# Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 42

THE house in Paris to which Sabine and Richard Callendar returned after their honeymoon stood in the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. It belonged, properly speaking, to Thérèse herself, an enormous florid house of white stone built in the baroque German style which came to dominate the new parts of Paris in the early part of the twentieth century. In all honesty it could be said that Thérèse was not responsible either for its architecture or its decoration; the house came to her in partial payment for the loans she had made a year or two before the mysterious collapse of the international banking firm, Wolff and Simon. It had been the property of Wolff, and Thérèse, examining it one day shortly after the transfer to her possession, decided that it would suit her admirably as a pied-à-terre in Paris. Instead of turning it into cash she kept it and used it, unchanged, during her visits.
Wolff, in the heyday of his prosperity (long before he shot himself after fleeing half-way across Europe from such tender creditors as Thérèse) had fancied himself as a collector of art. The house remained as a monument to his bad judgment in this matter; in a German fashion he had absorbed quantities of sentimental pictures and rococo bronzes that hung or stood on marble pedestals between enormous second-rate tapestries. All pieces of any value had vanished long ago when Wolff, in a frantic effort to save the collapse of his firm, had summoned a dealer who stripped the place of its Degas, its Rodins, and even the Seurat and the Rousseau which a mistress had led Wolff into buying against his will because she thought it chic to "buy moderns." All that remained were remnants, grandiose, vulgar and sentimental, among which Thérèse Callendar moved and lived with as great an indifference as she displayed toward the solid house on Murray Hill. The vast mass of marble and tapestry satisfied, it seemed, an Oriental longing for pomp and splendor. All that was Greek in her and much that was ​French exulted in this phantasmagoria of marble, red plush and mirrors.
The house depressed Sabine from the very moment she crossed the threshold and beheld with a shudder the expanse of tesselated floor, the red plush stair rail and the drawing-room beyond with its modern gilt furniture set upon an authentic Savonnerie beneath sentimental German pictures of the Dresden school. Unlike her mother-in-law she had an Anglo-Saxon feeling that a home should be a place in which one was surrounded by warm and beautiful things. To Thérèse Callendar a house was a house. She owned houses in London, New York, Paris and Constantinople. A house was simply four walls within which one found rich food and soft beds during the brief weeks between journeys from one capital to another; and so the houses she possessed, like the one in the Avenue du Bois and the one on Murray Hill, came to have the indifferent air of great caravanseries. The only rooms which might have attained the dignity of the word "home" were those occupied by the concierges and the caretakers.
It was in this house, after the turbulence of her honeymoon, that Sabine found the time to analyze, with all her passion for such things, the exact character of her position. The process began during the first week when her husband, a little gruff over her dislike for the place, left her a great deal in solitude. She found that he expected her, during the day, to amuse herself; at night he was devoted enough, but the days clearly were to be his to be spent among his friends of the Jockey Club and elsewhere. The afternoons she passed languidly in a sitting room which adjourned their bed-chamber and had once served as a boudoir for the same mistress who led Wolff into buying a Seurat.
Sabine understood perfectly the character of the room; indeed, she found amusement in reconstructing from the evidence furnished by the atrocious house, the character and history of the suicide ​banker; and, though she never knew it, she came miraculously close to the truth.
The former boudoir had a marble floor on which were spread a tiger skin from India and a white bearskin from Siberia. There were mirrors on every side; the lady who had once occupied the room could not have turned her head without encountering a dozen reflections of her pink voluptuous body. (Wolff, being a German and a Jew, was certain to choose that sort of mistress.) The walls were covered with black satin on which had been painted a Parisian decorator's version of Tokyo in cherry blossom time. The chaise longue, fashioned like an Egyptian couch with carved lions' heads at both ends, stood almost hidden beneath great piles of cushions of fanciful design and color . . . mauve, yellow, green, crimson and black, all decorated with a profusion of tassels and gold lace. Lying upon it Sabine gazed at her innumerable reflections and thought that being a lady was much more satisfactory than being a demi-mondaine; only to laugh aloud the very next moment at the picture of her mother-in-law in respectable black satin and jet moving complacently about amid such vulgar and guilty splendor.
But all her thoughts were not amusing ones. For a bride, they were remarkably cynical and disillusioned. She was troubled by the change which had come over Callendar since their marriage . . . a change of which she had become aware almost at the moment she turned away from the altar of St. Bart's. Being the wife of Richard Callendar, she understood, was not the same as being his friend. This new relationship had altered everything. As a friend she might have found him satisfactory until the day of her death; as a husband . . . she did not know. She was puzzled. It seemed to her that in gaining a husband, she had lost a friend.
She understood, quite coldly and without conceit, that she was much more clever than most women of her age. She was ​not silly; she had few illusions. Nor was she, perhaps, romantic; though of this she could not be so certain.
It puzzled her that in becoming the wife of Richard Callendar, she had forfeited so quickly the old understanding, the habit they had of exchanging jests and of mocking people in the manner of naughty school children. She had tried from the first to revive the old intimacy, but when he failed to respond to her sallies and regarded her with a queer look of disapproval, she had grown depressed. It was as if the new intimacy, so intensely physical with a man like Callendar, had killed the old; as if by becoming his wife she had attained a position immeasurably remote from that of his friend.
Would he, she wondered, treat a mistress in this fashion, as if she were an institution? And an institution over which he had complete authority?
It was not that she thought him in love with her. Reflecting now with some bitterness, she knew why he had married her. From his point of view, the time had come for him to marry; she was suitable, and he must have known that a woman so clear-headed would cause him no difficulties, no scenes, no unpleasantnesses. His mother had desired it because she liked Sabine and because it increased the already vast fortune for which she cared so tenderly. Lately, when they dined out together, she had come to understand even more—that he had perhaps chosen her because she made the best of herself, because she was a woman of spirit who, on entering a room, made an impression. There was in Callendar a strange sort of vanity which demanded satisfaction, a vanity which was, perhaps, another and a masculine manifestation of his mother's passionate sense of property. It would have been impossible for him to have married a woman, no matter how pretty she might have been, who was simply commonplace, sweet and insipid. He demanded in his wife an element of the spectacular. He had devoted himself to the tawny Lorna Vale, ​to the black and glittering Mrs. Sigourney, and to that strange, uncivilized musician from the middle west. About them all, there had been a spectacular quality, an undercurrent of fierce vitality, of outward distinction from the mob which appeared to have fascinated him.
She did not flatter herself that he had married her through desire; yet from the moment of their marriage he had been passionate after a fashion which shocked her. It was confusing to find that a man who was so polite and indifferent, so free from the little tendernesses which, to be honest, she had never expected, could at times display a passion so fierce and unexpected. It was as if in some way, love, passion, desire—she could not in his case define it precisely—were isolated, a thing apart.
There were reasons enough why she had married him. He was a great match; women would have desired him even if he had not been rich. And, she reflected with astonishing coldness, to have won him in the face of so much competition was a triumph worth paying for with much unhappiness. It was a victory over women who hated her and had sought with all the bag of their nasty feminine tricks to outwit her. She had married him too because she had come very nearly to the conclusion that she could never fall passionately in love with any man and that, therefore, it was far better to choose an interesting husband than a dull one. It was impossible, she felt, for love to survive such a passion as hers for dissection and analysis; love could not stand being pinned down and pulled apart. She did not then expect great love, and for the rest of it, Callendar had fascinated her as no other man had ever done, because he had always eluded her, just as he was eluding her now that he was her husband. In a sense, he offered her material vigorous enough to last a lifetime.
More than once in the midst of such reflections there returned to her the memory of the night when the raw young creature, whom she now thought of as "that musician," had fainted. She ​remembered how, on this occasion, she had regarded Callendar minutely as he stood, his hands clenching the back of a chair, watching the naked Burmese dancer swaying to the insidious rhythm of tom-tom and flageolet. She remembered how the dancer and the barbaric music had shocked her a little as being wildly out of place in the big stuffy drawing-room. It was music which to her meant very little save that it was mildly exciting. Upon Callendar and his mother it had produced the most astonishing effect. Could it be that in this lay the clue alike to his fascination and to her failure to fathom that obscure thing which people called his soul? Though he had been her husband, even her lover, for a long time, she knew him no better than she had known him on the night of his mother's absurd soirée.
And lying in that preposterous boudoir that had once belonged to the mistress of Wolff, she found herself admitting that slowly and certainly he was gaining complete possession of her imagination. It troubled her because she valued above all else in the world her own aloofness; so long as she did not lose her sense of being a spectator, no one could hurt her, not even her own husband. It troubled her too because she could not be certain whether this new interest had any relation to love or whether it had its roots in a sort of perverse attraction, fundamentally intellectual in quality . . . an attraction which carried an element of the sensual hitherto entirely foreign to her nature. Day after day she found herself smiling over the thought that this sensual attraction should have been a little shocking and was not. In one sense he had overwhelmed her. He was a cruel, a passionate lover. If she had been less intelligent, more innocent, more sentimental, he might have wounded her very soul; but the curse which made romantic love impossible also saved her. Never, for more than a passing moment, had he been able to dissipate her awful awareness.
He had come to her, after all, from Lorna Vale, from Mrs. Sigourney, perhaps even from that American girl (though of this ​she could not be certain) and, doubtless, from many other women. So much experience, she understood, made him dangerous to any woman possessed of curiosity.
During those first weeks in Paris, it amazed Sabine to find that her husband knew so few of his own countrymen; he told her that most Americans who chose to live in Paris were either silly or depraved and so revealed for the first time the fact that he did not consider himself American. He became sulky when she asked him to dine with a school friend of hers whose husband chose to live in Paris.
"I know her husband," he answered in contempt. "He is an ass who tries to live like the French. He's not a Frenchman. His money comes out of a New England shoe factory."
But he went all the same, perhaps because she managed to convey to him without saying it, that he was neglecting her. During the day she spent a great deal of time with friends and acquaintances, mostly women who had married foreigners of one sort or another. In their company she went from shop to shop buying an endless number of clothes. The same taste which caused her to shudder at the monstrous house in the Avenue du Bois led her to love clothes passionately. She knew too that beautiful clothes satisfied the strain of vanity in her husband which demanded a wife who was dressed with taste and distinction. She had begun already to plan how she might attract and keep him.
One evening, while they were dressing for the Opera, he said to her as she came out of the boudoir and faced him, "It is true what Jacques said at the club to-day. It takes the Parisian to make the clothes and the American to wear them. The Americans are the best dressed women in the world."
And he looked at her in such a way that she grew warm suddenly in the knowledge that her figure was superb, that her shoulders were marvelously white and beautiful, and that her clothes were perfect. Until lately she had dressed, like most American women, for the sake of other women; now she under​stood that, without knowing it, she had been dressing of late to please a man, because she had found one who understood the beauty and importance of clothes. There was, despite all her other doubts, great satisfaction in that.
She discovered too that his friends were not among the Americans and the English but among the French and the Russians. She found herself, night after night, at dinners watching him as he stood, straight, dark and handsome, his queer gray eyes wrinkled a little with laughter, talking to some friend who was a foreigner, and at such moments she was aware of his great difference from her own people. He was, in some obscure fashion, linked with that preposterous boudoir and its florid decorations. Perhaps, secretly, he really liked the awful house as much as his mother liked it.
She saw too, with the green eyes which took in everything, that the women about her were intensely conscious of him, and she knew then that she had been at the same time lucky and tragically unlucky. It would be so easy for him . . . a man of so much intelligence and a beauty like that of a fine animal.
Toward the end of the first winter, a day or two after she had made certain that she was to have a baby, she interrupted her shopping long enough to have lunch at the Ritz. She had a table, alone, in one corner of the big room and, having no one to talk with her, she fell to observing the types at the other tables and reflecting upon the vulgarity and self-conscious glitter which marked the patrons of such hotels the world over. So she was startled when she found that the personality of some one who entered the room at that moment had the power of distracting her.
Two women came in together and stood for a time surveying the room. The one (it was she who was disturbing) was tall, slender and handsome, dressed smartly in a black suit with a black fur. The other, plainly a Jewess (who understood perfectly the manipulation of head-waiters) was small, with a ferrety, ​good-natured face and an energetic, chattering manner. They took a table at a little distance so that Sabine was able to watch them.
In the beginning, as she realized that there was some reason for her having noticed the pair, she became aware of a sense of familiarity in the taller woman. Then, as she watched them, the reason became quite clear. It was the American girl . . . the musician, in Paris and in the Ritz of all places, and no longer dowdy but handsomely dressed!
By long established precedent, Sabine made no move toward approaching the newcomer. It was her habit to avoid involving herself with too many people; such a course made life far too tiresome and complicated. She had known the girl well enough, but there was no point now in renewing the acquaintance; indeed, it seemed idiotic even to consider the idea. Vaguely, she reflected, it was a good idea to leave what was well enough alone.
But the old, insatiable curiosity had been aroused; she found herself puzzled as to the presence of Ellen . . . (Tolliver, that was her name) . . . in Paris. She had been poor. She had been, she told Sabine during those stark conversations in the house on Murray Hill, hindered by a hundred obstacles. Yet here she was, in Paris, dressed handsomely in clothes which the appraising eye of Sabine told her had come from one of the best establishments, probably Worth or Chanel. Sabine was curious too regarding the whereabouts of the husband . . . the husband whom she had once mistaken very stupidly for the girl's lover. And slowly, in the midst of the noisy room filled with a fantastic assortment of people, there rose in her memory a picture of that vulgar apartment the Babylon Arms, and a glimpse as they opened the door of the tiny top floor flat, of a mild little man in shirt sleeves. What had become of him?
She remembered too the confidences which she had exchanged with her mother-in-law in the days when the young musician seemed so near to upsetting their carefully laid plans. Mrs. ​Callendar had mentioned the mild little man, saying, "I'm certain the girl doesn't care a fig for him. She's tied to him by pity. That's all. But we can be thankful for him. He stands between her and Richard."
Where was the little man to whom she was tied by pity?
Any one noticing Sabine as she made ready to leave the dining room might easily have taken her for an adventuress. She drew her veil over her face and holding her fur almost up to her eyes, she hastened out, taking care on the way that her back was toward the tall girl and the busy little Jewess. In the battle between an overwhelming curiosity and a vague instinct of fear, it was fear which, unaccountably, won the victory.
As her motor, very small and very expensive, sped away along the Rue de Rivoli and across the white spaces of the Place de la Concorde into the Avenue des Champs Elysées, Sabine succumbed to an inexplicable sense of depression. It occurred to her that she did not really know whether the girl had ever been the mistress of her husband. She could not even be certain that Callendar had ever asked Ellen Tolliver to be his wife. Thérèse Callendar had the word of the girl that there had been nothing; yet with Callendar, it was impossible to know. If he had asked her to marry him, it must have been but a step toward seducing her from her husband, the mild little man. It did not occur to Sabine that with two women a man might be two quite different persons.
The motor sped smoothly along the asphalt past the Elysée Palace, around the Arc de Triomphe and on toward the huge house in the Avenue du Bois.
It might be, she thought, that Callendar himself knew the girl was in Paris. It might even be that he had arranged it for her to be there.
And again Sabine reflected that in her good fortune there was a tragic element of bad luck.
​Callendar came in late for tea. She heard the footman speaking to him as he came through the vast hall across the tesselated floor. She waited for him, sitting behind the silver tea things in the small sitting room at the back of the house, and as he entered she was seized again by the disturbing fear of losing herself. He kissed her, casually, and said, "Well, have you had a busy day?"
"Nothing. . . . I went shopping with Madeleine and lunched alone at the Ritz."
She might easily have added, "And whom do you think I saw there?" But she did not. On the contrary, she said, "It's a funny show . . . the Ritz. . . . And you? . . . What have you done?"
She did not hear his answer, because her attention was swallowed up by a sharp sense of his presence . . . a vivid image of the dark face and the fine, muscular hand as he raised his silk kerchief in a familiar gesture to stroke his mustaches. In the back of her mind a small voice told her that it was perilous and awful to have such emotions.
She poured his tea but he did not drink it.
"I'll have a glass of port," was his reply. And then, "I had luck to-day. I won eleven thousand francs at baccarat . . . playing with Henri and Posselt, the Russian."
"Good," was her reply, and again it was not what she might have said. This gambling worried her. It was not that he would bring them to poverty by it; that was almost impossible. But there was in her mind a feeling of disgust at the picture of men spending five hours of daylight in gambling. She tried to reproach herself by the thought that the idea was American and provincial. But she understood why his mother sometimes reproached him for not thinking more of his business. (Always he retorted that she liked business and he did not.)
There was silence and presently Sabine said, "I wonder, Dick, if we can't do something about this house . . . either take one of our own or clear out some of this rubbish."
​"It's very comfortable. . . . There's every luxury."
She laughed. "Too much luxury . . . I feel at times like a kept woman. Wolff had it for his mistress . . . I'm sure he did."
Callendar smiled. "That's true," he replied. "Some of it is very bad, but can't we stick it out until spring? We'll go to the country then or to England for a time."
She had spoken of the matter before and the answer had always been the same. She now revived the discussion without hoping for any solution; she wanted to know whether he really liked it, whether he was really linked in some way to the extravagance of that awful boudoir. Watching him as she spoke, she believed that he did.
For a time they smoked in silence and then Sabine, crushing out the ash of her cigarette, observed with a magnificent air of indifference, "I wonder what has become of that American girl . . . the musician. You remember, 'Miss Tolliver' was her name."
She saw that he looked at her sharply and then, disarmed by her indifference, that his face assumed an expression which matched her own.
"I don't know. I suppose she's still in New York. She was very talented."
"She planned to come to Paris some day. If she does, it would be a nice thing to do to look her up."
Her husband smiled before he answered her, a quiet amused smile such as he used to display when he caught his mother in some intricate feminine plot.
"I don't see why we should. She probably wouldn't like it. After all, it wouldn't be the same, would it?"
From this she could make nothing. All that he had said might mean anything at all. It seemed to her that the more she talked, the more confusing, the less clear everything became.
"I simply happened to think of her. She's a remarkable girl. She's had a struggle from the beginning."
​"A damned fine lot," was his comment. "You'll hear from her some day."
She must have understood that all her slyness was of no use, that methods such as this brought her nowhere, for she fell silent after this until Dick rose and said, "Shall we go up? My nerves are on edge from playing all afternoon. I think I'll sleep a bit."
Then while she watched him, as from a great distance, it occurred to her that all this was scarcely the behavior of a bridegroom on his honeymoon; it was, on the contrary, as if already they had been married for years.
As she rose to go with him, a sudden decision crossed her mind. Without thinking why she was employing it, she used the one stake which she had at hand.
"Dick," she said abruptly, "I am going to have a baby."
He turned, and into his face came an expression of pleasure the like of which she had not seen there before. He smiled and, moving toward her, took her gently into his arms.
"That's fine," he said softly. "That's wonderful." And she felt him kiss her gently after a fashion that was new and disarming. It was neither a casual kiss, nor a passionate one; those two moods she knew very well. This was something new. She felt almost that she were an animal, a pet for whom he had a great affection and a strong desire to protect.
"Your mother will be pleased," she said, frightened again by the old dread of losing herself. (She was ashamed too that he should feel her tremble so.)
"She will be delighted. She wants an heir. She thinks I'm not much good at taking care of all her money." And he kissed her again in the same tender fashion.
"But it might be a girl."
He laughed a little. "No, I'm lucky . . . Think of my eleven thousand francs!"
But she saw that he wanted a boy, desperately, that he was not in the least interested in a girl. It was very foreign of him . . . ​that desire for some one to carry on the name, to inherit all the fortune.
After they had gone up the stairs with the rail of red plush, he came into the sitting room again to kiss her gently and to ask if she were feeling well, and when he had gone Sabine, as she lay in the darkness among the gaudy pillows of the chaise longue, understood clearly and bitterly for the first time the change which their marriage had brought about. He was being gentle and loving not because she was a woman or because he loved her, but because she had become now by the course of nature an institution, a wife, a prospective mother. He was being tender not toward her but toward an idea. He placed her a little apart, so that the old sense of companionship was no longer possible. She was a symbol now . . . the wife and mother who was the rock and foundation, the one who produced sons to carry on name and property, but not by any chance the one who was loved because she was a woman.