MADEMOISELLE MISS
And Other Stories
By Henry Harland
London: William Heinemann Bedford Street
MDCCCXCIII
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CONTENTS
MADEMOISELLE MISS
THE FUNERAL MARCH OF A MARIONNETTE
THE PRODIGAL FATHER.
A SLEEVELESS ERRAND.
A LIGHT SOVEREIGN.
MADEMOISELLE MISS
“Mais que diable allait-elle faire en cette galère?”
Paris is the gloomiest town in Christendom to-day,—though it is a
lovely day in April, and the breeze is full of softness, and the streets
are gay with people,—and the Latin Quarter is quite the dullest bit of
Paris: Mademoiselle Miss left last night for England.
We all know what it is like when a person who has been an absorbing
interest in our lives suddenly goes away: how, apart from the immediate
pang of the separation and the after-pain of more or less consciously
missing the fugitive, there is a wide, complex, dim underworld of
emotion, that may be compared to the thorough-bass of a sad tune, and
seems in some sort to relate itself to the whole exterior universe.
The sun rises as usual, but the sunlight is not the same. Other folk,
apparently unconcerned, pursue the accustomed tenor of their way; but
we are vaguely surprised that this should be the case,—surprised, and
grieved, and a little resentful. We can’t realise without an effort
how completely exempt they are from the loss that has befallen us;
and we feel obscurely that their air of indifference is either sheer
braggadocio, or a symptom of moral insensibility. The truth of the
matter is, of course, that our departing friend has taken with him not
his particular body and baggage only, but an element from the earth
and the sky. and a fibre from ourselves. Everything is subtly,
incommunicably altered. We wake up to a changed horizon: and our
distress is none the less keen because the changeling bears a formal
resemblance to the vanished original.
So! Mademoiselle Miss has gone to England; and to-day it is anew and
an unfamiliar and a most dismal Paris that confronts the little band of
worshippers she has left behind her. Indeed, it was already a new Paris
that the half dozen of us who had assembled at St. Lazare to see her
off, emerged into from the station last night, after her train had
rolled away. We found a corner seat for her in a third-class compartment
reserved for dames seules; and while some of us attended to the
registering of her box, others packed her light luggage into the rack
above her head; and this man had brought a bunch of violets, and that
a book for her to read; and Jean contributed a bottle of claret, and
Jacques a napkin full of sandwiches: and taken for all in all, we were
the forlornest little party you can easily conceive of, despite our
spasmodic attempts at merriment. We grouped ourselves round the window
of her carriage,—stopping the way thereby, though not with malice
aforethought, for such other solitary ladies as might wish to
enter,—whilst Miss smiled down upon us from eyes that were perilously
bright; and we sought to defy the ache that was in our hearts, by firing
off brisk little questions and injunctions, or abortive little jests.
“Sure you’ve got your ticket all right?”
“You must make a rush for a berth directly you reach Dieppe.”
“Mind you write the moment you arrive.”
“Oh, we’ll get news of her through Don Antonio.”—This was meant
as facetious, and we all laughed, though rather feebly: Don Antonio
being an aged Italian model whom Miss had painted a good deal, and
between whom and herself there was humorously supposed to have taken
place a desperate flirtation.
We were constantly lapsing into silence, however; and for the last
five minutes we scarcely spoke at all. We simply waited there, moving
uneasily among ourselves, and gazed up at her. She kept on smiling at
us; but it was a rueful smile, and we could easily see that the tears
weren’t far behind it. Then suddenly a bell rang; the officials
shouted “En voiture;” there was a volley of good-byes, a confusion
of handshaking; the engine shrieked; her arm was drawn in through the
window; the train moved; and Miss was gone.
We lingered for a moment on the platform, looking stupidly after the red
lamp at the end of the last carriage, as it waned swiftly smaller and
fainter in the distance.
Presently someone pulled himself together sufficiently to say, “Well,
come on.”
And we made our way out of the station into a Paris that was blank and
strange. Aubémont (Adolphe) was frankly holding his pocket-handkerchief
to his eyes; but we Anglo-Saxons chid and chaffed him till he put it out
of sight.
“By Christopher! when I think of the way we treated that girl in the
beginning!” cried Chalks, an American, whose lay-name is Charles
K. Smith, but he’s called Chalks by all his English-speaking
fellow-craftsmen.
Whereat—“Oh, shut up!” came in chorus from the rest of us. We
didn’t care to be reminded of those old days.
Then little Schaas-Keym, the Dutchman, proposed that we should finish
the evening, and court oblivion, at the Galurin Cassé: and we adopted
his suggestion, and drank beer, and smoked, and chattered, and ate
cold beef and pickles, till the place was closed, at 2 a. m., when we
returned to the Quarter, six in a single cab.
Thus we managed to wear out last night with sufficient comfort. We gave
ourselves no time, no chance, to think. We stood together, and drowned
our sorrow in the noise we made. And then, by the time we parted,
we were sleepy, so that we could go straight to our beds and forget
everything.
But—this morning!
It is proverbially on the next morning that a man’s wound begins to
hurt. For the others, since I’ve seen none of them, I can speak only
by inference: in the morning our little cénacle scatters to the four
corners of the town, not to be reunited till the hour of dinner; but
what reason is there to doubt that the day will have treated them very
much as it has treated me? And oh, the weary, dreary, bright spring day
it is! The Luxembourg is fragrant with budding trees, and vocal with
half a thousand romping children; the Boule-Miche is at its liveliest,
with a ceaseless ebb and flow of laughing young men and women; the
terrasse of the Vachette is a mass of gleaming top-hats and flaunting
feminine bonnets; and the sky overhead is one smooth blue vault, and the
sun is everywhere, a fume of gold: but the sparkle and the joyousness
of it all are gone. Turn where I will, I find the same awful sense of
emptiness. The streets are deserted, in spite of the crowds: I can
hear my solitary footsteps echo gruesomely through them. Paris is like
Pompeii.
After luncheon, thinking to obtain relief by fleeing the Quarter (where
every blessed stick and stone has its bitter-sweet association with
her), I crossed the river, mixed with the throng in the Boulevard, sat
for a while at the Café de la Paix. But things were no whit better. The
sun shone with the same cheerless brilliancy; the air touched one with
the same light, uncomforting caress; the laughter of the wayfarers had
the same hollow ring. A blight had fallen upon man and nature. I came
back to the Rue Racine, and its ghosts of her.
That exclamation of Smith’s last night, to which we all cried taboo,
really hit one of the salient points of the position: when I think of
the way we treated her in the beginning! Extenuating circumstances might
be pleaded for us, no doubt. It was only natural that we should
have treated her so, if tradition and convention can make a thing
natural—if it is natural that men should glare at a woman in a
smoking-carriage, for example. And besides, she has had her revenge. For
that matter, she was never conscious of our offences; but she has had
her revenge, if to see us one by one prostrate ourselves at her feet,
humble adorers, eager servitors,—if that may constitute revenge. And
then, we are told, though our sins be as red as scarlet, if we do truly
repent, they shall be washed as white as snow: and we have repented,
goodness knows how truly. All the same, forgiveness without
forgetfulness being but the guinea-stamp without the gold, I wish I
could forget the way we treated her in the beginning.
One is judged by the company one keeps; and she kept—ours. It is
now some nine months ago that she appeared in it, at the Hôtel de
l’.céan et de Shakespere, in the Rue Racine. We were just hasty
enough, unobservant enough, blunt enough of perception, to judge her
accordingly,—to take for granted, in a casual, matter-of-course
fashion, that she would be a vessel of like clay to our own.
The entrance to the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shakespere, a narrow,
dark, ambiguous-looking entrance, is flanked by two tin signs. That at
the right hand reads, “Chambres ci Cabinets Meublés,” that at the
left, “Pension de Famille.” Call it a Pension de Famille, if you
will: at the epoch when Mademoiselle Miss arrived among us, we were, to
put it squarely, the most disreputable family in Europe.
Our proprietress, Madame Bourdon, was a gelatinous old person from
Toulouse, with a pair of hazy blue eyes, a mottled complexion, a
worldly-wise smile, an indulgent heart, and an extremely nasal accent.
I speak of her as old; but she wasn’t old enough to know better,
apparently. At any rate she had a certain unbeneficed abbé perpetually
hanging to her apron-strings, and she kept him to dinner half a dozen
evenings in the week. Of her boarders all the men were students, all the
women étudiantes,—which, being interpreted, I suppose means students
too. There were Mesdames Germaine, Fifine, Olga, Yvonne, Zélie, and
Lucile,—
“Whose names are six sweet symphonies,”—and perhaps it was because
Lucile was her niece that Madame had dubbed her shop a pension de
famille. You paid so much for your room and service, and then you could
take table d’hôte or not, as you elected. Most of us took it, because
it was only fifty francs a month, vin compris. Our ladies dined abroad a
good deal, being inconstant quantities, according to the custom of their
sex; but the men were almost always present in full number. We counted
seven: Chalks, Schaas-Keym, Aubêmont, Jeanselme, Campbell, Norton, and
myself. We formed a sort of close corporation, based upon a community of
tastes, interests, and circumstances. We were all “arts,”—except
Jeanselme, who was a “mines,” with a disordered tendency to break
out in verse: we were all ridiculously poor, and we were all fond of
bohemianising up and down the face of Paris.
One evening in September of last year, on entering our
salle-à—manger, we beheld a stranger, an addition to our ranks; and
Madame, with a comprehensive gesture, introduced her to us in these
terms: “Une nouvelle, une anglaise, Mees,...” Then she made awful
hash of rather a long-winded English name: and we were content to accept
the newcomer simply as Miss. The concierge and the servants, though, (to
anticipate a little), treated Miss as a petit-nom, like Jane or Susan,
and prefixed the title Mademoiselle. The pleonasm seemed a happy one,
and we took it up: Mademoiselle Miss. On her visiting-card the legend
ran, “Miss Edith Thorowether.” It was probably as well, on the
whole, that French lips should not too frequently have tackled that.
Now if she had been plain or elderly or constrained in her bearing or
ill-natured-looking, no doubt we should have felt at once the difference
between her and ourselves, and understood her presence with us as merely
the outward and visible sign of some inward and spiritual blunder. But,
as it happened, she was young and distinctly pretty; and she appeared to
be entirely at her ease; and she smiled graciously in acknowledgment of
the somewhat cursory nods with which we favoured her. We hadn’t the
wit or the intuitions to recognise her ease for the ease of innocence;
and our hotel was such a risky box; and ladies of English or American
origin were no especial novelty in the Quarter; and we didn’t stop to
examine this one critically, or to consider; and so things fell out in a
way we now find disagreeable to remember. It was Saul who had strayed by
hazard into the midst of our prophetic councils; and we mistook him
for one of our own prophetic caste, and proceeded to demean and express
ourselves in our usual prophetic manner. Fortunately, Saul’s
knowledge of our prophetic tongue was limited. We spoke the slang of the
Boulevards; whilst the little French that Mademoiselle Miss was mistress
of she had learned from Ollendorf and Corinne.
The situation was partially cleared up, I forget how long afterwards,
by our discovering in her room, whither she had bidden us for an
evening’s entertainment, an ancient copy of a certain Handbook to
Paris,—“the badge of all our tribe,” as the tourist called it. On
opening to its list of hotels (which somebody did by chance), we
found the following note, with a pencil-mark against it: “Hotel de
l’.céan et de Shake-spere, Rue Racine, chiefly frequented by visitors
pursuing art-studies: well spoken-of and inexpensive.” That explained
it. Mademoiselle Miss had trusted to a guide that was ten years behind
the times: so the date on the title-page attested. And in ten years
how had the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shake-spere fallen from its
respectable estate!—unless, ten years ago, the editor of that most
exemplary handbook had been egregiously imposed upon. In his current
edition the paragraph that I have cited does not appear.
But to return to the evening of her arrival. In our salle-à-manger
there was a rigid division of the sexes. The men sat on one side of the
long table, the women on the other, with ‘Madame and her abbé cheek
by jowl at the head. It was the only arrangement Madame had been able
to effect, whereby to maintain amongst us something resembling order.
Mademoiselle Miss had a seat assigned to her between Zélie and Yvonne,
nearly opposite Chalks and myself; and she entered without embarrassment
into conversation with all four of us. That is to say, she responded
as well as she could in her broken classic French, and with perfect
amiability, to such remarks as we directed at her. Save in addressing
Madame or the abbé, nobody ever thought of saying vous at our
unceremonious board; and Miss showed neither displeasure nor surprise
when we included her in the prevailing tu. She had a quiet, sweet,
English voice; an extremely delicate complexion, pale rose merging
into lily-white (which we, I dare say, assumed was due to a scientific
management of rouge and powder); a pair of large gray eyes; a lot of
waving warm-brown hair; and a face so smooth of contour, so soft
and fine in texture, that one might have thought her a mere girl of
eighteen,—or twenty at the utmost,—whereas, in point of fact, as we
learned later on, she was twenty-three.
On this first evening of her arrival, however, neophyte though she was,
we observed her with no special care, paid her no special attention,
nor felt any special curiosity regarding her. Ladies of the quality we
tacitly ascribed to her were such an old, old story for us; familiarity
had bred apathy; we took her for granted very much as we might have
taken for granted an addition to the number of chairs in the
room. Besides, an attitude of nil-admirari towards all things, and
particularly towards all things new, is the fashion of the Quarter; an
attitude of torpid omniscience, of world-weary sophistication. We have
seen everything, dissected everything, satisfied ourselves that stuffed
with sawdust. We are fin-de-siecle, we are décadents, and we are
Anglomaniacs to a man. To evince surprise at anything, therefore, or
more than a supremely languid interest in anything, is what, when we are
on our guard, most of us would die rather than do. Hence the questions
that we put to Miss were few, desultory, superficial, and served in no
wise to correct our misappreciation of her; whilst, together with the
affirmative propositions that we laid down, they pre-supposed a point of
view and a past experience similar to our own.
Zélie, for example, asked her roundly (as one of a trade to another):
“Tu cherches un callage, hein? On fais l’indépendante?”
Miss looked a little puzzled, but answered tentatively, “Non, pas
college. Je suis artiste.”
Whereat one or two of us stared, thinking it meaningless; one or two
smiled, thinking it doubly-meaning; but the majority heeded it not;
and no one paused to consider the depths of ignorance (unless, indeed,
ignorance of the French language) that the reply might indicate.
I should perhaps add that with us the young ladies who dance at
Bullier’s, sing at the concerts apéritifs, or serve in the
brasseries-à-femmes, style themselves artistes.
At the end of the dinner, when the stuff that Madame Bourdon
euphemistically calls coffee was brought in, we all broke out in loud
accord with a song that time-honoured custom has prescribed for the
event and moment. We are never treated to this beverage at the Hôtel
de l’.céan et de Shakespere, except on the advent of a nouveau or
a nouvelle, when it is charged to his or her account; and here is the
salute with which we hail it:—
A la recherch’ de la paternité!
Chaforé?
Accident arrivé
A l’amèr’ Chicorée
Par liaison passagère
‘Vec le père
Café.
Papa Café?
Pas, pas café!
L’amèr’ Chicorée est française,
Fill’ de fermier,
Et pourtant,—comment donc,—ell’ baise
Cet étranger,
Ce gros gaillard de païen
Pacha Café?
Shocking—hein?
Et le bébé,
Chaforé?
C’reti’n,—
Baptisé
A main pleine
D’eau de Seine,
This atrocious doggerel, with its false rhymes and impossible
quantities, its bad puns and equivocal suggestions, we sang straight
through, at the tops of our voices; and Mademoiselle Miss listened
smiling. How were we to know that she hadn’t the faintest inkling of
what it was all about, and that her smile betokened nothing deeper than
pleasure in our high spirits and amusement at our vociferous energy?
By and by she rose from the table, wished us a polite good-evening, and
left the room.
I think it was on the next night that we made up a party to go to
Bruant’s, in the Boulevard Rochechouart; and Zélie, moved by an
impulse of kindness, turned to Miss, and proposed that she should
join us. Miss asked what Bruant’s was; and Zélie answered vaguely,
“Comment, tu ne sais pas? Tant mieux, alors. Tu vas voir.” And Miss
retired to put on her bonnet.
Thank goodness, if her acquaintance with French was slight, her
acquaintance with the jargon talked and chanted at the Cabaret du
Mirliton was null. Otherwise, she must always have remembered her visit
there with pain and humiliation, and she could never have forgiven us
for allowing her to make one of our expedition. As a matter of fact,
however, she is able to recall the occasion as that of a singularly
jolly little adventure, and is entirely unaware of the blame that we
deserved.
At the outcry of
“O-là-là,
C’tte gueule qu’elle a!
wherewith ladies crossing the threshold of Bruant’s establishment are
welcomed, Miss only smiled in a dazed way, never dreaming, I suppose,
that it was meant for her and her companions, but fancying that we
had entered in the middle of a noisy chorus. Then, when we had secured
places, and ordered our bocks, I dare say she employed a few minutes
in glancing round her, and receiving a general impression of the queer
little room,—with its dark colouring, its profuse jumble of ornaments
and paintings, its precious old Fifteenth Century fireplace, its giant
mirliton suspended from the ceiling, its dubious clients, and its
improbable orderer and master, handsome, brigandish-looking Aristide,
in his scarlet neck-cloth, his patent-leather riding-boots and corduroy
knickerbockers: all visible through an atmosphere rendered opalescent by
candlelight struggling with cigarette-smoke.
At Bruants, as everybody knows, it is against the rules to call a
spade a spade; you must find a stronger name for it, and reserve the
comparatively inoffensive “spade” for some such mild implement as
a teaspoon. This is among Aristide’s numerous dainty methods of
certifying his scorn for the shifty refinements of modern life; and
besides, for reasons that are not obvious, he thinks it’s funny,
and expects people to laugh. So, when presently he swaggered up to our
little group of peaceable art-students, slapping our shoulders with
violent good-fellowship, he must needs hail us as mes mufles, mes
cochons, et cetera; and we of course had to approve ourselves no
milksops by smiling delightedly. Then he lowered his voice, and told us
he was in great distress.
“I’ve no piano-banger. The cut-purse who usually does for me has
sent word that he’s laid up. Any of these chits here know how to thump
the ivories?”—chits being rather a liberal translation of the term
that he employed.
“Chit yourself!” cried Zélie, playfully. “Vieux chien!”
“Can you play the piano?” Chalks asked in English of Mademoiselle
Miss. “Bruant wants somebody to play his accompaniments.”
“I can play a little. I could try,” she answered simply.
And Bruant led her to the instrument, where she sat with her back to the
company, and worked hard for its entertainment, till, in about an
hour, the delinquent pianist turned up, apparently recovered from his
indisposition, and took her place.
Now what were we to make of this? A young woman going to Bruants (than
which there is scarcely a shadier resort in all the shady by-ways of
Bohemia)—going to Bruant’s for the first time in her life, boldly
gets up, and takes part in the performance! How were we to penetrate
beneath the surface of her conduct, and perceive the world of innocence,
the supreme unconsciousness of evil, that lay hidden there, and
accounted for it? Bruant himself, to our shame be it owned,—rough,
ribald, rowdy Aristide,—saw what we were blind to.
“How the devil does she come to be knocking about with your flash
mob?” he asked me, in the pauses of one of his songs; he struts
hither and thither through the room, as he sings, you know and exchanges
parenthetical remarks with everybody. “You’re no fit pals for the
likes of her, vous autres, b———, m————!”—words that
would put any English printing-machinery out of gear.
“Why not?” I queried meekly.
“Because she’s an honest girl, that’s all. She’s fallen among
thieves, and I believe she doesn’t know it. You oughtn’t to have
brought her to a sale trou like this.”
“I didn’t bring her. She came of her own free will.”
“Well, it’s some ridiculous mistake, mark what I’m telling you.”
And he moved off singing the second stanza of “Saint Lazare.”
Upon the arrival of his own paid pianist, he conducted Miss back to her
seat at our table, made her a grand bow, thanked her in a speech every
word of which could have been found in the Academy Dictionary, and
insisted upon her drinking a galopin of beer with him, and clinking
glasses. She laughed and blushed a good deal; but it was plain that in
her heart she was murmuring, “What fun!”
Afterwards we went to the Rat Mort for supper. Yes, heaven forgive us,
we took Mademoiselle Miss to the Rat Mort for supper!
One thing, in recalling those early days, I catch myself perpetually
thanking our stars for, with a joy the obverse of a terror; and that
is that it was mercifully given to us to find her out before she had a
chance to do the same by us. Otherwise,—if we had persisted a little
longer in our error, and in our consequent modes of speech and conduct,
and she had come to understand,—my heart quails to picture the hurt
and mortification she would have suffered, the contempt and horror she
must have felt for us. But, by a good fortune that we had certainly done
nothing to deserve, our eyes were opened to her true colours in the very
nick of time; and we made haste to turn over a new leaf before she had
been able to spell out the old. I can hardly tell just how it began. It
began probably in vague misgivings, dim surmises, that gradually waxed
stronger and clearer, and were in the end confirmed by circumstances.
Little questions she would ask, little comments she would make, little
things she would do, struck us as odd, as hopeless to explain,—unless
on an hypothesis that at first seemed quite too far-fetched, but
by-and-by forced itself upon us as the only one that would in any way
fit the case; the hypothesis, namely, of her stupendous innocence; that,
indeed, as Bruant had divined, her presence with us was due to some
preposterous misconception; that, in her own perfect soundness and
honesty, she was totally unsuspicious of the corruption round about her.
Chalks used to give expression to this growing sentiment of ours, by
shaking his head, looking half wise, half mystified, and muttering,
“There’s something queer about that girl. I’ll be gol-donged if I
can make her out.”
Once for instance, she confided to us that she thought Madame Bourdon
must be a very religious person, because she was always with a priest.
It was clear that she proffered this remark in entire literalness
and good faith, with no ulterior intention of any sort; and we, after
staring at it for a minute or two, reflected upon it for a fortnight.
True enough, the black robe of Monsieur the Abbé did lend a
meretricious air of orthodoxy both to Madame and to her establishment.
Then the fact came out, I can’t remember how, that she was working
at Julian’s,—taking “whole days,” too, which means nine or ten
hours of heavy labour in the pestilential air of a studio packed with
people, where every window is shut, and the temperature hovers between
eighty and ninety Fahrenheit. Why should she be breaking her back and
poisoning her lungs at Julian’s, if—-?
“There’s something queer about her,” Chalks insisted.
She was always extremely friendly, though, with the other ladies of our
household: visited them in their rooms, received them in her own, walked
out with them, chatted with them as freely as her French would let her;
and this confused us, and deferred our better judgment. It was hard to
believe that anybody, no matter how guileless, nor how ill-instructed in
their idiom, could rub elbows much with Zélie, Yvonne, Fifine, and
not become more or less distinctly aware of the peculiarities of their
temperament. If actions speak louder than words, manners nowadays are
masters of seven languages.
Yet, one afternoon, in the garden of the Luxembourg, Miss asked of me,
“Are they all married, those young ladies at our hotel?”
I looked at her for a moment in a sort of stupefaction. Was it her
pleasure to be jocular? No, she had spoken in utmost sobriety.
“Married?” I echoed. “What on earth made you think they’re
married?”
“Everybody calls them Madame. I thought in French Madame was only used
for married women, like Mrs. with us.”
Some providential instinct in me bade me respect her simplicity, and
answer with a prevarication.
“Oh, no,” I said, “not in the Latin Quarter, at any rate. It’s
the custom here to call all women Madame.”
“But then,” she proceeded with swift logic, “why do they call me
Mademoiselle?”
This was rather a “oner,” but I came up manfully. “Ah,
that’s—that’s because you’re English, don’t you see?”
“Oh,” she murmured, apparently accepting the reason as sufficient.
Then I ventured to sound her a little.
“You like them, you find them pleasant, the girls at the hotel?”
“Yes, I like them,” she answered deliberately. “Of course, their
ways aren’t quite English, are they? But I suppose one must expect
French girls to be different. They seem intelligent and good-natured,
and they’ve been very nice to me.”
“I dare say you don’t always understand each other?” I suggested.
“Oh dear no. That is what prevents our being intimate. French is
so difficult, and they talk so fast. It’s as much as I can do to
understand the masters at the school, though they speak very slowly and
clearly, because they know I’m English. But I think I’m learning
a little. I can understand a great deal more than I could when I first
came. Do all French girls smoke cigarettes? I knew that Spanish and
Russian women did, but I didn’t know it was the custom in France.”
“Yes, decidedly,” I said to myself,
“Chalks is right. There’s something ‘queer,’ about her.”
But how to reconcile the theory of her “queerness” with the fact
of her residence here alone among us in the Latin Quarter of Paris?
Assuming her to be a well brought-up, innocent young English girl, how
in the name of verisimilitude had she contrived to get so far astray
from her natural orbit?
Nevertheless, in the teeth of difficulties, the theory gained ground.
And as it did so, it was amusing to note the way in which the other
girls accepted it. They were thoroughly scandalized, poor dears. Their
sense of propriety bridled up in indignant astonishment. So long as they
had been able to reckon Miss, simply and homogeneously, a case of
total depravity,—a specimen of the British variety of their own
species,—they had placed no stint upon their affable commendation of
her. She was pas mal, très bien, très gentille, très comme il faut,
even très chic. But directly the suspicion began to work in their minds
that perhaps, after all, appearances had been misleading, and she might
prove an entirely vertical member of society,—then perforce they had
to wag their heads over her, and cry fie at her goings-on. What! how! a
respectable unmarried woman,—a demoiselle, du monde,—a jeune fille
bien élevie,—come by herself to Paris,—dwell unchaperoned in the
Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shakespere,—hob and nob familiarly with you
and me,—submit to be tutoyée by Tom, Dick, and Harry! Mais, allons
donc, it was really quite too shameless. And they played my ladies
Steyne and Bareacres to her inadequate Rebecca; looked askance at her
when she came into the room, drew in their precious skirts when they
had to pass her, gathered in corners to discuss her, and were, in fine,
profoundly and sincerely shocked. For, here below, there are no sterner
moralists, no more punctilious sticklers for the prunes and prisms of
conventionality, than those harmful, unnecessary cats, the Zélies and
the Germaines of the Quartier-Latin.
“Mai’s, enfin, si c’est vrai,—si elle est réellement comme,
ça, nest-ce pas,—mais c’est une honte,” was one of their
refrains; and “Elle manque complètement de pudeur alors,” was
another; to which the chorus: “Oh, pour sur!”
And poor little Miss couldn’t understand it. Observing the frigid and
austere reserve with which they met her, feeling their half suppressed
disapproval in the atmosphere, she searched her conscience vainly to
discover what she could have done to anger them, and was, for a time I
fear, exceedingly unhappy.
We men, meanwhile, were cursing ourselves for blockheads, chewing
the sharp cud of repentance, and trying in a hundred sheepish, clumsy
fashions to make amends. It would have been diverting for an outsider to
have watched us; the deference with which we spoke and listened to her,
the interest we took in her work, the infinite little politenesses we
paid her. When all is said, the sins we were guilty of towards her had
been chiefly metaphysical; it was what we had thought, rather than what
we had done. But I don’t know that our contrition was on this account
any the less acute; we had thought such a lot. We fancied a sister of
our own in her position, and we conceived a frantic desire to punch
the heads of the men who should have dared to think of her as we, quite
nonchalantly and with no sense of daring, had thought of Miss. Our
biggest positive transgression was the latitude of speech we had allowed
ourselves at the table d’hôte; and the effect of that was happily
neutralised (no thanks to us) by the poverty of her French. But, though
our salvation lay in the circumstance, I am far from sure that it did
not aggravate our remorse. We were profiting by her limitations,
taking sanctuary in her ignorance; and that smacked disagreeably of the
sneakish.
Our yearning to make amends was singularly complicated by the necessity
we were under, as much for her sake as for our own, to prevent her ever
guessing how (or even that) we had offended. Not to confess is to
shirk the better half of atonement; yet confession in this case was
impossible, concealment was imperative. That, if she should get so much
as a glimmer of the truth, it would blast us forever in her esteem, was
a consideration, but a trifling one to the thought of what her emotions
must be like to realise the sort of place she had lately held in ours.
No, she must never guess. With the consciousness in our hearts that
we had practised a kind of intellectual foul play upon her, and in our
minds a vivid picture of the different footing things would be on if she
only knew, we must continue cheerfully to enjoy her smiles and her good
graces, and try to look as if we felt that we deserved them. It was
bare-faced hypocrisy, it was a game of false pretences; but it was
Hobson’s choice. We could not even cease to thee-and-thou her,
lest she should wonder at the change, and from wonderment proceed to
ratiocination.
“One thing we must do, though,” said Chalks, “we must get her
out of this so-called hotel. Blamed if I can guess how she ever came
here.”
This was before we had found the guidebook in her room, long before we
had heard her simple story, which explained everything.
“We’ve acted like a pack of hounds, that’s my opinion,” Chalks
went on. “And now we’ve got to step up to the captain’s office and
settle.”
His rhetoric was confused, but I dare say we caught the idea.
“We’ve been acting like a pack of poodles latterly,” somebody put
in, “following her about, fawning at her feet, fetching and carrying
for her.”
“Well, and hadn’t we oughter?” demanded Chalks. “Is there any
gentleman here who doesn’t like it?”
“Oh, no, I only mentioned the circumstance as a source of unction,”
said the speaker.
“Chalks is right. We must get her out of the hotel,” Campbell
agreed. “She mustn’t be exposed any longer to contact with those
little beasts of Mimis.”
“That’s all very well, but how are we to manage it?” inquired
Norton. “We can’t give her the word to move, without saying why. And
as I understand it, that’s precisely the last thing we wish to do.”
“We want to get her out of the mud, without letting her know she’s
in it,” said another.
“Yes, that’s the devil of it,” admitted Chalks. “But I’ll tell
you what,” he added, with an air of inspiration. “Why not work it
from the other end round? Get rid of the Mimis, and let Miss stop?”
This proposition was so radical, so revolutionary, we were inclined
to greet it with derision. But Chalks stood by his guns. “How to do
it?” he cried. “Why, boycott ‘em. Make this shop too hot to hold
‘em. Cultivate the art of being infernally disagreeable. They’ll
clear out fast enough. Then there’d be no harm in Miss staying till
the end of time.”
“What’ll Madame say?”
“Oh, we can fill their places up with fellows. I’ll go touting among
the men at the school. Easy enough to bag a half a dozen.”
“But what about Lucile?”—Lucile, it will be remembered, was
Madame’s niece.
“That’s so,” confessed Chalks, dashed for a moment. “Lucile’s
the snag. But I guess on the whole Lucile will have to go too. I’ll
hire a man I know to want her room. Madame won’t let family feeling
stand in the way of trade. Especially the sky-pilot won’t, not he. And
I’d like to know who’s the boss of this shebang, if not Monsieur the
Abbé? There’s no love lying around loose between him and Lucile, as
it stands. Just let a man turn up and ask for her room, Madame’ll drop
her like a hot potato.”
But from the labour of putting such schemes in operation we were saved
by a microbe: a mouse can serve a lion. Half of our male contingent went
down with the influenza: and our ladies, Lucile included, incontinently
fled the ship. They dreaded the infection; and the house was as
melancholy as a hospital; and noise being inhibited, they couldn’t
properly entertain their friends. Besides, I think they were glad enough
of an occasion to escape from the proximity of Miss. She had infused
an element of ozone into our moral atmosphere; their systems weren’t
accustomed to it; it filled them with a vague malaise: they made a break
for fouler air.
And it was at this crisis that Miss came out strong. She laid aside all
business and excuses, and constituted herself our nurse.
All day long, and very nearly all night long too, she was at it: flying
from room to room, administering medicines to this man, reading aloud
to that, spraying eucalyptus everywhere, running for the doctor when
somebody appeared to have taken a turn for the worse,—in short,
heaping coals of fire upon our heads with a lavish, untiring hand. When
we got up from our sick-beds, every mother’s son of us was dead in
love with her. From that time to the end she went about like a queen
with her body-guard; and there wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t have
given his life to spare her a pain in the little finger; and our rewards
were her smiles. It is to be noted that she accepted our devotion with
the same calm unconsciousness of anything extraordinary that she had
shown in the old days to our doubtful courtesy. She wore her crown
and wielded her gentle sceptre like one in the purple born, whilst her
subjects outdid each other in zeal to please her.
Meantime we had learned her previous history; we had pieced it together
from a multitude of little casual utterances. Her father, some five
years ago, had died a bankrupt; and she had gone as governess with
an English family to the far West of America, where they had a cattle
ranch; and now she was on her way home, to seek a new engagement; and
she was breaking her pilgrimage with a season of art in Paris (she had
always wanted to cultivate her natural gift for painting); and she had
chosen the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shakespere because her guide-book
recommended it.
Now Norton had a sister married to a squire in Derbyshire; and one day
this good lady advertised in the Times for a governess; and Miss, who
kept watch on such advertisements (going to Neal’s library to study
the English papers), was on the point of answering it, when Norton cut
in with a “Let me write that letter for you. Mrs. Clere happens to be
my sister.” Of course Miss got the place; and it was to take it, and
begin her duties, that she left us last night.
I follow her in fancy upon her journey, and imagine her arrival at the
big, respectable, dull country house; and I wonder will she regret a
little and think fondly now and then of Madame Bourdon’s hotel and the
ragged staff of comrades she has left behind her here. For the present
the Rue Racine is an abhorrent vacuum, and I am sick with nostagia for
the Paris of yesterday.
THE FUNERAL MARCH OF A MARIONNETTE
“Elle est morte et n’a point vécu.”
Who does not know the sensation that besets an ordinary man on entering
a familiar room, where, during his absence, some change has been
made?—a piece of furniture moved, an old hanging taken down, a
new picture put up?—that teasing sense of strangeness, which, if
subordinate to the business of the moment, yet persists, uncomfortably
formless, till, for instance, the presiding genius of the place
inquires, “How do you like the way we have moved the piano?” or
something else happens to crystallise the sufferer’s mere vague
feeling into a perception; after which his spirit may be at rest again?
When I woke this morning, here in my own dingy furnished room, in this
most dingy lodging-house, I had an experience very like that I mean to
suggest: something seemed wrong and unusual, something had been changed
overnight. This was the more perplexing, because my door had remained
locked and bolted ever since I had tucked myself into bed; and within
the room, after all, there isn’t much to change; only the bed itself,
and the armoire, and my writing-table, and my wash-hand-stand, and my
two dilapidated chairs; and these were still where they belonged. So
were the shabby green window-curtains, the bilious green paper on
the walls, the dismal green baldaquin above my head. Nevertheless, a
tantalising sense of something changed, of something taken away, of an
unwonted vacancy, haunted me through the brewing and the drinking of my
coffee, and through the first few whiffs of my cigarette. Then I put on
my hat, and “went to school,” and forgot about it.
But when I came back, in the afternoon, I found that whatever the cause
might be of my curious psychical disturbance, it had not ceased to act.
No sooner had I got seated at my table, and begun to arrange my
notes, than down upon me settled, stronger if possible than ever, that
inexplicable feeling of emptiness in the room, of strangeness, of an
accustomed something gone. What could it mean? It was disquieting,
exasperating; it interfered with my work. I must investigate it, and put
an end to it, if I could.
But just at that moment the current of my ideas was temporarily turned
by somebody rapping on my door. I called out, “Entrez!” and there
entered a young lady: a young lady in black, with soiled yellow ribbons,
and on her cheeks a little artificial bloom. The effect of this,
however, was mitigated by a series of flesh-colored ridges running
through it; and as the young person’s eyes, moreover, were red and
humid, I concluded that she had been shedding tears. I looked at her for
two or three seconds without being able to think who she was; but before
she had pronounced her “B’jour, monsieur,” I remembered: Madame
Germaine, the friend of poor little Zizi, my next-door neighbour. And
then, in a flash, the reason appeared to me for my queer dim feeling of
something not as usual in my surroundings, I had not heard Zizi cough!
That was it! Zizi, the poor little girl in the adjoining room,—behind
that door against which my armoire stands,—who for three months
past has scarcely left the house, but has coughed, coughed, coughed
perpetually: so that every night I have fallen asleep, and every
morning wakened, and every day pursued my indoor occupations, to that
distressing sound. Oh, our life is not all cakes and ale, here in the
Quarter; we have our ennuis, as well as the rest of mankind; and when
we are too poor to change our lodgings, we must be content to abide in
patience—whatever sounds our neighbours choose to make.
At all events, so it came to pass that the sight of Madame Germaine, in
her soiled finery, cleared up my problem for me: Zizi had not coughed.
And I said to myself, “Ah, the poor little thing is better, and is
spending the day out of doors.” (It has been a lovely day, soft
as April, though in midwinter; and my inference, therefore, was not
overdrawn.) “And Madame Germaine,” I proceeded rapidly, “has come
to see her; and finding her away, has looked in on me.”
Meanwhile my visitor stood still, just within the threshold, and gazed
solemnly, almost reproachfully, at me with her big protruding eyes: eyes
that, protruding always far more than enough, seemed now, swollen by
recent weeping, fairly ready to leave their sockets. What had she been
crying for, I wondered. Then I began our conversation with a cheery
“Zizi isn’t there?”
“Ah, m’sieu! Ah, la pauv’ Zizi!”! was her response, in a sort
of hysterical gasp; and two fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, making
further havoc of her rouge. She took a few steps forward, and sank into
my arm-chair. “La pauv’ petite!” she sobbed, I was puzzled, of
course, and a little troubled. “What is it? What is the matter?” I
asked. “Zizi isn’t worse, surely? I haven’t heard her cough all
day.”
“Oh, no, m’sieu, she isn’t worse. Oh, no, she—she is dead.”
I don’t need to recount any more of my interview with Madame
Germaine, though it lasted a good half-hour longer, and was sufficiently
vivacious. I can’t describe to you the shock her announcement caused
me, nor the chill and despondency that have been growing on me ever
since. Zizi—dead? Zizi and Death!—the notions are too awfully
incongruous. I look at the door that separates our rooms,—the door
athwart which, in former times, I have heard so many bursts of laughter,
snatches of song, when Zizi would be entertaining her——she called
them “friends;” and, latterly, that hacking, unyielding cough of
hers,—I look at the door, and a sort of cold and blackness seems to
creep in from its edges; and then I fancy the darkened chamber beyond
it, with the open window, and Zizi’s little form stretched on the bed,
stark and dead,—poor little chirping, chattering, ribald Zizi! Oh, it
is ghastly. And all her trumpery, twopenny fripperies round about her,
their occupation gone: her sham jewels, and her flounces, and her tawdry
furs and laces, and her powder-puffs and rouge-pots—though it was only
towards the end that Zizi took to rouge. It is as if they were to
tell you that a doll is dead: can such things die? They are not wholly
inhuman, then?
They have viscera? are made of real flesh and blood? can experience real
pains? and—and die? Here are you and I, serious folk, not without
some sense of the solemnity and mystery of God’s creation, here are
we still working the first degree of our arcana,—Life; and yonder lies
that tinselled little gewgaw, admitted to the second! She has passed the
dread portals, she has accomplished the miracle of Death! She was vain
and shallow and hard: she was malicious: she was shameless in her speech
as in her conduct: she was lively, it is true, and merry-mannered, and
pretty: but she had no affections, no illusions, no remorse; and lies
dropped like toads from her mouth whenever she opened it: yet she
is dead! And to-morrow women (who would have shrunk from her in
her lifetime, as from something pestilential) will reverently cross
themselves, and men (who would have.... ah, well, it is best not to
remember what the men would have done) will decently bare their heads,
as her poor coffin is borne through the streets on its way to the
graveyard. Isn’t it ghastly? Isn’t it quite enough to depress a
fellow, to sober him up, when there is only a thin partition, broken by
a door, to separate him from such a death-chamber?—Wait; I must tell
you something about Zizi, as I have known her.
Long before our personal acquaintance began I used to see her here and
there in the Quarter: at the Bullier balls, or the Café Vachette, or
in the Luxembourg or the Boule-Miche when the weather was fine: and to
admire her as a singularly inoffensive specimen of her class. Those were
her palmy days. Her “friend” was a student of law, from the Quartier
Marbouf, with a pocketful of money and a pointed beard. She was the
smallest of possible little women, no higher than her law-student’s
heart, if he had one; and he was only a medium-sized Frenchman. She was
very daintily formed, with fine hands and feet; she had a great quantity
of black hair, and a pair of bright black eyes. Her face was pale, and
decidedly an interesting face: pert, if you please, and tremendously
mischievous, but suggestive of wit, of intelligence, even of humour and
passion: a most uncommon face, with character in it,—I believe I
may even say with distinction. It was a face you would have noticed
anywhere, to wonder who and what its owner might be. And then she used
to dress very well, very quietly: in refined grays or blacks: there was
absolutely nothing in her dress to betray her place in the world’s
economy: passing her in the street, you would have taken her for an
entirely irreproachable little housewife, with an unusually interesting
face. I used to see her in all the pleasure-resorts of the Quarter, ami
to admire her, and speculate about her in a languid, melancholy way.
Then I left town for the summer; and when I came back last September I
established myself here in the Hôtel du Saint Esprit.