HAPPINESS
Madame Pouchée’s house, the goal of the girl’s journey, belonged to
history; a thatched, lozenge-windowed structure, of which the pargeted
gables, the black oak joints, and plaster panels abutted, with
pathetically incongruous air, as of some aged spinster at a ball, on
one of the brisk, modern thoroughfares of the town.
A brass plate engraved ‘Pouchée’ was on the front door, conferring a
semi-professional character upon the mouldering household. Although
the fencing-master, honest man, had lain for twenty years in Père
la Chaise, and Madame Pouchée had no more ostensible livelihood
than such small sums as Mademoiselle gained by the teaching of her
language, their plate raised them to the plane of citizens. The mother
and daughter formed units in that curious gathering of poor French
people which exists in our University towns, decayed families of
fencing-masters, hair-dressers, or cooks, once prosperous, who shiver
through English fog and cold to the end of their existence because they
are ‘dans leurs meubles,’ ratepayers!
To quit her dark old home, to forego the sound of Great St. Mary’s
curfew, to submit her furniture to the hammer of the auctioneer, would,
to Madame Pouchée, have seemed little short of sacrilege. She passed
her life with no larger pleasure than knitting, no acuter pain than
rheumatism. She could go to Mass on Sundays and festivals with more
security in Cambridge than in France. Pouchée’s foils and masks were
suspended in the raftered entrance hall. Pouchée’s portrait, as a
glossy bachelor of twenty, with black frock coat, turn-down collar, and
gamboge gloves, hung in the salon. Upstairs, in one of the low-ceiled
attics, were her crucifix and bénitier, just as she brought them from
far Provence before her first child saw the light.
Such things to an aged woman are more than climate, more than
nationality. Madame Pouchée’s lot had not been rose-coloured during the
fencing-master’s life. At the time of his death, even, Monsieur was in
Paris, led thither by some of the unexplained affairs which perennially
drew him from his own fireside. But his widow clung to the foils and
masks and portrait with as much patient fidelity as though he had loved
her always. The careless husband who lay in Père la Chaise belonged to
Madame Pouchée’s middle age. The foils, the masks, the glossy bachelor
with gamboge gloves and turn-down collar, were relics of her youth.
Every corner of the house was burnished to that vanishing point of
cleanliness which only French housewives understand, on the evening
of November 15. Ere Marjorie had well alighted from her cab, an
unforgotten figure rushed forth through wet and darkness to meet her, a
pair of kind solid arms held her fast.
‘But you are tall--but you are fresh and vermeille!’ Mademoiselle
Pouchée hurried the girl across the strip of pavement to the house. ‘I
see no more the little Cendrillon of old days. Come, then, mère, leave
thy kitchen. Come, that I may present thee to our future Girton girl.’
Madame Pouchée’s cheeks were swarthy as the olives of her native
country. An ample checked apron was tied round her neat black dress.
She wore the provincial linen head-dress of her youth. Genuine French
people do not shake hands on every occasion of human life, and fifty
English years had left Madame Pouchée a genuine Frenchwoman still. The
old lady came forward, not with a hand outstretched, but with such
natural courtesy, such charming welcome written on her Southern face as
reminded Marjorie of Spain, and caused her somewhat flagging spirit to
rally.
‘I feel six years old again, dear Pouchée.’ This she said when
Mademoiselle had led her into the salon, a tiny panelled room where a
table was cosily spread for a dinner of two before the fire. ‘Surely
we had our lessons this morning! Surely I was wicked--when was I not
wicked?--and you gave me a double row of spelling for my penitence.’
Throughout the evening a mysterious sense of having gone back to her
childhood fell balmily on Marjorie’s heart. Madame Pouchée gave them a
little dinner, as exquisitely cooked, I dare to say, as was any dinner
in Trinity or Magdalen that night. For dessert were Tintajeux pears,
of which a goodly hamper had come over as a present from the Seigneur.
Their coffee was served in Sèvres cups, dislodged for the occasion from
Madame Pouchée’s inlaid cabinet--the costliest ornament of the salon,
brought with her in bridal days from Paris, when the nineteenth century
was in its teens.
‘It is like a Tintajeux holiday,’ cried Marjorie, as she and Pouchée
sat, hand clasped in hand, beside the fire. ‘Do you remember every 29th
of May we used to eat our dinner under the big oak in honour, you said,
of le martyr Protestant, Charles?’ The prayer-books in the Tintajeux
family pew were of ancient date. Pouchée, honest creature, was wont to
entangle herself among the various Stuart and Orange services, greatly
to the Seigneur’s edification. ‘Ah, Pouchée, we are wiser now. We have
learnt history from loftier historians than Lady Callcott. And I, for
one, am not happier.’
‘Whenever I look at Tintajeux I see a small Marjorie with temper, with
eyes, with a determined Spanish face--and whom I loved much. There are
no figures in the picture. Still, whenever I look at Tintajeux----’
Mademoiselle Pouchée’s voluble tongue stopped abruptly.
‘No figures in the picture?’ Marjorie glanced round the empty walls.
‘And what picture are you talking of? Where is the photograph of the
Manoir I sent you last Christmas?’
As she spoke Madame Pouchée entered, bearing a fresh-trimmed lamp--for
this little household boasted of no parlour-maid. The old Frenchwoman
lingered a while, her quick septuagenarian eyes watching the faces of
her daughter and of their guest. She had caught Marjorie’s last words.
‘The photograph of Tintajeux Manoir? Why, it has been moved upstairs.
It hangs in the salon of our gentleman, notre bon locataire--pas vrai,
ma fille?’
Mademoiselle Pouchée put the interruption quietly aside.
‘Mère loses her memory. We must not always heed her,’ she observed to
Marjorie, presently. ‘In bygone days, when the good papa was living,
our family received undergraduates as lodgers. Mère has the old time in
her heart still.’
‘Jesuitry, Pouchée! I remember your talents in that line. In bygone
days, when the good papa was living, no photograph of Tintajeux Manoir
existed.’
The remark was accompanied by a Bartrand look, as familiar, as smiting
to poor Pouchée as though she and Marjorie had done battle over some
delicate point of moral faithfulness that very morning.
‘There are accidents--contingencies--nay, times being hard,
there is necessity. As well confess the truth. We do not take
lodgers.’ Pouchée’s eyes dwelt fondly on the inlaid cabinet, the
porcelain, the exquisite order of the little salon. ‘We are private
citizens--rentières, living on our means.’
‘And there is no one in the house save yourselves?’
A flourish of Pouchée’s fingers hinted negation. ‘The old place is, in
fact, two houses, as you will see by daylight. There are rooms at the
back that can be entered by a flight of open-air steps--steps dating
from the fourteenth century, ma mie.’
‘You promised me truth--not history, Mademoiselle.’
‘And by hazard--for the moment--we have a locataire. Not an
undergraduate. We spare a room or two, on occasion, to some quiet
gentleman--some resident M.A.--some student from the Art Schools. No
undergraduate sets foot within our doors. _We are not licensed._’
So keen a sense of distinction was conveyed by the italicised
words that Marjorie forebore from further questioning. An hour
later, however, when they were parting for the night in the fresh,
chintz-draped attic which was the guest-chamber of the house, she
ventured on a last surmise.
‘As we passed a certain baize door at the turning of the stairs I
smelt the smell of a pipe. Our bon locataire must live somewhere in
that neighbourhood, Mademoiselle--our quiet gentleman, who is not an
undergraduate, and who has the photograph of Tintajeux Manoir on his
walls?’
But Pouchée was blankly uncommunicative. The gentleman went in and out
by the other staircase. Marjorie would neither see nor hear him during
her stay in Cambridge. As to the photograph--it would certainly return
to its place in the salon to-morrow morning.
‘If you are afraid of University ghosts,’ added the Frenchwoman, as she
bade her guest a final good-night, ‘you will do wisely to bolt your
door. Sleep well, ma mie, and dream that we are making cowslip balls,
as we used a dozen years ago, in the woods of Tintajeux.’
The first five days of her Cambridge visit were resolutely spent by
Marjorie in sight-seeing. It was well for her, she said, to come under
the external influences of the Alma Mater, watch the cheerful flow of
undergraduate life, look at Newnham and Girton from without, before
delivering her letters of introduction.... It was well for her, while
she still stood uncommitted to the future, to run a last forlorn chance
of meeting the man she loved!
Here was the truth, unrecognised, perhaps, as truth, even in Marjorie
Bartrand’s moments of sternest self-questioning. Day after day,
however, slipped vainly by. A dozen times in each twenty-four hours
her heart would leap, her pulses throb as men of Geoffrey’s height or
build went past her in the crowded streets. Geoffrey Arbuthnot appeared
not. She fell to quarrelling with herself over her own folly. Geoffrey
might be at the other side of the world--married--contented: in every
case must have learnt long ago to live his life, to do his work without
_her_. Happily, there were reprisals....
On the morning of the sixth day she determined to put her sweetheart
away from her remembrance for ever.
‘I have come to the end of my sight-seeing.’ This she told the Pouchées
at breakfast. ‘I have heard a University sermon and the services at
King’s and Trinity. We have visited Trumpington churchyard and the
Backs. I have seen Milton’s tree and Gray’s fire-escape, and--and the
Girton girls playing tennis. When I have gone over your house, Madame
Pouchée, when I know what kind of rooms reading gentlemen inhabit, my
experience will be complete.’
The speech fell from her idly. Small curiosity in the affairs of others
was never a sin to be reckoned among the Bartrand qualities.
But Mademoiselle Pouchée’s manner gave it purpose. Mademoiselle changed
colour, fidgeted with her coffee-spoon, contradicted herself. ‘The
rooms were the plainest rooms in Cambridge. No knowing at what time our
gentleman went out or might return. For herself, she seldom entered his
part of the house, and----’
‘Pouchée,’ exclaimed Marjorie, the old spirit of contradiction taking
possession of her, ‘there is a mystery about our excellent lodger which
I mean to solve. You seldom enter his part of the house, you say? You
were in his rooms last evening. I saw you enter through the baize door,
as I have seen you do pretty often already. I heard your voice as you
talked to him. Explain these things.’
‘Enfin! It would be better if the truth were told,’ said old Madame
Pouchée in her own language. ‘Our gentleman is an enemy of the sex.
What will you have! When he heard a young lady was coming to visit
us----’
‘He offered, of free will, to go in and out by the other stairs,’
interrupted Pouchée, adroitly. ‘He showed the finest, most delicate
consideration. Since that first evening when Marjorie perceived his
pipe our gentleman has not smoked. He goes out early. He does not
return until he is worn out with work--such work as his is, too--at
night!’
‘Then it is impossible we can disturb him,’ exclaimed Marjorie, rising
briskly from the table. ‘As a matter of architecture I am interested in
the fourteenth-century stairs. The rooms they lead to must be equally
curious. You need not chaperon me.’ She looked back at Pouchée across
her shoulder. ‘I shall push back the mysterious red baize, and walk
straight into Bluebeard’s chamber without knocking.’
And running up the stairs, she was about to put her threat into
execution when Pouchée, by a dexterous flank movement, cut off her
advance.
‘There may be a litter of papers. Grand ciel! there may be the bones,
the skull.’ With her hands upon the lock, Mademoiselle Pouchée barred
Marjorie’s progress by her own solid person; then, opening two inches
of door, she peered in, cautiously. ‘No; we are in order. We have
locked up our skeleton for once. You may enter, child--Barbe-bleu is
not here to eat you.’
Marjorie Bartrand stopped short upon the threshold. Something in the
meagrely furnished room, the piles of books, the small fireless grate,
the absence of any pretence at decoration or cheerfulness, affected her
strongly. She shrank from intruding, unbidden, on such valiantly borne
poverty as was here in evidence before her.
‘And you have robbed him of Tintajeux Manoir!’ She glanced round at the
bare, damp-stained walls. ‘Tintajeux at least gives one a notion of
quick and wholesome air, of honest sunshine!’
‘Our gentleman robbed himself. When I told him the morning after your
arrival that you had asked for it, he took the photograph from his wall
with his own hand.’
‘And you can give him no other picture to fill its place?’
‘He has a magnifique picture here, facing the window. See,’
Pouchée adjusted herself into a favourable light with an air of
connoisseurship, ‘a magnifique portrait, just a little mildewed, of
King William the Fourth. The fur on his Majesty’s cloak has been the
admiration of many artists. Come in, ma mie, entrez. What are you
afraid of?’
And Marjorie entered. She looked for a few seconds at the time-stained
mezzotint which, with its black frame, its cheap glass, seemed but to
make the wall whereon it hung more sorrowfully ugly. Then she crossed
to the room’s one window--a diamond leaded casement through whose small
dulled panes the side view of a crowded alley, of the corner of a still
more crowded churchyard, was attainable.
A ponderous book lay on a chair beside the window. Marjorie Bartrand
lifted it.
‘Marjorie, I forbid you to touch a book! Our gentleman studies for
medicine. Medical works are not for the perusal of young girls.’
‘The girl of the future peruses everything! Quain’s “Elements of
Anatomy,”’ cried Marjorie, holding the volume as high out of Pouchée’s
reach as its weight would allow. ‘I wonder whether our gentleman would
lend it to us, if we asked him prettily? We might study our bones
together, Pouchée. Who knows, in days to come, that I may not go for a
Natural Science Tripos?’
And--with the book still held aloft--her nimble fingers found their way
to the title-page. In the top right-hand corner was a name, written in
characters she knew:
‘GEOFFREY ARBUTHNOT, _January_, 1880.’
For an instant Marjorie Bartrand turned ashen pale. Then as she
recalled her position, as she realised that she had forced herself,
unasked, into Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s room, the poor child crimsoned from
throat to brow. She felt that the very soul within her had cause to
blush over her temerity.
‘Let us come away this moment. I am taken by surprise--there has been
some cruel mistake.’
The book almost fell out of her grasp. Swiftly as her limbs would carry
her she made her way out of the room and down the stairs. Then, when
they were safe again in the little salon, she caught Pouchée’s hand
with passion.
‘I look to you, Mademoiselle, for an explanation,’ she cried with
impetuous voice, with flaming eyes. ‘What right had you to conceal from
me that Geoffrey Arbuthnot lived here?’
But Pouchée had the strength of conscious innocence. All further need
of mystification was over now. Regarding their lodger as a shy recluse,
an enemy of the sex, the two poor French ladies had striven with will
to keep him and their visitor from meeting. This was the secret of
their reticence, the sum of their offending. Mademoiselle Pouchée met
Marjorie’s lightning glance calmly.
‘Mère and I had nothing to conceal. How could it have interested you to
hear a stranger’s name?’
‘And you have never spoken of me in his presence?’
‘If we did, it was by hazard. Why should Marjorie Bartrand of
Tintajeux be more than any other young lady to Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’
‘Simply,’ returned Marjorie, closely watching Pouchée’s unmoved
face,--‘simply because Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot had the picture of
Tintajeux hanging on his walls.’
‘By hazard, also. He took a fancy to the photograph from the first day
he came to lodge with us. It had a look of Scotland,--it recalled some
place where he had known good times. And so, to give him pleasure,
I said that while he lodged here, Tintajeux should hang above his
chimney-piece.’
‘From whence it was unhung, by his own hand, to please the caprice of
an unknown visitor. Mr. Arbuthnot is very generous!’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot,’ cried Pouchée, warming on the instant, ‘is the most
noble-hearted man living. Yes, and I have travelled! I have had my
experiences widened. I know my world. That he should work hard at the
hospital or over his books, I comprehend. A high degree is at stake.
Men have their ambition. Mr. Arbuthnot goes into courts and alleys,
vile places, left alone by the police, and where priests or parsons
might get their throats cut. He searches out the worst outcasts in
Barnwell and Chesterton, only to serve them.’
‘Now--at this present time?’ stammered Marjorie, conscience-stricken.
‘Now, while you and I, mon enfant, have been sight-seeing. His last
protégé,’ went on Pouchée, ‘is a miserable bargeman, one of the worst
characters on the river. This man was struck over the head by some
falling timber two or three weeks ago. He was too nearly gone, so his
mates thought, to be carried to hospital, and our gentleman just saved
his life. He has nursed him day and night since, as one of your great
London doctors would nurse a Prince of the Blood. If Mr. Arbuthnot were
of our religion I could understand it. I visit in Barnwell myself a
very little.’
This was Pouchée’s account of her own charities. She visited in
Barnwell a great deal. Beside fever-stricken, dying pallets, her
acquaintance with Geoffrey Arbuthnot had first begun.
‘But we, Catholics, see in the poor our own sick soul. We hope, in
saving them, to save ourselves.’
‘And Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’
‘He serves them, gives them his time, his money--what do I know! his
heart--simply _because_ they are castaway men and women. “Sisters and
brothers in a queer disguise.” You should hear him say that, with his
grave smile! It was to talk over some of the sisters and brothers,
Marjorie, that I went to our gentleman’s rooms last night.’
‘Our gentleman ought to be a happy man,’ said Marjorie, with a sigh.
The Frenchwoman’s shoulders were sceptically expressive.
‘A hair-shirt is never worn for pleasure, child. It is not in nature
that a man of six-and-twenty should care for other people’s lives more
than for his own. Geoffrey Arbuthnot might have made a good servant of
the Church,--an Ignatius Loyola, a Francis Xavier. But if one speaks
about happiness--allez!’