On Thursday, June 17, 1897, in the women's toilet-room at one end of a parlour-car on the Overland Limited, speeding westward from Chicago, a lady sat smoking a cigarette. It was a sultry day and she did not appear to be very comfortable; obviously no one but a confirmed smoker would have resorted to this only means, in the circumstances, of evading the custom of the country.
The Countess Ella Nattatorrini was a well-preserved, fashionably dressed woman of fifty. Little lines were beginning to gather around her grey eyes. Her golden-red hair, parted and waved, quite evidently owed its hue to the art of the hairdresser. Her slightly sagging chin was supported by the stiff bones in her high lace collar. She was at that dangerous and fascinating age just before decay sets in. Nevertheless, although at the moment an expression of melancholy lurked, shadowlike, about her countenance, her face offered at once the impression of an alert intelligence and an abounding vitality, an impression accentuated by her somewhat saucy nose which tilted slightly upwards, a mouth which, aided by artifice, formed a perfect Cupid's bow, and by her small, well-formed, rosy ears, her best feature. There was something agreeable about her figure, too, despite the undeniable fact that she was a trifle stout. Had she been a milk-maid, one might have described her as buxom, and she would have been hard put to appear to advantage in the styles of 1923. The mode of 1897, however, exactly suited her. Her hips and breasts and buttocks were round and pleasing, and she set off smartly her black taffeta dress and her toque of black coquilles, piled with yellow roses, feathers, and ribbons. On the curve of her breast sparkled a life-sized, gold dragon-fly, the wings of which were encrusted with rubies and sapphires, and from the tail of which depended a diamond-studded watch. Her low shoes were of a French design and her black stockings were sheer. Her mutton-legged sleeves, which, bulging at the shoulder, fitted the arm tightly below, terminated in ruffles of ivory lace, fashioned to fall across her hands, but, owing to the excessive heat, she had turned these back, exposing a curious emblem which had been tattooed on her left arm just above the wrist: a skull, pricked in black, on which a blue butterfly perched, while a fluttering phylactery beneath bore the motto: Que sais-je?
Her cigarette—her tenth since she had left Chicago—finished, the Countess discarded the stump and opened the window to permit the smoke to escape so that no evidence should remain of her voluntary turpitude. Then she returned to her green plush chair in the parlour-car, Beside her reposed a black leather travelling-bag and a new novel by Paul Bourget in a yellow paper cover. Propped up against the wall near the window stood a black lace parasol with a carved ivory handle. The car was not crowded and the places opposite, as it happened, remained unoccupied. With a somewhat unconventional, considering her environment, but entirely unself-conscious impulse she placed her little feet with their trim ankles on this seat. Then she made an entirely unsuccessful attempt to read a few more pages in Bourget's novel. Her effort to arouse her interest in literature proving abortive, she permitted her gaze to fall on the landscape outside, where a lambent sun lit up the rolling country, splendid with its vast fields of corn, the half-grown stalks, with their green leaves and tasselled cobs, waving in the slight breeze as far as the eye could reach, so that the train seemed to be passing through the midst of some great inland sea. Occasionally these fields were interrupted by stretches of charming wooded country, by meadows, stocked with cattle, by straggling, nondescript villages, by farmhouses and yards, by brooks, and by rivers which seemed only a trifle larger than the brooks.
These scenes were no more successful than the Bourget novel in capturing the roving attention of the Countess, although her gaze seemed to be focused upon them. Presently, indeed, tears welled to her eyes, and she sought her handkerchief to wipe them away. The melancholy, however, which shadowed her face was not precisely a tragic melancholy. Her emotion, even to an indifferent observer, would have appeared to be petty. It had in it that ephemeral quality which is distinguishable in the eyes of a young girl who has just been refused permission to go out to a party.
What was the Countess thinking of, what souvenirs had disturbed her, to cause her these moments of self-pity? As, it is said, happens to a drowning man, twenty years had rushed pell-mell into her consciousness. In this mental process there was no chronology, no arrangement, even, sometimes, no clarity. She recalled the fields of France, sprinkled with scarlet and saffron poppies and bright blue corn-flowers; an Opéra bal, which she had attended in the guise of Froufrou, obsessed her memory, and she began to hum la Valse des roses; a dinner at Tortoni's with the Duc de Vallombrosa, the Vicomte de Sarcus, Monsieur and Madame de Beschevet; a box of bonbons from Boissier, with an unforgettable card. . . . She remembered how she had met her husband at a Charity Ball in Chicago—how long ago?—twenty or twenty-five years? She could not be certain. Then, a few years later, his sudden death in Venice, his entombment in the mausoleum at Ravenna, the picturesque mourning garments which Worth had created for her. Quite abruptly other pictures displaced these: moments at the Paris Exposition of 1889, Sibyl Sanderson in Esclarmonde, a dinner on the platform of the Tour Eiffel, a breakfast at the Pavillon Henri IV at St. Germain. Again, she considered her pink and gold salon in Paris, with its countless, miniature, beflowered, white porcelain figures of Saxe and Sèvres, mounted on gold or enamelled bases. For this room Bouguereau had painted one of his prettiest, most waxy Italian peasants, and on another wall hung her own portrait by Carolus-Duran, in which she was represented wearing a gown with successive flounces of yellow lace, a full-blown, red rose in her belt, standing before a background of marble terraces and clipped limes. But always at the root of her mind stirred the thought of Tony, and always, despite her protracted effort to drive it away, this memory rose to inspire the tears in her eyes.
She had encountered Tony, a blond French boy of surpassing handsomeness and twenty-two years, ten months ago in the Quinconces at Bordeaux. From the very beginning she had been vaguely aware that he was stupid, what the French call bête, that he dressed like a cabot, and that he had the habits and manners of a maquereau. Nevertheless, from the moment that she first saw him she felt that she belonged to him completely. His name was Antoine Dupuy and he was a tenor in a travelling operetta troupe. She remembered him with especial delight as Frederic, Prince of Pisa, in La Mascotte, a rele in which she had seen him the night before their meeting. How fine he had appeared in his royal blue doublet and hose; how valiantly he had assisted in the celebrated presage quartet; how vigorously he had attacked his Ra-ta-plan air in the last act! Later, she had heard him sing Grenicheux in Les Cloches de Corneville—could she ever forget the Barcarolle?—Marasquin in Girofle-Girofla, Valentine in Olivette, and, above all, Paris in La Belle Helene:
Pour enjôler les garçons
Ont de drôles de façons!
She could still feel the flush of blood to her cheeks at the moment when she first met him in the park. She had spoken to him, told him how greatly she had admired his performance in La Mascotte, and he had accepted her praise, she recalled, much in the manner that Jean de Reszke might receive encomiums in regard to his interpretation of Raoul in Les Huguenots. Then, she had asked him to dine with her. She knew then, she knew now, how ridiculous she had been. She knew that his reason for accepting her attentions was based on his correct suspicion that she was rich. She could analyze his motives now. She was conscious, indeed, that she must always have known, really, in some subterranean chamber of her mind, just how far his affections carried. At the time, however, she had stifled logical thought, common sense, for she had fallen deeply in love with the boy, and idealized his feeling for her until it had seemed that she had never before been so happy. She had even been on the point at one time, she recalled with shame, of offering him marriage. She had, as a matter of fact, done something even worse: she had thrown caution into the waste-basket—with certain essential reservations, for in her most impulsive acts she always retained a regard for the convenances—and had travelled with the troupe . . . as his mistress. She buried her face in her hands. as his mistress! Dijon, Avignon, Orange, Nîmes . . . where not? Gradually, she had become aware that Mlle. Gabrielle Desparges, the soprano of the organization, herself held some kind of lien on the tenor. Occasionally Tony had excused himself, explaining that he was too tired to dine with the Countess. By bribing a waiter it was easy to discover that Mlle. Desparges had dined with him in his room. And how much these infidelities cost the Countess in gold as well as pain! He was spending her money on this woman! Degradation, it would seem, could go no further, but it did. She had paid his amende, borne him off to Paris, and established him in an apartment in the Rue de la Pompe. There she had visited him, except for the few occasions when she had bidden him come to her. The pink salon was darkened, the blinds drawn. My God! how happy she had been! What weeks of pleasure until . . . One day she had told him that she would take tea with the Princesse de Laumes. Some vague fear had caused her to change her mind; some instinctive and minatory doubt drove her rather to visit the Rue de la Pompe. She passed the concierge without a challenge as she had passed her so many times before, ascended the stairs to the second storey, and inserted her key in the door of his apartment. In the salon she had found them: Mlle. Desparges in her chemise, he in his calecon. She had been ready to retire, to forget what she had seen. Why had she come at all? Then she could have pretended not to know. It was too late. Her pride proved stronger than her desire: she had reproached him, even cursed him. He had laughed, stroking his paltry blond moustache, and, turning to Mlle. Desparges, had muttered: Quelle vieille gueuse! Blind with fury and pain she had fled. Two days went by without a word from him. How much she loved him! What difference could it make to her if he loved this other? It was her supreme humiliation to be aware that nothing he could do had the power to kill her desire for him. She must see him again. She had sent him a petit bleu. No reply. Again she visited the apartment in the Rue de la Pompe. She found the rooms in the greatest disorder; all his clothes were gone. He had, it was fairly obvious, decamped. She recalled that three weeks earlier, at his urgent request—he could not, he had asserted, continually be asking a woman for money—she had established an account in his name, at the Credit Lyonnais, depositing 50,000 francs. And now Mlle. Desparges was spending this! For the three days following the Countess was unable to see anybody. She had attack after attack of hysterics. She had lain awake all night and sobbed all day. Two of her servants, weary of this futile exhibition of temperament, had given notice. Then, one day, she had flung herself prone on the floor, desolate and despairing. How long had she remained there? She could not now be certain, but she recalled that she had not shed a tear. Her grief was too deep for tears, but the idea of suicide had raced into her brain, and she considered the possible means of suicide at hand. On her dressing-table stood a little vial of bichloride of mercury tablets, the drawer of her escritoire harboured a loaded revolver with a handle of black and gold Toledo work, and there was always the Seine. She had remembered that some one had told her that potassium cyanide, with its faint odour of peach-blossoms, was an excellent, sudden, and painless method of terminating one's existence. But she had failed to kill herself; she had not been equal to this demand on her courage. Instead, she had tried the alternative of going back into the great world, searching consolation, sympathy, without naming the cause of her grief, but after she had observed the enchanted expression in one or two pair of eyes, which made no effort to conceal their satisfaction at the sight of an unhappy woman, she quickly withdrew again, shutting her doors, and giving Jean orders to admit no callers.
It was during this period of self-enforced seclusion that she had remembered a sentiment which she had once expressed to Edmond de Goncourt—he had embedded it in his diary: Une femme me disait ce soir, qu'elle croyait qu'un grand chagrin pouvait mourir dans la paix, le calme, l'isolement de la campagne, mais qu'à Paris, l'enfiévrement de la vie ambiante autour de ce chagrin, ne pouvait que l'exaspérer. She had been speaking of another woman, but now she realized that the cure might be efficacious in her own case. So she planned a trip to Sicily, and another to the Swiss Alps, but these never went beyond the preparations. Marie had packed her trunks, and then the Countess had changed her mind. There could be, she knew too well, no forgetfulness in these excursions. Everywhere she would miss Tony and wish he were beside her to share her pleasure, which would be no pleasure, indeed, were he not there.
Another week dragged by, a week of misery, of pain, of acute suffering, of desolation. Not a word came from Tony to officialize the break, to relieve the strain. He was silent; he had remained silent up to this present moment. At first, this silence on his part seemed heartless to her, even brutal; at first, when she was still under some vague illusion that he must have loved her. Now that even this illusion had deserted her, now that she was able to think back and recall that during the whole course of their relationship he had never once kissed her unless she had first asked him to do so, now that she remembered how guarded he had been in his forced protestations of fondness, she understood only too well how he had felt from the beginning, how he had only half reciprocated—and half was perhaps an exaggeration—the deep affection she had lavished on him, how he had tolerated her advances with a certain good-natured calculation, how he had responded half-heartedly to her full-hearted outpouring, how he had even rejected certain of her maddest suggestions, how, in short, he was, by type and birth, a cabot and a maquereau, and, above all, a youth, with every one of the normal desires of youth. And yet, she was now confessing to herself, she still loved him.
A line from Victor Hugo wandered, inexplicably, into her mind: Je suis veuf, je suis seul, et sur moi le soir tombe. Yes, she was growing old; she had admitted this freely after her first two days of loneliness; she had been relentless and cruel to herself. She had compelled herself to gaze at her fading reflection in the great oval glass with its ornate Louis XV gilt frame, which stood in her dressing-room. She was old; she was fifty, and now, for the first time, her anxiety was making her look her full age. Until Tony had deserted her, she had been carefree; fairness made her add the word comparatively. Nothing—well, not very much—had troubled her, and she had appeared to be quite astonishingly young, but Tony's departure had added years to her age, made her seem older even than she really was. He had caused her hours of worry, hours which had added new lines to the crow's-feet which were already gathering around her eyes, new lines to those which already encircled her throat. Even before he had abandoned her there had been a premonition of this coming disaster: one afternoon at tea, she had noted that her hand trembled as she lifted her cup, so fearful had she been that Tony would not kiss her when she asked him to. Her apprehension had proved not to be without foundation; Tony had been cold and distant that day, and he had refused to kiss her, refused even to accept her kiss, pleading a headache. Now she knew why. This incident had occurred two weeks before the last day that she had seen him. He had known that their relationship would soon end, and although, during the following days, he had been over-attentive for the same reason, she had had the sense, quite clearly, she saw in retrospect, of impending doom.
Time and time again she reviewed these scenes, and others connected with her life with Tony; they seemed to be the only phases of her career which had left an imprint on her character, stirred her imagination, and as the train spurted ahead, stopping nowhere, she had again indulged in this passionate and futile pastime. Hope, however, had quitted her. She knew that the end had come. She had known this when she had tried to bring herself to do away with her life; she had known this when she had abandoned her projected excursions to Sicily and Switzerland; above all, she had known it when she had tried to face the gaiety of Paris. She had left Paris before the Fête aux Fleurs in the Bois; before Duse's début in the French capital. For the first time in many years she was missing the Grand Steeple Chase at Auteuil, the Grand Prix de Longchamps. She had been invited to visit Lady Adela Beaminster in London, to stop at Portland Place during the festivities in honour of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. She had found this invitation, too, easy to decline in her present mood. In any case, she could not, at this time, contemplate the idea of facing the horrible old Duchess of Wrexe. One alternative of conduct remained, it occurred to her one day, a day passed entirely in bed, interrupted only by frequent fretful complaints directed at her maid and occasional vain efforts to interest herself in a new novel, and that was the experiment of a reversion to type. Would, she wondered, a return to the scenes where she had spent her childhood, girlhood, and young womanhood, scenes which she had not visited for twenty—or was it twenty-five?—years, succeed in making her forget? Would she be able, after more than two radiant decades of European society, to arrange a new, if somewhat different career against the background of the past? Her father, a rich banker, had been dead two years. Her mother had died when she was a child; she could barely remember her. But there was the old home—without much difficulty she recalled its 1873 white brick outlines, great bow-windows projecting from almost every room, the turrets and cupolas, the roof of slate, and the tall white brick chimneys—and there was her sister Lou. Lou she had seen occasionally, but she had met her in London or Paris, where this spinster sister seemed strangely ill at ease and out of place. Lou had none of the adaptability of the Countess, none of the latter's graceful worldliness. She was as plain and commonplace as a female robin humbly chirping beside its better-feathered mate. In Paris she was entirely out of the picture. In Maple Valley, on the other hand, Lou held a position of considerable prominence, based on race and money and permanent residence. But even in Paris, little as the two had in common, the Countess had not found her sister unsympathetic. Lou's presence had the soothing virtue of making Ella feel younger, reminding her of the days when they had attended college together at Cornell in Mt. Vernon. It had even amused her to listen to Lou's chatter about her neighbours and friends, people whose names never entered the Countess's mind except when she was with her sister, and while Lou would never have been able to understand the Countess's life or fit into it, she never asked uncomfortable questions, largely, the Countess reflected, because of a complete and rather smug satisfaction with her own provincial mode of existence which prevented her from exhibiting, or even feeling, any considerable curiosity regarding the lives of others. Lou accepted Ella because Ella was her sister, and it never occurred to her that there had been any metamorphosis since Ella had become the Countess Nattatorrini. Have I changed, after all? the Countess asked herself. As a girl she had always been brilliant and daring, Lou drab and conventional, but the life of a widow in European capitals—for the Count had died five years subsequent to their marriage—had offered opportunities for the expansion of these qualities. She had never, however, she recollected with a great deal of complacency, overstepped the boundaries of discretion. Even in her tempestuous affair with Tony she had been circumspect in certain important particulars. During the tournee they had—invariably engaged separate rooms in the hotels, and in Paris she had never met him save in his apartment or her own. She had never forfeited the respect of the Faubourg—although once or twice she had come dangerously near to doing so—never, indeed, lost touch with it, until this crisis in her affairs had made it impossible for her to consider going anywhere. She was quite fully aware then that there existed no unalterable cleavage between her and her past, no break that could not, conceivably, be crutched.
To Maple Valley, through the mouth of her sister, she was merely an Iowa girl who had had the good fortune to marry an Italian nobleman with whom she had lived in his villa outside Ravenna until he died, when her position and her desire made it a simple matter for her to claim a social rank of considerable eminence in Paris. This much these folk would know about her, and little besides. Her friends would be middle-aged. Some of them would have married and have left Maple Valley. There would be the nucleus of a new group, a new generation, and she felt that she could safely entrust her broken heart to this new group, against the security of the familiar background—a background so familiar that on certain dull, rainy days, sitting in her rose salon on the Avenue Gabriel, she had sometimes diverted herself by reconstructing it, from the unpaved streets to the station—with some difficulty she recalled the American word depot—before which the trains stopped.
At any rate, she had determined on this step as the only feasible move that remained for her to make, and she had made it. 'This time, after she had instructed Marie to pack her trunks, the order had not been countermanded. This time, after cabling her sister, she had boarded the train for Havre, and embarked on the steamship for New York. And, to make the distinction between her present and the past she hoped to recreate as complete as possible, she had left Marie in Paris, travelling, perhaps for the first time in her life, without a maid.
The train was running more slowly now along the shore of a river, the banks of which rose high into wooded hills, deep blue and green in the glow of the setting sun. Presently, river, hills, and trees faded from view; wooden houses began to appear; the two tracks expanded into five. Now, through the windows, freight-cars, modest warehouses, and factories were to be observed. There was movement in the car. The Countess extracted powderpuff and lip-stick from her bag and applied them to her face, holding a mirror in her left hand. As she bent forward to replace her toilet articles, she saw a pin, the point towards her, gleaming on the floor. Extremely superstitious, she stooped to pick it up, and inserted it in her waist-band. Gratefully, she recalled that she was not entering her natal city on Friday. The Negro porter was busily engaged brushing the dust from passengers' garments, collecting bags and depositing them on the platform of the car. Ella's turn came and, as she stood up in the aisle, a curious impression of lonely embarrassment beset her. Had she made another error? Could she go through with it? She felt friendless and helpless as the train came to a full stop, and the conductor shouted: Maple Valley!