Years of Grace

by Margaret Ayer Barnes

  *You didn't really think I wouldn't come, did you?' said Andre.

  'I didn't know,' said Jane. Then added honestly, 'I didn't want to hope too much that you would.'

  'Why not?' smiled Andr6.

  Tor fear of being disappointed,' said Jane promptly. 'I like to keep my illusions.'

  'Am I one of your illusions, Jane?' asked Andr^, with a twinkle.

  'You always have been,' said Jane soberly.

  Andre laughed at that. 'The same honest Jane!' he said, as the taxi drew up at the curbing.

  As Andre paid the cabman, Jane stood on the sidewalk and wondered where she was. She stared up at the grey stone fagade of the building before her. She had not noticed where the taxi was going. It had crossed the Seine. That was aU she knew. She felt a pleasing little sense of adventure as she followed Andre through some iron gates, across the corner of a crumbling courtyard, and in a tall carved doorway that

  opened on the court. A curved stone stairway stretched before her, leading up into comparative darkness. Jane's sense of adventure deepened.

  'It's three flights up/ said Andre, 'and there is no lift.'

  Jane tried not to catch her breath too audibly as she plodded up the stairs, her hand on the iron rail. Her sense of adventure had faded a little. How ignominious, she was thinking, how fifty-one, to have to puff and pant on a staircase at Andre's side! On the third landing he unlocked a door.

  'Gome in,' he said.

  Jane found herself in a large Ught white-washed room, the walls of which were hung with charcoal sketches and lined with bronze and plaster and marble figures. A frame platform occupied the centre of the floor. On it were placed a high stool, a box of sculptor's tools, and a tall ambiguous form that was draped in a white cloth. A grand piano stood in one corner. Near it were clustered a divan, two comfortable armchairs, and a tea-table. Above them a great square window looked out over the rounded tops of an avenue of horse-chestnuts, down a curving vista of narrow grey street to the Gothic portico of a little hunchbacked church. One of the tourist-free, nameless old churches, Jane thought, that you always meant to visit in Paris and never did!

  'Well, how do you like it?' asked Andr6.

  'I love it,' said Jane.

  She sat down in an armchair and smiled up at Andr6. She was beginning to feel that this bearded gentleman was really the boy that she had loved. The grandchildren seemed very far away. She felt a tremulous little sense of intimacy at the thought that this was Andre's very own studio and that they were alone in it together.

  'I do all my work here,' said Andr^.

  Jane gazed about her. The place looked very business-like.

  The armchairs were worn and the divan was covered with a frayed Indian rug and a heterogeneous collection of cushions that had seen better days. The tea-set was a little dusty. Jane felt, absurdly, that she would like to wash that tea-set for Andre!

  'Would you like some tea?' he asked.

  Jane shook her head.

  T can get it,' said Andre. T live here, you know, a great deal of the time. I've a bedroom and a kitchen on the court.'

  T thought,' said Jane, 'you had a house in Paris.'

  T have,' said Andre, 'but my wife's not often in it. I live there, usually, when she's in town.'

  His words made Jane think instantly of the older Duroys. Of Mr. Duroy, looking just like Andre, riding that tandeir bicycle with his wife!

  'Andre,' she said, 'where is your mother?'

  'She lives in England,' said Andre soberly. 'Father died twenty years ago in Prague. Mother went back to my grandfather's house in Bath.'

  'The one you told me about,' smiled Jane, 'in the Royal Crescent?'

  'The same,' said Andre, answering her smile. 'Mother's seventy-three, you know. She's very active. She breezes in here every few months and washes up those teacups!' He broke oflf abruptly. 'Are you interested in sculpture?'

  'I'm interested in yours,' said Jane.

  Her eyes were wandering over the bronze and plaster and marble figures. They were charming, Jane thought. It was absurd of Cicily to call that Eve vieuxjeu! It was absurd of

  Cicily to say Jane rose suddenly from her chair. Her

  gaze on the bronze and plaster and marble figures had grown a little more intent. She walked the length of the room in silence. Andre's nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas

  diDoped on every pedestal. Soft limbs and clinging draperies met the eye at every turn. The charcoal sketches on the walls vaguely revealed the grace of feminine curves. There was a certain harem-like quaUty to Andre's studio! Would she have noticed it, Jane wondered, if it had not been for Cicily's cynical words in the Luxembourg Gallery? Why — it was an absolutely Adamless Eden! Except for Andre, of course.

  T must show you what I'm doing now,' he said suddenly. He turned toward the frame platform. 'It's a war memorial,' he explained, as he removed the cloth from the ambiguous form. 'Isn't she charming?'

  She rfflj charming. She was just that. Jane stared in silence at the unfinished figure — a lovely girlish angel, sheathing a broken sword over a young dead warrior. Angels should be sexless, thought Jane quickly. Over young dead warriors their wings should droop in pity, not in love.

  'Isn't she charming?' repeated Andre. 'My angel?'

  Who was she? Jane could not help thinking. It was one of those thoughts that you despised yourself for, of course.

  'Yes,' she said doubtfully. 'Yes, but '

  *But what?' smiled Andre.

  'Not awfully — angelic' Jane wondered, as she spoke, just why she felt that she must make her criticism articulate. It was part of the old fourteen-year-old feeling of intimacy, perhaps. The feeling that she always owed Andre the truth. He was smiling again a trifle ironically.

  'A little earthy, you think, my angel?'

  Jane nodded soberly.

  'Perhaps you're right,' said Andre cheerfully. 'Some of my angels have been a Httie earthy, you know.'

  Jane looked at Andre. She still had that funny feeling that she owed him the truth.

  'That's too bad,' she said.

  *Oh, I don't know,' said Andre. -I've liked them earthy.*

  Jane could not quite respond to his comical smile.

  'Wasn't that — rather foolish of you?' she said slowly. She was beginning to feel a terrible prig! Andre was looking at her with a very amused twinkle in his shrewd brown eyes.

  'Qui vit sans folie n^est pas si sage qu'il croit,' he said. 'La Rochefoucauld said that, Jane. He was a very wise old boy.'

  Jane's glance had dropped before Andre's twinkle.

  'Yes/ she said slowly, 'but '

  'But what?' said Andre again.

  Jane's eyes were on his hands. She had felt a little shock of recognition when she looked at them. Hands did not change as faces did, she thought. Andre's were still the strong sculptor's hands of his boyhood. Prig or no prig, Jane felt an inexplicable impulse to give Andre good advice.

  'Andre,' she said solemnly, 'you ought to snap out of all this. Leave Paris. Go out to the provinces and forget the earthy angels. You've still got twenty years ahead of you.' Andr<5 was smiling at her very amusedly, but Jane was not abashed. 'You ought to come back to the corn belt, Andre. I know that seems ridiculous, but it's true. Come back to the com belt and do a bronze of Lincoln. Spend a winter in Springfield, Illinois, and get to know the rail-spKtter. It would do you good.'

  He shook his head. 'It's not in my line,' he said. 'I tried a bronze of Foch last year. I had a good commission, but I couldn't get interested.'

  'You would get interested,' urged Jane, 'if you really worked at it. You get interested in anything you actually experience.'

  Again Andre's smile was very much amused. But rather tender.

  'It's thirty-four years since I last saw you, Jane,' he said. 'What havejoM experienced?'

  He had dismissed the subject. He spoke as if to a child. Jane suddenly felt very young and virginal, but just a little irritated.

  'I've experienced Stephen,' s
he said briefly.

  'That all, Jane?' asked Andr^. Under his ironic eye Jane felt far from confidential. She succumbed to an impulse to dismiss a subject herself.

  'Of course,' she said.

  'I wonder,' said Andr6 gallantly. But the gallantry was not very convincing. He did not seem incredulous. Jane was not surprised. She knew, of course, that she did not look any longer Hke the kind of woman who had ever experienced anything very much.

  'But if it's true,' continued Andr6 lightly, 'don't let it trouble you. Uamour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer Vamour. It all comes to the same thing in the end, Jane, whatever we experience.'

  Jane stared at him, appalled. He was pulUng the cloth back over his earthy angel. He seemed quite unconscious of the significance of his utterance. Of the significance of the lesson that he had learned firom life. Jane did not feel young and virginal and irritated any longer. She felt~fifty-one years old and quite stripped of illusion. But very sorry for Andre.

  'I must go,' she said. 'I must go back to Stephen.' The grandchildren seemed much nearer than they had twenty minutes before. Andr^ smiled pleasantly at her as she preceded him out of the studio.

  'I loved seeing your angel,' said Jane politely.

  They descended the stairs together in silence. They crossed the crumbhng courtyard and went out through the iron gates. Andr^ whistled for a taxi. Jane could not think of anything more to say to him. She was thinking of the faith that she had kept with the lover of her girlhood. ^Uamour fait passer U

  tempSy le temps fait passer V amour.'' Jane wished very sincerely that Andre had stayed in the French Alps. She wished that she had never come to his studio. The taxi rolled up to the curb. Andre handed her into it.

  'Good-bye,' said Jane.

  ^Au revoir,' said Andre. He did look exactly like his father — in spite of the earthy angels! 'It's been great to see you, Jane!'

  'Good-bye,' said Jane again. She smiled and nodded gaily. The taxi rolled off down the curving vista of the narrow grey street. It tooted its horn and turned abruptly at the Gothic portico of the little hunchbacked church. The quai, the Seine, the Isle Saint-Louis and the towers of Notre Dame swung quickly into view. The day was fading into a sunset haze. But Jane was not thinking of the view. She was thinking of how things turned out. Of the inevitable disillusion of hfe.

  'It all comes to the same thing in the end, Jane, whatever we experience.' But that was not true. That was a very fallacious philosophy! For, obviously, you did not come to the same thing in the end, yourself. You were, eventually, the product of your experience.

  Jane's mind returned to the problems of her children. If she had had Cicily's courage of conviction, she reflected with a dawning twinkle, she might have married Andre and remarried Stephen and run away with Jimmy. Her life might have been the more interesting for those forbidden experiments. But she would not have been the same Jane at fifty-one. Not thatjane thought so much of the Jane she was. Or did she? Did you not always, Jane asked herself honestly, think a Uttle too tenderly of the kind of person that you had turned out to be?

  Cicily had been right about one thing. You had to choose in Ufe. And perhaps you never gave up anything except what

  some secret self-knowledge whispered that you did not really care to possess. But no, thought Jane! She had made her sacrifices in agony of spirit. She had made them in simphcity and sincerity and because of that curious inner scruple that Matthew Arnold had defined — that 'enduring power, not ourselves, which'makes for righteousness.' But to what end?

  For Cicily had been right about another thing. You did not know — you could not ever tell —just where the path you had not taken would have led you. Cicily and Albert, on their way to Russia, were very happy. Belle and Billy were happy in Murray Bay. Jack, stringing his telephone wires and building his bridges down near Mexico City, was well on the road, perhaps, to a more enduring happiness than he had ever known before. The six children, Jane was prepared to admit, would probably fare quite as well at the hands of five affectionate parents as they had at the hands of four. Jane could not conscientiously claim that the world was any the worse for Gicily's bad behaviour.

  To what end, then, did you struggle to live with dignity and decency and decorum? To play the game with the cards that were dealt you? Was it only to cultivate in your own character that intangible quaUty that Jane, for want of a better word, had defined as grace? Was it only to feel self-respectful on your deathbed? That seemed a barren reward.

  T have lived and accomplished the task that Destiny gave me, and now I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade.' Dido had said that. Across the years Dido had saiid that to Jane and Agnes on the Johnsons' little front porch 'west of Clark Street.' Jane could remember thinking it was 'nice and proud,' Dido's niceness and her pride had illumined the difficult hexameters of Virgil's '^Eneid.' They had burned with a brighter light than the flames of her funeral pyre.

  The reward, however, still seemed a trifle barren. To pass

  beneath the earth no common shade. That romantic prospect was not as inviting to Jane at fifty-one as it had been at sixteen. A place in the hierarchy of heaven sfiemed rather unimportant. Jane felt a little weary, facing an immortality that would prove in the end only one more social adventure. She would prefer oblivion.

  But Andre had not been right about experience. If Andr^ had married Jane and settled down in Lakewood, he would not have been the bearded cynic he was at fifty-three. Wives had a lot to do with it. It was Gyprienne — and the earthy angels, of course —Jane thought indulgently, who had made Andre what he was to-day. ^ U amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer VamourP What words to hear firom the lips of the man whose romantic memory you had been tenderly cherishing for thirty-four years! From the Hps of the boy who had walked so bravely, so proudly out of your youth down Victorian Pine Street! Jane was thinking again of the inevitable disillusion of hfe. Was it inevitable, she wondered? If Jimmy had lived, would he be as dead as Andr^?

  But Stephen had lived and he was still very much alive. That consoling thought struck Jane the moment that she entered the Httle green sitting-room in the Chatham Hotel, and she felt distinctly cheered by it. Stephen was sitting between the twins on the Empire sofa, with Robin Redbreast on his knees. He looked cheerfully up at Jane over the book he was reading. Jane recognized it at once. It was the familiar copy of the King Arthur Stories, from their library at home. Stephen must have taken it from the shelf, Jane thought swifUy, and packed it in his trunk for the grandchildren without saying anything to her about it. Stephen was a darling! Husbands had a lot to do with it, too, of course. Stephen had

  had a lot to do with the sort of Jane Jane found herself at fifty-one. Facing Stephen and the grandchildren she felt a little ashamed of her recent preoccupation with Andre and with Jimmy.

  'Go on/ she said. *Don*t stop reading.' She sank into a chair. The children wriggled their approval.

  Stephen's eyes returned to the book. 'We're just finishing,' he said.

  Jane knew the story well. It was the first adventure of Sir Percival in the Forest of Arroy. The boyish Sir Percival — Jane's favourite knight. She had heard Stephen read it innumerable times to Cicily, Jenny, and Steve. Years ago now, of course, though it seemed only yesterday. When she closed her eyes, Jane lost all sense of time. She lost all sense of the grandchildren. When Jane closed her eyes, she was no longer in Paris. But she was not in the Forest of Arroy. She was back once more in the Lakewood living-room, and Stephen was sitting in his armchair with the children around him, and Cicily's hair was long and crinkly, and Jenny's round forehead was topped with her Alice in Wonderland comb, and Steve was wearing his first sailor suit.

  How odd it was, thought Jane, that children grew up so unexpectedly. On looking back down the years, you could not see just what you had done —just what you had let them

  do that And once they had escaped you, what was there

  to say to them? But Stephen was finishing the story of Sir
Percival.

  ' "And as it was with Sir Percival in that first adventure, so may you meet with a like success when you ride forth upon your first undertakings after you have entered into the glory of your knighthood, with your life lying before you and a whole world whereinto you may fireely enter to do your devoirs to the glory of God and your own honour."*

  There it was in a nutshell. That was all there was for parents to say to children. You could bring them up according to your lights, but in the end you could only watch them ride forth and wish them well. And parents should remember, Jane admitted with a sigh, that the whole world should be freely entered, and that the idea of devoirs was apt to differ in successive generations.

  Stephen closed the book. Robin Redbreast wriggled off his knee. Littlejohn Ward's eyes were shining. His sister's face, however, looked a trifle wistful. Perhaps she had not been listening so very attentively.

  'I wonder,' she said slowly, *I wonder where Mother is now.'

  Stephen's eyes met Jane's. *I was thinking,' he said, 'wc might all go out to the theatre this evening.'

  ^All of us?' cried Uttle Jane. Her eyes were shining now like John Ward's.

  *A11 of us,' said Stephen solemnly.

  *Not Robin Redbreast?' said John Ward.

  'Yes, Robin Redbreast,' said Stephen.

  The twins began jumping up and down in ecstasy. Robin Redbreast's four-year-old countenance was stupefied with delight. It was fiin to please children. You could please them so easily. Nevertheless, Jane looked inquiringly at Stephen.