Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (19 page)

“Yes, I presume so,” said Virginie.

“Yes, you presume so,” said Elishama, “and you have been able to go wherever you liked all your life. And you have come here, Miss Virginie, to this house.”

Virginie blushed deeply with anger, but at the same time
she once more felt, and more deeply than before, that the two were alone in the house, with the rest of the world shut out.

Virginie’s father had been a merchant in Canton. His motto in life, engraved in his signet ring, had been
“Pourquoi pas?”
All through his twenty years in China his heart had still been in France, and the great things going on there had filled and moved it.

At the time of his death Virginie had been twelve years old. She was his eldest child and his favorite. As a little girl she was as lovely as an angel; the proud father amused himself taking her round and showing her off to his friends, and in a few years she had seen and learned much. She had a talent for mimicry; at home she gave pretty little performances, imitating the scenes she had witnessed and repeating the remarks and the gay songs she had listened to. Her mother, who came from an old seafaring family of Brittany and was well aware that a wife ought to bear with her man’s exuberant spirit, would still at times gently reprove her husband for spoiling his pretty daughter. She would get but a kiss in return, and the laughing comment:
“Ah, Virginie est fine! Elle s’y comprend, en ironie!”

In his young days the handsome and winning gentleman had traveled much. In Spain he had done business with, and been on friendly terms with, a very great lady, the Countess de Montijo. When later, out in China, he learned that this lady’s daughter had married the Emperor Napoleon III and become Empress of the French, he was as proud and pleased as if he himself had arranged the match. With him Virginie had for many years lived in the grand world of the French
Court, in the vast radiant ballrooms of the Tuileries, among receptions of foreign majesties, court cabals, romantic love affairs, duels and the waltzes of Strauss.

After her father’s death, during long years of poverty and hardship, and while she herself lost the angelic grace of her childhood and grew up too big, Virginie had secretly turned to this glorious world for consolation. She still walked up marble stairs lighted by a thousand candles, herself all sparkling with diamonds, to dance with princes and dukes; and her companions of a lonely, monotonous existence in dreary rooms wondered at the girl’s pluck. In the end, however, the Tuileries themselves had faded and vanished round her.

Even when the father had endeavored to engraft moral principles in the daughter’s young mind he had illustrated them with little anecdotes from the Imperial Court. One of them had impressed itself deeply in the little girl’s heart. The lovely Mademoiselle de Montijo had informed the Emperor Napoleon that the only way to her bedroom ran through the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Virginie was familiar with the Cathedral of Notre Dame; a big engraving of it hung in her parents’ drawing room. She had pictured to herself a bedroom of corresponding dimensions, and in the middle of it the lovely Mademoiselle Virginie, all in lace. The vision many times had warmed and cheered her heart.

Alas, the way to her bedroom had not run through the Cathedral of Notre Dame! It had not even run through the little gray French Church of Canton. Lately it had run, without much of a detour, from the offices and counting-houses of the town. For this reason Virginie despised the men that had come by it.

One triumph she had had in her career of disappointments, but nobody but herself knew of it.

Her first lover had been an English merchant-captain, who
had made her run away with him to Japan, just then opened to foreign trade. On the couple’s very first night in Japan there was an earthquake. All round their little hotel houses cracked and tumbled down and more than a hundred people were killed. Virginie that night had experienced something besides terror; she had lived through the great moment of her life. The thundering roar from heaven was directed against her personally; the earth shook and trembled at the loss of her innocence; the mighty breakers of the sea bewailed Virginie’s fall! Frivolous human beings only—her lover with them—within this hour ignored the law of cause and effect and failed to realize the extent of her ruin.

Virginie had a good deal of kindness in her nature. In her present sad situation, after she had definitely come down from the Tuileries, she would have liked her lovers better had they left her free to love them in her own way, as poor pitiful people in need of sympathy. She might have put up with her present lover, Elishama’s friend, if she could have made him see their liaison such as she herself saw it—as two lonely people’s attempt to make, in an unpretentious bourgeois way and by means of a little mutual gentleness, the best of a sorry world. But Charley was an ambitious young man who liked to see himself as a man of fashion and his mistress as a great demimondaine. His mistress, who knew the real meaning of the word, in their daily life together was tried hard by this vanity of his, and it lay at the root of most of their quarrels.

Now she sat and listened to Elishama, with her arms folded, and her lustrous eyes half closed, like a cat watching a mouse. If at this moment he had wanted to run away she would not have let him go.

“Mr. Clay,” said the young man, “is prepared to pay you a hundred guineas if, on a night appointed by him, you will come to his house. This, Miss Virginie …”

“To his house!” cried Virginie and looked up quite bewildered.

“Yes,” said he. “To his house. And this, Miss Virginie …”

Virginie rose from her chair so violently that it tumbled over, and she struck Elishama in the face with all her might.

“Jesus!” she cried. “His house! Do you know what house that is? It is my father’s house! I played in it when I was a little girl!”

She had a ring on her finger; when she struck him it scratched Elishama’s face. He wiped off a drop of blood and looked at his fingers. The sight of blood shed by her hand put Virginie into a fury beyond words, she walked to and fro in the room so that her white gown swished on the floor, and Elishama got an idea of the drama. She sat down on a chair, got up, and sat down on another.

“That house,” she said at last, “was the only thing left me from the time when I was a rich, pretty and innocent girl. Every time that I have since then walked past it I have dreamed of how I would enter it once more!” She caught at her breath as she spoke; white spots sprang out on her face.

“So you are to enter it now, Miss Virginie,” said Elishama. “So is, Miss Virginie, the young lady of Mr. Clay’s story rich, pretty and innocent.”

Virginie stared at him as if she did not see him at all, or as if she sat gazing at a doll.

“God,” she said. “My God! Yes—‘
Virginie est fine, elle s’y comprend, en ironie!
’ ” She looked away, then back at him. “You may hear it all now,” she said. “My father said that to me!”

She stopped her ears with her fingers for a moment, again let her hands drop and turned straight toward him.

“You can have it all now,” she cried, “you can have it all! My father and I used to talk—in that house—of great, splendid, noble things! The Empress Eugenie of France wore her white satin shoes one single time only, then made a present of them to the convent schools for the little girls there to wear at their first communion! I was to have done the same thing—for Papa was proud of my small feet!” She lifted her skirt a little and looked down at her feet, in a pair of old slippers. “The Empress of France made a great, unexampled career for herself, and I was to have done the same. And the way to her bedroom—you can have it all now, you can have it all—the way to her bedroom ran through the Cathedral of Notre Dame! Virginie,” she added slowly,
“s’y comprend, en ironie!”

Now there was a long silence.

“Listen, Miss Virginie,” said Elishama. “In the shawls …”

“Shawls?” she repeated, amazed.

“Yes, in the shawls that I brought you,” he continued, “there was a pattern. You told your friend Mr. Simpson that you liked one pattern better than another. But there was a pattern in all of them.”

Virginie had a taste for patterns; one of the things for which she despised the English was that to her mind they had no pattern in their lives. She frowned a little, but let Elishama go on.

“Only,” he went on, “sometimes the lines of a pattern will run the other way of what you expect. As in a looking-glass.”

“As in a looking-glass,” she repeated slowly.

“Yes,” he said. “But for all that it is still a pattern.” This time she looked at him in silence.

“You told me,” he said, “that the Emperor of Rome owned all the world. So does Mr. Clay own Canton and all the people of Canton”—all except myself, he thought. “Mr. Clay, and other rich merchants like him, own it. If you look out into the street you will see many hundred people going north and south, east and west. How many of them would be going at all, if they had not been told to do so by other people? And the people who have told them, Miss Virginie, are Mr. Clay and other rich merchants like him. Now he has told you to go to his house, and you will have to go.”

“No,” said Virginie.

Elishama waited a moment, but as Virginie said no more he went on.

“What Mr. Clay tells people to do,” he said, “that is what matters. You struck me a little while ago; you tremble now, because of what he told you to do. It matters very little in comparison whether you do go or not.”

“It was you who told me,” she said.

“Yes, because he told me to do so,” said Elishama.

There was another pause.

“Let down your hair over your face, Miss Virginie,” said he. “If one must sit in darkness, one should sit in one’s own darkness. I can wait for as long as you like.”

Virginie, in her very refusal to do as he advised her, furiously shook her head. Her long hair from which, when she rushed up and down the room, the ribbon had fallen, floated round her like a dark cloud, and as she let her head drop, it tumbled forward and hid her face. She sat for a while immovable in this chiaroscuro.

“That way of which you spoke,” said Elishama, “which ran through the Cathedral of Notre Dame—it is in this pattern. Only in this pattern it is reversed.”

From behind her veil of hair Virginie said: “Reversed?”

“Yes,” said Elishama. “Reversed. In this pattern the road runs the other way. And runs on.”

The strange sweetness of his voice, against her own will, caught Virginie’s ear.

“You will make a career for yourself, Miss Virginie,” said Elishama, “no less than the Empress of France. Only it runs the other way. And why not, Miss Virginie?”

Virginie, after a minute, asked: “Did you know my father?”

“No, I did not know him,” said Elishama.

“Then,” she asked again, “from where do you know that the pattern of which you speak does run in my family, and that there it is called a tradition?”

Elishama did not answer her, because he did not know the meaning of the word.

After another minute she said very slowly: “And
pourquoi pas
?”

She flung back her hair, raised her head, and sat behind her table like a saleswoman behind her desk. To Elishama her face looked broader and flatter than before, as if a roller had passed over it.

“Tell Mr. Clay from me,” she said, “that I will not come for the price which he has offered me. But that I shall come for the price of three hundred guineas. That, if you like, is a pattern. Or—in such terms as Mr. Clay will understand—it is an old debt.”

“Is that your last word, Miss Virginie?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Virginie.

“Your very last word?” he asked again.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then, if it is so,” he said, “I shall now hand you over
three hundred guineas.” He took up his wallet and laid the notes on the table.

“Do you want a receipt?” she asked.

“No,” he said, reflecting that this bargain would be safer without a receipt.

Virginie swept the notes and the playing cards, all together, into the drawer of the table. She was not going to play any more patience today.

“How do you know,” she said and looked Elishama in the face, “that I shall not set fire to the house in the morning, before I leave it again, and burn your master in it?”

Elishama had been about to go; now he stood still.

“I shall tell you one thing before I go,” said he. “This story is the end of Mr. Clay.”

“Do you believe that he is going to die with malice?” asked Virginie.

“No,” said he. “No, I cannot tell. But one way or another, it will be the end of him. No man in the world, not the richest man within it, can take a story which people have invented and told and make it happen.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

He waited a moment. “If you add up a column of figures,” he said slowly so as to make the matter clear to her, “you begin from your right-hand side, with the lowest figure, and move left, to the tens, the hundreds, the thousands and the ten thousands. But if a man took into his head to add up a column the other way, from the left, what would he find? He would find that his total would come out wrong, and that his account-books would be worth nothing. Mr. Clay’s total will come out wrong, and his books will be worth nothing. And what will Mr. Clay do without his books? It is not a good thing for me myself, Miss Virginie. I have been in his
employ for seven years, and I shall now lose my situation. But there is no getting away from it.” This was the first time that Elishama ever spoke confidentially about his master to a third party.

“Where are you going now?” Virginie asked him.

“Me?” he said, surprised that anybody should take an interest in his movements. “I am going home now to my own room.”

“I wonder,” said she with a kind of awe in her voice, “where that will be. And what it will be like. Had you a home when you were a child?”

“No,” said he.

“Had you brothers and sisters?” she asked again.

“No,” said he.