March, 1902.
Flora Allen found she was not following the words on the page, and let
the book slowly fall shut. As it lay there among her hair-brushes and
cold-cream pots, she looked at it with a listless distaste. How sick she
was of reading instructive books! She never wanted to see another! She
turned sideways in her chair with the gesture of a person about to stand
up, but the motive power was not enough, and she continued to sit, one
arm hanging over the back of her chair. Why get up? Why do anything more
than anything else?
How horribly lonely she was! How horribly empty her room was!
The emptiness echoed in her ears. It was an echo she often heard. She
always heard it more or less. She told herself that it was like the
emptiness of a long stone corridor along which she seemed to be always
hurrying, hoping to come to a door that would let her out into life--the
warm, quivering life that other people--women in books for
instance--seemed to have.
Now she was tired. She had almost worn herself out in the long flight
down the empty passage-way that led from birth to death. She began
dreadfully to fear that she would never find a door. Wherever she
thought she saw one ajar, it was slammed in her face.
Looking back, how she envied her earlier rebellious unhappy self, bright
with the animation of her naive hatred for Belton and America; quivering
with her aspiring cry of "Europe" and "culture!" She had been married
almost sixteen years--was it possible! A life-time! A life-time filled
with nothing. A life-time spent between Belton and Bayonne! Oh, it
wasn't fair! She had never had a chance--never! And soon it would be too
late for her chance!
How hideously fate always discriminated against her. She was always
thrown in the dreariest places with the dreariest dead-and-alive people,
flat and insipid and tiresome.
Other women encountered big and moving things in their lives, knew
adventure and excitement, had something to look forward to, something to
look back on. But she had nothing but stagnation. And nobody to care
_what_ she had, because they all assumed that if sawdust and chips were
good enough for them, that diet ought to be good enough for any one.
The days, that might be so precious, slid by, one like another, and
there were not so very many days left to her, when vivid personal life
might be possible. Where was she to find it, where, where? She was so
_tired_ of stagnation.
She was reduced to envying the exciting life of the women of the
demi-monde of whom she was aware here as never before in her life, of
whom everybody was conscious. It was indeed precisely to avoid
resembling their bright colors and gaiety that all the appallingly
respectable women wore such ill-fitting dark clothes and heavy shoes on
the street, never broke their solemn silence in a public place, and
never laughed freely anywhere except safely behind walls. The women they
were so determined not to resemble seemed from a distance to Flora Allen
the only people in France who openly enjoyed life as she thought people
in Europe did, the only ones who bore the slightest relationship to the
vivacious, animated picture of European existence as she had imagined it
in Belton. Except, of course, such dusty, vulgar excursion-train crowds
of common people as you saw at Lourdes. Flora hated vulgar people.
And yet--ugh!--life couldn't be all gaiety and brightness for the women
of the "half-world." That evening last year, when she had tried to
lighten the deadly dullness by a little, playful flirtation with M.
Fortier, such as any American would have answered by half-sentimental
banter--she had never forgotten how frightened she had been by his
instant misunderstanding--the horrible spring he had made at her in the
dusk of the carriage; his brutal hands on her shoulders, his flabby, old
face suddenly inflamed; the terrifying weight of his obese body against
her hands as she pushed him furiously away! For months afterwards she
had been afraid to smile at any man, as she said "good-evening"; and she
read in their eyes, in all their eyes, what they would think of her if
she but looked squarely and frankly at them.
But wasn't there _ever_ to be anything for her, between the deadly flat
propriety of things like those awful progressive-euchre parties in
Belton and _that_ sort of thing?
* * * * *
Isabelle came into the room now, floor-brush and cleaning cloths in
hand. She was surprised to find her mistress still before her
dressing-table at half-past ten in the morning. To herself she made the
comment, not by any means for the first time, "Well, the good God
certainly never created a lazier good-for-nothing." Aloud she said
respectfully, "I beg Madame's pardon for not knocking. I thought the
room was empty. Do I disturb Madame by coming to clean?"
Madame got up hastily, murmured a "no, oh no," and disappeared down the
hall. Isabelle opened the windows, fell on her knees and set to work
with energy, suppressing (lest her mistress still be within earshot) the
lively dance-air which came to her lips, as she rattled the brush
against the furniture and base-boards. She would be nineteen at her next
birthday. What a lovely spring day, how sweet the air was, Jeanne had
promised to let her walk out beyond the city-walls next Sunday afternoon
with Pierre, and she had a new pair of shoes, real leather shoes, to
show off there. Perhaps Pierre would take her to a confiserie and buy
her some candied chestnuts! Her pulse beat strong and full, the
dance-tune jigged merrily inside her head, she reached far under the bed
with her brush, and enjoyed so heartily the elastic stretch and recoil
of the muscles in her stout shoulders, that she reached again and again,
although there was no need for it. "Jig! Jig! Pr-r-rt!" went the dance
tune in her head ... new shoes ... sunshine ... candied chestnuts ...
Pierre ... kisses.
Her mistress, detesting the sight of Isabelle's broad, vacuous face had
walked aimlessly away, anywhere to escape the slatternly flap of her
heelless sandals, and the knock of her brush as she went through the
never-varying routine of the morning cleaning. Around and around, every
slow dawn brought exactly the same sequence of tiresome, insignificant
events. Only stolid, vegetable natures like Isabelle's could endure it.
Flora's small, thin, white hands fluttered piteously out into the air as
though trying physically to lay hold on something else. There _must_ be
something else. The tears stood for a moment in her blue eyes, not so
blue now as they had been--oh, she knew how they were fading!
She went through the corridor into the salon, and pulling the curtains
aside, stepped into the alcove where her writing desk stood. But she had
no intention of writing a letter. To whom? If she wrote what she really
felt, there was nobody to understand her. She did not now, as had been
her habit in the first days, go to the window and amuse an idle hour by
looking down on the crowd below, the ox-drivers, the fish-women, the
soldiers, the Spanish peddlers, all the bright-colored, foreign throng
that had seemed to her like a page out of a book. Not for nothing had
she lived four years in Bayonne! That first simple candor of hers was
darkly dyed with new knowledge. She knew now that people talked about a
woman still young enough to be desirable, who showed herself at an open
window. She knew they talked, and she knew what they said. That hearsay
knowledge had been sharpened by her gradual perception of the way
certain men among the passers-by had looked up at her; and it had been
driven deeply home one day, by one of those men. As she leaned out, her
fair hair bright in the sun, a passer-by, a well-dressed man with a
walking-stick in his hand, had stared hard at her, caught her eye,
hesitated and looked again. Flora had not avoided his eye. Why should
she? It was early in her life in the half-Spanish town. She did not fear
men's eyes. When he saw this he turned and mounted the stairs to ring at
the bell. Isabelle had let him in, not knowing him from any other
caller. He stepped quietly to the salon, where the lady of the house,
not dreaming that any one had entered, still stood before the window.
When she turned in answer to a discreet little cough on his part, she
had seen him standing there, hat in hand, waiting, with a singular
little smile on his lips, a smile she never forgot.
Oh, he had been perfectly polite, indeed quite desolated at having made
a mistake, and had speedily bowed himself out of the place, apologizing
gracefully to the moment of door-closing. But that very day, Flora Allen
had the swathing lace-curtains put back in their original position,
covering every inch of the glass; and when dusk fell, she was always the
first to think of drawing the heavy damask curtains over them, so that
there seemed to be no windows at all in the room.
That seemed to her to express her life--no windows except these opening
on what was physically sickening and coarse; no doors save those leading
back and forth between the deadly familiarity of the imprisoning rooms.
What was it she had not done which other women did to let them into the
center of life, while she was exiled to the outer fringes? How was it
that while other women's arms seemed to close about warm, living
substances, hers grasped at shadows. Or did other women only pretend to
be satisfied, for fear of facing the emptiness which echoed in her ears
more and more loudly?
Did they really and honestly find the absorbing joy in their children,
which was the sentimental tradition? And if they did, how did they
manage it? She loved Marise, nobody had a nicer little girl, nor a
prettier. But the plain facts were that a little girl and a grown woman
were very different beings, with very different needs and interests.
There was nothing she would not do for Marise, she often told herself,
if Marise needed it. But Marise apparently did not need a single thing
her mother could do for her, any more than any healthy little girl
absorbed in her school and play. There was no sense in doing
uninteresting things for people when they were just as well off without
them. She often looked at Marise across the dinner-table, fresh and
well-groomed by Jeanne's competent hands, and wondered with a sincere
bewilderment how any one could expect her to make an occupation out of
loving a very busy, self-centered, much-occupied little girl, who left
the house before her mother was out of bed, was gone all day, spent
most of her few free hours with her music teacher, and in the nature of
things went to bed just at the beginning of the evening.
From time to time, when they had first come to Bayonne, she had made
various attempts to connect her life with Marise's, annoyed by the
affection Marise showed to Jeanne and to that singularly unattractive
Mlle. Hasparren. Breaking through the tyrannical regularity of the
child's hard-working life, she had carried her off, now for a day on the
beach at Guethary, now for a day in the shops at Biarritz, once for a
week-end at Saint Sauveur. But she had come home after such attempts,
mortally weary and depressed. What was the use of trying to pretend that
the things which delighted and amused a child were not inconceivably
tiresome to a grown-up? Those endless hours while she sat in the sun on
the sand (which got into her Shoes), and watched Marise inanely prance
in the surf, or dig for clams which she did not care to keep after she
had caught them! How could she see anything but very visible
repulsiveness and dirt, and quite probably diseases in the lank stray
dogs and cats which always turned up when Marise went along a street,
and which Marise always felt an inexplicable and perverse desire to
fondle? And those cheap bazaars, where Marise loved to linger, gazing
with dazzled eyes at the trumpery, papier-mache gimcracks and
playthings...! Of course, as Marise had grown less childish, walks had
been free of hoop-rolling with its inevitable encounters with irascible
old gentlemen's legs, but she had developed other tastes quite as
bothersome. Flora's pretty, slender feet ached with fatigue at the
recollection of the long hours she had stood beside Marise, who, sucking
hard on a barley-sugar stick, and hooking her elbows over the parapet of
the bridge over the Adour, gazed endlessly down on dirty, smelly ships
being unloaded by dirty, smelly workmen.
Flora had come to the conviction that the European custom of sending a
servant around with children was based on a realistic recognition of
facts. It was better for both sides; for she knew that, although she
tried to be patient, Marise felt her lack in interest in chatter about
whether the stone would hit the tree _this_ time, or how long Marise
could walk over flagged sidewalks without once stepping on a crack. Good
Heavens! What difference did it make! It was inevitable that a servant's
vacant mind should be naturally more nearly on the childish level.
And yet, once in a while, when Marise came into the salon to kiss her
mother good-night, Flora's arms caught her fast, wistfully, feeling an
aggrieved, helpless resentment at somehow being cheated out of what
seemed to mean so much more to other mothers. Marise always felt
instantly this special mood in her mother and always flashed up in an
ardent return, straining her mother to her in a great silent hug. It was
a good moment for them both, but so quickly gone.
She looked now at her watch and remembered an engagement at her
dressmaker's to try on a new house-dress. It suddenly made her sick to
think of bothering with it. What was the use of a new house-dress? Who
would see it except Horace, who never saw anything, or perhaps some one
like Madame Fortier or Madame Garnier, who would think it unbecoming for
a married woman to wear pretty, frilly things, or to think of anything
but how to shove their husbands and sons and daughters ruthlessly ahead
of other women's. Heavens above! How tiresome they were about their
families! They never saw another thing in the world! Except scandalous
suppositions about other people's actions.
She discovered that she did not feel at all well, not nearly well enough
to go to have the dress tried on. She was always tired. The enervating
climate certainly did not agree with her. The doctor paid no real
attention to her case, and the sulphur baths at Saint Sauveur had done
her no good, for all they cost so much. How she had hated the dreary
little village, full of sick women, perched on the narrow ledge, from
which the sanitarium and the bathing establishment looked dizzily down
into the frightful gorge where the gave of Gavarnie boiled among its
rocks. It had given her materials for many a nightmare, that long black
cleft in the earth, so full of the wild haste of the waters that the ear
was never for an instant, asleep or awake, freed from their plunging
roar. It had given her nightmare; and the sulphur baths had not helped
her worn feeling of prostrated weakness in the least. And now she feared
there was something else--her heart was certainly not quite normal.
There were times as now (she put her fingers to her wrist) when sitting
perfectly still, she felt her pulse drop almost to nothing. A muffled,
listless beat, like a clock that is running down....
"Running down?"--the chance phrase caught her attention. Was she running
down to middle-age, without once having...? She started up, stung by the
thought, frightened, angry--a way out into life--a way to escape from
the stagnant pools where Fate always cast her--a way to find some
vibrant stirring aim--if it were only for an hour--something to care
about intensely! Other people did--women in books.
* * * * *
Jeanne, passing the door on her way out saw her mistress standing in the
alcove, and paused to ask a question. "... if Madame wished Mademoiselle
Marise to wear a white ribbon in her hair that afternoon? Because if so,
a fresh one was needed." Her old voice thrilled as she pronounced the
child's name.
Madame brought her thoughts back from their wanderings with an effort.
"A white ribbon?" she said vaguely.
Jeanne reminded her, "The annual competition for the prize in music at
Mademoiselle's school. The young ladies are to dress in white." Madame
remembered, "Oh, yes, yes, yes." A pause, while she seemed to begin to
drift away again, and then, with a perception that Jeanne still stood
before her, waiting, "Why, yes, of course, buy a white ribbon if she
needs it."
Jeanne took her tall, black-clad body off into the hall and thence into
the street, her mistress instantly gone from her mind. She had no time
or strength that momentous day for anything beyond her passionate
absorption in her dear girl's ordeal, Marise's first step into the
battle of life. Her little Marise almost a young lady, her fifteenth
birthday so near, contending with rival young ladies! Jeanne ground her
strong yellow teeth and prayed furiously that the other competitors
might all have cramps in their fingers, that a fog might come before
their eyes, that they might have blinding headaches or at least that
their petticoats might hang below their skirts and disgrace them as they
walked across on the platform.
She went to the best shop in town for the ribbon, the only detail
lacking in the spotless costume which had been ready for days, pressed
by Isabelle and pressed over again by herself. Jeanne had all the
possible shades brought down; dead white--ivory white--pearl
white--cream, she took them to the door to see how they looked in full
daylight, and withdrawing herself by a swoop of her will power, from the
clattering confusion of the street, she held up the rolls of ribbon one
by one, imagining, as though Marise were there before her, each one
against the gleaming dark head. Not the dead white--no, that looked like
nun's stuff, and there was nothing of the nun in Marise, thank God! Not
the pearl white--that bluish tinge--oh, no! that was only fit for a
corpse--The cream? No, the white organdie of the dress would make it
look dirty. The ivory--yes, the ivory.
She carried the others back and looked hard at the ivory on both sides,
making a deft fold or two with her stiff old fingers, to see how it
would tie into a bow. She held it out at arm's length, her
tightly-coifed, gargoyle-head on one side. She drew a long breath,
having been so absorbed in the ribbon that she had forgotten to breathe
for some time. "Well, give me a metre and a half," she said finally to
the clerk, adding scornfully, "if that's the best you have!"
Cloth-of-gold embroidered with pearls would not have satisfied her.
As she came out, she turned her head sideways to estimate the height of
the sun, having a low opinion of the accuracy of clocks, and was
startled to find it so late. If she were to get across to the river, to
the Holy Ghost Church, to set a candle burning before Our Lady for
Marise's success, she would need to hurry, and of late Jeanne had found
hurrying not so easy a process as it had been. If Marise was older, so
was she, seventy-six her last birthday. It was harder for her to stretch
her long legs to the old stride. Something happened to her breathing,
all the blood seemed to go to her head and a blackness came before her
eyes, so that once or twice she had been obliged like any weakling
Parisian to lean against a wall or table till the roaring in her ears
stopped and the dull heavy fullness in her head subsided. But Jeanne
despised people who gave way to little notions like that, and had no
intention of putting on any such airs. Certainly not now, when Marise's
welfare was at stake.
Of course she must make her prayer for her darling's success, and set a
candle burning before Our Lady. The easy way to do this was to step up
the street to the Cathedral but Jeanne did not care for the Cathedral,
where all the heretic tourists from Biarritz went to stare, and which
was as big and bare as the waiting-room of a railway station. How could
Our Lady notice one little candle or one old woman there! No, Jeanne was
set on lighting her candle in her own half-ruined, dark Church of the
Holy Ghost, where the Basques go on pilgrimages to pray before the holy
"Flight into Egypt." Our Lady of the Saint-Esprit had already performed
many miracles for good Basques.... Oh, for a miracle now!
She began to pray as swiftly and violently as she walked, "Blessed
Mother of God, be with her this afternoon! Holy Infant Jesus! Help her!
Blessed little Saint Theresa, help my darling!"
She cast herself so vehemently into her supplications that she felt her
heart blazing like a torch. She soared high out of her body. She was
swinging along through space among the clouds, wrestling with the
Saints, clinging to their knees, dominating them by the fury of her
prayers.... No, they would not _dare_ refuse her.... She would not give
them an instant's peace...!
"Blessed St. Cecilia, stand at her side! Oh, most Holy Mother of God,
guide her fingers...!"
* * * * *
"... a way out into life? How could she find it? Other people did ...
women in books...." Flora Allen's eyes moving slowly about the room fell
on a photograph of the South Portal of the Bayonne Cathedral. It was
framed in dark wood with a little Gothic arch at the top. It made her
sick to look at it. How much trouble she had taken to get that
photograph and to find the frame that would suit it. How eagerly she had
hung it on the wall; and then had turned round to find it had made no
difference in her life, or in any one's life. She looked at it now, her
pretty lips set bitterly. What an idiot she had been! What difference
_could_ it have made? What had she ever thought it could do for her, she
and the other women of Belton, everlastingly studying something or
other, going after culture with such eagerness, bringing it home,
hanging it on the wall, and turning round to find it had changed
nothing, nothing. How silly they were! Nobody over here cared anything
for "culture" or art, or sculptures--except badly-dressed, queer people
with socialistic ideas, like Marise's music-teacher.
And they were right not to care. What was there in it for any one? What
could she ever have thought there was? What earthly difference did the
sculptures on the South Portal make to her, Flora Allen, driven along
through life, without getting out of it a single one of the things women
really wanted? What good did it do any one to go and gape at the
paintings in the Museum, most of them ugly, and all of them as dead as
dead? When what you wanted was to be alive! To have gaiety and sparkle
and cheerfulness in your life, not to vegetate and mold like the
primitive lower forms of life around you, like Isabelle; not to dry and
harden and become a mere block of wood like old Jeanne!
There was nothing unreasonable in not wanting to shrivel and stagnate.
It was _right_ to want to have an ardent life, full and deep, that
carried you out of yourself.
But in her life, as by a fatality, there were never any occasions for
emotion, for fresh, living sensations. Nothing ever happened to her that
_could_ stir her to anything but petulance and boredom--nothing!
nothing! If anything seemed to promise to--why, Fate always cut it
short. Those wonderful afternoons when Sister Ste. Lucie had taken her
to the convent to talk to Father Elie! From the first of her Bayonne
life she had felt it very romantic to know real Catholics, who used
holy-water and believed in saints, and she had loved to go round with
Sister Ste. Lucie in her long black gown and frilled white coif, just
like a picture out of a book. But this was different. When the dark,
gaunt, hollow-eyed, old missionary-priest had given her one somber look
and made the sign of the cross over her, she had felt her heart begin to
beat faster. And as he talked to her afterwards, in the bare,
white-washed parlor of the convent, with the light filtering in through
the closed shutters, he had made her tremble with excitement, as he
himself had trembled throughout all his thin powerful old body. His
deep-set eyes had burned into her, as he talked, his emaciated fingers,
scorched brown by tropical suns, shook as he touched the Crucifix. How
he had yearned over her as he told her that, never, never would she know
what it really was to live, till she cast out her stubborn unbelief and
threw herself into the living arms of her true Mother, the Church of
God. Flora had not known that she had any belief in particular to cast
out ... she had never thought anything special about religion at all,
one way or the other. She only wanted him to go on making her tremble
and feel half-faint, while Sister Ste. Lucie clasped her rosary beads
and prayed silently, the tears on her cheeks! And then the very next day
the Father Superior of his Order had sent him off to Africa. Would he
ever come back?
Perhaps she _could_ become a Catholic. Why not? If it moved you like
this just to be in contact with the Church--what must it bring you to be
intimately of it? She remembered that in a book Sister Ste. Lucie had
given her, stories were told of women who lost consciousness from sheer
emotion, when they felt the consecrated wafer of Communion on their
tongues; others who were caught up among the saints for hours, hearing
heavenly music and when they came to themselves, the room was all
scented richly with invisible roses....
Also, without a word spoken she thought she had understood that the
Marquise de Charmieres and all that old aristocratic set would not be so
stand-offish if she were converted.
But as this last idea slid into her mind from behind something else,
there came with it as frighteningly as if she had seen the walls of her
stone corridor closing in on her, a doubt that cast a stale sallow
reflection on all her thoughts;--suppose she were really taken up by the
Marquise and all the old aristocratic set, _would things be any
different then_? Mightn't that, too, be just something else she had gone
out after and brought home and hung on the wall, only to find that it
changed nothing? She turned away from this idea, cold and frightened at
all it implied ... that life was not deep at all, anywhere, but a
shallow mud-hole, and that she had sunk far enough down to touch the
bottom.
* * * * *
She heard now the uneven clattering jangle of the bell, heard Isabelle
come out of the bed-room and go down the tile-paved corridor. Her
sandals dragged at the heel as they always did in the morning before she
put on her street shoes. That slatternly flap and drag of Isabelle's
sandals made her mistress sick. She had spoken about them a thousand
times. She had come to have a nervous hatred of the sound, had actually
flown into rages over it, stamping and shrieking at Isabelle as she
despised French housekeepers for doing. But how much impression had she
made? For one morning, perhaps two, Isabelle laced up her early morning
foot-gear, and after that she always forgot, slid back, flop, scuff,
flop. That was the sort of sandals all the chambermaids in Bayonne wore
for the first cleaning of the morning; that was the kind they always had
worn; the American mistress might as well make up her mind to the fact
that that was the kind they always would wear. There was about this
trivial matter of the sandals, the same nightmare quality of passive,
inert resistance to the idea of any change, which sagged smotheringly
down on Flora Allen everywhere she turned in her French life. They
called it stability. She and her friends in Belton had called it a
"background of tradition."
And yet she knew herself now incapable of going back to live in Belton
where she would not be able always to depend on an Isabelle, where at
times she would have to sweep her own rooms, and scour her own greasy
pots herself. It made her sick to think of living that way again--nobody
to bring her breakfast in the morning! To get up in a cold house with
all the responsibility for everything on her shoulders. She felt weak
at the thought of it.
Isabelle scuffed in, the mail in one rough, strong, red hand, and
flapped back to her cleaning. This time her mistress made no comment on
her laceless sandals.
What might there be in the mail? Nothing interesting, that she knew
beforehand. She turned the letters over, recognizing from their very
aspect the flatness of their contents. A letter from America? Oh, yes,
only from Horace's old Cousin Hetty, for Marise. How she did keep up
that correspondence! Did she suppose for a minute that any child could
go on remembering some one she hadn't seen for four years, especially a
child like Marise, so self-centered and absorbed in her own life, caring
really about nothing but her music.
A bill for Marise's school for the last quarter--to be put with Horace's
mail; a circular from that something-or-other society Mlle. Hasparren
was always fussing over, trying to raise money to keep some quartet
running in Bayonne; a bill from the dressmaker; another circular--oh, as
bad as Mlle. Hasparren's, that association with the long name, that took
care of foundling babies--they were always wanting money too! A notice
from the school, another bill? No, the announcement of the music-contest
that afternoon. Heavens! Never again for her! Once was enough, to sit
silently all a long afternoon on a teetering folding chair in the midst
of stodgy, dowdy mothers, whose boring eyes saw right through the fabric
of your dress to the safety-pin with which you had replaced a missing
petticoat button, and who had no more interest in the music banged out
by the schoolgirls than you had, except to wish ill to every child not
their own.
There was one letter, addressed to her in the pointed, fine convent
handwriting of Soeur Ste. Lucie. She opened this with more interest. Ah,
Father Elie was coming back. And wished to see her to-morrow afternoon.
She felt a little stir of her pulse, the first in so long. What dress
would she wear to the convent? Her black voile--and the little
close-fitting hat?
Still thinking of this she turned from the letters to the printed
matter. There were a couple of battered, out-of-date New York
newspapers, weary with their long traveling, and the deadly little
Bayonne paper, with its high-flown, pious articles, and its nasty hints
at scandals. She stood leaning against the table, looking down
scornfully at it, till her eye caught a name, and her face changed.
Mme. Garnier's son back from his two year stay in New York, where he had
been studying American business methods....
Flora Allen looked up quickly at her pretty blonde smiling reflection in
the mirror, turning her head to get the three-quarter view which was her
favorite. So he was back, was he? So he was back. His dear mama must
have decided that he was now old enough to protect himself from
golden-haired American ladies. So he was coming back to perch on the
front edge of his chair and look volumes out of those great soft eyes of
his that were so shy and yet could be so expressive. He was coming back
to be so nervous and moved that his shaking fingers could not hold his
tea-cup, and yet so persistent that he came week after week whenever she
was at home to visitors; so timid that he hadn't a word to say for
himself but so bold that he often spent the entire evening, romantically
sitting on the bench across the way, staring up at her windows.
He was coming back after his exile in America, was he? And two years
older. Well, we would see what we would see. And in the meantime Father
Elie could wait.
She had a singular little smile on her lips, as she turned from this
item to a card from Horace, saying that business would keep him longer
in Bordeaux than he had thought and he would not be back till a week
from Saturday. She tossed this card with the letters on the table, and
began to turn over the canary-colored books scattered on her desk. No,
the volume was not there. She must have put it back long ago in the
book-case. She ran her finger along the titles on a shelf near her,
found it, pulled it out. With it in her hand she sank down on the
chaise-longue. But before she began to read, she sat for a moment, her
lips curved, remembering what was in it, and remembering how more than
two years ago she had looked up from it to see Jean-Pierre Garnier for
the first time. Yes....
She opened the book, fluttered the pages, read a little here and there;
and then, as if slowly drawn by an undertow, sank into the book, with a
long breath.
After a time Jeanne let herself in, stood for an instant in the door,
despising her mistress, and passed on to Marise's room. But the
novel-reader heard nothing, drowned deep in the book, reading very
slowly, her eyes dwelling long on every word. "... I wakened, thinking I
heard my name called, slipped out of bed and went to the window. The
moon poured liquid silver upon the garden, and there in the midst of it
stood Urbain, slim and young as a lady's page, his soft eyes glittering
like jewels. With a bound he leaped up towards me, and found a foot-hold
on the rough stones of the old wall, so that he stood beside me with
only the low window-sill between us. He took my hand in his. He was
trembling like a leaf. He looked at me imploringly."
"'Go! Go! Urbain!' I whispered, trying to steel my heart against his
youth and ardor, 'Go, I am like an old woman to thee, a mere child.' His
answer was to put one trembling arm around my bare shoulders and gently
lay his velvet cheek upon my breast. I felt myself melting, melting in a
delicious languor. After all, why not? Where would the dear boy find a
more devoted and delicate initiation into life.... Think into whose
hands he might fall if I repulsed him!
"He raised his face adoringly to mine, drew me down to his lips ... his
young, firm lips ... sweet as the petals of a rose ... perfumed with
youth. I closed my eyes...."
The only break in the intense immobility of the reader was that
occasionally she moistened her lips with her tongue, and once in a while
she drew a long, sighing breath.