May 10, 1898.
Marise sat in her room, in front of her table, a copy-book opening blank
pages of coarse paper before her, a thin, mean-looking, pale-blue book
marked "Mots Usuels" on her lap. It was her own impression that she had
stopped for a minute's rest from study (although she had not yet begun),
and that she was thinking hard. But she was not thinking. She was
feeling.
She sat with her elbows on the table, her chin in her two hands, braced
so that she was quite motionless. Her eyes were fixed on the candle
flame, burning bright, fluttering and throbbing in the draughts which
came into the old room, around the decrepit window-casing, under the
door, through the worm-eaten base-board. There seemed to be a thousand
wandering puffs from every direction. What Marise called her "thoughts"
were burning bright, fluttering and throbbing like the tiny flame at
which she stared. They too were blown upon by a thousand breaths from
every direction. If they would only hold still for a moment, Marise
thought, and give out a steady light that she could see something by! If
she only had some shade to put around those flickering thoughts so they
wouldn't quiver so! It upset her, jerking around so, from one way of
seeing things to another. What she wanted to know was, how did things
_really_ look?
Of course it was worse here in France, where everything was so
uncertain, but it had started back home in America, it had always been
going on ever since she could remember. It had always made her feel
queer, as though she were holding an envelope up to a mirror to read the
address and saw it wrong end to, the way everything looked different at
Ashley the moment Maman came up to Vermont to take her home after
vacations with Cousin Hetty. Marise loved it so there at Ashley, the
dear darling old house in the mountains, with its nice atticky smell
that no other house in the world had! It just fitted all around you,
when you went in the door, the way Cousin Hetty's arms fitted around
you, when she took you up on her lap, and rocked and sang, "We hunted
and we hallooed."
At the memory, Marise's heart gave a great homesick throb. How far away
she was from Cousin Hetty and Ashley now! How long since she had sat on
anybody's lap.
And yet when Maman came to take you away, from the first minute she went
in and looked around her, you could see right through her eyes and what
you saw was something different. After all it was just a homely old
house with ugly crocheted tidies on the chairs, and splashers done in
outline stitch back of the wash-stands, and old red figured carpets on
the floors, the way _no_body did at home in Belton. And Cousin Hetty
talking so queer and Vermonty, her white hair smoothed down flat over
her ears instead of all roughed up, fluffy, over a rat the pretty way
other ladies did, with her funny clothes, her big cameo pin holding down
her little flat round collar, and all other ladies so stylish with high
collars under their ears. Yes, of course, the minute Maman looked at
her, you saw how ashamed you'd be of Cousin Hetty if she came to visit
your school at Belton. And yet there _was_ the other Cousin Hetty you'd
been having such a good time with. You just flickered away from Maman's
way of seeing it to yours and never could make up your mind which was
the real way.
Marise shook her head, drew a long breath and looked down again at her
spelling lesson. It was a list of the names of furniture and household
utensils, all very familiar to her from old Jeanne's thinking them so
terribly important. My! How much more Jeanne cared about her work than
any girl they'd ever had in Belton.
"_Lit ... sommier ... traversin ..._" all the names of the complicated
parts of a bed, a sacred French bed. As Marise looked at them on the
page she could see Jeanne in the mornings, taking poor stupid little
Isabelle's head right off because she didn't make the bed up smoothly
enough; and all the time it was about a million times smoother than any
bed ever was in America! Marise didn't believe the President of the
United States had his bed-clothes pulled so tight and smooth. And she
wondered if Jeanne worked in the White House, if she would let even the
President's little girl sit down on the bed in the daytime. How
_particular_ they were about things in France! About everything. When
you bought anything in a store how they did drive you wild with their
slowness in getting it put up in the package just _so_, as if it
mattered, when you were going to take it out of the package three
minutes later, as soon as you got home. And at school how they did fuss
about neatness! The lessons were easy enough to learn. Marise never had
any trouble with lessons, but how could anybody ever do things as neatly
as they wanted you to. And how the teacher jumped on you if you didn't,
ever so much worse than if you got the answer to an arithmetic problem
wrong. Mercy! How she did scold! There wasn't anybody in America knew
_how_ to scold like that even if they wanted to, and they didn't. It had
scared Marise at first, and made her feel like crying, and she never had
got entirely used to it although she saw how all the other girls did,
just took it and didn't care and did whatever they liked behind her
back.
Marise couldn't get used to Jeanne that way either, to her yelling so
when she scolded. Marise hated to have people get mad and excited. And
how Jeanne did carry on about the house being neat, the part that is,
where company could come; (under her kitchen sink it smelled awfully and
was full of greasy rags) and yet she'd shine up the salon floor over and
over when it was already shiny, and never think of those rags. The least
little bit of clutter left around in the dining-room, or even your own
room, and how she would scold! And yet she was so awfully good to you,
and was always giving you big, smacking kisses, and hugging you, and she
always saved over the best things to eat when Maman had a lunch party,
and you were at school. Even when Maman had said you couldn't have any
of something Jeanne always brought it to your room, under her apron,
after you'd gone to bed. It wasn't very nice to do things behind Maman's
back, but everybody seemed to be doing things behind everybody else's
back. Maman did behind Father's, lots of times, and it was perfectly
understood between them that Marise was never to tell Father on her. And
it would be telling on Jeanne if you told Mother. And anyhow Marise
didn't see Maman so very much any more, to tell her things; it was
mostly Jeanne who did things for her.
Marise laid down her book again, lost in one of her recurrent attacks of
amazement at there being so many different Jeannes inside that one
leathery skin. There was the Jeanne who came every morning to take
orders, and folded her hands on her apron, and sort of stooped herself
over and said, "Oui, Madame," to everything Maman said. You'd think she
was scared to death of Maman, and yet she went away to the kitchen on
the other side of the landing and became another Jeanne who never paid
the least attention to what Maman had said, but ran the house just the
way she thought it ought to be.
There were two Jeannes right there, and there was another one, the
outdoor Jeanne, who took her to school every morning--how funny that in
France a great girl of eleven had to have somebody tagging along every
time she stepped outside the house! This was the most interesting Jeanne
of all. She told stories every single minute. Lots of them were about
when she had been a little girl--gracious! think of Jeanne ever having
been a little girl! That was ever so long ago, before the Emperor and
the Empress had made Biarritz the fashion. Jeanne said those were the
good days, when the Basques had their country to themselves, and you
never saw a hat on any woman's head; they all wore the black kerchief
for everyday and mantillas on Sunday for Mass, and lived like
Christians. Jeanne could remember when Biarritz was just a little
fishing village, a decent place, and _now_ look at it! She could
remember just as well when Napoleon and his Spanish wife first began to
come down there so the Empress could get as near to Spain as possible.
Many and many's the time Jeanne had seen them in their springy
barouche, driving right along this very street, he with his eyes as dead
as a three-days-caught fish's, and she as handsome as any Basque girl!
They weren't all stories of Jeanne when she was a little girl. Lots of
them were of what had happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago around
here. There were ever so many stories of witches and ghosts and
sorcerers. There were plenty of those still in the Basque country. There
was a sorcerer living in that little tumble-down house near the river on
the road to St. Barthelemy. Why, Jeanne's own mother, years ago, one day
looked up from her spinning and saw a monstrous pig, big and black. She
jumped up and ran out to try to catch it. Her grandmother went out too,
and there were a lot of the neighbors who were trying to drive the pig
away. But it didn't pay a bit of attention, butted at them so fierce
when they came near they were afraid, for he was as tall as a calf, and
whoever saw a pig as big as that? And then the grandmother made the sign
of the cross, Spanish fashion ... and like snapping your fingers, didn't
the pig change, right before their eyes, into a little wee woman they'd
never seen, and she went up in the air as thin and light as a loose
spider's thread, and drifted away and there was nothing there.
The little American girl knew enough to know that this story couldn't be
true, of course. And yet Jeanne's mother and all those people had seen
it. They saw a pig and it turned into a wee witch woman.
Marise stopped thinking about that, leaned forward and began kneading
the softened tallow at the upper end of the candle. Father could say all
he liked about candles being a bother, they were lots of fun. This part
up next the flame got just right so you could poke it and it stayed put,
any way you wanted it. And it was fun to lean the candle over and drop
the melted tallow on your hands in little drops that got hard and you
could peel them off.
As she poked at it, a dozen pictures flickered through her mind; the
bridge over the Adour with the river flowing yellow and strong under
it, and the bright painted vessels loading and unloading; the Sister who
opened the door at school, always so calm and silent; the playground at
school with the black-aproned girls, their faces twisted up with running
and screaming and catching each other; and the same girls at their
desks, with their faces all smoothed and empty, looking up at
Mademoiselle as though they had never thought of doing anything she told
them not to; the school-room itself, battered and gray with age, the old
black desks with the slant lids that lifted up; Reverend Mother stopping
in to hear a lesson, with her old, old quiet face; Maman so pretty and
stylish, looking so sweet when she made mistakes in French that nobody
minded, or thought of laughing at her.
Marise tipped the candle over carefully and let some melted tallow fall
on the back of her hand. As she set it back and waited for the tallow to
harden, she was thinking how very different from home Bayonne was; the
Basque fish-women, with the shiny fish in the round flat baskets on
their heads; the white oxen with the sheep-skin on their horns, and
their red-striped white canvas covering, pulling those two-wheeled
carts; everybody streaking it along in canvas sandals and berets,
talking French and Basque and Spanish and never a word of English. And
yet, Marise reflected as she slowly peeled off the hardened tallow
drops, none of that was the _real_ difference. And there was a real
difference. The real difference was something inside you. You felt
different, as if you'd looked in the glass and seen somebody not quite
you. It was....
Somebody was walking slowly down the brick-floored hall to her room. It
was Father's heavy step. That was nice! She hadn't thought she would see
either Father or Maman, because there had been company to dinner again.
She gathered the tallow drops together and dropped them in the base of
the brass candle-stick. Then she remembered that Jeanne would scold if
she did that. These candle-sticks like everything else in the house had
to be just _so_, or everybody caught it. She swept them out again with
her fingers, and stood holding them in her hand, looking around her for
some place to put them. The waste-paper basket was too open, they would
fall right through on the floor, and what a fuss there would be over
that! Oh, there was the fireplace, if you put things way back of the
sticks, Jeanne didn't see them.
She was just straightening up from reaching back of the wood, when
Father came in. He said, "Hello, kid," and she answered, "Hello, Poppa."
They did this for a kind of a joke, to be extra American when Maman
couldn't hear them.
Father sat down on the edge of the bed, making a big dent in the
fluffed-up crimson, eider-down quilt, which Jeanne rounded so carefully
each morning, and which she never let anybody disturb. Not, of course,
that Jeanne would dare to say anything to Father, le patron. She would
only grumble in Basque, under her breath, and Marise would feel her
opinion of Americans going down even lower than it was. Marise could
always feel everybody's opinions as they went up and down. And how she
did hate to feel them going down, anybody's about anything! She always
tried to fix it so they would go up. She now planned to fluff the
edredon to a puff again, after Father had gone back. She didn't say
anything about it to Father. You never did, about that sort of thing,
even Maman didn't, although it made her awfully provoked not to have
Father care, and she always said a lot afterwards. Marise didn't even
say anything to him about the white down that would be sure to work
through the cover of the edredon and get on his clothes. Father wouldn't
care if it did. There were such lots of things Father didn't care about.
But Maman would. She must remember to brush him off before he went to
the salon.
"Having a good time?" asked Father slowly, the way he did, that let you
see how he knew perfectly well you weren't.
"Not so very," she answered.
"Neither am I," he returned, "though you needn't mention it to Momma."
There were always a great many things that were not to be mentioned to
Maman, and a lot of quite other things that were not to be mentioned to
Father, and Isabelle told her things she didn't want Jeanne to know, and
_everything_ that Jeanne said was not to be mentioned either to Father
or Maman. Marise, coming back from school, used to feel when she opened
the door of the apartment, as though she were walking into cobwebs
spread around in the dark, and you mustn't on any account brush into any
one of them.
Father now went on, "What are you doing with yourself?"
Marise looked down at the cahier, its pages as blank as when she had sat
down. Her father looked with her. "That's lovely paper, I must say," he
commented, always with his way of showing that he meant just the
opposite. "Are you supposed to write on it in ink?"
"Oh, yes," cried Marise, flashing up to seize the chance of sympathy for
one of her grievances, "they _never_ let you use lead-pencils because in
lead-pencil there's a chance to rub out your mistakes. You're not
supposed to _make_ any mistakes."
"Doesn't your pen get stuck in it--it must be like writing on
mosquito-netting," said Father.
"Yes, it does," complained Marise, "and you spatter the ink all over and
break off the tips of the pen, and everything. And the teachers just
kill you if it's not perfectly neat."
Father took up the cahier and looked at the paper hard, scratching it a
little with his finger-nail. "Well, there's culture in the air, anyhow,"
he said without smiling, although Marise knew he was quoting Maman. He
looked around the room now without saying anything more. Marise followed
his eyes and saw with him the dingy, high-ceilinged room, dimly lighted
by the one weak candle-flame, the heavy, figured tapestry curtains drawn
over the window, the draught, although the window was closed, making
them suck in and out; the ugly, ugly wall-paper, dark and scriggly; the
stuffed red chair, the only comfortable one, where Jeanne would never
let her curl up with her feet under her, because she said the place for
shoes was on the floor; the marble-topped wash-stand with its little
chipped white earthen-ware basin and pitcher like the old things at
Cousin Hetty's; the clock on the chimney-piece that looked as though it
were carved out of greasy, dark-green soap with a greasy dark-green man
in a Roman toga on top of it; the shabby, dingy, red-and-white checked
curtains hanging over the hooks where Marise hung up her dresses, the
tall dark armoire whose slightly greenish mirror reflected all these
things as if you were looking at them through water; and finally over
the bed, the big, shiny lithograph of Our Lady of Lourdes in her bright
blue cloak, standing in front of her grotto.
"Well, maybe it's in the _air_," said Father. He spoke in his usual
tired, slow voice, sagging down on the bed the way he always sat.
But then he surprised Marise very much and said something she never
forgot. It gave her such a jump of astonishment to have Father say
something as though he really meant it, that she sat up straight at his
first words, staring at him. He said in a strong voice, "But look here,
Molly, there _is_ something in the air here, by heck, and I wish you'd
get it. I mean the way every one of them in this country keeps right
after what he's doing, till he's got it just right. That's the way to
do, and we're all off the track with our 'that'll do,' the way we say
back in America. It's the only thing in their whole darned country _I_
can see, that don't make you sick. Now, look here, kid, you go after it
and get it. Start right in now. Learn how to make that infernal
note-book perfectly all right in spite of the bad paper. I wish to the
Lord _I_ had been taught that."
And then, while Marise was still staring, the words echoing loudly in
her ears because of the strangeness of hearing them from Father, he went
on in his usual voice, "It might be _something_ to hold on to, and I
don't see much else."
Marise had never before known Father in any way to try to "bring her
up!" He made Maman so much provoked because he always said that he
didn't know, any more than Marise, how she ought to be brought up, and
he didn't see that it made so much difference what you did, everything
turned out about the same in the long run. Now her little room seemed
full of the oddness of his thinking that something did matter, of his
telling her so hard that he wished she'd do something. In the loud
silence which followed, she could hear his voice and what it said,
sinking deeper and deeper into her mind.
After a while Father yawned very wide and rubbed his hair forward and
back so that it was all rumpled up the way Maman didn't like to see it.
"What did you say you were doing?" he asked again.
"I'm writing down my lecon d'orthographe," said Marise.
"Your _what_!" said Father.
"My spelling lesson," Marise corrected herself with a jerk. She knew how
Father hated to have people mix up their languages.
"Well, I don't know that you're any worse off at that than we are in the
sitting-room," said Father. He always called the _salon_ the
sitting-room. He added, glancing at her blank note-book, "You haven't
got very far, I see." He paused, and smiled a little with one corner of
his mouth, "But then neither have we in the sitting-room."
It came into Marise's mind that perhaps Father, seeing he was so
specially serious to-night, might tell her some way to keep her thoughts
from jiggling around so, from one way of feeling to another, according
to what other people thought of things, instead of knowing what she
thought of things. But she had no chance to ask him, for when she began,
"Well, I sort of forgot about my spelling. I got to thinking," Father
broke in, as he got up heavily to go, "I wouldn't advise you to do
_that_, either. It never gets anybody anywhere."
Marise forgot till after he had got clear back to the salon that she had
not brushed off the down from the edredon. Maman wouldn't like that a
bit, to have him look untidy when company was there! Oh, dear!
But she forgot this as she thought again about the queerness of Father's
seeming to care so much about her doing one thing rather than another.
It was still there, this wonder at him, when she turned to her book
finally to study that spelling lesson. "Lit ... sommier ...
traversin...." She wrote the words down on the coarse paper, with
infinite care, drawing on some deep, unfamiliar store of patience when
the pen sputtered and caught its point and stuck. She was going to try
to do as Father said. She would take as much trouble with writing those
words about a bed, as old Jeanne took in making the bed every morning;
and that was more trouble than anybody in America ever took about
anything.
Her dark, shining hair fell forward about her cheeks as she leaned over
the copy-book, writing slowly, chewing her tongue, frowning in her
concentration on the formation of those letters.
She forgot all about her uncertainties as to how things really were; she
forgot her loneliness. All her flickering thoughts steadied themselves
and grew quiet as she worked. A stillness came over her. She felt
happier than she had since they came to France to live.
Later, ever so much later, after she had undressed, washed in the cold
water in the little earthen-ware basin, gone to bed and to sleep, the
night-time Jeanne tip-toed in to see that she was all right. This Jeanne
was very different from all the others, because she was so quiet. Marise
half-waked up when she felt the energetic French kiss on her cheek
(Jeanne always kissed you so hard), and as she dozed off again, she
heard Jeanne saying a prayer over her, half in Basque and half in Latin.
Marise couldn't understand either Latin or Basque, but she understood
the intention of that nightly prayer at her bed, and she caught sleepily
at old Jeanne to return her kiss. It wasn't as good as Cousin Hetty's
taking you on her lap and putting her arms around you, but it was enough
sight better than nothing. Also she heard Jeanne carefully close the
window. Jeanne always did this every night, although Maman said to leave
it open. Jeanne was the last one in there always so she had it her way.
She didn't think it healthy to let night air into rooms. Marise was too
sleepy to get up and open it again. Anyhow Jeanne often told her about
the evil spirits, that come in through open bedroom windows, and sit on
your chest and suck your life into their black bodies, as you sleep.
Marise did not believe this, in the least, of course, and yet....