by Willa Cather
In time the mother was reassured by letters and documents from England. She wished to do well for her daughter, and what very brilliant opportunities were there in Martinique? As for the girl, she wanted to see the world; she had never been off the island. Longstreet made a settlement upon Madame the mother, and submitted to the two services, civil and religious. He took his bride directly back to England. He had not advised his friends of his marriage; he was a young man who kept his affairs to himself.
He kept his wife in the country for some months. When he opened his town house and took her to London, things went as he could not possibly have foreseen. In six weeks she was the fashion of the town; the object of admiration among his friends, and his father’s friends. Gabrielle was not socially ambitious, made no effort to please. She was not witty or especially clever,—had no accomplishments beyond speaking French as naturally as English. She said nothing memorable in either language. She was beautiful, that was all. And she was fresh. She came into that society of old London like a quiet country dawn.
She showed no great zest for this life so different from anything she had ever known; a quiet wonderment rather, faintly tinged with pleasure. There was no glitter about her, no sparkle. She never dressed in the mode: refused to wear crinoline in a world that billowed and swelled with it. Into drawing-rooms full of ladies enriched by marvels of hairdressing (switches, ringlets, puffs, pompadours, waves starred with gems), she came with her brown hair parted in the middle and coiled in a small knot at the back of her head. Hairdressers protested, as one client after another adopted the “mode Gabrielle.” (The knot at the nape of the neck! Charwomen had always worn it; it was as old as mops and pails.)
The English liked high colour, but Lady Longstreet had no red roses in her cheeks. Her skin had the soft glow of orient pearls,—the jewel to which she was most often compared. She was not spirited, she was not witty, but no one ever heard her say a stupid thing. She was often called cold. She seemed unawakened, as if she were still an island girl with reserved island good manners. No woman had been so much discussed and argued about for a long stretch of years. It was to the older men that she was (unconsciously, as it seemed) more gracious. She liked them to tell her about events and personages already in the past; things she had come too late to see.
Longstreet, her husband, was none too pleased by the flutter she caused. It was no great credit to him to have discovered a rare creature; since everyone else discovered her the moment they had a glimpse of her. Men much his superiors in rank and importance looked over his head at his wife, passed him with a nod on their way to her. He began to feel annoyance, and waited for this flurry to pass over. But pass it did not. With her second and third seasons in town her circle grew. Statesmen and officers twenty years Longstreet’s senior seemed to find in Gabrielle an escape from long boredom. He was jealous without having the common pretexts for jealousy. He began to spend more and more time on his yacht in distant waters. He left his wife in his town house with his spinster cousin as chaperone. Gabrielle’s mother came on from Martinique for a season, and was almost as much admired as her daughter. Sir Wilfred found that the Martini-quaises had considerably overshadowed him. He was no longer the interesting “original” he had once been. His unexpected appearances and disappearances were mere incidents in the house and the life which his wife and his cousin had so well organized. He bore this for six years and then, unexpectedly, demanded divorce. He established the statutory grounds, she petitioning for the decree. He made her a generous settlement.
This brought about a great change in Gabrielle Longstreet’s life. She remained in London, and bought a small house near St. James’s Park. Longstreet’s old cousin, to his great annoyance, stayed on with Gabrielle,—the only one of his family who had not treated her like a poor relation. The loyalty of this spinster, a woman of spirit, Scotch on the father’s side, did a good deal to ease Gabrielle’s fall in the world. For fall it was, of course. She had her circle, but it was smaller and more intimate. Fewer women invited her now, fewer of the women she used to know. She did not go afield for those who affected art and advanced ideas; they would gladly have championed her cause. She replied to their overtures that she no longer went into society. Her men friends never flinched in their loyalty. Those unembarrassed by wives, the bachelors and widowers, were more assiduous than ever. At that dinner table where Gabrielle and “the Honourable MacPhairson,” as the old cousin was called, were sometimes the only women, one met promising young men, not yet settled in their careers, and much older men, so solidly and successfully settled that their presence in a company established its propriety.
Nobody could ever say exactly why Gabrielle’s house was so attractive. The men who had the entrée there were not skilful at defining such a thing as “charm” in words: that was not at all their line. And they would have been reluctant to admit that a negligible thing like temperature had anything to do with the pleasant relaxation they enjoyed there. The chill of London houses had been one of the cruellest trials the young Martiniquaise had to bear. When she took a house of her own, she (secretly, as if it were a disgraceful thing to do) had a hot-air furnace put in her cellar, and she kept coal fires burning in the grates at either end of the drawing-room. In colour, however, the rooms were not warm, but rather cool and spring-like. Always flowers, and not too many. There was something more flower-like than the flowers,—something in Gabrielle herself (now more herself than ever she had been as Lady Longstreet); the soft pleasure that came into her face when she put out her hand to greet a hero of perhaps seventy years, the look of admiration in her calm grey eyes. A century earlier her French grandmothers may have greeted the dignitaries of the Church with such a look,—deep feeling, without eagerness of any kind. To a badgered Minister, who came in out of committee meetings and dirty weather, the warm house, the charming companionship which had no request lurking behind it, must have been grateful. The lingering touch of a white hand on his black sleeve can do a great deal for an elderly man who has left a busy and fruitless day behind him and who is worn down by the unreasonable demands of his own party. Nothing said in that room got out into the world. Gabrielle never repeated one man to another,—and as for the Honourable MacPhairson, she never gave anything away, not even a good story!
In time there came about a succession of Great Protectors, and Gabrielle Longstreet was more talked about than in the days of her sensational debut. Whether any of them were ever her lovers, no one could say. They were all men much older than she, and only one of them was known for light behaviour with women. Young men were sometimes asked to her house, but they were made to feel it was by special kindness. Henry Seabury himself had been taken there by young Hardwick, when he was still an undergraduate. Seabury had not known her well, however, until she leased a house in New York and spent two winters there. A jealous woman, and a very clever one, had made things unpleasant for her in London, and Gabrielle had quitted England for a time.
Sitting alone that night, recalling all he had heard of Lady Longstreet, Seabury tried to remember her face just as it was in the days when he used to know her; the beautiful contour of the cheeks, the low, straight brow, the lovely line from the chin to the base of the throat. Perhaps it was her eyes he remembered best; no glint in them, no sparkle, no drive. When she was moved by admiration, they did not glow, but became more soft, more grave; a kind of twilight shadow deepened in them. That look, with her calm white shoulders, her unconsciousness of her body and whatever clothed it, gave her the air of having come from afar off.
And now it was all gone. There was something tense, a little defiant in the shoulders now. The hands that used to lie on her dress forgotten, as a bunch of white violets might lie there … Well, it was all gone.
Plain women, he reflected, when they grow old are—simply plain women. Often they improve. But a beautiful woman may become a ruin. The more delicate her beauty, the more it owes to some exquisite harmony in modelling and line, the more completely it is des
troyed. Gabrielle Longstreet’s face was now unrecognizable. She gave it no assistance, certainly. She was the only woman in the dining-room who used no make-up. She met the winter barefaced. Cheap counterfeits meant nothing to a woman who had had the real thing for so long. She must have been close upon forty when he knew her in New York,—and where was there such a creature in the world today? Certainly in his hurried trip across America and England he had not been gladdened by the sight of one. He had seen only cinema stars, and women curled and plucked and painted to look like them. Perhaps the few very beautiful women he remembered in the past had been illusions, had benefited by a romantic tradition which played upon them like a kindly light … and by an attitude in men which no longer existed.
V
When Mr. Seabury awoke the next day it was clear to him that any approach to Madame de Couçy must be made through the amiable-seeming friend, Madame Allison as she was called at the hotel, who always accompanied her. He had noticed that this lady usually went down into the town alone in the morning. After breakfasting he walked down the hill and loitered about the little streets. Presently he saw Madame Allison come out of the English bank, with several small parcels tucked under her arm. He stepped beside her.
“Pardon me, Madame, but I am stopping at your hotel, and I have noticed that you are a friend of Madame de Couçy, whom I think I used to know as Gabrielle Longstreet. It was many years ago, and naturally she does not recognize me. Would it displease her if I sent up my name, do you think?”
Mrs. Allison answered brightly. “Oh, she did recognize you, if you are Mr. Seabury. Shall we sit down in the shade for a moment? I find it very warm here, even for August.”
When they were seated under the plane trees she turned to him with a friendly smile and frank curiosity. “She is here for a complete rest and isn’t seeing people, but I think she would be glad to see an old friend. She remembers you very well. At first she was not sure about your name, but I asked the porter. She recalled it at once and said she met you with Hardwick, General Hardwick, who was killed in the war. Yes, I’m sure she would be glad to see an old friend.”
He explained that he was scarcely an old friend, merely one of many admirers; but he used to go to her house when she lived in New York.
“She said you did. She thought you did not recognize her. But we have all changed, haven’t we?”
“And have you and I met before, Madame Allison?”
“Oh, drop the Madame, please! We both speak English, and I am Mrs. Allison. No, we never met. You may have seen me, if you went to the Alhambra. I was Cherry Beamish in those days.”
“Then I last saw you in an Eton jacket, with your hair cropped. I never had the pleasure of seeing you out of your character parts, which accounts for my not recognizing—”
She cut him short with a jolly laugh. “Oh, thirty years and two stone would account, would account perfectly! I always did boy parts, you remember. They wouldn’t have me in skirts. So I had to keep my weight down. Such a comfort not to fuss about it now. One has a right to a little of one’s life, don’t you think?”
He agreed. “But I saw you in America also. You had great success there.”
She nodded. “Yes, three seasons, grand engagements. I laid by a pretty penny. I was married over there, and divorced over there, quite in the American style! He was a Scotch boy, stranded in Philadelphia. We parted with no hard feelings, but he was too expensive to keep.” Seeing the hotel bus, Mrs. Allison hailed it. “I shall be glad if Gabrielle feels up to seeing you. She is frightfully dull here and not very well.”
VI
The following evening, as Seabury went into the dining-room and bowed to Mrs. Allison, she beckoned him to Madame de Couçy’s table. That lady put out her jewelled hand and spoke abruptly.
“Chetty tells me we are old acquaintances, Mr. Seabury. Will you come up to us for coffee after dinner? This is the number of our apartment.” As she gave him her card he saw that her hand trembled slightly. Her voice was much deeper than it used to be, and cold. It had always been cool, but soft, like a cool fragrance,—like her eyes and her white arms.
When he rang at Madame de Couçy’s suite an hour later, her maid admitted him. The two ladies were seated before an open window, the coffee table near them and the percolator bubbling. Mrs. Allison was the first to greet him. In a moment she retired, leaving him alone with Madame de Couçy.
“It is very pleasant to meet you again, after so many years, Seabury. How did you happen to come?”
Because he had liked the place long ago, he told her.
“And I, for the same reason. I live in Paris now. Mrs. Allison tells me you have been out in China all this while. And how are things there?”
“Not so good now, Lady Longstreet, may I still call you? China is rather falling to pieces.”
“Just as here, eh? No, call me as I am known in this hotel, please. When we are alone, you may use my first name; that has survived time and change. As to change, we have got used to it. But you, coming back upon it, this Europe, suddenly … it must give you rather a shock.”
It was she herself who had given him the greatest shock of all, and in one quick, penetrating glance she seemed to read that fact. She shrugged: there was nothing to be done about it. “Chetty, where are you?” she called.
Mrs. Allison came quickly from another room and poured the coffee. Her presence warmed the atmosphere considerably. She seemed unperturbed by the grimness of her friend’s manner; and she herself was a most comfortable little person. Even her too evident plumpness was comfortable, since she didn’t seem to mind it. She didn’t like living in Paris very well, she said; something rather stiff and chilly about it. But she often ran away and went home to see her nieces and nephews, and they were a jolly lot. Yes, she found it very pleasant here at Aix. And now that an old friend of Gabrielle’s had obligingly turned up, they would have someone to talk to, and that would be a blessing.
Madame de Couçy gave a low, mirthless laugh. “She seems to take a good deal for granted, doesn’t she?”
“Not where I am concerned, if you mean that. I should be deeply grateful for someone to talk to. Between the three of us we may find a great deal.”
“Be sure we shall,” said Mrs. Allison. “We have the past, and the present—which is really very interesting, if only you will let yourself think so. Some of the people here are very novel and amusing, and others are quite like people we used to know. Don’t you find it so, Mr. Seabury?”
He agreed with her and turned to Madame de Couçy. “May I smoke?”
“What a question to ask in these days! Yes, you and Chetty may smoke. I will take a liqueur.”
Mrs. Allison rose. “Gabrielle has a cognac so old and precious that we keep it locked in a cabinet behind the piano.” In opening the cabinet she overturned a framed photograph which fell to the floor. “There goes the General again! No, he didn’t break, dear. We carry so many photographs about with us, Mr. Seabury.”
Madame de Couçy turned to Seabury. “Do you recognize some of my old friends? There are some of yours, too, perhaps. I think I was never sentimental when I was young, but now I travel with my photographs. My friends mean more to me now than when they were alive. I was too ignorant then to realize what remarkable men they were. I supposed the world was always full of great men.”
She left her chair and walked with him about the salon and the long entrance hall, stopping before one and another; uniforms, military and naval, caps and gowns; photographs, drawings, engravings. As she spoke of them the character of her voice changed altogether,—became, indeed, the voice Seabury remembered. The hard, dry tone was a form of disguise, he conjectured; a protection behind which she addressed people from whom she expected neither recognition nor consideration.
“What an astonishing lot they are, seeing them together like this,” he exclaimed with feeling. “How can a world manage to get on without them?”
“It hasn’t managed very well, has it? You may rememb
er that I was a rather ungrateful young woman. I took what came. A great man’s time, his consideration, his affection, were mine in the natural course of things, I supposed. But it’s not so now. I bow down to them in admiration … gratitude. They are dearer to me than when they were my living friends,—because I understand them better.”
Seabury remarked that the men whose pictures looked down at them were too wise to expect youth and deep discernment in the same person.
“I’m not speaking of discernment; that I had, in a way. I mean ignorance. I simply didn’t know all that lay behind them. I am better informed now. I read everything they wrote, and everything that has been written about them. That is my chief pleasure.”
Seabury smiled indulgently and shook his head. “It wasn’t for what you knew about them that they loved you.”
She put her hand quickly on his arm. “Ah, you said that before you had time to think! You believe, then, that I did mean something to them?” For the first time she fixed on him the low, level, wondering look that he remembered of old: the woman he used to know seemed breathing beside him. When she turned away from him suddenly, he knew it was to hide the tears in her eyes. He had seen her cry once, a long time ago. He had not forgotten.
He took up a photograph and talked, to bridge over a silence in which she could not trust her voice. “What a fine likeness of X—! He was my hero, among the whole group. Perhaps his contradictions fascinated me. I could never see how one side of him managed to live with the other. Yet I know that both sides were perfectly genuine. He was a mystery. And his end was mysterious. No one will ever know where or how. A secret departure on a critical mission, and never an arrival anywhere. It was like him.”
Madame de Couçy turned, with a glow in her eyes such as he had never seen there in her youth. “The evening his disappearance was announced … Shall I ever forget it! I was in London. The newsboys were crying it in the street. I did not go to bed that night. I sat up in the drawing-room until daylight; hoping, saying the old prayers I used to say with my mother. It was all one could do … Young Harney was with him, you remember. I have always been glad of that. Whatever fate was in store for his chief, Harney would have chosen to share it.”