk. I realized that I did not at all remember what he had looked like on the stage of the Amphitheatre. The aspect of his face was uncommonly stern, although his brow was noble. I had never before seen eyes so deep-­set; they were large, and in this light seemed lost, cavernous, and almost sad. There were deep furrows beneath them, as though he thought all night instead of sleeping. His lips were rather thin and permanently turned down at the corners; again this seemed more from constant rumination than from meeting the world with disapproval. His hair was mostly gray, a little long, and swept back from his head; there was a white streak just at the center of his brow. And there was something frightening in the intensity with which he regarded me. And something—­I cannot explain it. I felt that if this man were to ask anything, anything of me, I did not know if I could refuse. He was awe-­inspiring in the fullest sense of the word.

  “Sit down, Augustine.”

  “I am afraid of you,” I blurted out.

  “You are?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

  “Terrified,” I said, and sat. A small wooden chair painted black.

  “Green disease,” Dr. Charcot said calmly, making a steeple of his fingers in front of his mouth, “is a form of hysteria. It is why you are here.”

  “Am I mad?”

  “You are in need of help, Augustine. The outward symptoms of green disease are unmistakable. You have been evincing them quite convincingly.”

  There was something in his voice I knew I could use to my betterment here. Satisfaction, that was it. He might be seeing in me a means to an end. I remembered the attendant saying to me, “Dr. Duret says you will surely be of use to Dr. Charcot.” And the journal and ink. And Adelaide speaking of the lucky ones.

  I looked down demurely. The great red heat of embarrassment poured over my face. I concentrated on the way breath flowed into and out of my lungs without my volition as I tried to calm my heart; I was sure he could hear it beating.