My mother was a Mirecourt. The family was of a prouder nobility than
my father’s. Her people were of the _Grand Chevaux de Lorraine_. They
fought with the English against the kings of France in the fourteenth
century. One reads about them as fighters during several hundreds of
years beginning with the Crusades. Sometimes they were on the right
side, sometimes on the wrong. Later generations were not proud of the
part they played in the siege of Orleans. But they were proud people
and acted on caprice or in self-interest with a sublime belief in
themselves. They did not like kings and were loth to give allegiance
to any one. When Louis XI took away their lands, they went over to the
king, but it is to be gathered from the letters of the time that they
considered no king their equal. Richelieu was too much for them. He
reduced them to poverty. To repair the damage the head of the family
made a bourgeois marriage. They were sure of themselves in those days.
Marrying money caused them no uneasiness nor fear of ridicule. My
mother said one day when talking of Philibert and Jane--“We have done
this sort of thing before but always with people of our own race who
had a proper attitude. With foreigners one never knows.”
My father was a Breton. Anne of Brittany was the liege lady of his
people. His _aieux_ were worthy gentlemen who played an obscure but
on the whole respectable part in history. An occasional spendthrift
appeared now and then among them to add gaiety to their monotonous
lives. The spendthrifts being few and the tenacity of the others very
great, they amassed a considerable fortune and were ennobled by Louis
XIV: a fact of which my aunt Clothilde used occasionally to remind us.
Aunt Clothilde was my father’s sister. She had made a great match in
marrying the first Duke of France, but she seemed to think nothing of
that nor to have any consciousness of the obligations of her class.
She made fun of the legitimists, scoffed at the idea of a restoration
and despised the Duc d’Orleans for the way he behaved in England. She
and my mother did not get on. My mother thought her vulgar. She was,
but it didn’t detract from her being a very great lady. She was always
enormously fat, a greedy, wicked old thing, with a ribald mind, but
with a tremendous _chic_. Philibert called her _La Gargantua_. She was
Rabelaisian somehow. I liked her. She never seemed conscious of my
being different from other men, and she was kinder to Jane than the
others.
There were a great many others. We made a large clan. It seemed strange
to Jane that half the people in Paris were our cousins or uncles or
aunts. But of course it is like that. One is related to everybody.
As a family we had the reputation of having very nice manners. It was
thought that we knew very well how to make ourselves agreeable and what
was more characteristic, how to be disagreeable without giving offense.
My mother was reputed to be the only woman in Paris who could refuse an
invitation to dinner in the same house six times running without making
an enemy of its mistress. My mother was perpetually penning little
plaintive notes of regret. She was greatly sought after and stayed
very much at home. After my father’s death it became more and more
difficult to get her to go anywhere, but she liked being asked so that
she could refuse. The result was that she became something precious,
inapproachable, a legend of good form and grace and she remained this
always. I have on my table a miniature of her painted when she was
married, at the age of eighteen. She was never a beauty. A slip of a
thing, gentle and pale, with dark ringlets and very bright intelligent
eyes. Her power of seduction was a thing that emanated from her like
a perfume, indefinable and elusive. Claire, my sister, has the same
quality.
One of my mother’s special pleasures as she grew older consisted in
having her dinner in bed on some grand gala evening, and telling
herself that she was the only lady of any importance in Paris who had
refused to be present. Sometimes on such evenings she would send for
me to come and sit with her for an hour. I would find her propped
up on her pillows, her eyes glowing with animation under the soft
old-fashioned frill of her voluminous boudoir cap, and presently I
would become aware that she was submitting me to all the play of her
wit and her charm, and I would know that out of a pure spirit of
contradiction she was giving me, her poor ugly duckling, the treat
that she had withheld from that brilliant gathering, whether to amuse
me most or herself it would be difficult to tell. We understand each
other. Her manner to me was always perfect. It was a beautiful and
elaborate denial of the fact that my deformity was unpleasant to
her. She went to a lot of trouble to pretend that she liked having
me about. If she wanted a cab called in the rain and there wasn’t a
servant handy--we didn’t have too many--it was a part of her delicacy
to ask me to do it rather than have me think that she had my infirmity
constantly on her mind. If she required an escort to some public place
she would choose me rather than Philibert, but she would not always
choose me, lest I should come to feel that she forced herself to do
so. She had the humblest way of asking my advice, and then when she
did not take it, went to the most childlike manœuvres to deceive me
and make me think she had. When I came back from school in England, I
remember wondering what she would do about me and her friends. She had
an evening a week and received on these occasions a number of stiff old
gentlemen and gossipy dowagers, a handful of priests and all the aunts
and uncles and cousins. The question for her was whether she should
inflict on me the penance of talking to these people in order to show
me that she liked to have me about, or whether she would let me off
attendance and trust to my superior understanding to assume that I was
in her eyes presentable. I believe she would have decided on the latter
bolder plan, had I not taken the matter out of her hands by asking her
to excuse me. Her answer was characteristic.
“But naturally, _mon enfant_. You don’t suppose that I think these
old people fit company for you. Only if it’s not indiscreet, tell me
sometimes about your doings. I, at least, am not too old nor yet too
young to be told.”
Dear mother. She would have gone to the length of imputing to me a
dozen mistresses if she had thought that would help me. And yet in
spite of it all, perhaps just because of it all, I knew that the sight
of me was intolerable to her. But this I feel sure was a thing that she
never knew that I knew. It was a part of my business in life never to
let her find it out.
My being sent to England to school had been to me a proof. Though
my father had taken the decision I knew it was to get me out of my
mother’s way. It was not the habit of our family to send its sons
abroad for their education. Philibert had had tutors at home. None
of my cousins had gone away. We were as a clan not at all given to
travelling. In the extreme sensitiveness that engulfed me like an
illness during a certain period of my youth, I had told myself bitterly
that I was banished because they could not abide the sight of me, but
my bitterness did not last, thank God; and when after my father’s death
I came home to live, I set myself to matching my mother’s delicacy with
my own. I arranged to convey to her the impression of being always at
hand and yet I managed to be actually in her presence a minimum of
time. I did things for her that I could do without being aggravatingly
near her; such things as running errands and visiting her lawyer and
looking after her meagre investments, accumulating these duties while
at the same time I withdrew more and more from sharing in her social
activities.
I had kept, for reasons of economy and in order to be near her, my
apartment in a wing of her house over the porter’s lodge, in that part
of the building that screened the house from the street. My windows
looked on the one side across the street into some gardens and on the
other side into our court yard. From my dressing-room I had a view of
my mother’s graceful front door with the wide shallow steps before it
and the gravel expanse of the inner carriage drive. Sometimes when I
came home in the evening, Madame Oui, the _concierge’s_ wife, would tap
on the glass in her door that was just opposite my own little entrance
behind the great double portals that barred us into our stronghold, and
would tell me that my mother had come in and would like to see me. Or I
would find a note bidding me come to her lying on my table. She wrote
me a great number of notes, sprightly amusing missives that reminded
one of the fact that Frenchwomen have been for centuries mistresses in
the art of letter-writing. They gave me the news, recounted the latest
family gossip, contained tips as to how to behave if I came across an
aunt who owed her money, or an uncle who had lent her some, warned me
against this or that person whom she did not want to see any more,
asked me to pay a call on one of her ancient followers who was in bed
with a cold, enclosed a tiresome bill that she hadn’t the money to pay
immediately, or implored me in witty phrases of complaint to use my
influence with Philibert and try to get him away from some woman: in
all of which matters I did my best to meet her wishes save as regarded
my brother. “My influence with Philibert” was one of my mother’s least
successful fictions. I wonder even now that she kept it up. I suppose
it would have seemed to her shocking to admit even tacitly that her
two sons never spoke to each other if they could help it. Yet she must
have known that although he lived nominally in my mother’s house up to
the time of his marriage I scarcely ever saw him unless at a distance
in some crowded salon. The few mutual friends we possessed never asked
us to dinner or lunch together, and strangely enough in the one place
where we might often have happened to come across one another, that
is in my mother’s own boudoir, we never did meet. My mother must have
managed this. She must have manœuvred to prevent such encounters. She
arranged to see us always separately and yet continued to talk to us,
each to the other, as if she supposed that beyond her door we were
amusing ourselves together, thick as thieves.
She would say--“I hear this latest friend of Philibert’s whom he has so
made the mode this year, is really quite pretty. Tell me what she looks
like,”--assuming me to be perfectly aware of this affair. Or--“Your
brother’s new tailor is not successful at all. He gives him the most
exaggerated shoulders. Fifi is not tall enough to stand it. I wish you
would get him to go back to the old one.” Or even--“Tell me what your
brother is up to. I never see him.” As if I knew what Philibert was up
to.
My rare meetings with him took place at my sister’s. She used sometimes
to have us at her house together. Her husband would bring him home to
lunch unexpectedly, or I would drop in unbidden and find him there.
Poor Claire had married the biggest automobile works in the country,
and had been taken to Neuilly and shut up there in a gigantic villa.
She was finding that it tasked her philosophical docility to the utmost
to meet the demands of the uxorious individual who paid all her bills
from his own cheque book and was generous only in the way of supplying
her with babies. She had had four in six years, and her health was a
source of anxiety to my mother, who was frankly exasperated by the turn
her daughter’s affairs had taken.
“My dear,” she said to me one night on her return from Neuilly, “I
supposed that that man had married Claire to get into society, and now
that I’ve given her to him he has taken her off to the wilderness.
I don’t know what to make of it. The poor child is wasting away. He
simply never leaves her alone. They go to bed together every night at
ten o’clock. It is horrible.”
Claire may have bemoaned her lot to my mother in those long
tête-à-têtes of theirs, but she never complained to me, nor did she,
I believe, to Philibert, who was in the habit of borrowing money from
her large, oily, sleek-headed husband. She had some of my mother’s
mannerisms, her little way of quickly moving her head backwards with
the slightest toss; the same light flexible utterance; the same sigh
and sudden droop of irrepressible languor. I believe her to be the
only person of whom Philibert was ever unselfishly fond. She pleased
him. Her physical frailty, appealed to his taste which was in reality
so fastidious, however vulgar some of his amusements might be, and her
mocking spirit was congenial to him. When one thought of Claire one
thought of her dark shadowed eyes with the deep circles under them
marking the tender cheeks, and her truly beautiful smile. She was
a collection of odd beauties combined in a way to make one’s heart
ache, but there was something sharp in her--something hurting. Lovely
Claire, cynical siren, how caressingly she spoke to me, how she drew
out of my heart its tenderness, and how often she disappointed me. Not
brave enough to be happy, far too intelligent not to know what she was
missing, she took refuge in self-mockery and when faced with a crisis
subsided into complete passivity.
One evening in the early summer, more than twenty years ago now, I
found a note from my mother tucked in the crack of my door asking me to
come to her at once as she had news for me of the utmost importance.
I found my sister with her, and something in the attitude of the two
women, who were so closely akin as to reproduce each one the same
physical pose under the stress of a deep preoccupation, conveyed to
me a suspicion that Philibert had that moment skipped out through the
long open window. They sat, each in a high brocaded chair, their heads
thrown back against their respective cushions, their hands limp in
their laps and their eyes half-closed. I thought for an instant that
both had fainted. My mother was the first to make a sign. She lifted an
arm and in silence pointed a finger at a chair for me.
“Your brother,” she said, when once I was seated, “has sold this house
over my head. He is going to be married.”
“To a little American girl,” breathed Claire.
“The fortune is immense,” added my mother.
“The daughter of that awful smart Mrs. Carpenter,” said Claire, opening
wide her eyes the better to take in the horror.
“She asked me three times to luncheon,” said my mother. “I have never
seen her.”
I looked from one to the other--“But if the fortune is immense--” I
ventured.
“It is all tied up,” wailed my mother. “Her trustees insist on his
debts being paid beforehand. I understand nothing--but nothing.” Her
head dropped forward. She pressed her thumb and forefinger against her
worn eyelids. She began to cry.
Claire, with a strange sidelong look at her expressive of compassion
and exasperation and wonder, got up and walked to the window and stood
with her back to us looking out into the garden.
“I should have thought my son-in-law would have saved me this
humiliation,” said my mother, fumbling with her left hand for her
handkerchief. “But Claire says he has already lent Philibert very
considerable sums.” I saw my sister’s slender figure stiffen. “What
curious people Americans are. It seems that the father made such a
will as passes belief. The child comes into the entire fortune but can
only dispose of the income. The mother has an annuity, Claire says
it must be a big one as she entertains a great deal. Why did you not
tell me your brother was getting so dreadfully into debt? The girl is
just eighteen. It appears that in America girls reach their majority
at eighteen. Her name is Jane. A most unpleasant name. Philibert says
she is not pretty. These _mésalliances_ are so tiresome. If only he
could have married that exquisite little Bianca. I shall be obliged to
receive the mother. I am sure she has a very strong accent.”
My poor mother stretched out her hand to me. “What is to become of
us?” she wailed gently. I felt very sorry for her. I understood that
she was afraid of the invasion of a horde of big noisy strangers. I
tried to comfort her. She seemed to me for the first time pitiful, and
I saw that her youthfulness was after all, just one of the illusions
she cast by the exercise of her will. It fell from her that evening as
if it had been some gossamer veil destroyed by her tears.
Claire remained silent. Only once during all my mother’s broken lament
did she speak, and then she said without turning--“I should have
thought one such marriage in a family was enough.”
It transpired that Philibert needed five hundred thousand francs to put
him straight, that the house was being sold for a million and that the
remaining half was my mother’s, since they owned the property between
them. He had brought her the deed of sale to sign that afternoon, and
had gone away with the signature in his pocket. She said--“Naturally I
could not refuse. It is not as if he could have sold half the building.”
I felt humiliated for my mother. It seemed to me that my brother had
injured her in a most offensive way. There was a kind of indecency
about the proceeding that made me ashamed. It was the kind of thing
I had hoped we were none of us capable of doing. He was taking away
from her not only her shelter and security, but a part of her own
personality. It was as outrageous as if he had forced her to cut off
her hair and had taken it round to a wigmaker to turn into a handful
of gold. I saw that without that fine old house, so like her own self
expressed in architecture, with its bland and graceful exterior and
delicate ornamented rooms, she would lose a vital part of her entity.
She was not one of those people whose public and private selves are
distinct. The proud little bright-eyed lady who drove out of those
stately doors in her brougham to dispense finely gradated smiles to the
meticulously selected people of her acquaintance, and the passionate
intriguing mother so given to subterfuges of kindness and ineffable
make-believe of disinterested affection, were one and the same
person. She had no special manner for the world. There was no homely
naturalness for her to subside into, no loose woolly dressing-gown of
conduct and no rough carpet slippers of laziness to don in the presence
of her family or by her lonely self. What she was when in attendance
on the Bourbons that she was in her own silent bedroom. Even about her
weeping there was a certain style. Her tears were pitiful but not ugly.
They had destroyed the illusion of her youthfulness, but they had not
marred her elegance. There was measure and appropriateness and dramatic
worth in her weeping. Her son had not broken her heart or her spirit;
he had merely dragged off some of her clothing. She stood denuded,
impoverished, a little shrunken in stature, that was all. It was that
that enraged me. I said--“What a brute.” My mother pulled me up sharply.
“My son,” she said to me, with more of haughtiness than I had ever
seen in her manner to any one of us. “I have consented to do what your
brother has asked. I have approved of his conduct. That is sufficient.”
I felt then the finality, the hopelessness. I believe I smiled. The
change was sudden. It had always been like that with mother. She might
complain of Philibert but no one could criticize him to her.
“Ah, well,” I said, “if you have made up your mind to accept her--”
Mother lifted her head quickly. “Whom?”
“Your new daughter-in-law.”
I am almost sure that she turned pale. I cannot have imagined it. Her
words too, gave me the same painful impression.
“I have accepted it, not her, as yet.”
And suddenly I thought of the girl, Jane Carpenter, whom I had not yet
laid eyes on, with an immense pity.
“Yes,” said Claire, coming back to us, and looking at us with her
least charming, most bitterly mocking air. “We prepare a nice welcome
for her. I wonder how she will like us.”
But my mother had the last word.
“We shall, I presume, know how to make ourselves agreeable,” she said,
putting away her handkerchief into her little silk bag. I saw that she
would shed no more tears over the girl, Jane Carpenter.