Читать книгу The Wasted Generation - Owen Johnson - Страница 9

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Paris

At the Quai d’Orsay, where I debarked three nights ago, the old days came back to me with a vividness of pain which I had not expected; the old careless days of another world which has been snuffed out. I walked out alone, being en permission, feeling my way along the black banks of the hidden Seine. The street where she had lived was close at hand and habit was so strong that despite my reason I felt the tug of old instinct. Where was now that light, reckless crowd, so indefatigable in the scampering pursuit of pleasure? Scattered to the four winds of heaven. Most of the women have drifted away,—some to London, some to America; one, a fortune’s favorite, died in an air raid; another, a suicide after her lover’s death, one whom I had not thought capable of a real passion. The test of war has redeemed some of the men—there were the good with the bad—by some spark of a saving ancestry, perhaps simply from a gambler’s love of a new hazard. Those who were born to fight have found a purpose; the rest,—well, it does not much matter what has become of the froth: all that matters is that a man or two, whom once we despised, has redeemed himself with an heroic death. All these memories are inseparably bound up with the experience which, I suppose, was bound to come into my life,—that I believed erased from my memory, but which to-day remains a haunting, ominous specter which sooner or later must be faced.

The memory that obtrudes is of a clouded page in my life—a chapter which I fatuously hoped had been closed and laid aside forever—something to be regretted, to stand as a warning in the future, and yet inclining me to a greater charity. This I know is the experience of many men. That in my case, by some malignant turn of the fates, it should remain in tragic permanence, is something against which I rebel.

* * * * *

I think that I can now look back dispassionately upon the David Littledale of 1913 and recognize the impulses which led me into an infatuation which, without the outbreak of the great war, would in all probability have left me a moral wreck.

Even as I write this severe judgment, I react against it. Perhaps I am too harsh upon myself. It may be that of my own will I would have found the strength to free myself of the humiliating bondage—perhaps—but I am not sure.

Yet I am quite certain that not for a moment was I in love with Madame de Tinquerville. Curiosity, vanity, habit, idleness; the pride of a young man still a boy in the ways of the world; a fancied domination over a woman accomplished in artifice; an unsated appetite for pleasure; susceptibility to flattery; the old Littledale failing of intense exaggeration in all things; all these motives I clearly see. And then,—I was playing at love, which often is more dangerous than love itself.

* * * * *

I have frequently heard women of the demimonde referred to as dangerous women. There is nothing dangerous in such women except to a young and inexperienced man, with quick sympathies and a conscience. They carry their warning on their faces. The woman who is truly dangerous is the unsuspected woman who waits behind the mask of a Madonna. Since my arrival, twenty instances have reminded me of the woman I knew as Letty, Madame de Tinquerville.

I do not know that I can be entirely dispassionate as I look back over this incident in my life. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner: to understand everything is to forgive everything. There may have been in her life, in her inheritance, or in her tradition—perhaps in her earlier contact with men—things which would make her comprehensible. I do not know them. There is a mystery of evil and good in us that defies analysis. It is so in my case; it must be so in hers. And yet,—she is the only human being in my experience who did evil from the sheer delight of doing it. She did it as a child plays with some defenceless animal. Yet there was nothing obvious about her, and in all the different societies through which she moved I doubt if more than five men ever suspected what lay behind her quiet, strictly conventional attitude toward life.

* * * * *

I met her first at the studio of a fashionable artist, Enrico Gonzalez, in the midst of a Goya fête, to which the fashionable, slightly déclassée society of cosmopolitan Paris had come, eager for a new sensation.

I saw her directly I had passed under the swinging lanterns and entered the glowing studio. Amid the gay confusion of reds and yellows, greens and purples of gala Spain, she stood out, slight and dark in the black velvet serenity of her costume,—an infanta with a certain intuitive dignity of childish astonishment.

She saw my persisting look, studied me a moment, and asked a friend to present me. The next moment I was at her side, flattered, inviting her to dance.

She shook her head with a smile.

“What—not dance?”

“Never, in public.”

She motioned me to a seat and, looking at me intently, said:

“Tell me, where have we met before?”

“I am certain that I have never seen you.” I was on the point of adding, “For I could not have forgotten it,” but instinctively feeling how banal the answer would seem to her satiated ears, I refrained.

She looked at me, unconvinced.

“You are quite certain?”

“Yes, quite.”

“As children, perhaps?”

“No.”

My manner seemed to amuse her. She studied my face a moment, and then said:

“You are from the South; from Virginia, perhaps?”

“Not even that. A Yankee from Connecticut.”

“Strange! I shouldn’t have thought it.”

After a moment, as if her interest in me had ceased, she asked:

“You like to dance, of course?”

I bowed my assent.

“There is a little girl from the Opéra over there who dances beautifully. Ask her to dance.” Then, as I rose, perplexed, not quite certain whether to be angry or not,—“and later, come back and talk to me.”

The conversation had been in French and, though I was certain she was not of that nationality, I was unable to place her. I know that my first movement was one of mistrust, for my answers had been unnecessarily brusque. For no reason whatsoever I was conscious of an instinctive antagonism and yet I obeyed her suggestion and began a tango. From time to time I glanced in the direction of Madame de Tinquerville but, though I was certain she was observing me, each time I sought her glance I found her in languid conversation with the group of young men who surrounded her.

The dance ended. With a growing antagonism, I asked myself why I had so docilely followed her request. With a resentment that was like a child’s, I avoided her and did not speak to her again that night. This was the instinctive revulsion of our first meeting.

* * * * *

Yet from the crowd I watched her. Very small, she seemed slighter for the prevailing note of black. The only note of color was the natural brilliance of her lips,—extraordinary lips, full and, the lower one, sensuously so, lips that had just been plunged into strawberries; eyebrows like the flight of ravens’ wings; a nose that might have been Cleopatra’s, thin-bridged and slightly irregular; eyes black as Africa, not nervously alert like the glance of the city woman, which is crowded with shifting details, but with the fixed contemplation of one accustomed to gaze steadily towards far horizons and clear spaces.

Her manner? At first contact utterly impersonal, interested only in herself, in her pretty poses, her transparent fingers and her dainty feet. I remember thinking that one might live with such a woman a lifetime and never know her inmost thoughts,—if thoughts there were behind the mask. She had two characteristic smiles which I learned to know; one for the public,—the smile that she wore like a necklace. Occasionally, when something stirred a slumbering spark in her, a smile all excitement and vibration suffused her face like the flash of footlights: it was then that mischief was brewing. My first impression was of distrust: of a woman all instinct, tyrannous, jealous, adroit, feline, languid, brooding, voluptuous, hidden and, above all, without sense of pain, either for herself or for others.

* * * * *

I retained only a troubling memory of this pungent, irritating impression when, a few days later, I received a formal note inviting me to call. I was flattered. I went.

She was alone. She made no reference to my avoiding her, led me to talk with intelligence, turned any approach to intimacy, and was so natural and gracious that I asked myself in astonishment why I should have felt such a sudden antagonism. In a short time, without my being able to distinguish the gradual progression, I was enveloped in the insidious charm of her personality as completely as though she had bound me hand and foot. For six months I forgot everything else in the world and followed where she led, allowing her slender fingers to turn my destiny according to their malicious fancy.

How did she do it? As skilfully as one plays a trout. Indifference—with a sudden touch of simulated interest, immediately withdrawn as soon as offered—a little opening of the doors to intimacy and, once I had learned to expect it, an abrupt refusal; the power to read me and to rouse my appetites and my vanities: in a word, the ability to create the illusion of being pursued and of waking in me the instinct of the pursuer.

* * * * *

I learned of her life only by hearsay, never from her own lips. Paris is full of just such women; the drift of strange currents, out of mysterious beginnings. Her father was an Irish adventurer, John Finucane, who by devious and clouded ways had amassed some fortune in Egypt and the Orient. Her mother, according to one story, was the daughter of an Arab sheik; according to another, a gypsy; others ascribed to her the rôle of a woman of the circus, a wandering mountebank. I saw her once and, allowing for all exaggerations, she was undoubtedly of some Eastern strain,—an inheritance apparent in Letty. Madame de Tinquerville had married early an old roué of that well-known family, impoverished and exiled to a minor diplomatic position, and who, shortly after bringing his bride and her fortune back to Paris, left her a widow.

She was, I am certain, thoroughly conscient in everything she did. The corruption she exerted over me was both mental and moral. I had come back to Paris filled with enthusiasm and ambition. My self-discipline disappeared. I threw myself into a life of pleasure and dissipation. My days were disorganized and I obeyed only the craving for excitement, movement, and rapidly succeeding sensations. My old philosophy, simple and proud, yielded to the worldly wisdom of the facile luxury which surrounded me. I saw how easy it was to achieve by social trafficking what men spent lifetimes laboriously to acquire.

* * * * *

Not that I yielded without a struggle. At times, scenes of extreme violence broke out between us; scenes I realize now it was her delight to provoke. Though of strong and violent passions, I had always held myself in firm control. What had been an orderly, measured mode of life, contemplative, tolerant, and good-humored, now became a tumultuous succession of days and nights, when every nerve was raw to the exposure. I found myself irritable, suspicious, passing from sudden depressions to feverish flights of gayety; quick at offence and wincing under the new tortures which she invented each day for the perverse delight of proving to herself how completely she held me in subjection. Why I did not strangle her in some blind moment of rage, I do not know.

This I will say: she did not lack courage. It never failed her in the dangerous excesses of jealousy she provoked in me, for, even as my fingers itched to close over her delicate throat, at a sudden smile, at a look in the shadowy eyes, at a caress from her fingers, the heat would vanish from my brain and I would be pliant in her hands. Perhaps it was this constant revolt—the rough, untamed animal in me—that interested her. Did she care for me, or not? At this moment, despite the tragic sequence of events, I am not certain but that at bottom, despite all her malignant appetites, her joy in destruction, her catlike love of cruelty, for some unknown reason, she genuinely loved me,—so far as she could comprehend love. Sometimes I believe that the secret of her attachment to me was in my resemblance to some one whom she had known and loved—as a young girl loves—before the flood of corruption had contaminated her. It may be that I recalled this other by some trick of look or manner. I do not know. I know very little of her past life.