“But if it’s true,” continued André lightly, “don’t let it trouble you. L’amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer l’amour. It all comes to the same thing in the end, Jane, whatever we experience.”
Jane stared at him, appalled. He was pulling 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 from 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 André.
“I must go,” she said. “I must go back to Stephen.” The grandchildren seemed much nearer than they had twenty minutes before. André 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 crumbling courtyard and went out through the iron gates. André 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. “L’amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer l’amour.” Jane wished very sincerely that André had stayed in the French Alps. She wished that she had never come to his studio. The taxi rolled up to the curb. André handed her into it.
“Goodbye,” said Jane.
“Au revoir,” said André. He did look exactly like his father—in spite of the earthy angels! “It’s been great to see you, Jane!”
“Goodbye,” 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 life.
“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 André 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 that Jane thought so much of the Jane she was. Or did she? Did you not always, Jane asked herself honestly, think a little 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 life. 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 simplicity 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 Cicily’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 quality 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.
“I 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 said 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 Aeneid. 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 seemed 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 André had not been right about experience. If André 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 Cyprienne—and the earthy angels, of course—Jane thought indulgently, who had made André what he was today. “L’amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer l’amour!” What words to hear from the lips of the man whose romantic memory
