AFTER lunch Jean went to Elizabeth. She was washing up the dishes,
or she preferred to let Jean think she was; as a matter of fact, she
had been having what is known in servants’ quarters as a “snack,” but
like all healthy, properly brought up English servants, she liked
her employers to fancy that she lived upon air alone. Jean sat on
the kitchen table and swung his legs to and fro in a confidential
manner. He had an implicit masculine confidence in Elizabeth’s
sympathy--Elizabeth was perhaps only a sour old maid, but she would
know that he was there to have his grievance produced, and she would in
time produce it for him. So he took a cigarette and waited.
“Oh, Master Jean, if Miss Anne should see you now!” said the
scandalized Elizabeth. Jean was forbidden to smoke, but he knew
Elizabeth admired it. His melancholy deep brown eyes had a sudden
charming twinkle in them; he had a curious face, irregular as to its
features, but very much alive; it reminded the observer of a young
wild thing in the woods absorbed in the deep business of life.
“Though you do look nearly a man now,” went on Elizabeth, “and are
grown so lately, Master Jean, and if I may say so, a thought more
English about the shoulders.”
“I am a man,” said Jean. “I’m twenty, Elizabeth, and they’ve turned me
out of their consultation as if I were a schoolboy, and I’m positive
it’s about me.”
“There, there, Master Jean!” said Elizabeth soothingly. “You know you
can get it all out of the doctor afterwards; ’e’s as easy to get into
as a tin of apricots--’im and ’is professional secrets!”
Elizabeth snorted.
“I don’t like getting things out of people when they’re the things they
ought to tell me any way,” said Jean. “When I went in this morning,
Elizabeth, they were all saying ‘Paris’ as if they’d heard of it for
the first time.”
Elizabeth looked at him thoughtfully.
“There was a letter from there this very morning,” she said, “with a
seal on the back; perhaps it’s a fortune, Master Jean, come from your
rich uncle in Paris.”
“More likely a misfortune, I’m afraid,” said Jean gloomily. “Well,
Elizabeth, I think I’m going off to the woods again. Put something cold
out for me to-night; I shan’t be back till late.”
Elizabeth looked anxious, but she knew better than to expostulate with
her idol. She was allowed to worship only on the distinct understanding
that she never interfered. A worshipper that tries to manage his god
is confusing the situation. From his tenth birthday on, Jean had ruled
Elizabeth with a rod of iron. It was a small kingdom, perhaps, for the
little lonely boy, it only contained his dog and Elizabeth, but he
ruled it well, and there had never been a hint of rebellion. Elizabeth
knew that Miss Prenderghast had noticed these increasing despotic
absences of Jean’s. He went away almost daily now for hours at a time,
and gave no account whatever of his proceedings. Miss Prenderghast
shook her head over them; she had a shocked suspicion, not unlike the
priest and the doctor, that he might be meeting some woman; but she
would have been even more shocked if she had known he was meeting
his own soul. A woman would not have prevented Jean from becoming a
bank clerk, but no one knows what a man’s soul may prevent him from
becoming. It has led him before now to become an artist, and it has
even taught him (and this is the hardest thing perhaps for thoroughly
good, religious people to understand) to develop into a saint.
But Jean wasn’t going to become a saint, he was only born a
musician, and he had inherited on both sides of his nature a certain
recklessness, only thinly covered by a reticence which was not natural
to him, the inevitable result of a sensitive nature that has not found
in its early years any direct response.
His mother had had a romantic zest for all the adventures of the
spirit, even her broken heart had not checked her dauntless craving for
the impossible; she had ceased to look for it in her husband, but she
had never found that the world was small. The Baron on his side had a
lucid, unwavering instinct for pleasure, it was his intention to make
everything serve his senses. This instinct had descended upon Jean in
the shape of a fierce desire, of which he was hardly conscious, to tear
something living and responsive from the grip of his future. As he
strode off once more upon his innocent adventures his mind was fiercely
and ardently awake and busy. “What had he done with his life?” he asked
himself, in frenzied self-reproach. Here he was at twenty--no older, no
more experienced, no more active than many a boy of fourteen. He did
not take his attempted opera nearly as seriously as Miss Prenderghast
had taken it; he was possessed by melody, he always had been; ever
since he could remember he seemed to have been listening to a tune,
but he hardly knew that he was peculiar in this, and he knew enough
of the music to which great musicians had listened not to think too
much of his own ambitious flutterings. “I have done nothing,” he said
to himself bitterly. “I am nothing--I have no powers!” And he flung
himself face downwards on the dry, dead leaves of the late summer
in the terrible abandonment of youth. To have never left Ucelles in
his life, to have been brought up a good Catholic, to have no friends
but a sour-faced English cook and a few inarticulate peasants (it is
sad to say that Jean forgot the Curé and the doctor), wasn’t that a
certain proof of his failure in life? He thought of Maurice Golaud,
that magnificent young man he had met at the Choral Society. Maurice
had all the world before him--money, a family of admiring sisters, and
that unacquirable self-confidence which the artist, except in rare
moments of creation, never knows! Jean had tried to play to Maurice
once, but he had broken down in the middle; it was the only thing he
could do--play--and it had come over him suddenly that Maurice did not
think much of playing. He thought a great deal more of how to curl your
moustache and look at a woman, and for the moment Jean was not sure
that Maurice was not right.
Jean buried his face in the long dried grass, and drank in the
haunting, fresh scent of the dead leaves; the air was full of a faint,
warm haze that crept across the distant fields and hung above the
trees. The leaves that were still upon them were very dry with the heat
and rattled a little as the soft breeze shook them together. The birds
spoke in sharp, disconnected twitters; all the sounds and all the life
of the earth seemed interrupted now, and yet urgent. The swallows flung
themselves in long, unsettled curves about the sky; everything was
changing, moving, departing. Jean alone must stay here always to the
bitter sound of his own wasted life! He watched himself grow tamely,
narrowly old, through the coming years; there would be nothing in him
to challenge life. Maurice and his fellow-officers and their fun would
go out once more into the merry world, Jean would remain. In time he
would cease attending the Lycée, he would come home and farm Ucelles.
In the evenings he would play a little if he was not too tired, but
never his own music any more! Why should he shame the divine flickering
gift within him, which he could never develop, nor yet throw away? He
wanted to be a musician--he wanted only that--and he buried his face in
the friendly dry leaves that scratched his cheeks, and wept.
“I shall never be able to do anything,” sobbed Jean. “I shall never be
able to go anywhere, and I shall never meet anyone to love.”
Miss Prenderghast waited half an hour for dinner. It was an unfortunate
half hour; in it all the sacrifices she had made for Jean increased
with the inroad he was making upon punctuality.
For the last ten years Miss Prenderghast had been practising the stoic
virtues, and though these are probably the hardest of all the virtues
to practise, they rarely, if ever, make the possessor lovable. In this
one half hour Miss Prenderghast saw their worthlessness, but she could
not admit that she was to blame; surely the guardians of youth only
owed to their special charges the one great duty of correction, to be
met by youth in its turn with implicit obedience? And Miss Prenderghast
knew that she had corrected Jean and that he had usually obeyed her.
Between them these two admirable virtues had destroyed any human
relationship. “He is lacking in consideration,” said Miss Prenderghast
to herself, and she wiped her glasses. She had given Jean a gold watch
for his birthday present, and he had not kissed her. She had told him
at the time that she hoped it would make him more punctual.
Elizabeth brought in the soup at nine.
“Master Jean is very late,” said Miss Prenderghast; “put something cold
on the sideboard, Elizabeth, and go to bed. I will sit up for him.”
There was such a tone of finality in Miss Prenderghast’s voice that
Elizabeth almost obeyed her. She put some soup on the kitchen fire and
began to do her hair in curl-papers on the stairs.
Jean came in a few minutes afterwards. He apologized perfunctorily for
the lateness of the hour, and his aunt remarked that careless people
always gave trouble. Jean accepted the thrust in silence; he did not
think it fair to receive an apology with further correction; it had the
result also of drying up any possible springs of remorse.
“He is becoming hardened,” thought his aunt miserably; then she advised
him not to take butter with meat; she said it was an extravagant habit
and un-English. Jean took more butter.
Miss Prenderghast sighed and shook her head.
“Well, Jean,” she said at last, “I daresay you wonder why I have been
sitting up here for you, just as I have been wondering what has made
you so late. Have you no explanation you can offer me?”
“No, _ma Tante_,” said Jean, without lifting his eyes from his plate.
He looked very guilty.
“I would have forgiven him anything if he were not so secretive,”
thought his aunt; aloud she said, “I am afraid you have been idling--or
worse! You are twenty, old enough to be doing some good in the world
if you have any capacity for it. The time has come for something to be
decided about your future.”
Miss Prenderghast was only expressing in her own familiar way the
very thoughts that had kept Jean lingering in the field, but it is
extraordinary how very different our own thoughts about ourselves can
sound from the lips of our nearest relatives! Jean had not felt in the
least hostile to himself as he lay in the long grass, speculating as to
his lack of the talents necessary for life, but he felt very hostile to
Miss Prenderghast now; he kicked the table leg.
“I daresay you hardly remember your Uncle Romain,” she went on, with
a grieved glance at the furniture; “you are hardly likely to, as
hitherto his only interest in you has been displayed by his remarkable
confidence in my powers of bringing you up. However, it appears he has
suddenly remembered that he is your natural guardian, and has written
to suggest a profession for you.”
“I remember my Uncle Romain extremely well,” said Jean with more
haste than accuracy, “and I am grateful to him for his interest. What
profession does he suggest?”
“The Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas,” said Miss Prenderghast. “You are
to receive no salary for the first six months, and your uncle does not
apparently intend to offer you his hospitality. I cannot congratulate
you upon the generosity of your French relatives.”
Jean said nothing, he looked more than ever like a trapped wild thing
in the flickering candlelight. His brown eyes shone with a fierce glint
peculiar to them in moments of excitement, his thin, long brown hands
moved with nervous gestures, and his nostrils quivered and dilated like
those of an excited horse. It seemed a good moment to his aunt to make
an appeal to his feelings.
“My dear boy,” she said, “if you go to Paris, as I fear you must, I
foresee great temptations for you. I have done all I could to bring you
up a decent, respectable member of society, and to bring out in you the
strain of your English blood; but several things have been against me,
your Roman Catholic religion and your naturally difficult temper. I
have never quite felt as if you understood me, but that doesn’t matter
now. Try to be honourable, straightforward and economical, and whatever
you do, don’t be like your father--I don’t like to mention such
horrors, but there it is; you have that to fight against as well as the
temptations natural to any young man--the poor man came, as we know, to
a shocking end.”
Jean flung back his chair and sprang to his feet. He spoke in a tone
Miss Prenderghast had never heard him use before, and he lapsed into
quick, explosive French, which she always found it difficult to follow.
“Do not dare to say these things to me, Madame,” he said hoarsely.
“Respect my father’s memory, if you respect nothing else that is mine.
He had courage, he was a gallant man, he never did a dishonourable
thing in his life--he died sadly!”
“He died by his own hand,” interrupted Miss Prenderghast dryly, “after
he had lived what, in my religion, would very rightly be termed a life
of sin.”
“_Mon Dieu!_ you shall not say these things to me,” cried Jean, and
suddenly he caught up the plate nearest him, and with the quick gesture
of an angry child, flung it through the nearest window-pane. It crashed
through the glass of the long French window, out on to the terrace
beyond. The boy trembled all over with excitement and fury. Miss
Prenderghast regarded him with scandalized contempt. He had really
startled her, but even in her astonishment she was scornful. Shame
overwhelmed him; he rushed past her out into the long corridor, and
tore upstairs to his room.
Elizabeth heard him; she ran out of her room to intercept him in a
sulphur-coloured dressing-gown, her gray hair hanging about her head in
rigid wisps.
“Ah, Master Jean! Master Jean! Whatever in the world ’ave you been and
done?” she moaned in terror.
“Let me go! Let me go, Elizabeth! or I shall go mad,” gasped the boy.
“There, there! don’t you take on so, Master Jean,” said Elizabeth
softly, but she let him go--she knew that there is one thing a man
prefers even to a woman’s sympathy, and that is his own freedom.
Jean reached his room and flung himself headlong on his bed, shaking
with sobs. “Why should he feel so--why should he always feel so much
too much?” he asked himself. “He had acted like a bad child, like a
mere boy; his aunt despised him. Who was he to go out and face the
world, to see Paris--a man who could not keep his temper with his
aunt?” Even lying there alone in the dark he felt the hot waves of
colour rushing over him afresh. He had been rude to her, and she was a
woman, and she had done so much for him! How he hated her having done
so much for him--why couldn’t she have left him alone?
He raised his eyes to where he knew his mother’s crucifix was hung, but
his Aunt Anne had said such things about his father--his poor father
whose beautiful, unharassed eyes Jean so well remembered; and Jean
had adored the father, who came so seldom but so grandly to Ucelles.
His mother had been his life’s companion, but his father had been his
dream--at the thought of the words his Aunt Anne had used about the
late Baron the tears dried on his cheeks.
“No, I won’t apologize to her. I won’t,” said Jean, looking in the
direction of the crucifix. Then he went on his knees and took out his
rosary and prayed afresh all those special prayers the Curé had taught
him to pray for his father’s wandering soul.
He felt vaguely comforted when he lay down again. His window was wide
open and his room was full of the autumn evening. The night was very
still; high above the avenue of whispering limes the waning moon slid
idly through the sky. She was warped and twisted and out of shape, and
silvery pale--she stood to Jean as a symbol of all perverted, tortured
lives, his father’s, and his own too, perhaps; who knew what would
happen to him in Paris? Not what his Aunt Anne thought, nothing ever
happened quite as she thought, because life always leans a little to
the side of the ideal, even in its ugliest moments; but strange things
other than Jean could yet imagine? He prayed again that he might not
disgrace his name and his blood.
Even his Aunt Anne had good blood, he remembered; she had never stirred
when he had looked his savage rage at her and flung the plate through
the window. No! he could not apologize to her, but he would pray too
for his Aunt Anne. He was not quite sure what form his prayer should
take--the Curé had told him always to pray that Miss Prenderghast
might become a Catholic; but Jean had never felt that this was quite
fair, for he knew how very little his Aunt Anne herself wanted it;
at present, too, he particularly wished to be fair. So he decided at
last to pray to St. Joseph, who was well known to be particularly
benevolent, to grant his Aunt Anne any good thing that she might want.
“And if she doesn’t want any good thing,” he argued to himself, “it
really isn’t my fault!”
He would have been very much surprised, and even a little touched, if
he had known that his aunt was at that very moment praying for him.
“I do not think I have been very wise,” Miss Prenderghast prayed, “but
I cannot approve of his French relations, and I knew it was my duty
to warn him against his father’s awful example. If I have done aught
amiss--and I do not think the boy’s temper entirely his own fault (the
Prenderghasts, too, always as a family had hasty tempers)--forgive
me--lay his temper to my charge, and protect him, if it is possible,
from Paris!”
As for Elizabeth, she prayed that Jean might enjoy himself. (In spite
of her appearance, there was something rather Greek about Elizabeth.)