THE BEAUSOLEILS AND ST. PIERRES.
You think of going to New Orleans in the spring. Certainly, the spring
is the time to go. When you find yourself there go some day for
luncheon--if they haven't moved it, there is talk of that,--go to the
Christian Women's Exchange, already mentioned, in the Rue
Bourbon,--French Quarter. You step immediately from the sidewalk into
the former drawing-room of a house built early in the century as a
fashionable residence. That at least is its aspect. Notice, for
instance, in the back parlor, crowded now, like the front one, with
eating-tables, a really interesting old wooden mantelpiece. Of course
this is not the way persons used to go in old times. They entered by
the porte-cochère and open carriage-way upon which these drawing-rooms
still open by several glass doors on your right. Step out there. You
find a veranda crowded with neat white-clothed tables. Before some
late alterations there was a great trellis full of green sunshine and
broken breezes entangled among vines of trumpet-creeper and the
Scuppernong grape. Here you will be waited on, by small,
blue-calico-robed damsels of Methodist unsophistication and
Presbyterian propriety, to excellent refreshment; only, if you know
your soul's true interest, eschew their fresh bread and insist on
having yesterday's.
However, that is a matter of taste there, and no matter at all here.
All I need to add is that there are good apartments overhead to be
rented to women too good for this world, and that in the latter end of
April, 1884, Zoséphine and Marguerite Beausoleil here made their home.
The tavern was sold. The old life was left far behind. They had done
that dreadful thing that everybody deprecates and everybody likes to
do--left the country and come to live in the city. And Zoséphine was
well pleased. A man who had tried and failed to be a merchant in the
city, he and his wife, took the tavern; so Zoséphine had not reduced
the rural population--had not sinned against "stastistics."
Besides, she had the good conscience of having fled from Mr.
Tarbox--put U. and I. apart, as it were--and yet without being so hid
but a suitor's proper persistency could find her. Just now he was far
away prosecuting the commercial interests of Claude's one or two
inventions; but he was having great success; he wrote once or
twice--but got no reply--and hoped to be back within a month.
When Marguerite, after her mother's receipt of each of these letters,
thought she saw a cloud on her brow, Zoséphine explained, with a
revival of that old look of sweet self-command which the daughter so
loved to see, that they contained matters of business not at all to be
called troubles. But the little mother did not show the letters. She
could not; Marguerite did not even know their writer had changed his
business. As to Claude, his name was never mentioned. Each supposed
the other was ignorant that he was in the city, and because he was
never mentioned each one knew the other was thinking of him.
Ah, Claude! what are you thinking of? Has not your new partner in
business told you they are here? No, not a word of it. "That'll keep
till I get back," Mr. Tarbox had said to himself; and such shrewdness
was probably not so ungenerous, after all. "If you want a thing done
well, do it yourself," he said one evening to a man who could not make
out what he was driving at; and later Mr. Tarbox added to himself,
"The man that flies the kite must hold the thread." And so he kept his
counsel.
But that does not explain. For we remember that Claude already knew
that Marguerite was in the city, at least had her own mother's word
for it. Here, weeks had passed. New Orleans is not so large; its
active centre is very small. Even by accident, on the street, Canal
Street especially, he should have seen her time and again.
And he did not; at any rate not to know it. She really kept very busy
indoors; and in other doors so did he. More than that, there was his
father. When the two first came to the city St. Pierre endured the
town for a week. But it was martyrdom, doing it. Claude saw this. Mr.
Tarbox was with him the latter part of the week. He saw it. He gave
his suggestive mind to it for one night. The next day St. Pierre and
he wandered off in street-cars and on foot, and by the time the sun
went down again a new provision had been made. At about ninety
minutes' jaunt from the city's centre, up the river, and on its
farther shore, near where the old "Company Canal" runs from a lock in
the river bank, back through the swamps and into the Baratarian lakes,
St. Pierre had bought with his lifetime savings a neat house and
fair-sized orangery. No fields? None:
"You see, bom-bye [by-and-by] Claude git doze new mash-in' all right,
he go to ingineerin' agin, and him and you [Tarbox] be takin' some
cawntrac' for buil' levee or break up old steamboat, or raise
somet'in' what been sunk, or somet'in' dat way. And den he certain'
want somboddie to boss gang o' fellows. And den he say, 'Papa, I want
you.' And den I say how I got fifty arpent' [42 acres] rice in field.
And den he say, 'How I goin' do widout you?' And den dare be fifty
arpent' rice gone!" No, no fields.
Better: here with the vast wet forest at his back; the river at his
feet; the canal, the key to all Barataria, Lafourche, and Terrebonne,
full of Acadian fishermen, hunters, timber-cutters, moss-gatherers,
and the like; the great city in sight from yonder neighbor's
balustraded house-top; and Claude there to rally to his side or he to
Claude's at a moment's warning; he would be an operator--think of
that!--not of the telegraph; an operator in the wild products of the
swamp, the _prairies tremblantes_, the lakes, and in the small
harvests of the _pointes_ and bayou margins: moss, saw-logs, venison,
wild-duck, fish, crabs, shrimp, melons, garlic, oranges, Périque
tobacco. "Knowledge is power;" he knew wood, water, and sky by heart,
spoke two languages, could read and write, and understood the ways and
tastes of two or three odd sorts of lowly human kind. Self-command is
dominion; I do not say the bottle went never to his lips, but it never
was lifted high. And now to the blessed maxim gotten from Bonaventure
he added one given him by Tarbox: "In h-union ees strank!" Not mere
union of hands alone; but of counsels! There were Claude and Tarbox
and he!
For instance; at Mr. Tarbox's suggestion Claude brought to his father
from the city every evening, now the "Picayune" and now the
"Times-Democrat." From European and national news he modestly turned
aside. Whether he read the book-notices I do not know; I hope not. But
when he had served supper--he was a capital camp cook--and he and
Claude had eaten, and their pipes were lighted, you should have seen
him scanning the latest quotations and debating the fluctuations of
the moss market, the shrimp market, and the garlic market.
Thus Claude was rarely in the city save in the busy hours of the day.
Much oftener than otherwise, he saw the crimson sunsets, and the cool
purple sunrises as he and St. Pierre pulled in the father's skiff
diagonally to or fro across the Mississippi, between their cottage and
the sleepy outposts of city street-cars, just under the levee at the
edge of that green oak-dotted plain where a certain man, as gentle,
shy, and unworldly as our engineer friend thought Claude to be, was
raising the vast buildings of the next year's Universal Exposition.
But all this explains only why Claude did not, to his knowledge, see
Marguerite by accident. Yet by intention! Why not by intention?
First, there was his fear of sinning against his father's love. That
alone might have failed to hold him back; but, second, there was his
helplessness. Love made Tarbox, if any thing were needed to make him,
brave; it made Claude a coward. And third, there was that helpless
terror of society in general, of which we have heard his friend talk.
I have seen a strong horse sink trembling to the earth at the beating
of an empty drum. Claude looked with amazed despair at a man's ability
to overtake a pretty girl acquaintance in Canal Street, and walk and
talk with her. He often asked himself how he had ever been a moment at
his ease those November evenings in the tavern's back-parlor at
Vermilionville. It was because he had a task there; sociality was not
the business of the hour.
And now I have something else to confess about Claude; something
mortifying in the extreme. For you see the poverty of all these
explanations. Their very multitude makes them weak. "Many fires cannot
quench love;" what was the real matter? I will tell.
Claude's love was a deep sentiment. He had never allowed it to assert
itself as a passion. The most he would allow it to be was a yearning.
It was scarcely personal. While he was with Marguerite, in the inn,
his diffidence alone was enough to hide from him the impression she
was making on his heart. In all their intercourse he had scarcely
twice looked her full in the face. Afterward she had simply become in
memory the exponent of an ideal. He found himself often, now, asking
himself, why are my eyes always looking for her? Should I actually
know her, were I to see her on this sidewalk, or in this street-car?
And while still asking himself these silent questions, what does he do
one day but fall--to all intents and purposes, at least--fall in
love--pell-mell--up to the eyebrows--with another girl!
Do you remember Uncle Remus's story of Brer Rabbit with the bucket of
honey inverted on him? It was the same way with Claude. "He wa'n't des
only bedobble wid it, he wuz des kiver'd." It happened thus: An artist
friend, whose studio was in Carondelet Street just off of Canal, had
rented to him for a workroom a little loft above the studio. It had
one window looking out over roofs and chimney-pots upon the western
sky, and another down into the studio itself. It is right to say
friend, although there was no acquaintanceship until it grew out of
this arrangement. The artist, a single man, was much Claude's senior;
but Claude's taste for design, and love of work, and the artist's
grave sincerity, simplicity, and cordiality of character--he was a
Spaniard, with a Spaniard's perfect courtesy--made a mutual regard,
which only a common diffidence prevented from running into
comradeship.
One Saturday afternoon Claude, thirsting for outdoor air, left his
eyrie for a short turn in Canal Street. The matinée audiences were
just out, and the wide balcony-shaded sidewalks were crowded with
young faces and bright attires. Claude was crossing the "neutral
ground" toward Bourbon Street, when he saw coming out of Bourbon
Street a young man, who might be a Creole, and two young girls in
light, and what seemed to him extremely beautiful dresses; especially
that of the farther one, who, as the three turned with buoyant step
into Canal Street to their left, showed for an instant the profile of
her face, and then only her back. Claude's heart beat consciously, and
he hurried to lessen the distance between them. He had seen no more
than the profile, but for the moment in which he saw it, it seemed to
be none other than the face of Marguerite!