Old M. Pigeonneau had more than once offered me the privilege of a walk
in his company, but his invitation had hitherto, for one reason or
another, always found me hampered. It befell, however, one afternoon
that I saw him go forth for a vague airing with an unattended patience
that attracted my sympathy. I hastily overtook him and passed my hand
into his venerable arm, an overture that produced in the good old man so
rejoicing a response that he at once proposed we should direct our steps
to the English Garden: no scene less consecrated to social ease was
worthy of our union. To the English Garden accordingly we went; it lay
beyond the bridge and beside the lake. It was always pretty and now was
really recreative; a band played furiously in the centre and a number of
discreet listeners sat under the small trees on benches and little chairs
or strolled beside the blue water. We joined the strollers, we observed
our companions and conversed on obvious topics. Some of these last, of
course, were the pretty women who graced the prospect and who, in the
light of M. Pigeonneau’s comprehensive criticism, appeared surprisingly
numerous. He seemed bent upon our making up our minds as to which might
be prettiest, and this was an innocent game in which I consented to take
a hand.
Suddenly my companion stopped, pressing my arm with the liveliest
emotion. “La voilà, la voilà, the prettiest!” he quickly murmured;
“coming toward us in a blue dress with the other.” It was at the other I
was looking, for the other, to my surprise, was our interesting fellow
pensioner, the daughter of the most systematic of mothers. M. Pigeonneau
meanwhile had redoubled his transports—he had recognised Miss Ruck. “Oh
la belle rencontre, nos aimables convives—the prettiest girl in the world
in effect!” And then after we had greeted and joined the young ladies,
who, like ourselves, were walking arm in arm and enjoying the scene, he
addressed himself to the special object of his admiration, Mees Roque.
“I was citing you with enthusiasm to my young friend here even before I
had recognised you, mademoiselle.”
“I don’t believe in French compliments,” remarked Miss Sophy, who
presented her back to the smiling old man.
“Are you and Miss Ruck walking alone?” I asked of her companion. “You
had better accept M. Pigeonneau’s gallant protection, to say nothing of
mine.”
Aurora Church had taken her hand from Miss Ruck’s arm; she inclined her
head to the side and shone at me while her open parasol revolved on her
shoulder. “Which is most improper—to walk alone or to walk with
gentlemen that one picks up? I want to do what’s most improper.”
“What perversity,” I asked, “are you, with an ingenuity worthy of a
better cause, trying to work out?”
“He thinks you can’t understand him when he talks like that,” said Miss
Ruck. “But I _do_ understand you,” she flirted at me—“always!”
“So I’ve always ventured to hope, my dear Miss Ruck.”
“Well, if I didn’t it wouldn’t be much loss!” cried this young lady.
“Allons, en marche!” trumpeted M. Pigeonneau, all gallant urbanity and
undiscouraged by her impertinence. “Let us make together the tour of the
garden.” And he attached himself to Miss Ruck with a respectful elderly
grace which treated her own lack even of the juvenile form of that
attraction as some flower of alien modesty, and was ever sublimely
conscious of a mission to place modesty at its ease. This ill-assorted
couple walked in front, while Aurora Church and I strolled along
together.
“I’m sure this is more improper,” said my companion; “this is
delightfully improper. I don’t say that as a compliment to you,” she
added. “I’d say it to any clinging man, no matter how stupid.”
“Oh I’m clinging enough,” I answered; “but I’m as stupid as you could
wish, and this doesn’t seem to me wrong.”
“Not for you, no; only for me. There’s nothing that a man can do that’s
wrong, is there? _En morale_, you know, I mean. Ah, yes, he can kill
and steal; but I think there’s nothing else, is there?”
“Well, it’s a nice question. One doesn’t know how those things are taken
till after one has done them. Then one’s enlightened.”
“And you mean you’ve never been enlightened? You make yourself out very
good.”
“That’s better than making one’s self out very bad, as you do.”
“Ah,” she explained, “you don’t know the consequences of a false
position.”
I was amused at her great formula. “What do you mean by yours being
one?”
“Oh I mean everything. For instance, I’ve to pretend to be a jeune
fille. I’m not a jeune fille; no American girl’s a jeune fille; an
American girl’s an intelligent responsible creature. I’ve to pretend to
be idiotically innocent, but I’m not in the least innocent.”
This, however, was easy to meet. “You don’t in the least pretend to be
innocent; you pretend to be—what shall I call it?—uncannily wise.”
“That’s no pretence. I _am_ uncannily wise. You could call it nothing
more true.”
I went along with her a little, rather thrilled by this finer freedom.
“You’re essentially not an American girl.”
She almost stopped, looking at me; there came a flush to her cheek.
“Voilà!” she said. “There’s my false position. I want to be an American
girl, and I’ve been hideously deprived of that immense convenience, that
beautiful resource.”
“Do you want me to tell you?” I pursued with interest. “It would be
utterly impossible to an American girl—I mean unperverted, and that’s the
whole point—to talk as you’re talking to me now.”
The expressive eagerness she showed for this was charming. “Please tell
me then! How would she talk?”
“I can’t tell you all the things she’d say, but I think I can tell you
most of the things she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t reason out her conduct as
you seem to me to do.”
Aurora gave me the most flattering attention. “I see. She would be
simpler. To do very simply things not at all simple—that’s the American
girl!”
I greatly enjoyed our intellectual relation. “I don’t know whether
you’re a French girl, or what you are, but, you know, I find you witty.”
“Ah, you mean I strike false notes!” she quite comically wailed. “See
how my whole sense for such things has been ruined. False notes are just
what I want to avoid. I wish you’d always tell me.”
The conversational union between Miss Ruck and her neighbour, in front of
us, had evidently not borne fruit. Miss Ruck suddenly turned round to us
with a question. “Don’t you want some ice-cream?”
“_She_ doesn’t strike false notes,” I declared.
We had come into view of a manner of pavilion or large kiosk, which
served as a café and at which the delicacies generally procurable at such
an establishment were dispensed. Miss Ruck pointed to the little green
tables and chairs set out on the gravel; M. Pigeonneau, fluttering with a
sense of dissipation, seconded the proposal, and we presently sat down
and gave our order to a nimble attendant. I managed again to place
myself next Aurora; our companions were on the other side of the table.
My neighbour rejoiced to extravagance in our situation. “This is best of
all—I never believed I should come to a café with two strange and
possibly depraved men! Now you can’t persuade me this isn’t wrong.”
“To make it wrong,” I returned, “we ought to see your mother coming down
that path.”
“Ah, my mother makes everything wrong,” she cried, attacking with a
little spoon in the shape of a spade the apex of a pink ice. And then
she returned to her idea of a moment before. “You must promise to tell
me—to warn me in some way—whenever I strike a false note. You must give
a little cough, like that—ahem!”
“You’ll keep me very busy and people will think I’m in a consumption.”
“Voyons,” she continued, “why have you never talked to me more? Is that
a false note? Why haven’t you been ‘attentive’? That’s what American
girls call it; that’s what Miss Ruck calls it.”
I assured myself that our companions were out of ear-shot and that Miss
Ruck was much occupied with a large vanilla cream. “Because you’re
always interlaced with that young lady. There’s no getting near you.”
Aurora watched her friend while the latter devoted herself to her ice.
“You wonder, no doubt, why I should care for her at all. So does mamma;
elle s’y perd. I don’t like her particularly; je n’en suis pas folle.
But she gives me information; she tells me about her—your—everything but
_my_—extraordinary country. Mamma has always tried to prevent my knowing
anything about it, and I’m all the more devoured with curiosity. And
then Miss Ruck’s so very fresh.”
“I may not be so fresh as Miss Ruck,” I said, “but in future, when you
want information, I recommend you to come to me for it.”
“Ah, but our friend offers to take me there; she invites me to go back
with her, to stay with her. You couldn’t do that, could you?” And my
companion beautifully faced me on it. “Bon, a false note! I can see it
by your face; you remind me of an outraged maître de piano.”
“You overdo the character—the poor American girl,” I said. “Are you
going to stay with that delightful family?”
“I’ll go and stay with any one who will take me or ask me. It’s a real
nostalgie. She says that in New York—in Thirty-Seventh Street near
Fourth Avenue—I should have the most lovely time.”
“I’ve no doubt you’d enjoy it.”
“Absolute liberty to begin with.”
“It seems to me you’ve a certain liberty here,” I returned.
“Ah, _this_? Oh I shall pay for this. I shall be punished by mamma and
lectured by Madame Galopin.”
“The wife of the pasteur?”
“His digne épouse. Madame Galopin, for mamma, is the incarnation of
European opinion. That’s what vexes me with mamma, her thinking so much
of people like Madame Galopin. Going to see Madame Galopin—mamma calls
that being in European society. European society! I’m so sick of that
expression; I’ve heard it since I was six years old. Who’s Madame
Galopin—who the devil thinks anything of her here? She’s nobody; she’s
the dreariest of frumps; she’s perfectly third-rate. If I like your
America better than mamma I also know my Europe better.”
“But your mother, certainly,” I objected a trifle timidly—for my young
lady was excited and had a charming little passion in her eye—“your
mother has a great many social relations all over the continent.”
“She thinks so, but half the people don’t care for us. They’re not so
good as we and they know it—I’ll do them that justice—so that they wonder
why we should care for them. When we’re polite to them they think the
less of us; there are plenty of people like that. Mamma thinks so much
of them simply because they’re foreigners. If I could tell you all the
ugly stupid tenth-rate people I’ve had to talk to for no better reason
than that they were _de leur pays_!—Germans, French, Italians, Turks,
everything. When I complain mamma always says that at any rate it’s
practice in the language. And she makes so much of the most impossible
English too; I don’t know what _that’s_ practice in.”
Before I had time to suggest an hypothesis as regards this latter point I
saw something that made me rise—I fear with an undissimulated start—from
my chair. This was nothing less than the neat little figure of Mrs.
Church—a perfect model of the femme comme il faut—approaching our table
with an impatient step and followed most unexpectedly in her advance by
the pre-eminent form of Mr. Ruck, whose high hat had never looked so
high. She had evidently come in search of her daughter, and if she had
commanded this gentleman’s attendance it had been on no more intimate
ground than that of his unenvied paternity to her guilty child’s
accomplice. My movement had given the alarm and my young friend and M.
Pigeonneau got up; Miss Ruck alone didn’t, in the local phrase, derange
herself. Mrs. Church, beneath her modest little bonnet, looked
thoroughly resolute though not at all agitated; she came straight to her
daughter, who received her with a smile, and then she took the rest of us
in very fixedly and tranquilly and without bowing. I must do both these
ladies the justice that neither of them made the least little “scene.”
“I’ve come for you, dearest,” said the mother.
“Yes, dear mamma.”
“Come for you—come for you,” Mrs. Church repeated, looking down at the
relics of our little feast, on which she seemed somehow to shed at once
the lurid light of the disreputable. “I was obliged to appeal to Mr.
Ruck’s assistance. I was much perplexed. I thought a long time.”
“Well, Mrs. Church, I was glad to see you perplexed once in your life!”
cried Mr. Ruck with friendly jocosity. “But you came pretty straight for
all that. I had hard work to keep up with you.”
“We’ll take a cab, Aurora,” Mrs. Church went on without heeding this
pleasantry—“a closed one; we’ll enter it at once. Come, ma fille.”
“Yes, dear mamma.” The girl had flushed for humiliation, but she carried
it bravely off; and her grimace as she looked round at us all and her
eyes met mine didn’t keep her, I thought, from being beautiful.
“Good-bye. I’ve had a ripping time.”
“We mustn’t linger,” said her mother; “it’s five o’clock. We’re to dine,
you know, with Madame Galopin.”
“I had quite forgotten,” Aurora declared. “That will be even more
charming.”
“Do you want me to assist you to carry her back, ma’am?” asked Mr. Ruck.
Mrs. Church covered him for a little with her coldest contemplation. “Do
you prefer then to leave your daughter to finish the evening with these
gentlemen?”
Mr. Ruck pushed back his hat and scratched the top of his head. “Well, I
don’t know. How’d you like that, Sophy?”
“Well, I never!” gasped Sophy as Mrs. Church marched off with her
daughter.