"There!" said Madame Garnier, scanning the chair-filled assembly-room
from the back, "up there in the second row there are three seats. We can
take two and hold one and perhaps after Danielle has played, she can
come and sit by us."
They were in plenty of time, long before the contest began, so that she
gave herself the pleasure of walking slowly down the aisle, stopping
wherever she saw a familiar face to exchange greetings and to say
proudly, "Yes, Jean-Pierre is returned from America. Looking very well,
isn't he? Yes, that's the style in America, neither beard nor mustache.
But I think after a while he'll let his mustache grow again. I tell him
he looks like a priest."
But she did not think that he looked in the least like a priest. She
thought him the most beautiful young man in the world, and she was so
ecstatically happy to have him back again after the rending anguish of
the two years' separation, that she forgave him all the anxiety he had
caused them by that foolish infatuation of his. That was in the past
now, she hoped. Perhaps he had outgrown his foolish idea, as they had
hoped he might when they had sent him away. He had certainly said
nothing about it in any of his letters. But even if he hadn't forgotten,
if he but knew it, she was more than ready to yield the point to him, to
yield anything that would end his alienation from her, that would bring
him back to live in Bayonne. She had grown old during those two endless
years. They had broken her resolution. He was too precious. She could
deny him nothing. If he still wanted it, why, let him _have_ his little
American girl, as soon as she was old enough to marry. She might be made
over into a passable wife for Jean-Pierre. There was no doubt she was
pretty and fine, with nice hands and feet; and she seemed gentle and
quiet. Once get her away from those impossible parents, into a decent
home...!
Her heart was rippling full with joy to feel Jean-Pierre there beside
her. At times it overflowed, and she all but opened her lips to tell him
she would sacrifice anything for him, that she would put no obstacle in
his way. But for the moment a prudent thought restrained her. She would
wait and see whether perhaps Jean-Pierre had not forgotten that curious
infatuation with a mere child. There was no use putting the idea back in
his head, if his exile and two years' time had blotted it out.
They sat in a decorous silence, waiting for the beginning of the
program. Madame Garnier moved nearer to Jean-Pierre, for the pleasure of
feeling his arm, a man's arm now, inside a very well-cut masculine
coat-sleeve. She remembered what it had been, the rosy translucent flesh
of her first baby, then the little thin, white arm of his long ailing
boyhood--how she had fought with ill-health to keep him--all those
years, never an instant's relaxation of her care, her prayers, her
piercing anxiety! Oh, well, it was all over now. There he sat, a
splendid young man, still a little delicate, but sound and well. Her
reward had come. How goldenly the years stretched out before her!
Perhaps it was just as well to have him marry young, to have his wife
come to him intact in the first bloom of her early girlhood. He himself
was so unworldly, he would never be able to manage an older woman. A
fleeting picture came to her of a rosy baby's face--Jean-Pierre's first
child. The thought flooded over her, rich with pride and joy.
She continued to gaze at a certain spot in the curtain, her face framed
in her heavy velvet hat, composed in decorous vacancy.
* * * * *
Beside her Jean-Pierre also fixed his eyes on a certain spot in the
curtain, and composed his face to quiet. But he was afraid of the
silence. He wished his mother had gone on chatting, or that they had sat
down near acquaintances with whom he would have been forced to talk.
Then he would not have been so conscious of the dryness of his mouth, of
the roaring of his pulse in his ears. He stared hard at the curtain,
trying to interest his eyes in the design of the tapestry. But they
could see nothing but what they had seen for two years, liquid dark eyes
looking straight into his heart, his poor heart that he could not hide
from them; dark eyes that seemed to be looking wistfully for something
they did not find, something that he knew he could give, something that
he longed to give with such an abandon of desire that he felt now, as so
many times before, the sweat start out on his forehead.
He shifted his position, folded his arms, looked away from the curtain
and down at the floor. Come, come, this was becoming nothing more than a
fixed idea, a mania! It was idiocy to let it master him so! Good God,
what had she been but a little girl! What was she now but a little girl!
A girl of fifteen was no more than a child. His heart sprang up at him
with a tiger's leap--"only three more years to wait--perhaps only two
more--." He frowned, cleared his throat, and taking his handkerchief out
of his pocket, passed it across his lips.
And then she might be totally changed by this time; girls often did
change. Suppose she had grown very stout--or were gawkily thin like his
sister Danielle, or bold and forward, or dull. He rolled himself in the
hair-shirt of all the possible changes for the worse, and felt his
passion burn hotter. Well, he would see. In a few moments he would see.
He looked at his watch.
"It must soon begin," said his mother anxiously, leaning towards him,
evidently fearing that the delay might bore him.
He smiled at her reassuringly, and put his watch back. Dear Maman! How
she did spoil him! How he had missed her, missed his home, those two
years in America. He thought of the boarding-house on 59th Street with a
qualm. How good it was to get back to a real home.
But there were fine things in America, too, even if they did not know
how to create real homes, even if the men did not know how to love their
mothers, or cherish their wives. He had learned a great deal there, a
great deal even beyond the revelation of new business methods. What he
had learned commercially was enormous! He faced his future here in
France, sure of success.
But he had taken in other things too--he was thankful that he had been
to Marise's native country and had learned something about the attitude
towards women there--not that he would ever, ever treat Marise as
American wives were treated, with that rough-and-ready, cowboy lack of
ceremony, nor would he ever neglect her, leave her out of his life, as
American husbands did. He would know how to combine the American honesty
and sincerity with what no American ever felt or showed, with what no
American woman ever experienced--tenderness, cherishing tenderness. He
would be tender for Marise as no other human being could be; he would
find the most exquisite ways to surround her with tenderness, to protect
that sweet mouth of hers from bitterness or sorrow, or knowledge of the
world's evil.
He looked down steadily at the floor, a knot in his throat, his heart
aching, and swallowed hard.
* * * * *
Three wooden thumps sounded from the platform, and the curtain drew
itself aside, showing the stage decorated with a stand, two potted
palms, an armchair, and a sprawling black grand piano with two
cane-bottomed chairs before it.
From the wings trudged in a red-cheeked young girl, with a large bust,
and brawny rough arms, hanging down over her starched white dress.
Behind her trotted a short withered elderly woman, a black silk waist
crossed over her flat chest, her scanty gray hair smoothed down in thin
bandeaux over her ears. They sat down before the piano, opened the
music, carried by the older woman, waited till she had adjusted drooping
eye-glasses on her high thin nose, and had peeringly found her place.
Then the young girl began to pound out the Raindrop Prelude while the
other turned over the pages.
The audience preserved a respectful silence, bestowing a minute
attention on the hang of the player's skirt, the fit of her bodice, the
crimped waves of her light brown hair, her over-plump hands, and the
bulging patent-leather shoes, which she pressed nervously up and down on
the pedals.
Something seemed to break and clear away in Jean-Pierre's head, like
fumes drifting away from a shattered retort. So this was a school-girl,
this solid, unformed lump of human flesh, neither child nor woman, who
had lost a child's poetry and had not yet come to woman's seductiveness.
He looked coolly at the girl (his mother whispered her name, the younger
sister of a lycee friend of his), dissecting her with his eyes,
immeasurably relieved. Was it for an amorphous creature like this, too
old to kiss on the cheek, too young to kiss on the mouth, that he had
suffered? Why, it was nothing; a mere morbid whim of his ignorant
boyhood. How right Maman had been in making Papa send him away from it!
He had grown to be a man without realizing it, a man of the world, in no
danger of losing his head over chits.
The Prelude was finished. The player got to her feet, and bowed
self-consciously to the muted thuddings of gloved palms on gloved palms
which greeted the cessation of her activities. She got herself off the
stage, walking heavily in her too-tight slippers. Jean-Pierre, who sat
at one side could see a little behind the scenes and observed that as
soon as she thought she was out of sight of the audience, she gave way
to childish relief that the ordeal was over, and skipped forward,
running. He suppressed a supercilious smile of aesthetic scorn. Her body,
as large and heavy as a woman's, no longer expressed the impulses of the
child she still was. She skipped clumsily, with an inelastic energy of
gesture like a cow capering in a spring-time pasture. Jean-Pierre felt
the keenest pleasure in his ruthless perception of her lack of grace.
This was emancipation!
"She plays very nicely," murmured his mother, on the general chance that
some member of her family might be sitting within earshot.
"Yes, very agreeably," he concurred.
Neither of them had heard a note of the music.
They continued to sit in decorous silence, looking with vacant faces
straight before them, till the next performer appeared. This was Elise
Fortier, whom they were both prepared to detest because of her father
and mother and brother. They did detest her, everything about her from
her thin, dry hair, frizzed out to imitate abundance, to her shifty eyes
exactly like her mother's, from her stooping shoulders, to her long bony
hands, which clattered out loudly the Schubert Marche Militaire. When
she had finished, "Really quite a talent," observed Mme. Garnier taking
pains to be audible; and, "Remarkable for her age," agreed Jean-Pierre.
He was relaxing morally, in an inexpressible ease at finding his head
clear, his heart at rest. To own yourself, to look at life from behind a
stout wall of critical cynicism--it was to be in safety at last! He
barely glanced at the next player, a nondescript, precocious child, who
murdered a Moment Musical, her short thin legs dangling from the stool.
And the next, the one who played the Liebestraum, a tall young lady with
the self-admiring graces and manners of an opera singer on the concert
platform. He looked at his watch again and wondered how long it would be
before the stupid school performance would be over, and he could get
away for an aperitif at the Cafe du Grand Bouleau on the Place d'Armes
and an evening with----
He saw that another player was coming forward, a slim tall girl with
thick shining dark hair held back by a white ribbon like the others. She
stood for an instant to bow to the audience before sitting down at the
piano, and he could look up full into her unconscious face, gazing out
over his head impersonally with shy, liquid, dark eyes. She was
breathing a little rapidly, her young breast rising and falling under
the filmy white of her dress. A timid propitiatory smile curved her
sensitive mouth and arched her long, finely-drawn eyebrows.
Not a muscle of Jean-Pierre's face changed; every line of his careless,
confident attitude froze taut as it was. And underneath this motionless
exterior, he felt his heart hotly, joyfully weeping in a passion of
thanksgiving, like a frightened lost child who has come into the right
way. He lost all sense of connection with his body and yearning,
worshipping, clamoring, imperiously calling, humbly beseeching, he gazed
out from the bars of his immobile, well-dressed external self at the
girl sitting before the piano. Two years, two long years of exile, how
could life ever make up to him for those two lost years? How he had
starved! His famished eyes fed ravenously on what they saw, the supple,
elastic slimness of the young body, the fine, thin ankle and shapely
foot, the creamy forearm, the agile, strong, white fingers, so bravely
flinging out harmonies beyond the comprehension of the smooth broad
brow, inviolate, intact, innocent, ignorant, which bent its full child's
curve over the keys.
Jean-Pierre looked and looked, prostrating himself in awe before the
revelation of divine, stainless youth. Never till that moment, he told
himself, had he understood the meaning of the holy word, virgin.
And he had thought, those two long years, that he had always held her
before his eyes! He had remembered nothing, nothing of what she was.
Yet, how could he have divined what she was becoming--that mouth, her
pure girl's mouth, cleanly drawn in scarlet against the flower-like
flesh perfumed with youth. Would he--would he know the first cool touch
of those young lips ... he found that he could see her no more, for a
mist before his eyes, and yet he continued to strain his eyes through
the mist towards where she sat.
Some one touched him on the arm. It was Maman--Maman who looked at him
in tender sympathy. As their glance met, she smiled at him, and nodded
her head once, reassuringly. She looked as she had when he was a little
boy, and she had yielded at last to some desperately held whim of his.
Dearest Maman! It was a promise she gave him silently, a promise to help
him towards his happiness. She too had succumbed to Marise. Who would
not? He pressed her hand gently, and smiled in return. A calm peace came
upon him.
* * * * *
Madame Garnier knew very well beforehand when the little American girl
was to come on the program, and after that ill-bred, over-dressed Yvonne
Bredier had wriggled and grinned her way off the stage, she felt an
anxious, nervous expectation. Jean-Pierre had no idea what was coming.
She could feel that. Although she dared not change her position to look
at him, she was acutely aware of the relaxed careless pose of his body,
and of the nonchalant turn of his head as he glanced at the girl who now
came forward on the stage.
And then she felt with that sixth sense of her passion for Jean-Pierre
that he had been struck, had been pierced, as though a knife had thrust
him through and through. Although he had not moved--because he had not
moved, had not changed a line of his careless attitude, she divined that
he had been stricken into immobility. What was it? Was it the shock of
disillusion, of disappointment at prosaic reality after a long, romantic
dream? Or did he still find in the girl whatever strange sorcery had so
bewitched his boyish fancy?
She herself sat as stiffly motionless as he, suffering so exquisite a
torture of suspense that she dared not bring herself to end it by a look
at his face.
Some one back of her coughed, and the sound broke the spell. She drew a
long breath and resolutely turned her head towards her son.
"Oh, my Jean-Pierre, oh, my little boy! is it so you feel? Oh, my
darling, do you want her, do you want anything in the world like that?
My little boy, a man! To think that it is my little boy, thus burning
with a man's desire! Oh, yes, Jean-Pierre, you shall have her ... what
is your mother for but to help you have what you want? Oh, poor boy,
poor boy, to look at any woman so.... Oh, Jean-Pierre, if you knew
women, how they only live to fool men ... no woman on earth is
worth...."
She saw now that his flaming young eyes were veiled with tears. She
touched his arm, she smiled at him, closer to him than since his early
childhood. And he took her hand, he smiled back, he looked at her as he
had not once since his infatuation began--like her son, her only son
once more letting her into his heart. She held tightly to his hand, now
happy and at peace.
Thus together, hand in hand, they were looking up at the stage when the
girl struck the final chord, and rising, turned once more towards the
front to make her bow in acknowledgment of the applause. The excitement,
the effort, had brought a shell-like color into her subtly modeled
cheeks. Once more she looked out into the audience impersonally and
then, as she turned to go, unconsciously drawn by the intense gaze of
the couple in the second row, her dark eyes dropped to them for an
instant's glance of friendly recognition. Madame Garnier felt her son
draw a sudden, gasping breath through half-open lips and tighten his
hold on her hand.
During the rest of the program her thoughts and plans rose in a busy
circling swarm. After all, there were advantages. It might be much
worse! Impressionable, sensitive, inexperienced as Jean-Pierre was, it
might very well have been some mature married woman in search of a new
sensation who had thus caught his first young passion. Or even not his
passion at all. Even if he himself had felt nothing, any woman could
have victimized him by working on that foolish sensibility of his. If
she could make him think--and his mother always had a scared sense of
how easy that would be--that she was in love with him, he would never
know how to retreat, as more brutal men knew so well how to do. She had
always been afraid of some such entanglement as that, in which
Jean-Pierre's weakness (in her heart she called it plainly that, and not
chivalry or sensibility) would make him a helpless victim of a woman
either an old fool herself or a calculating sensualist. Heavens! How
many dangers there were in the world for one's son! And sons could not
be guarded like daughters, by keeping them under your thumb. There were
also, for such a romantic, unworldly boy as Jean-Pierre, all the
variations on the Camille theme. How easily some shrewd woman of the
demi-monde could have pulled the wool over his eyes! Madame Garnier had
no doubts that Jean-Pierre knew such women. Her son was a man like all
other men, for all his poetic, high-strung ideas, and had certainly had
his part of an ordinary man's life, especially those last two years away
from home, irresponsible and alone. Oh, yes, the more she thought
shudderingly of the dangers he had escaped, the more harmless appeared
this fancy for a school girl. And if his fancy was to light on a young
girl, in some ways it was more convenient to have her a foreigner with
no family, so to speak, rather than a girl of Bayonne society, whose
family would expect to have much to say about all the arrangements of
Jean-Pierre's life. Heavens! suppose it had been Elise Fortier--think of
Jean-Pierre saddled with Madame Fortier as a mother-in-law! Not that
that worthless idle American mother-in-law was much better; except that
those people _must_ go back to America some time! Everybody did go back
to his native country ultimately. And too, she was a weak, foolish thing
who would never have the force to make trouble. Look at the way she let
herself be run by her servants. Also, until now, she had paid precious
little attention to her daughter; there was no reason to think she would
develop any more interest in her later on. And the child herself seemed
malleable material. There was no doubt she would be a pretty woman, and
marrying very young, she would certainly assimilate the standards of the
Garnier family.
When the concert was over, she said to Jean-Pierre, "If you like, we
will wait till the girls come out, and walk home with Danielle and her
classmates." As she spoke she nodded to old Jeanne Amigorena, the cook
in the American family, who stood there, also waiting, her young
mistress' cloak and hat on her arm. It occurred to her that one of the
first things to do would be to eliminate that servant. She probably knew
altogether too much about Marise's family. It would not be prudent to
have her around a young menage; and anyhow, old servants were an
intolerable nuisance with their airs of belonging to the family.
* * * * *
Behind the scenes where the girls were waiting for the concert to begin,
there had been a deal of giggling and whispering and rustling.
Mademoiselle Vivier, chosen to turn the pages for the players because
she was so severe it was thought she could keep them in order, was
"gend'arming around" as the girls called it, pouncing on one group for
laughing too loud, and on another for making too much noise as they
executed grotesque caricatures of the way they intended to make their
entries on the stage. The moment her back was turned, they whispered
and giggled and pranced more wildly than ever, turning deep bows into
pirouettes, shaking out their full skirts and whirling about like
dervishes. Everybody took care to lose her music and get it all mixed up
with everybody's else, just to see Mlle. Vivier go into the air.
"Here's that missing sheet from your Schubert, Marguerite! Oh, no, it's
Gabrielle's Chopin!"
"Oh, all the scherzo pages have gone from my Delibes!"
"Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle, I feel so faint, I don't believe I _can_
play."
"Oh, Mademoiselle, I forgot to bring my--oh, yes, here it is, right
under Danielle! Get up, Danielle! Get up! _Mademoiselle!_ Danielle
Garnier won't get off my music! Oh, Mademoiselle, can't I play my
Nocturne instead of the Autumn Leaves! I _feel_ like a nocturne; just
ready to go to sleep."
Poor Mademoiselle Vivier, single-handed as she was, grew more and more
frantic, rushing about, a dark red flush on her thin face, crying, "Sh,
_sh_!" much more loudly than the girls were whispering, exhorting them
angrily to have some manners, not to behave like so many barbarians, and
to realize the seriousness of the occasion, the Gambert music prize at
stake!
But one of those flint-like school traditions originating God only knows
how, and utterly impervious to exhortations from any faculty, decreed in
that school that the Gambert music prize was a joke, a scream of a joke.
The girls would kill themselves with work and worry to win any other
prize, for dramatic recitation, for dancing, even for French
composition, much as they hated that, but care who won the music prize
they would not; although, of course, it was exciting to have no classes
that afternoon, to wear your best white dress and parade out on the
stage. They had handed down from one school generation to another the
fixed idea that M. Gambert had been short, red-faced and ridiculously
fat, and they enraged their teachers by drawing on the margins of their
music, impudent sketches of a paunchy, bald little man ceremoniously
bestowing a huge wreath on a knock-kneed, scrawny girl. Whereas, as a
matter of historic fact, M. Gambert had been a very good-looking
bourgeois, who in his youth had been a dashing lieutenant under Napoleon
I. Also the Gambert prize was not a wreath at all but an album of piano
music, beautifully bound in bright red leather, which, because the
Mother Superior feared arousing the vanity of the winner, was privately
bestowed behind the scenes. But historic facts have no bearing on a
cherished school joke of long standing. For the girls, the Gambert prize
continued always to be one gigantic lark, one of those perennial farces,
the indestructible quality of which so endears them to fourteen and
fifteen year olds.
This year they had a new variation on their usual fooleries. Elise
Fortier told them that her grown-up young lady cousin had discovered
something as good as the rouge which was so strictly forbidden to them
by the Sisters, that its very name was not allowed to be pronounced in
school. If you bent over double and hung your head upside down, way
over, thus, till it was on the same level with your knees, and held it
there till you felt as though you'd burst, you'd have the loveliest
color in your cheeks, just like an actress.
Of course they all wanted to look like actresses. What could be more
delightful than to look like an actress!
In an instant the horrified Mademoiselle Vivier was treated to an
appalling spectacle. All of her charges utterly forgetting their manners
or even decency, were stooping double, their full starched skirts
sticking out at acute angles behind, and to the tune of muffled shrieks
of laughter were dangling and shaking their heads, like so many
lunatics, their carefully dressed hair sweeping the floor. She rushed at
the nearest one, Marise Allen, and forced her back to an upright
position. But this did not improve things. When Marise caught a glimpse
of the others, like great white mushrooms, stooping and shaking, she
burst out into anything but a muffled shout of laughter, which brought
them all up, one after another, to gaze and scream, and lean, convulsed
and hysterical, against the walls.
It was a critical moment. The curtain was due to go up, and the girls
were really out of hand. Mademoiselle Vivier could do nothing with them.
They had lost control of themselves; her experienced eye knew the
signs. In a moment more, one of the more high-strung ones would begin to
cry and then.... Good God! what a mess! What diabolically infernal
creatures girls were to handle! How sick she was of their imbecility!
She ran hastily around to the side door and beckoning in the Mother
Superior told her what was happening. The nun nodded understandingly,
meditated for an instant, casting about in her mind, and then, her aged
face taking on an expression of majestic calm, she swept back to the
little room behind the stage. The girls were startled to see her and
alarmed by the intense gravity of her face.
"My children," she said quietly in the clear, gentle, masterful voice
which had kept the Community in whole-hearted subservience to her for
thirty years, "my children." She bent her wasted old face on them,
raising one thin white hand, peremptorily. Her long flowing black sleeve
gave a commanding amplitude to this gesture. "My little children, lift
up your hearts...." She waited an instant, till she held every eye, and
then she said reverently, "My children, at every important moment of our
lives we must turn to Our Very Holy Mother, to bless us. Before you go
on the stage to-day, to represent your school in public, and to do honor
to music, which God has blessed as an instrument of good, let us pray
Our Mother to be with you, and guide you."
She bowed her head. Hypnotically, all the young heads bowed with hers.
She began in a low murmur, "Ave Maria, sancta tu in mulieribus...." All
the young voices murmured with her, discharging in the reverenced words,
the nervous tension of their excitement and frolic. When they finished,
they were all quiet, with serious faces. The Mother Superior raised her
hand over them, murmuring a short, inaudible prayer of her own. There
was an instant's silence.
"Go tell Mathurin to raise the curtain," said the Reverend Mother
hurriedly in a low tone to Mademoiselle Vivier; a command which
Mademoiselle Vivier lost no time in executing.