# Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 59

IN Paris the house in the Rue Raynouard was got ready for the arrival. It had begun again to take on a little of the old gaiety and sense of life, for it had passed through the depths of its depression in the days which first Lily and then Ellen had spent there alone in their sorrow. All things pass in time and so ​the grief and loneliness had begun to pass from the house. Lily, as the shrewd Rebecca predicted during her first quarrel with Ellen, found in time some one to console her for the loss of César. It was impossible that one so simple, so without complexities, should have gone on mourning; Lily lived as much in the present as Ellen lived in the future. Her consoler was the grave, dignified Monsieur de Cyon (the same white-haired gentleman connected with the government, whom Fergus had met at tea) the widower of "Tiens! Tiens!" de Cyon, whom Ellen had loathed long ago when she first came to the Rue Raynouard. He was glad no doubt to have been freed by death from the crêpe-laden "Tiens! Tiens!" and satisfied to have found so agreeable a creature as Lily—a woman whom he described to his friends as dignified, worldly, cultivated and beautiful, not omitting the fact that she was very rich and that she was an American, a factor of political importance at a moment when America was so necessary to Europe in general and to France in particular.
And Lily too was, in her casual way, content with such a marriage. In the room, smelling of scent and powder, where she had exchanged other confidences with Ellen, she said, "He is a gentleman and distinguished. Perhaps he may be in the next cabinet. I am rich. I can help him. And as for me . . ." She laughed softly, with a touch of the old abandon in her voice. "He will not bother me much. He is an old man." But she was grave too when she spoke again. "And I . . . I am no longer young. I am forty-three. I must begin to look about for something to take the place of youth. I shall make him a good wife. I shall be able to entertain and give dinners that will help him and I will have a position that I have never had before."
And then she grew thoughtful and added, "It will be good for Jean too. It is time he had a father . . . a thing he has never had. It is time that I stepped out of the picture and made way for him."
She had lived, if not a life beyond reproach, one that was at least discreet and marked by good taste, and so the other things, ​since the world is as it is, did not matter. Of those who had really known her secret only three remained . . . Ellen and Hattie and Jean. César and Madame Gigon and Old Julia were dead. It did not, of course, occur to her to include The Everlasting, who had known all the while.
Jean too was happier now, for he had grown used to wandering about on crutches and had become accustomed to a new leg, made so admirably that he could still ride as much as he liked. It would have been impossible for him to have remained depressed; there was too much of Lily in him and, it must not be forgotten, he resembled Fergus greatly. The old friendship between him and Ellen waxed stronger than ever. It seemed to her at times that Fergus had returned or had never died at all. In the evenings while his mother sat talking quietly in the big soft drawing room with Monsieur de Cyon, Ellen joined him at the piano in playing with four hands the wildest songs out of the music halls. Rebecca in rare moments of good humor added to the gaiety with imitations of poor old Sarah Bernhardt or Mistinguette or Spinelly.
Rebecca had long since come to make herself at home in the big house. She was settled now in one of the rooms opening on the long gallery and she was perpetually with them, for it never occurred to Lily to offer objections to one more guest; but, having nothing to occupy her time, she grew irritable and restless. Her occupation had gone suddenly and there remained nothing to absorb her energy. Ellen remained stubborn and mysterious. She would not return to America where there was a fortune awaiting her.
"I have enough," she said. "I need not work myself to death. I am rich now. I am through with struggling. Whenever I see fit I can return."
But to Rebecca, it must have seemed that Ellen had slipped somehow out of her reach, beyond the control which she had once held over her. She would not even quarrel as they had once done ​so often and with such vigor. She would simply repeat, "No. When I am ready, I will tell you. I am going to rest for a time."
It was her contentment that clearly had the power of disturbing Rebecca. She seemed at times almost happy. The old wilfulness and caprice were gone, and when she sat at the piano with Jean, there were times when it even seemed that she was enveloped by a hard, bright gaiety, touched, it is true, by hysteria and bitterness. She was unmanageable in a way she had never been.
"You are deceiving me," Rebecca reproached her. "There is something that I don't know. You are keeping something from me." And she would grow tearful and descend to the rich depths of Oriental sentiment. "Me," she would repeat, beating her thin breast, "who have given my life for you . . . who have worked myself to the bone . . . given all my time. . . . For no other reason than to make you a success. It is shameful."
And Ellen, in her new wisdom, might have answered, "Because you have found the thing you were born to do. Because you were aimless till you fastened upon me. . . . Because you found happiness in taking possession of me and my life."
But she said none of these things because it seemed to her that quarreling was useless. She only laughed and replied, "And you told the most wonderful lies about me. . . . You created Lilli Barr but Lilli Barr is having a rest now. I am being myself . . . Ellen Tolliver . . . for a little time."
Still Rebecca, too wise to be put off with such answers, only looked at her with suspicion and remained sulky. She could not run off now to visit Uncle Otto and Aunt Lina in Vienna nor the aunt in Riga nor the cousins in Trieste. She could not even make a round of the watering places, for all those which were not closed or filled with wounded soldiers lay on the other side of the circus parade that had begun to draw near to the end. One could almost hear the distant toots of the steam calliope, manned and manipulated by politicians, that fetched up the rear.
​July had passed and with it the last peril to Paris, but still Callendar did not return. She heard from him whenever he had time to write. They were busy now (he wrote). They were beginning to look toward the end. The arrival of the Americans had done much for the French, not that they counted for much because there were not enough of them, but because, simply, they were there. He had kept on the qui vive for her other brother—Robert—but he had not come across him. It was not strange since his own division was nowhere near the Americans. Still he might see him. . . . One could never tell. . . . They expected to be shifted soon eastward in the direction of the (here the word was deleted), quite near to the Americans. It was easy for him to make himself acquainted since he was, after all, half-American.
And he would write again and again, "Do not worry about me. I have the most incredible luck—always. There are some men who go through the thing knowing that nothing will ever happen to them. I know it. It's a feeling that is in the bones. In the worst messes, I have that feeling . . . so strong that it is physical. 'Nothing will happen to me . . . nothing whatever,' I find myself repeating over and over again."
And as she read this, it occurred to her again that such a belief belonged to the part of him which had always been strange to her—the part which escaped in some nameless fashion even the limits of her imagination. It was mystical and profound and uncanny. At the very moment that she knew he must be right in his faith, she was terrified too because he was so certain. She could not believe with such intensity save in herself. Her beliefs were related always to the power, the force which she herself had at her own command; and in all the senseless, miserable killing there was no power which lay in one's self. It was simply a monstrous game of chance with the odds all against one.
But she found a happiness in those letters of a sort which she had never imagined. It seemed to her that in some way a part of herself was there with him enduring the same hardships and dan​gers, and for the first time in all her life she touched the borders of the satisfaction which comes of sharing an experience. She was troubled no longer by doubts; now that she had given her word, it never occurred to her to change. There was relief in the knowledge that all the years of indecision were at an end. There was satisfaction in feeling that the thing had been settled.
But she was abashed at the bold passion with which he wrote, shamelessly, assailing the wall of her fierce reserve. She was abashed and yet triumphant, for in all the years of struggle she had forgotten at times that she was a woman and young. His letters made her know for a little time some of the joy which Lily had possessed since the beginning.
He wrote at length that Sabine's divorce was completed. "I am free now and will have a leave soon, so we can try then to make up for all the wasted years. Because they have been wasted. We should have been married long ago. We should have been courageous enough to have cut through the tangle and set things right. We were cowardly then. It is tragic that we only learn through long experience that wastes so much of joy, so much of happiness. But you are mine now . . . mine forever. I shall never lose you again. . . ."
But the letter troubled her strangely; it invoked with each line some disturbing memory of the past. The allusion to courage. . . . Who could say what had been courage and what cowardice? If the matter had rested with Callendar alone, it would have been solved because he had had what he believed was courage. He would have thrust poor Clarence aside and trampled upon him, to take ruthlessly what he himself desired. It had been a courage different from hers, whose foundations stood rooted in self-denial. Yet she had saved no one in the end, not even Clarence. Some power, in which Callendar placed such faith, had brought them together in the end, destroying Clarence despite anything she could do to save him. And it seemed to her that all the trouble, all the sorrow went back to that winter evening on the shore of ​Walker's Pond when she had said "Yes" to Clarence and felt for him at the same moment a queer, inarticulate pity—a pity which she was beginning at last to understand.
She experienced again a fierce satisfaction, almost a pleasure, which Callendar, in the strangeness of his blood, would never know. It was the satisfaction in having dominated even one's own body.
But in the last lines there lay an echo of the old conflict. You will be mine . . . mine forever. I will never lose you again. It was an arrogant speech, so like the way he had come to her years ago in the Babylon Arms, not asking what she desired but simply taking for granted that she would do as he wished. The memory of that afternoon disturbed her again with the sense that this love of which he wrote was an obscene, middle-aged emotion worn by a too great experience. The freshness was gone and with it all the glow of their meetings in the open windows of Sherry's and the walks through the Spring in Central Park. . . . It was this knowledge perhaps more than any other, that made his passionate phrases seem shameful. All of that first youth was gone from them, yet he posed, he wrote her still in the same ardent phrases, grown threadbare and unconvincing, of a love that had once been clean and fresh and despite all that she knew, even then, virginal. There was a touch now that bordered upon the professional. . . .
He told her that Sabine was in Paris and might pay her a call, as much out of a gossip's curiosity as from her curious passion for knowing the truth, for knowing with a blazing clarity exactly how things stood.
Sabine did call, in her small, expensive motor, accompanied by little Thérèse, an awkward, sickly girl of ten, but Ellen sent word that she was out. She had no desire to see Sabine, perhaps because she feared what Sabine had to tell her. And she could not turn back now; for too many years she had followed a straight unswerving path.