Mrs. Carpenter was an American who apologized for her own country. She
had found it incapable of providing a sufficient field of activity for
her social talents and called it crude. The phrase on her lips was
funny. There was much about her that was funny, since one could not in
the face of her bright brisk self-satisfaction call her pathetic.
The flattery of such migrations as hers is mystifying to Parisians
like myself, who know that our city is the most delightful place in
the world, but do not quite understand why so many foreigners like
Mrs. Carpenter should find it so. She seemed to derive an immense
satisfaction from the fact that she lived in Paris. But why? Where
lay the magic difference between her Paris and her New York? She had
established herself in a large bright apartment in the Avenue du Bois
de Bologne. Her rent was high, her furniture expensive, her table
lavish, her motor had pale grey cushions and silver trimmings. All
these things she could have had in New York. She might have paid a
little more for them over there, but that would only have added to her
pleasure. She liked to pay high prices for things. It may be that I
am doing her an injustice. There were moments when her indefatigable
pursuit of us all filled me with scornful pity and made me think that
she did hide under her breezy successful manner a wistful and romantic
admiration for things that were foreign and old, and a touching respect
for things she did not understand. She once told me that she had wanted
to take an old hotel in our quarter, something with atmosphere and a
history and old-world charm. But somehow she had not found what she
wanted. The houses she saw were dark and gloomy and insanitary. They
were wonderfully romantic but they had no bathrooms. She had wanted
one in particular, had wanted it awfully, but the owner had insisted
on staying on in little rooms under the roof, which meant his using
her front stairs, so at last she had given up the idea. Her apartment
was certainly not gloomy. It glittered with gold--golden walls, gold
plate, gilt chairs. She ended by liking it immensely, but was sometimes
a little ashamed of being so pleased with it. Perhaps, at odd moments,
she called it crude.
I used to go there sometimes, long before Jane came to Paris. I am
sorry now that I did. Had I known Mrs. Carpenter was going to be,
for me, Jane’s mother, I would not have gone. It is not nice to
remember that I used to make fun of Jane’s mother, and accept her
hospitality with amused contempt. We all did. She was to us an object
of good-humoured derision. Poor old Izzy. She fed us so well; she
begged us so continually to come. She seemed to derive such pleasure
from hearing the butler announce our names. I am sure she believed that
awful flat of hers to be the social centre of a very distinguished
society. The more of a mixture the better to her mind:--Austrians,
Hungarians, Poles,--she liked having princes about, and their dark
furtive eyes and beautifully manicured hands filled her with joy. It
was only after Philibert got hold of her that she began to understand
that perhaps, after all, too cosmopolitan a salon was not quite the
thing. Philibert took her in hand. He had learned somehow about Jane.
He already had his idea.
And now I come upon a curious problem. I find that two distinct Mrs.
Carpenters exist in my mind, and I cannot reconcile them. One was a
beautiful romantic creature whom Jane--far away in the Grey House in
St. Mary’s Plains--called mother and wrote to once a week and loved
with a pure flame of loyalty; the other was Izzy Carpenter, whose
loud voice and tall elastic fashionable figure was so well-known
in Paris: Busy Izzy, who was run by Philibert, and a group of young
ne’er-do-weels. I find it very difficult to realize that this jolly
slangy woman, with curly grey hair and a blue eye that could give a
broad wink on occasion, was identical with the figure of poetry Jane
dreamed about night after night in her little restless cot at the
foot of her Aunt Patty’s four-poster bed. It is disturbing to think
that even about this decided hard-edged vivacious woman there should
have been such a difference of opinion, such a contrast of received
impressions as to make one wonder whether she had any corporeal
existence at all. I think of that stern humorous spinster Patience
Forbes comforting the child who was always asking questions about her
mother; I think of her taking the aching young thing on her gaunt knees
in the old rocking chair with its knitted worsted cushion, and lulling
that troubled eager mind to rest with stories of her mother’s childhood.
I can see the grim face of Patience Forbes while she searches her
memory for pleasant things about her heartless prodigal sister. She
sits in a bay window looking out into the back garden where there is
a sleepy twittering of birds. The trams thunder past up Desmoine’s
Avenue. The milkman comes up the path; the white muslin curtains
billow into the peaceful room that smells of lavender and mint. There
is sunlight on the old mahogany. Jane’s great-grandmother, in an oval
frame, looks down insipidly, her eyes mildly shining between the low
bands of her parted hair. And Jane has her arms round her Aunt Patty,
and her face, so unlike the gentle portrait, is troubled and brooding,
a sullen ugly little face with something strange, half wild, that
recalls her father and frightens the good woman who holds her close and
goes on answering questions about her sister Isabel. And then I think
of Mrs. Carpenter not as Jane’s mother, but as the daughter of old Mrs.
Forbes of the Grey House, and I am again bewildered. Those people in
St. Mary’s Plains, Jane’s grandmother, her aunts and her uncle, were
people of sense and character and taste. Who that knew Izzy Carpenter
would have thought it? Who that knew Jane could deny it? I suspect Mrs.
Carpenter of having been ashamed of them. Jane’s loyalty saved her from
any such stupidity.
When I went to St. Mary’s Plains the other day, Jane showed me, on the
wall of her uncle’s study, an old print representing the first log
cabin of the French settler who had come there across the Canadian
border in 1780. In the picture a Red Indian carrying a tomahawk and
capped with feathers skulks behind the trees at the edge of the
clearing, and in the foreground a group of Noah’s Ark cattle are
guarded by a man with a gun. Under the print is written--“St. Marie
les Plaines,” and the signature “Gilbert de Chevigné.” It was a
Monsieur de Chevigné from Quebec, Jane told me, who built the Grey
House. The name had been corrupted to Cheney; the Cheneys were her
grandmother’s people. Many of the families in St. Mary’s Plains traced
a similar history. The town in growing had cherished the story of
its French foundation and its social element had grown to believe
that it had a special sympathy with our country. Its well-to-do
people were constantly coming from and going to France. With an
indifference bordering on contempt, and an ease that suggested the
consciousness of special claims and opportunities, they would cross
the really tremendous expanse of territory that lay between their
thresholds and the Atlantic sea-board, ignoring the existence of
Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia and New York, and set sail for
Cherbourg. It was considered a perfectly natural occurrence and one
scarcely worthy of self-congratulation for a girl from St. Mary’s
Plains to marry a foreigner of real or supposed distinction, but those
who neither married abroad nor at home, but were led astray by the
vulgar attraction of some rich man from the far west or east were
the subject of pitying criticism. Such had been the case with Jane’s
mother. Silas Carpenter had come bearing down on St. Mary’s Plains, a
wild man from the great west; like a bison or a moose breaking into a
mild and pleasant paddock. Isabel Forbes, headstrong, discontented,
covetous, had fallen to his savage charm, his millions and the peculiar
oppressive magnetism of his silence, that seemed filled with the
memories of unspeakable experiences. The first rush to the goldfields
of California loomed in the background of his untutored childhood.
Later he had gone to the Klondike. Gold--he had dug it out of the
earth with his own great hands. Then he had taught himself oddly from
books. A speculator, a gambler, he had a passion for music, and played
the flute. A strange mixture. To please Isabel’s family he gave up
poker, went to church, was married in a frock-coat. People said he had
Indian blood in his veins. It seems possible. He had the long head and
slanting profile and the mild voice characteristic of the race. Society
in St. Mary’s Plains was genuinely sorry for Isabel’s family when she
married him. But she went away to New York to live and was forgotten
until on Silas’ sensational death her departure for Paris revived
interest in her doings.
“The Grey House” as it was known in St. Mary’s Plains, had the
benevolent patriarchal air of a small provincial manor. Built sometime
in the seventies it had not had too many coats of paint during its
lifetime, and its calm exterior with the double row of comfortable
windows each flanked by a pair of shutters was weather-stained and worn
like the visage of some bland unconcerned person of distinction who
is not ashamed to look in his old age a little like a weather-beaten
peasant. It stood well back from the street in the centre of a wide
plot of ground not large enough to be called a park, though containing
a few nice trees. The lawn indeed merged in the most sociable way into
the grounds of other neighbouring houses and ran smoothly down in front
to the edge of the public side-walk where there was no wall or railing
of any kind. A scarcely noticeable sign beside the path that led from
the street to the front porch with its two wooden pillars said “Keep
off the grass.”
There were only two storeys to the Grey House and a garret with dormer
windows in the grey shingled roof, the rooms of the ground floor being
raised only a foot or two from the level of the street, so that Jane’s
grandmother, sitting in her armchair by the living-room window could
look up over the tops of her spectacles and see and recognize her
acquaintances who often even at that comfortable distance would bow or
lift their hats to the little old lady as they passed.
Every one in St. Mary’s Plains knew the Grey House. When one of the
Misses Forbes went shopping, she would say “Send it to the Grey
House, please,” and the young man in the dry goods’ store would
answer--“Certainly, Miss Forbes, it’ll be right along. Mrs. Forbes is
keeping well, I hope? Let me see, it’s ten years since I was in her
Sunday-school class.” And Miss Minnie--it was usually Minnie who did
the shopping--would smile kindly at the chatty young man who certainly
did not mean any harm.
The occupants of that house were people content to stay at home, who
did not always know what day of the month it was, and who found a
deep source of well-being in the realization that tomorrow would be
like today. I imagine those gentlewomen doing the same thing in the
same way year after year, wearing the same clothes made by the same
family dressmaker, and opposing to the disturbing menace of events the
quiet obstinacy of their contentment. I watch them at night go up the
stairs together at ten o’clock, kiss one another at the door of their
mother’s room and go down the dim corridor, Patty staying behind like
a sentinel under the gas-jet, her bony arm lifted, waiting to turn the
light still lower once they were safe behind their own closed doors.
Jane in her bed used to hear their voices saying, “Good-night, mother
dear, pleasant dreams. Good-night, Minnie. Good-night.” And if the man
of the house, Jane’s Uncle Bradford, were at his club playing whist,
Beth, from the rosy interior of her cretonne chamber would be sure to
call out--“I left the front door on the latch for Brad. I suppose it’s
all right.” And Patience would say--“Who would burgle this house?” And
Minnie would add--“I put his glass of milk in his room.” And then there
would be silence disturbed only by the sound of footsteps moving to and
fro behind closed doors. And Jane would wait drowsily for Aunt Patty to
come in and say “Good gracious, child, not asleep yet? It’s past ten
o’clock.”
To the Forbes family the doings of the outer world were a pleasant
distant spectacle that interested and amused but made them feel all the
happier to be where they were. When a letter arrived from Izzy bearing
its Paris postmark, they would read it together, become pleasantly
animated over the news and then settle down with relief at the thought
that they didn’t have to go over there and do all those things. The
letter would then be added to a package bound with an elastic band and
put away in the secretary until some one came to call and asked how
Isabel was getting on.
I seem to see them all, on these occasions, sitting there in their
habitual attitudes. I imagine the little grandmother, with the letter
open in her black silk lap, adjusting her spectacles on the slender
bridge of her arched nose, and Jane on a footstool beside her, waiting
to listen once more with absorbing interest to the extracts from her
mother’s letter that she already knew by heart, and the two or three
friends sitting round rather primly on the old mahogany chairs, and
Aunt Beth with her embroidery on the horsehair sofa, and Aunt Minnie
making the tea, and Aunt Patty teaching one of her birds to eat from
her lips at the window, and perhaps Uncle Bradford, who has come home
from his office, visible across the hall through the door in his
study with some weighty volume on his knees, and a good cigar between
his lips. I seem to hear the purring song of the tea kettle and the
pleasant sound of voices calling one another intimate names. I see
the faded carpet with its dimmed white pattern and the stiff green
brocaded curtains in their high gilt cornices, and the pleasant mixture
of heterogeneous objects selected for use and comfort. I have in my
nostrils the perfume of roses opening out in the warmth of the room,
and of the newly baked cakes made for tea by Aunt Minnie, and still
another finer perfume, the faint fresh fragrance of the spirit of that
little old lady who ruled the house in gentleness and was beloved in
the town. A humourous little old lady who was not afraid of death, and
believed in the clemency of a Divine Father. She liked Jane to read
aloud to her while she knitted,--Trollope, Charles Lamb, Robert Burns,
were her favourites, and she enjoyed a good tune on the piano, and
would beat time with her knitting needles when Beth played a waltz. But
on Sundays Beth played hymns and the servants came in after supper to
sing with the family “Rock of Ages,” “Jesus Lover of my Soul,” “Abide
with Me.” Jane liked those Sunday evenings. They made her feel so safe,
was the way she put it.
All the inmates of the Grey House were God-fearing but Minnie was
the most religious. She had a talent for cooking and a craving for
emotional religious experience. The kitchen of the Grey House was a
very pleasant place with a window that gave onto the back verandah, and
often on summer mornings Aunt Beth who was young and pretty, would take
her sewing out onto this back porch while Aunt Minnie in the kitchen
was making cakes, and they would talk through the open window with
Jane curled up in the hammock beside Beth’s work-table. Beth, would
call out in her very high small voice that expressed her plaintive
dependence and blissful confidence in the protected life she so utterly
loved--“Minnie, Minnie!” and the sound of the egg-beater in the kitchen
would cease, and Aunt Minnie would call through the open window in her
lower, deeper tone--
“Yes, what do you say?”
“I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Blatchford asked me if I’d ask you to
make six cakes for the Woman’s Exchange Fourth of July Sale.”