would have been outcasts in any bourgeoise school in their own town.
Yet M. Brodard was a great champion of the public schools and never
lost an opportunity of defending against their bitter critics the
public lycées for girls, then just struggling into being in France. I
wondered a little that he should allow his daughters to go to such a
boarding-school as ours. But it seemed that the angry resistance of the
moneyed and pious families of Morvilliers had up to that time prevented
the establishment of a public lycée for girls there. This enabled Mme.
Brodard to steer past another dangerous headland in the complicated
course of her life. Perhaps, also, warm-hearted M. Brodard was not
inclined to be too hard on his girls, whom he fondly loved, after the
adoring manner of French fathers, nor to expect too much from his
devoted wife in the way of conforming to his ideas.
Even at that time, poor Mme. Brodard’s life was all one miracle of
adroit achievement in reconciling irreconcilable elements and effecting
impossible compromises. She had married her husband when they were
both young (he must have been an irresistible suitor), and before his
hot-headed sympathies for the under-dog had absorbed him. Like a good
and devoted French wife, she never admitted that anything her Bernard
did was other than what she would wish. But she remained exactly what
she had been at the time of her marriage, and although she was deeply
attached to her kind and faithful husband and made the best of homes
for him, she had not the slightest intention of changing a hair or
becoming anything but a good bourgeoise, a devoted believer in social
distinctions, in the Church, in the laboring classes _as such and in
their places_, and above all in the excellence of owning property and
inheriting money.
On this last point M. Brodard went much further than anything I had
heard discussed at home, and poured out incessantly in brilliant
editorials a torrent of scorn, laughter, hatred, and denunciation, upon
the sacred institution of inheritance, the very keystone of the French
social edifice. “How ridiculous,” he used to write on mornings when
no other forlorn hope stood in special need of a harebrained charge,
“that the mere chance of birth, or a personal caprice, should put vast
sums of unearned wealth into the hands of a man who has not had the
slightest connection with its production. Property, the amassing of
wealth by a man who has had the acumen and force to produce it ... we
may have two opinions about that, about whether he should be allowed to
keep for himself all he can lay his hands on. But there can be no two
opinions about the hilarious idiocy of the theory that his grown-up
son has any inherent right to possess that wealth, his son who has no
more to do with it than the Emperor of China, save by a physiological
accident. A hundred years from now, people will be laughing at our
imbecile acquiescence in such a theory, as we now laugh at the imbecile
acquiescence of whole provinces and kingdoms in the Middle Ages, passed
from the hand of one master to another, because somebody had married
somebody else.”
Mme. Brodard used to say resignedly, that she minded such editorials
least of all. “That is a principle that will never touch _our_ lives!”
she said with melancholy conviction, for her modest dowry was the
extent of their fortune and of their expectations. She herself had been
an orphan and all the Brodard elders were dead, having left nothing to
the family of such an enemy to society as they considered Bernard to be.
She did not complain; she never complained of anything her husband did;
but it was plain to see that she thought it her obvious duty to protect
her daughters from the consequences of their dear father’s ideas. The
income from her dowry kept them at school and dressed them at home, and
as the oldest began to approach the marriageable age Mme. Brodard cast
about her with silent intensity for some possible means for stretching
that dowry to enable Madeleine to make the right sort of match. She
knew of course that this was an impossible undertaking; but all her
married life had been an impossible undertaking carried through to
success, and she did not despair, although there were times when she
looked white and anxious.
But this was never when M. Brodard was at home. Indeed it was
impossible for any one to be tense or distraught in the sunny gaiety
of M. Brodard’s presence. His entrance into that neat, hushed, narrow,
waxed, and polished interior was like the entrance of a military band
playing a quick-step. He was always full of his latest crusade, fired
with enthusiasms, hope, and certainty of success. He made you feel
that he was the commanding officer of a devoted force, besieging an
iniquitous old enemy, and every day advancing further toward victory.
Yet another blast, down would tumble the flimsy walls of cowardly
traditional injustice, and sunshine would stream into the dark places!
Full of faith in what he was doing, he was as light-hearted as a boy,
electrifying the most stagnant air with the vibrant current of his
conviction that life is highly worth the trouble it costs. Big girls
as we were, he swept us off into hilarious games of hide-and-seek; and
never in any later evenings of my life have I rocked in such gales
of fun as on the evenings when we played charades. An impersonation
of a fussy, clucking setting hen which he gave as part of the word,
“ampoule” has remained with me as a high-water mark of sheer glorious
foolery never surpassed by the highest-salaried clown. In the following
charade we laughed so at his “creation” of a fateful Napoleon that
we could not sit on our chairs; and after that, carried away by his
own high spirits, he did the “strong man” at the village fair (he was
a prodigiously powerful athlete) lifting a feather with a grotesque
display of swelling muscles, clenched jaws, and widespread legs which
all but finished me. The tears of mirth used to come to my eyes as
I recalled that evening, and many a taut, high-strung moment of my
adolescence in after years relaxed into healthy amusement at the
remembered roar of M. Brodard’s laughter.
M. Brodard’s laughter ... alas!
And yet at the very time when his care-free, fearless laughter so
filled my ears, he was standing out single-handed against the most
poisonous hostility, to force an investigation of a framed-up law case,
in which a workingman had been defrauded of his rights. Apparently
there was always some such windmill against which he thought it
necessary to charge. Apparently his zeal for forlorn hopes never
diminished. We went back to school after that vacation leaving him the
center of a pack of yelling vituperations from all the staid and solid
citizens of the region ... “poor, dear Papa,” as the Brodard girls
always said, imitating their mother’s accent.
To me, school and lessons in deportment seemed queerer than ever,
after that great gust of stormy, ruffling wind, but the Brodard girls
were used to such contrasts. They but plunged themselves deeper than
ever, up to their very necks, into the atmosphere of gentility. They
had caught more than their mother’s accent, they had caught her deep
anxiety about their future, her passionate determination that the ideas
of their father should not drag them into that impossible world of
workingmen, radicals and badly dressed outcasts, which was the singular
choice of their excellent poor dear Papa.
When Mme. Brodard came to Paris, in the well-cut tailored dress which
I now knew to be the only one she possessed, she reported that Papa,
by sheer capacity for shouting unpleasant truths at the top of his
great voice, had obtained a re-trial and acquittal of that tiresome
workingman, and was now off on a new tack, was antagonizing all the
merchants of town by an exposé of their grinding meanness to their
hapless employees. It seemed that libel-suits were thick in the air,
and the influential members of society crossed to the other side of the
street when they met M. Brodard. “But you know how poor dear Papa seems
to thrive on all that!”
Well, _he_ might thrive on all that, but Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde
knew very well that nothing they wanted would thrive on “all that.”
Their only salvation was in escape from it. In the effort to prepare
themselves for that escape, they smeared themselves, poor things, from
head to foot with good breeding. They had nothing but themselves,
Maman, and her little dowry to count on; but at least no one should
be able to guess from their manners that their home life had not been
conventional. Mme. Brodard went on, that day, to consult with her
banker about re-investing some of her little fortune, so that it would
mean more income. When Madeleine left school, they would need more,
Heaven knew, to piece out the plain living furnished by the head of the
house. What could they do to rise to that crisis? _When Madeleine left
school_ ... an abyss before their feet! Could they perhaps go south,
to a winter resort for a few months every year, where there were no
Morvilliers people, where there might be eligible young men ... or even
some not so young? They all looked anxious and stern, when they thought
of it, for after Madeleine, there were Lucie and Clotilde!
I was sent home to America in June that year, before the end of
the school-term. The good-bys were said at lunch-time, before my
schoolmates went off to the lesson in deportment. The last I saw of the
Brodards at the time, was through the door of the salon as I passed on
my way to the street. They were learning how to handle a fan, how to
open it--“not tearing it open with both hands like a peasant girl, but
flirting it open with a sinuous bend of the wrist of one hand ... not
so abrupt!... smooth, suave, with an aristocratic....” As I went down
the hall, the voice of Professor Delacour died away on these words. I
wondered what poor dear Papa was up to now.
Two years later when I was taken back to France and went to visit the
Brodards, I found that he was still up to the same sort of thing. Just
then he was making the echoes yell in the defense of a singularly
unattractive, snuffy old man, who lived in a village six or seven
kilometers away from Morvilliers. Old M. Duval, it seemed, had gone to
South America in his youth, had accumulated some property there, and
had lost his religion. Now, at sixty-nine, with so it was said, enough
money to live on, he had come back to Fressy, had bought a comfortable
little home there, and settled down to end his days in his birthplace.
But Fressy, as it happened, had always been and still was noted for its
piety and conservatism. The curé of the parish was a man of flaming
zeal, and the Mayor was also a very devout ultramontane. Till then
their influence had been unquestioned in the town. They had boasted
that there was one loyal village left in France where none of the
poisonous new ideas had come in to corrupt the working classes, and to
wean them from their dutiful submission to the rule of their spiritual
and secular betters. Apparently till then, M. Brodard had overlooked
the existence of such a village near him.
His attention was now very much called to it by the persecution of
old M. Duval. The persistent and ostentatious absence from Mass of
the returned traveler was followed by a shower of stones which broke
most of his windows. His easy-going advice given publicly in a café to
some young workmen of the town to follow his example, to stand up for
themselves, get higher wages or strike, was answered by the poisoning
of his dog. The old fellow became indignant, and never dreaming of
the heat of the feeling against him, walked straight up to M. le Curé
one day in the street, and asked him--as if the priest had anything
to do with what was happening!--whether the laws of France did or did
not permit a man to live quietly in his own house, no matter what his
opinions were! That night some anonymous defender of the status quo set
fire to his chicken-house. It was at this time that M. Brodard began to
be aware of the existence of Fressy.
Old M. Duval called on the police for protection. “The police.” That
sounds very fine, but the police of Fressy meant a solitary old
garde-champêtre whose wife was the most pious woman in town, and whose
only daughter was the cook in the house of the fiercely legitimatist
Mayor. It is not surprising that the next morning, the scoffing
unbeliever from overseas found that somehow marauders had eluded “the
police,” and laid waste his promising kitchen-garden. They intended
(they proclaimed it openly) to drive out from their sanctified midst,
the man who flaunted his prosperity as the result of a wicked and
godless life.
But they had not counted on M. Brodard and on his unparalleled capacity
for making a noise. He stormed out to Fressy to see the old man,
thoroughly frightened by this time; heard his story, exploding at
intervals into fiery rockets of indignation; clasped him in his arms,
as though M. Duval had been his own kin; and swore that he would prove
to him that justice and freedom existed in France to-day as always. The
old man’s nerves were shaken by his troubled nights and his harried
sense of invisible enemies all about him. Until that moment it had
seemed to him that all the world was against him. His relief was
immense. He returned M. Brodard’s embrace emotionally, his trembling
old arms clasped hard about M. Brodard’s great neck, the tears in his
scared old eyes.
Then M. Brodard hurried back to Morvilliers, tore the throttle open,
and let her go ... to the great discomfort of Mme. Brodard and the
girls, the two elder of whom were now very reluctantly preparing
themselves to teach, for they had not been able to organize the
longed-for escape. That was the situation when I visited them.
Of course in due time the intemperate publicity about the matter put an
end to the attacks on M. Duval. The rattling crackle of M. Brodard’s
quick-fire protests rose in the air, till they reached the ears of
the Sous-Prefect, from whose exalted office orders to “see to that
matter” were issued, and came with imperative urgence even to the
royalist Mayor of Fressy. He very grudgingly issued certain unofficial
orders, which meant quiet in old M. Duval’s life. There was even a
victim sacrificed to shut M. Brodard’s too-articulate mouth. The
garde-champêtre lost his position and his chance for a pension, which
was very hard on an excellent, honest man whose only intention had been
to do his duty as he saw it.
By the time that I was back in America in college, Clotilde wrote me
that all that disturbance had died down, that M. Duval, horrid old
thing, had come on his shaking old legs to make a visit to Papa, to
thank him with deep emotion for the intense peace and comfort of his
present life. I could read between the lines that Clotilde thought they
might very well have a little more of those commodities in their own
life.
After that I heard from some one else (for M. Brodard and his ideas
were becoming famous) that the opposition had finally caught him in a
legal technicality, something connected with his campaign for tearing
down the miserable old disease-soaked medieval hovels where many
poor people lived in Morvilliers. The proprietors of the threatened
rookeries chipped in together, hired expensive expert legal advice,
and finally, to their immense satisfaction, succeeded in getting a tiny
sentence of imprisonment, for defamation of their characters, inflicted
on M. Brodard. He was kept in jail for two weeks, I believe, which
was a fortnight of pure glory. All his humble adherents, hundreds of
them, came tramping in to see him from all the region round, bringing
tribute. His “cell” was heaped with flowers, he fared on the finest
game and fattest poultry, and ... what pleased him vastly more ... the
fiery editorials which he sent out from his prison about the infamy
of wretched lodgings for poor families were noticed and reprinted
everywhere in France, where the circumstances of his grotesque
imprisonment were known.
The condemnation which his opponents meant to be a crushing disgrace
turned out an apotheosis. He enjoyed every moment of it and emerged
from his two weeks vacation, ruddier, stronger, in higher spirits than
ever, his name shining with the praise of generous-hearted men all
over the country. He cocked his hat further over one ear than ever and
strode off home. You could fairly see the sparks fly from beneath his
feet.
* * * * * * *
The morning after his release from prison, news came from Fressy that
old M. Duval had died of apoplexy.
Well, what of that? Ah, what of that ...?
He had willed his whole fortune to M. Brodard, and it seemed he was
frightfully rich: it came to more than three million francs.
* * * * * * *
Oh, yes, he took it. Of course he did. You knew he would. What else
would you have had him do? It’s all very well to have abstract ideas
about the absurdity and iniquity of inheritance; but when your own
daughters ... and your own wife ... expect so confidently....
Mme. Brodard, you see ... he was devoted to his wife who had so
faithfully made the best of homes for him; and to his daughters whom he
loved so dearly....
Can’t you see the astounded radiance of their faces at the news? And
they’d already been sacrificed so many years for his ideas.... _Ideas!_
What do you suppose he could do but accept it?
* * * * * * *
I don’t know one thing about the inner history of this period when
M. Brodard was bringing himself to a decision, and in the light of a
glimpse, just one glimpse which I had later, I think the less I know
about it the better for my peace of mind. The only information I had
was contained in a very nice, conventional note from Mme. Brodard,
giving me, in the pleasantly formal, well-turned phrases of French
epistolatory style, the news of their great good fortune which, she
said, was certainly sent by Providence to protect her dear husband
from the suffering and hardship which would have been his without it;
for M. Brodard was very ill, she wrote, oh, very ill indeed! He had
gone through a phase of strange mental excitement; from that he had
sunk into melancholia which had frightened them, and in the end had
succumbed to a mysterious malady of the nervous system which made him
half-blind and almost helpless. Helpless ... her wonderful, strong
husband! What could she have done to care for him if it had not been
for this financial windfall coming just when it was most needed?
You can imagine my stupefaction on reading this letter. It was caused
as much by learning that M. Brodard was a hopeless invalid as by
learning about that odd business of the fortune left them. How strange!
M. Brodard with a nervous affection which left him in a wheel chair! It
was incredible. I reread the beautifully written letter, trying hard
to see if anything lay between the lines. But there was nothing more
in it than I had already found. It was evidently written in the utmost
good faith. Everything Mme. Brodard did was done with the utmost good
faith.
Some years later I was in France again and found myself near the
address on the Riviera where the Brodards had purchased an estate. I
had not heard from them in some months, but on the chance that they
might be there, I went over from Mentone on a slow way-train which,
returning three hours later, would give me time to pay my call and
get back the same afternoon. Everybody at the little white-stuccoed
station knew where the Brodard villa was, and when he knew where I was
going, the driver of the shabby cab tucked me into it with a respect
for my destiny he had noticeably not shown to my very plain and rather
dusty traveling-dress. We climbed a long hill-road to a high point,
commanding a glorious view of the brilliant sea and yet more brilliant
coast, and turned into a long manorial allée of fine cypress trees.
The house was as manorial and imposing as the avenue leading to it and
I began to be uneasily aware of my plain garb. As I went up the steps
to the great door I could feel the house thrilling rhythmically to
excellent music, and to the delicate gliding of many finely-shod feet.
A servant led me to a small round salon hung with blue brocade, and
in a moment Mme. Brodard came hurrying to meet me. She had bloomed
herself luxuriantly open like a late rose, and from head to foot was a
delight to the eye. Of course she was very much surprised to see me,
but with never a glance at my garb she gave me the cordial welcome of
an old friend. Her perfect good faith and good breeding still governed
her life, it was plain to see. She was giving a _thé dansant_ for the
younger girls, she told me, adding that Madeleine had been married two
months before to a silk manufacturer of Lyons. She was evidently glad
to see me, but naturally enough, just for the moment, a little puzzled
what to do with me! I suggested to her relief that I make a visit to M.
Brodard first of all and wait to see the others till their guests had
gone.
“Yes, that’s the very thing,” she said, ringing for a servant to show
me the way, “he’ll remember you, of course. He will be so glad to see
you. He always liked you so much.”
As the servant came to the door, she added with a note of caution. “But
you must expect to find him sadly changed. His health does not improve,
although we have a resident physician for him, and _everything_ is
done for him, poor dear Bernard!”
The servant in a quiet livery of the finest materials, led me upstairs
over velvet carpets, and then upstairs again, to a superb room at the
top of the house. It was all glass towards the miraculous living blue
of the Mediterranean, and full of flowers, books, and harmoniously
designed modern furniture. M. Brodard, clad in a picturesque, furred
dressing-gown sat in a wheel chair, his bald head sunk on his breast,
his eyes fixed and wide-open, lowered towards his great, wasted white
hands lying empty on his knees. Until he raised his eyes to look at me,
I could not believe that it was he ... no, it was not possible!
He remembered me, as Mme. Brodard had predicted, but the rest of her
simple-hearted prophecy did not come true. He was not in the least glad
to see me and made not the slightest pretense that he was. A look that
was intolerable to see, had come into his eyes as he recognized me, and
he had instantly turned his head as though he hated the sight of me.
I knew at once that I ought to get out of the room, no matter how; but
I was so stricken with horror and pity that for a moment I could not
collect myself, and stood there stupidly.
A faint distant sound of gay music hummed rhythmically in the silence.
A professional-looking man who had been sitting with a book on the
other side of the room got up now and, with the bored air of a man
doing his duty, took hold of M. Brodard’s thin wrist to feel the pulse.
M. Brodard snatched away his hand and said to me over the doctor’s
head, “Well, you see how it is with us now.” He corrected himself. “You
see how it is with me.”
His accent, his aspect, his eyes added what he did not say. He had
been trembling with impatience because I was there at all. Now he was
trembling with impatience because I did not answer him! His terrible
eyes dared me to answer.
I would have done better to hold my tongue altogether, but my agitation
was so great that I lost my head. I felt that I was called upon to
bring out something consoling, and heard myself murmuring in a foolish
babble something or other about possible compensations for his illness,
about his still being able to go on with his work, to write, to
publish, in that way to propagate his ideas....
At that he burst into a laugh I would give anything in the world not to
have heard.
“My ideas ... ha! ha! ha!” he cried.
Oh, I got myself out of the room then! I ran down the velvet carpets of
the stairs, my hands over my ears.
As I hurried along to the outside door I passed the salon. I saw,
across the bare, gleaming desert of its waxed floor, Clotilde standing
with a well-dressed man. She had a fan in her hand, and, as I looked,
she opened it deftly, with a sinuous bend of her flexible wrist ...
“smoothly, suavely ... with an aristocratic ...”
FAIRFAX HUNTER
The erratic philanthropist of our family arrived from New York one
spring day with a thin, sickly-looking, middle-aged, colored man,
almost in rags. “This is Fairfax Hunter,” he announced with the
professional cheeriness of the doer of good. “He’s pretty badly run
down and needs country air. I thought maybe you could let him sleep in
the barn, and work around enough for his board.”
There was nothing professionally or in any other way cheery about the
colored man, who stood waiting indifferently for my decision, his knees
sagging, his hollow chest sunken. As I glanced at him he raised his
dark, blood-shot eyes and met my look. I decided hastily, on impulse,
from something in the expression of his eyes, that we could not send
him away.