In the Bois, one day, I met madame Aribaud. By madame "Aribaud" I mean
the wife of a very popular dramatist, and I call them Aribaud because
it wouldn't do to mention their real name. I like meeting madame
Aribaud when I am in Paris. It refreshes me, not only because she isn't
preceded by a gust of scent, and doesn't daub her mouth clown red,
like so many Parisiennes, but because she is so cheerful. She diffuses
cheerfulness. She sat beaming at her little son, while he scattered
crumbs for the birds, and she informed me--it was in 1912--that he was
in the latest fashion, having a nurse from England to give him the real
English pronunciation, though as yet he was hardly a linguist. And the
nurse said, "I tell madam we must be pietient with 'im; we can't expect
'im to talk like I do hall at once."
Also the lady informed me that they had finished arranging their
new house, and that on the morrow I must go there to déjeuner. Very
readily I went, and they showed me the "English nursery," and an
American contrivance that she had presented to her husband for his
dressing-room--"_Comme ils sont pratiques, les américains_!"--and an
antique or two that she had picked up for his study; and, not least,
she showed us both some croquettes de pommes that looked ethereal
and--I have never tasted croquettes de pommes like madame Aribaud's!
I always say she is the most domesticated of pretty women, and her
husband the most pampered of good fellows. Playgoers who know him
merely by his comedies, in which married people get on together so
badly up to the fourth act, might be surprised to see inside his villa.
Only when he and I were lounging in the study afterwards--my hostess
was in the little garden, pretending to be a horse--I said to him, as
the boy's shouts came up to us through the open window, "Doesn't the
child disturb you out there when you're busy?"
My friend nodded. "Sometimes," he acknowledged, "he disturbs me. What
would you have? He must play, and the 'garden' is too diminutive for
him to go far away in it. It makes me think of what Dumas père said
when he paid a visit to his son's chalet in the suburbs--'Open your
dining-room window and give your garden some air!' Once or twice I have
wondered whether I should work in a front room, instead, but to tell
you the truth, I always come to the conclusion that I like the noise.
Believe me, a dramatist may suffer from worse drawbacks than a child's
laughter." He blew smoke thoughtfully, and added, "I had a wife who was
childless."
Now, though I knew Maurice Aribaud very well indeed, I had never heard
that this was his second marriage, and I suppose I stared.
"Yes," he said again, "I had a wife who was childless." And then, with
many pauses, he told me a lot that I had not suspected about his life,
and though I can't pretend to remember his precise words, or the exact
order in which details were forthcoming, I am going to quote him as
well as I can.
* * * * *
"I had not two louis to knock together when I met her--and I wasn't
so very young. I had been writing for the theatre for years, and had
begun to despair of ever seeing anything produced. To complete my
misery, I had no companionship, if one excepts books--no friend who
wrote, or aspired to write, no acquaintance who did not draw his screw
from a billet as humdrum as my own. I was a clerk in the Magasins du
Louvre, and though of course the other men in the office talked about
plays--in France everybody is interested in plays; in England, I hear,
you are interested only in the players--none of them was so congenial
that I was tempted to announce my ambitions to him. I used to think how
exciting it must be to know authors and artists, even though they were
obscure and out-at-elbows. Every night, as I walked home and passed the
windows of a bohemian café I used to look at it wistfully. I envied the
fiercest disappointments of the habitues inside, for they were at least
professionals of sorts; they moved on a different planet from myself.
Once in a blue moon I found the resolution to enter, pushing the door
open timidly, like a provincial venturing into Paillard's. I suppose
I had a vague hope that something might happen, something that would
yield confidences, perhaps a comrade for life. But I sat in the place
embarrassed, with the air of an intruder, and came out feeling even
lonelier than when I went in.
"One windy, wet day I was at the mont-de-piété to redeem my watch.
I had pawned it two or three weeks before, because I had seen a
second-hand copy of a book that I wanted very much and couldn't
afford at the moment. I will not inquire whether you have ever pawned
anything in Paris, yourself, but if you haven't, you may not know the
formalities of the _dégagement_. Ah, you have pawned things only in
London.
"Well, after you have paid the principal and the interest, you are
given a numbered ticket, and then you go into a large room and take
your choice among uncomfortable benches, and wait your turn. It is
something like cashing a cheque at the head office of the Crédit
Lyonnais, only at the mont-de-piété the people on the benches sit
waiting for the most disparate articles. On one side of you, there may
be a fashionably dressed woman who rises to receive a jewel-case--and
on the other, some piteous creature who clutches at a bundle. The goods
and chattels descend in consignments, and when one consignment has been
distributed, the interval before the next comes down threatens to be
endless. The officials behind the counter converse in undertones, and
you meanwhile have nothing livelier to do than listen to the rain and
wonder how hard-up your neighbour may be.
"That day, however, I did not chafe at the delay. There was a young
girl there whose face caught and held my attention almost immediately.
Not only was her prettiness remarkable--her expression was astonishing.
She looked happy. Yes, in the gaunt room, among the damp, dismal
crowd, relieving the tedium by a heavy sigh or an occasional shuffling
of their shoes, this fair-haired, neat, innocent little girl looked
happy. Smiles hovered about her lips, and her eyes sparkled with
contentment. I tried to conjecture the reason for her delight, what
treasured possession she was about to regain. A trinket? No, something
indefinable in her bearing forbade me to think it was a trinket. My
imagination ranged over a dozen possible pledges, without finding one
to harmonise with her. Ridiculous as it sounds, I could picture nothing
so appropriate for her to recover as a canary, which should fly,
singing, to her finger. Every time a number was called, curiosity made
me hope that her turn had come. The latest load that had been delivered
was almost exhausted. Only three packages remained. Another call, and
she got up at last! The package was a bulky one. I craned my neck. It
was a typewriter.
"Quite five minutes more lagged by before I got my watch, and when I
crossed the courtyard I had no expectation of seeing her again; but no
sooner had I passed through the gate than I discovered her in trouble.
She had been trying to carry the typewriter and an open umbrella, and
now the umbrella had blown inside out, and she had put the typewriter
on the pavement.
"In such a situation it was not difficult for me to speak.
"I picked the thing up for her. She thanked me, and made another
ineffectual attempt to depart. I offered my help. She demurred. I
insisted. We made for her tram together--and tram after tram was full.
It had been raining for several hours and Paris was a lake of mud. In
the end I trudged beside her through the swimming streets, carrying
her typewriter all the way to the step of her lodging. So began my
courtship.
"She was as solitary as I; her father's death had left her quite alone.
He had been old, and very poor. Blind, too. But his work had been done
up to the last, my little sweetheart guiding him to the houses--he
had earned a living as a piano-tuner. In Sèvres she had an aunt, his
sister-in-law; but though the woman boasted a respectable business
and was fairly well-to-do, she had come foward with nothing more
substantial than advice, and the orphan had had only her typewriter to
keep the wolf from the door. Her struggles in Paris with a typewriter!
She had been forced to pawn it every time she lost a situation. But
every time she saved enough to recapture it she felt prosperous again.
Her own machine meant 'luxuries.' With her own machine she could afford
a plant to put in her attic window, and a rosebud for her breast.
"She loved flowers, and she often wore them, tucked in her bodice,
after the Magasins du Louvre closed--the lonely clerk used to hurry
to meet the little typist on her way home. Yet she told me once
that her love for them had come very late; for years the sight of
all flowers had saddened her. She had been born on that melancholy
boulevard that leads to the cemetery of Père La Chaise, that quarter
of it where one sees, exposed for sale, nothing but floral tokens for
the mourners--nothing to right and left but mountains of artificial
wreaths, and drear chrysanthemums in stiff white paper cones. As a
child she had thought that flowers were grown only for graves.
"I recall the courtship in all seasons, and always in the streets--when
the trees were brown and the light faded while we walked; and when the
trees had whitened and the lamps were gleaming; and when the trees grew
green and we walked in sunshine. It was in the streets that we fell in
love--in the streets that I asked her if she would marry me.
"We were on the quai des Orfèvres one Sunday afternoon in summer. I
had meant to wait till we were in the Garden of the Tuileries, but
we had stopped to look at the river, and I can see it all now, the
barge folk's washing hanging out to bleach, and a woman knitting among
the geraniums on a deck. There was a little fishing-tackle shop, I
remember, called 'Au Bon Pêcheur,' and a poodle and a Persian cat were
basking together on the doorstep. Our hands just touched, because
of the people passing; and then we went on to the Tuileries, and
talked. And before we seemed to have talked much, it was moonlight; a
concert had begun, and away in the distance a violinist was playing
_La Précieuse_. 'Why,' I exclaimed,' I've given you no dinner!' She
laughed; she hadn't been hungry, either. No millionaires have ever
dined at Armenonville more merrily than we, for a hundred sous, at a
little table on a sidewalk.
"She said, 'When I am your wife, I shall type-write all your plays for
you, Maurice--perhaps that will bring you luck.' And by and by, when we
came to the Magasins du Louvre, she pointed to the Comédie-Française:
'You haven't far to travel to reach it, dearest!' she smiled--'we'll
cross the road together.'
"How sweet she looked in the wedding frock that she had stitched! How
proud I was of her! Our ménage was two rooms on the left bank; and in
the evening, in our tiny salon on the sixth floor, her devoted hands
clattered away on her machine, transcribing my manuscript, till I
kissed and held them prisoners. Didn't she work hard enough all day for
strangers, poor child?--my salary was too small to liberate her. 'You
are jealous,' she would say gaily, 'because I write your dialogue so
much faster than you.' And often I wished that I could create a scene
as rapidly as she typewrote it. But we had our unpractical evenings,
also, when we built castles-in-the-air, and chose the furniture for
them. I had brought home, from the Magasins, one of the diaries that
they issue annually. It contained plans of the theatres--it always
does--and, perched on my knee, she pictured a play of mine at each
of them in turn, and the house rocking with applause. And then we
pencilled the private box we'd have; and drove, in fancy and our
auto-mobile, to sit there grandly on the three-hundredth night.
"We spent many hours in selecting presents that I would have made to
her if I could. One of the things she wanted was, of course, a theatre
bag: 'the prettiest that you can pretend!' and I pretended a beauty
for her in rose brocade--and inside I put the daintiest enamelled
opera-glasses that the rue de la Paix could show, and a fan of Brussels
point, and a Brussels-point handkerchief, and a quaint gold bonbonniere
with sugared violets in it. I remember she threw her arms round my neck
as ecstatically as if the things were really there. We were, at the
time, supping on stale bread, with a stick of chocolate apiece."
* * * * *
The dramatist sat silent, his eyes grown wide. I think that for a
moment he had forgotten his new, desirable home and the antiques on the
mantelpiece--that he was back in a girl's arms in a room on a sixth
floor. Under the window, his wife had ceased to play at horses, and was
swinging their son, instead. The child's delight was boisterous.
She called up to us now: "Are we a nuisance, messieurs? Shall we go to
the nursery?"
"No, no," cried Aribaud, starting, "not at all; we are doing nothing.
Continue, mon ange, continue!"
* * * * *
"What a heaven opened," he went on, turning to me, "when I had a piece
taken at last! As long as I live I shall think of the morning that
letter came, of our reading it together, half dressed, and crying with
joy. She was making the coffee for breakfast. And yet, even when the
contract was signed, it sometimes seemed incredible. I used to dream
that it had happened, and dream that I was dreaming--that I was to wake
and find it wasn't true. And the eternity of delay, the postponements,
one after another! And then, when we felt worn out with waiting, the
night that we jolted to the show in an omnibus, and sat breathless in
the fauteuils de balcon! I remember the first laugh of approval that
the audience gave, her clutching my hand; and how she clung to me,
sobbing and comforting, when we got home and knew that the piece had
failed.
"I had a short run the next autumn with _Successeur de Son Père_, but
my first hit, of course, was _Les Huit Jours de Léonie_. When that was
produced, the fees came tumbling in.
"Weren't we dazed at the beginning! And how important we felt to be
taking a flat and going to a bureau de placement to engage a servant!
We were like children playing with a doll's-house. The change was
marvellous. And when I received an invitation from somebody or other
who had been unapproachable only a year before--her exultance to
see me go! The invitations to the author, you understand, did not
always include his wife; and, unfortunately, those that ignored her
were often those that it would have been unwise for me to decline. I
found that rather pathetic; we had hoped together for so long, and now
that success had come she wasn't getting her fair half of the fun. An
elaborate evening gown that we had hurried expectantly to order for her
was not needed, after all--it was out of fashion before she wore it.
Still, as I say, she exulted to see me go--at first. And later Well,
when I insisted on a refusal because she had not been asked, it grieved
her that I neglected opportunities for her sake; and when I consented
to go without her she was, not unnaturally, dull.
"It was not very lively for her in the daytime, either. When my duties
as a clerk had taken me from her, she, too, had had employment, but
now, of course, her berth had been resigned, and while I wrote all
day upstairs, she was alone. She was not used to leisure--all her
life she had worked. We had no child to claim her time, to occupy her
thoughts and yield the interests of maternity. Though she endeavoured
to create distractions for herself, the flat that we had been so proud
of was rather dreary for her, after its novelty faded. She sighed in it
oftener than she laughed.
"The very few women that she met were actresses, who talked of nothing
but their careers--their genius, their wrongs, and their Press notices.
What companion could she find among them, even had I wished her to
seek their companionship? And the men who came to us also talked shop
continuously, and directed themselves chiefly to _me_. No doubt they
would have had enough, and too much, to say to her had I been absent,
but, as it was, they often appeared to forget that she was there. As
time went on, too, the theatre made more and more demands upon me--a
comedy in rehearsal while another was being written; the telephone
bell always ringing to call me away just when I had arranged to take a
half-holiday with her. And when I left the theatre I could not dismiss
the anxieties of a production from my mind as I had dismissed the
affairs of the Magasins when I left my office stool--they were mine,
and I brought them home with me. She grew bored, restless. She was
nervy with solitude, and chagrined at feeling herself insignificant.
She told me one day that she wanted me to put her on the stage.
"Mon Dieu! To begin with, she had no gift for the stage--and if she had
been ever so clever, did I want to see her there? I was aghast.
"'But, mignonne,' I said, 'what makes you think, all of a sudden, you
could act? Leaving everything else aside, what reason is there to
suppose you would succeed? You have had no experience, you have never
even shown the slightest tendency towards it.'
"'I want something to do,' she said.
"'But,' I said,' that isn't enough. And besides, you would not like
it at all--you would find it odious. You sit in a box and you see
a celebrated woman bringing the house down, and to be an actress
looks to you very fine. But she has been half a lifetime arriving at
celebrity--there is nothing fine about the journey to it. You would
feel that you had given up a good deal, I assure you--a dramatist's
wife in the box is a much more dignified figure than a dramatist's wife
rehearsing a trivial part and being corrected by the stage-manager.'
"'I did not mean trivial parts,' she said disconsolately--and I
realised for the first time that she had been dreaming of a début in
the principal rôle. But she let the discussion drop, and I half thought
I had convinced her.
"I was very much mistaken. A few weeks later she referred to it again,
and more urgently. She seemed to imagine that her project was a
perfectly simple matter for me to arrange, that the only obstacle in
the way was my personal objection to it. 'What you say about trivial
parts is quite true,' she acknowledged, with an air of being extremely
reasonable, 'but in one of your own pieces you could easily get me
lead. Everybody wants plays from you now; you would only have to say
that you wished me to be engaged. Of course, I should study; I should
go to a professor of diction and take lessons.'
"Well, I tried to explain the commercial aspect of the case to her.
I told her that, for one thing, the managers would see my plays in
Jericho before they agreed to entrust the leading part to a novice.
And I told her that, supposing for an instant I did find a manager
reckless enough to consent, I should be ruining my own property.
"'Ah,' she said, 'you make up your mind in advance that I have no
dramatic instinct?'
"I said: 'It is not even a question whether you have any dramatic
instinct; it is enough that you haven't any renown. You have heard too
much of the business by this time not to know that everybody tries to
secure the most popular artists that he can. For me to put up a play
with an absolutely unknown name, instead of a star's, would be asking
for a failure.'
"'If I were billed as "madame Aribaud" the name would not be unknown,'"
she argued.
"'Whether you were billed as "madame Aribaud," or as anybody else,' I
said, 'the point would be how good you were in the part. The public
would not pay to see an indifferent performance because you were madame
Aribaud.'
"'Ah, then you admit it--that is it, after all!' she cried; 'you
declare beforehand that I have no ability. Why should you say such a
thing? It isn't right of you.'
"I said: 'I declare beforehand that you have had no training! I declare
beforehand that you could not master, in a few weeks or months, a
technique that other women acquire only after years. And on top of all
that, I declare that I don't want to see you in the profession. Why
do you become dissatisfied after we have got on? Why can't you be as
content as you used to be when we had nothing?'
"'The days are longer than they used to be; I want something to do,'
she insisted.
"Oh, I understood! But I need hardly tell you that this fever of hers
didn't make for bliss. The theatre became a bone of contention between
us--the position that I had dreamed of and yearned for was dividing me
from my wife. It got worse every year. I no longer dared to mention
business in my home. We were on affectionate terms only in the hours
when the theatre was forgotten. One day I would hold her in my arms,
and on the next some chance allusion would estrange us. If I happened
to come across a little actress who was suitable to a more conspicuous
part than those that she had had hitherto, my casting her for it
was a domestic tragedy--I 'made opportunities for every woman but
one!' I have been told that strangers who pestered me for theatrical
engagements complained that I was unsympathetic--they little guessed
how I was pestered for engagements on my own hearth!
"The aunt at Sèvres also had something to say. She had managed to get
on a semi-friendly footing with us when _Les Huit Jours_ was running,
and now she had the effrontery to take the tone of a mother-in-law with
me. She 'knew I was devoted to her niece, but I was not being fair to
her--I ought to realise that she had a right to a career, too.' What
audacity!--a woman who had given nothing but phrases when her niece was
penniless! I did not wrap up my answer in silver paper--and I fancy the
aunt's influence was responsible for a good deal; I think she revenged
herself by offering all the encouragement possible behind my back.
"Anyhow, my wife announced to me at last that she had determined to go
her own road without my help. It was as if she had struck me.
"She meant to seek an opening in some minor company in the
provinces--in the obscurest of the theatres ambulants, if she could do
no better. It sounded so mad that at first I could hardly believe she
was in earnest. The doggedness of her air soon convinced me; I would
have welcomed the wildest hysteria in preference. Since I refused to
further her ambition, she must resign herself to beginning in the
humblest way, she told me quietly; she 'regretted to defy my wishes,
but she was a woman, and I had been wrong to expect from her the blind
obedience of a child--she could not consent to remain a nonentity any
longer!' She dumfounded me. It meant actual separation, it meant the
end of our life together--and she was telling me this composedly,
coolly, as if our life together were the merest trifle, compared with
the fascination of the footlights. I cursed the footlights and the day
I first wrote for them. I swear I wished myself back in the Magasins
du Louvre. My excitement was so violent that I could not articulate; I
stuttered and stood mute. I went from her overwhelmed, asking myself
what I was to do.
"There is one course that never fails to remedy marital unhappiness
and bring husband and wife together again--on the stage. It is when
he leads her to an ottoman, and, standing a pace or two behind her,
proceeds with tender gravity to recite a catalogue of her defects. He
contrasts them pathetically with the virtues that endeared her to him
in the springtime of their union--and the wife, moved to tears, becomes
immediately and for ever afterwards the girl that she used to be. The
situation is pretty, it is popular, and it is quite untrue, for in real
life one cannot recreate a character by making a speech. However, I was
a dramatist, and more credulous than I am now, and I tried.
"For days I pondered what I should say. Arguments were plentiful, but
the problem was how to present them forcefully enough to show her the
wildness of her plan, and yet gently enough to avoid incensing her.
Our future hung upon the scene, and I prayed to Heaven that not a
tactless word should escape me. I knew that we had reached the crisis,
that a mistaken adjective, even an impatient gesture, might be fatal.
I considered and reconsidered that appeal with more tireless fervour
than any lines that I have ever put into the mouth of a leading man.
I thought about it so much that sometimes I was enraged to find the
things I meant to say falling mentally into sentences too rhythmic and
rounded, as if I had indeed been writing for the stage, and I damned
my metier anew. You are an author yourself, my friend--you should
understand: I longed to open my heart to her with all simplicity--never
had any one sought to pour his heart out more earnestly, more freely,
more unaffectedly than I--and it seemed to me in these moments that the
artifices of the theatre were fighting against me to the very end. It
was as if its influence were unconquerable--it had surmounted her love
for me, and now it threatened even to mock my plea!
"Enfin, the opportunity came. She sat down on the couch--the ottoman
of the stage situation--and I began to speak, with all the tenderness
and gravity of the stage husband. Struggle as I would to banish the
thought, I could not help being conscious of our resemblance to the
hero and heroine of a thousand comedies in the last act. I say that I
'began' to speak, and that I felt constrained by a shoal of theatrical
reminiscences, but our likeness to the hero and heroine was brief. She
interrupted me, she defied the dramatic convention. In lieu of being
moved to tears, she replied, with a world of dignity, that the faults
were mine. She advised me, for my own sake, to try to attain a more
unselfish view. With a flow of impromptu eloquence that I envied, she
warned me that, though I was not intentionally unjust, I was allowing
'prejudice and egotism to warp my better nature.' Before I knew what
had happened, I stood listening to a homily. The situation that meant
my last hope had come out upside down!"
* * * * *
Aribaud paused again. On the little lawn the child had left the swing;
the most devoted of wives and mothers was playing _chat perché_ with
him now. They made a pretty picture, but my thoughts were with her
predecessor; I was mourning the love-story that had begun like an
idyll, and that seemed to have had so bad an end.
The man's voice brought me back. "Yes, the infallible situation had
failed," he repeated. "What do you suppose was the sequel?"
"I suppose," I sighed, "she had her way?"
"No," said Aribaud; "she had her baby." He waved a triumphant hand
towards the garden. "And from the first promise of that God-sent gift,
the glamour of the theatre faded from her mind and me talked only of
her home. From that day to this we have been as happy together as you
see us now."
My exclamation was cut short by the hostess whose history I had been
hearing.
"Messieurs, are you really sure we aren't laughing too much for you?"
she pealed up to us again.
"Sure, sure! It is well--it is as it should be--we come to join you,"
shouted Aribaud. "Laugh loud, my love--laugh on!"