Madame Claire

If you wish to be relieved from the worries of housekeeping; if you wish to cultivate the society of retired army folk, or that of blameless spinsterhood, ask for a room (inclusive terms) at the Kensington Park Hotel, Kensington. It is unprogressive, it is Early Victorian—though of late that term has lost some of its reproach—but it is eminently safe and respectable.

Although neither of these qualities had ever particularly attracted Lady Gregory—or Madame Claire, as her grandchildren called her—she found herself at the age of seventy a candidate for admission. It was out of the question for her to keep up the big house in Prince’s Gardens after her only son Eric married. Live with him she would not, valuing his love for her and his own happiness too much to risk a ménage-à-trois with a daughter-in-law—even a daughter-in-law 

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of whom at that time she approved. For Madame Claire not only faced facts squarely, but she had a way of seeing under and around them as well, which greatly endeared her to the more discriminating of her children and grandchildren.

It was eight years since Eric had married Louise Broughton, and eight years since Madame Claire had come to live at the Kensington Park Hotel. Her little suite was arranged with charming taste. Guests of the hotel were not encouraged to furnish their own rooms, but Madame Claire had succeeded little by little in ousting the hotel atrocities and had put in their place some favorite pieces left from the sale of the house in Prince’s Gardens. Her meals were served in her sitting-room by Dawson, her elderly maid, and there too she held her little court. She had a great pity for other old ladies less fortunately placed, who were obliged to be in, yet not of, the homes of their children or grandchildren—“Always there, like pieces of furniture. Whereas,” she would say, “if my family wish to see me they must come to me, and make an occasion of it.”

A wonderful woman she was then at seventy-eight, with all her senses very much on the alert. 

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She read a great deal, but thought more, looking out of her windows at the world. She usually dressed in gray or dark blue, avoiding black which she said was only for the young. She was more nearly beautiful at seventy-eight than at any other period of her life, though she had always been a woman of great charm. She had been a loved and invaluable wife to the late Sir Robert Gregory, whom the world knew best as ambassador to Italy. She often said that for the connoisseur there were only two countries, England and Italy.

When Robert Gregory died, leaving her a widow of sixty, she was speedily—too speedily some said—sought in marriage by their lifelong friend, Stephen de Lisle. That was eighteen years ago. Refused by her, and perhaps made to feel just a little an old fool, he went abroad in one of his black tempers, and she had not heard one word from him since. It was a great sorrow to her, for both she and her husband had loved him devotedly. The grandchildren, especially Judy and Noel, thought it a delightful romance. They liked having a grandmother who had refused a famous man at sixty and broken his heart. But it was a subject on which she would permit no affectionate comment. It would have meant 

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so much to her to have had him as a dear contemporary and friend.

One foggy morning in late December when the whole world seemed bounded by the thick yellow fog which pressed against her window panes, Dawson brought her a letter bearing a French stamp. She knew the handwriting at once, though it had been firmer in the old days. She read a few lines of it, then stopped and turned to her maid who was busy about the room.

“Dawson,” said Madame Claire in a voice that was far from steady, “here’s a letter from Mr. de Lisle.”

“Oh, m’lady!” cried Dawson who loved surprises, “it’s like a voice from the grave, isn’t it now?”

“He’s not well,” continued her mistress, reading on. “Gout he says, poor old thing. He writes from Cannes, where he’s gone for the sunshine. He has to have a nurse. How he must hate it!”

“And you as strong and well as ever,” exulted Dawson. It was a source of peculiar joy to her when any of Madame Claire’s contemporaries fell victims to the maladies of old age, or that severest malady of all, death. Her beloved mistress seemed to her then like the winner in a 

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great race, and who was she, Dawson, but the groom who tended and groomed the racer? She thrilled with pride.

Madame Claire read the letter through to the end, and then went at once to her desk, with as free a step, Dawson thought, as she had ever had.

“I must write to him immediately,” she said, a flush on her old cheeks.

The letter took her several hours to write, because there was so much to tell him. He kept it, as he kept all her letters, and when he died they came into Eric’s possession, and finally into the writer’s.

“My dear old Stephen,” she wrote,

“Nothing that has happened to me in the last ten years has given me as much pleasure as your letter from Cannes. After a silence a fifth of a century long, you have come alive for me again. Stephen, Stephen! How am I to forgive you for that silence? But I do forgive you, as you knew I would, and I thank you for the happiness you have given me by breaking it.

“I don’t believe you have changed much, though you say you are an invalid—gout, phlebitis, rheumatism! Infirm, crotchety old Stephen! Infirm as to legs, but very active, I gather, as to brain, 

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heart, and temper. How I wish we might see each other! But you cannot travel, and I—yes, I can, but I will not. I motor gently down to my little house in Sussex in the summer, and back again in the autumn, and that is enough. The rest of the time I dwell in peace and security in three rooms here at the Kensington Park Hotel, and it suits me very well.

“How good it is that we can pick up the threads of our friendship again! As far as I am concerned it has neither lapsed nor waned. You say I dealt you a great blow. But, Stephen, how could you expect Robert’s widow, already a grandmother, to have married again? That, my dearest friend, would have been an elderly folly for which I would never have forgiven myself. You sulked badly, Stephen, and I think now you owe it to your years and mine to laugh. Do laugh! There is nothing like the mirth of old age, for old age knows why it laughs.

“You say you want me to write you about everything that concerns myself. I know you are only trying to cover up your tracks here, for the one you really want to hear about is Judy. I am well aware of your elderly partiality for my granddaughter, with whom you fell in love when she was seven—twenty years ago. But I don’t 

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intend to pander to it at the expense of the others. Judy must take her turn along with the rest.

“Stephen, would you be young again? You, thinking of your gout and your phlebitis, would cry ‘Yes!’ But don’t you see that you would merely be inviting gout and phlebitis again? For myself, the answer is no, no, no! And I have been happy, too, and with reason. Not for anything would I be blind again, uncertain, groping; feeling my way, wondering where my duty lay, dreading the blows of fate before they struck, valuing happiness too highly. That is life. Now the turmoil has died down, confusion is no more. It’s like sitting on a quiet hilltop in the light of the setting sun. Fate cannot harm me—I have lived. There is nothing to be feared, and there is nothing to be expected except the kindly hand of death, and the opening of another door. Perhaps one is a little tired, but the climb, after all, was worth it, and one can think here, and listen to the cries of birds, and the sound of the wind in the grass. The lie of the land over which one has come taken a different aspect and falls into a pattern. Those woods where one felt so lost—how little they were, and how many openings they had, if one had only gone forward, instead of rushing in blind circles.…

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“Gordon, my tactless grandson, said the other day that no one would dream I was nearly eighty if it were not for the evidence of the family tree. That did not please me. I take as much pride in being nearly eighty as I once took in being sixteen. After all, being an old woman is my rôle at present, and naturally it is a rôle I wish to play well. Perhaps you’ll say that I would accept old age less philosophically if I were blind, or deaf, or bedridden. I wonder? Even without all one’s faculties, surely there are thoughts and memories enough to furnish the mind. (Why, why, Stephen, don’t we cultivate contemplation?) And that tantalizing veil that shuts us off from the beyond should be wearing thin at our age, so that by watching and waiting one should be able to catch glimpses of what it hides.

“And now you will say, ‘For Heaven’s sake stop moralizing and tell me about Judy.’

“I hate describing people—especially those I love, but I will try. She is lovely in her strange way, with moments of real beauty. I say strange, because she follows no accepted rules. She is somber, but lights up charmingly when she smiles. I suppose her mouth is too wide, but I like it. She, is dark—the sort of girl who wears tawny colors well. She has brains and humor and in 

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responsiveness is not even second to Eric. Her mother, my daughter Millicent whom you will of course remember, is foolishly trying to goad her into marriage. How I pity youth! It’s so vulnerable! Judy tells me she sometimes wakes at night in a sort of fever, hagridden by the thought that she may have made a mess of her life by not marrying this man or that, fearful that she may never meet the right one at all, hating the thought of spinsterhood, and, she says, seeing nothing else for it.

“‘What,’ you may ask, ‘are all the young men about?’ Well, we lost many of our best in the war, as you and I know full well, and Judy expects—everything—And why not, as she has everything to give? She is not a girl to make concessions easily. Noel, her younger brother, is a great joy to her. Do you remember Noel, or can you only remember Judy? He was a dear little boy in those days, with his prickly, unusual notions, and his elfishness. He is not exactly good-looking, but his height, and his extremely attractive smile make him at least noticeable. He lost his left arm in France, and is now finding it very difficult to fit into a job. His health was so bad before the war that he had never settled down to anything, and the doctors had frightened him 

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and all of us into the belief that a severe winter cold would kill him. Then the war came, and three winters in the trenches made a new man of him.

“Gordon, of course, went back to the Foreign Office, where he seems perfectly happy. He will never fit his grandfather’s shoes, however. Robert had more wit in his little finger than Gordon has in his handsome head—but it is a very handsome head.

“Do you know that I am practicing great self-restraint? I have hardly mentioned your godson Eric—for fear, perhaps, of saying too much. He was away at school when you were last here, so he must be a very shadowy figure to you. He might have been like a son to you all these years, if only you had not cut yourself adrift from us all. For five years, you say, you have been almost within a day’s journey of England without once crossing the Channel. And yet time was when London was like a ball at your feet. Your great fault, Stephen, is that you take defeat badly. I still believe that you could have turned your political reverse at least into victory if you had stayed.

“At forty-one Eric is very like what Robert was at that age, but more dynamic. Keep that 

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word in mind if you would know him. He infuses life into me through his voice, through his smile, through his intensely blue eyes. He is impetuous and headlong—but headlong always on the side of fairness. He has his father’s quick grasp of things. He is tremendously interested in what you say—in what he says—and in you. When he smiles he makes you smile, when he laughs you must laugh too. He treats me as if I were an interesting old friend whom he likes, as well as his mother whom he loves.

“His wife—he married Louise Broughton, the daughter of old Admiral Broughton—doesn’t in the least understand him. If I have a regret in the world it is that. But I will tell you more about her another time.

“And now a few words about Millicent whom you knew as a sedate young matron. She is still sedate. She is in fact the very embodiment of all that is correct and conventional (I almost said and dull) in the English character. By that I mean that she is always well-poised and completely mistress of herself whether at Court or in her nightdress in an open boat. (Where indeed she was, poor thing, for she was torpedoed crossing from America during the war. She had gone there to raise funds for the Belgians. An eye-witness 

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told me she presided all the time, especially when it came to handing round the rum and biscuits. She was always a good, if stiff, hostess. He said that her nightdress, barely covered by a waterproof and a lifebelt, became by some miracle of deportment a quite proper and suitable garment, and made the women who were wrapped in furs look overdressed. I can imagine it perfectly.)

“I have never outgrown a feeling of amazement at having achieved anything as correct as Millicent. She is always certain she is right, and she never sees obstacles. When Gordon, Eric, and Noel went to the war she never worried, but looked quite calmly to their safe return, completely ignoring the awful and uncertain ground between. I believe she thought that the Almighty had a special mission to look after Pendletons and Gregorys. It seems she had some grounds for her belief, only Judy says she forgot to concentrate on Noel’s arm.

“John, her husband, is as negligible as ever. I cannot think what you found in him to dislike, unless you, like Nature, abhor a vacuum.

“As for Connie—my poor Connie! Stephen, I don’t know where she is, nor whether she’s alive or dead.

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“Get better of your gout and the other things, and come to England. After all, there is no place like it. Although we are in the midst of winter and coal is scarce and dear, and though the descendants of the daughters of the horseleech have multiplied exceedingly and cry louder than ever, ‘Give, give, give!’ And although even the children nowadays seem to lisp in grumbles, for the grumbles come, it is still the best country in the world and you must come back to it and take it to your heart again before—but you hate the thought of that, so I won’t say the words.

“I will write again next week; there is so much to tell you. So good-bye, for now.

“Claire.”