May, 1906.
As Marise started up the front stairway she saw Biron emerging on the
run from the foot of the servants' stairway, his apron half-off, a net
marketing-bag in his hand. His broad, red face looked cross and anxious.
Something must have gone wrong. She turned back, meeting him in front of
the concierge's door.
"Oh, Mademoiselle, God be praised you're back in time. Desolation and
ruin! The sole has turned--it has been so hot to-day. I swear on my soul
as a Christian it was fresh when I got it--unless that blackguard Gagnan
changed...."
When Biron turned his torrent of objurgation on the tradespeople who
sold him eatables there was no stopping him. Marise cut in now.
"Were you going out for another? Do you want me to go?"
"Yes, yes--only not for a sole--there wouldn't be one left--and the
dinner was _planned_ for sole!"
He ground his teeth, white and sound as a wolf's, "I could send Melanie
if she had the intelligence of an angle-worm--and yet to leave her with
my sauce till I get back--I was right in the midst of a _sauce piquante_
for the...."
He turned as if to rush back upstairs, distractedly, and turned again as
if to rush distractedly out into the street.
Marise put out her hand for the market-bag and spoke with the peremptory
decision that was always necessary to unloosen Biron from his
temperamental tangles.
"Go right back to your sauce, Biron. I'll have the fish here in five
minutes. And have plenty of onion in that sauce. My father thought the
last not well-balanced, too much vinegar. He likes his sauces suave."
"But not a sole, Mademoiselle, not a sole! Any sole that is left on the
market at six of the evening is left because nobody would buy it. But
the dinner was _planned_ for sole!" He stamped his huge, felt-slippered
feet in exasperation.
"A mackerel," suggested Marise, "they're good at this time of the year."
He flung his arms over his head. "A _mackerel_! A gross, fat, dark
monster like a mackerel to replace a _sole_!"
"Oh, no, of course not." Marise saw his point. "I didn't think. Nor
salmon, of course."
He shuddered away from the idea of salmon.
They stood staring at each other, thinking hard, the cook's big,
parboiled fist clenched on his mouth, his brows knit together, like
those of the _Penseur_.
"Some merlans?" suggested Marise. "You can cook them _au gratin_ just
_like_ a sole."
"But will I have time!" he groaned. "Who knows whether the oven is hot
enough?"
"Well, hurry back and brighten the fire, while I rush out and get the
fish."
He fled back up the stairs, his slippers flapping. She left her roll of
music in the concierge's care and darted out into the street, market-bag
in hand. Twenty minutes later the fish were being disposed with a
religious care on a bed of chopped parsley, shallots, mushrooms and
butter. Biron shoved the baking-pan tenderly into the oven, wiped the
sweat from his face, and stopped storming at his wife.
"You were not to blame, after all, Melanie," he told her magnanimously,
and with a long breath, "But it was a close call, by God, a close call."
In the salon Marise was pouring an aperitif for her father, brightly
dishing up the news of the day with the sauce of lively comment, and
saying nothing about culinary close calls. Her father listened to her,
sipping his Dubonnet with an air of intense satisfaction. He took plenty
of time for it, allowing each mouthful to deliver all its complicated
burden of tang and bitterness and heat before he took another one into
his mouth.
"Excellent stuff, Dubonnet," he said appreciatively.
"I'm glad you like it," said Marise. She envied her father his
enjoyments. They were, comparatively speaking, so easy to get.
Looking at her seemed to remind him of something. He reached into a vest
pocket (with some difficulty, for his vests were more and more tightly
packed with each year of good living), and took out a little jeweller's
box.
"It's your birthday to-day," he remarked, taking another careful sip of
his aperitif.
Marise looked at the present, a little wrist-watch, from a very good
house.
"Oh, that's awfully good of you, Father," she said, trying it on.
"You can have one if that funny little friend of yours can," he
advanced.
"Oh, if you start giving me everything Eugenia has...!" protested
Marise.
"Somebody ought to make _her_ a present of a little ordinary sense," he
commented, with no great interest in the subject. "I've seen her kind
before. They tear things loose till they get what they want, and then
they don't like it."
"Eugenia just loves it, every bit of it," Marise objected.
"Well, let her," he dismissed her from consideration with his usual
nonchalance, and taking the last of the Dubonnet, he rose to go into his
room.
In a moment Marise heard an indignant roar, "_Melanie has forgotten my
hot water again!_" Her father came to the door of his room, vast and
bulging in his shirt and trousers, outraged by the oversight.
"Oh, yes," said Marise, in annoyance. "You might have known she would.
Biron has been in another tantrum and taking her head off. It gets her
so rattled she forgets her own work."
"I don't see what that has to do with _my hot water_," cried the master
of the house aggrieved.
"It hasn't! It hasn't!" cried Marise hastily, running to tell Melanie of
her crime.
Not till the hot water was safely delivered, and her father's comments
on bad service diminished to a distant solitary mutter, did Marise go
into her own room to dress. She had no hot water, either, but she washed
in cold, scorning with all her heart the childishness of men, and
laughing childishly at the picture her father had made, shouting and
indignant, billowing in his shirt and trousers. He and Biron! One had
always to be smoothing them down and wrapping them up in the little
things they wanted. It must be truly lovely to be married to one, as
poor Melanie was! But, after all, Father did his best to be good to her,
when everything about the house was all right and he could think of it.
She hoped the dinner would be all right. It was too bad about that sole.
Sole was so expensive too. Not that Father ever objected to anything the
table cost. Oh, _flute_! she had forgotten to see if Biron had exchanged
that Benedictine for Chartreuse. Father would raise the roof if they
served him Benedictine again. She put on her dress hurriedly, and
hooking it up as she went, she stepped hastily down the hall to the
kitchen. She never had any help from Melanie in dressing, not even
costumes that hooked up on the shoulders and under the arms, because it
was important not to disturb the small quantity of gray matter Melanie
had, at the hour of serving a meal. It was all needed for the matter in
hand.
* * * * *
Dinner was over, and had been acceptable. Her father had partaken of
everything with his careful appraising attention, and had found no
adverse comment to make. Coffee had been served, and the
Chartreuse--Biron had not forgotten.
Out in the kitchen Biron (first, taught by much experience, loosening
the sash which bound his mighty paunch), was sitting with his wife at
table, eating and drinking like a page out of Rabelais. The dinner had
pleased his exacting and irritable master (Biron immensely respected him
for being exacting and irritable), and it also had pleased Biron. There
was plenty of it left and this was a house where the cook was never
subjected to the indignity of having inquiries made about _les restes_.
He leaned back in his chair, undid the button at his throat, and smiled
at his wife, over his glass of excellent Burgundy.
"Life is good, hein, old lady?" he said.
She nodded in agreement, keeping her thoughts to herself in the usual
stealthy, secretive, feminine fashion.
Over the coffee and Chartreuse, facing another well-satisfied man sat
another secretive woman, talking in one key, feeling in another, and
finding the process far from enlivening. Down below the surface of the
sparkling, chatting Marise, drooped a listless, dispirited Marise for
whom a birthday was a most depressing occasion.
"You're nineteen, aren't you, Marise?" asked her father over his cigar.
Marise nodded.
"Well, that's another one gone! Congratulations on every one you get
over with," he commented, sipping the stinging green fire of his liqueur
with satisfaction.
Marise thought of nothing amusing to say and was silent.
Her father stirred his big body, with the air of some one arousing
himself to an effort. The effort seemed to be to say, "Is there anything
you want I can get for you?"
His daughter was at a loss before the comprehensiveness of this blanket
question. "What kind of a thing?" she inquired.
He professed himself more at a loss than she. "If I had any idea what, I
wouldn't need to ask you, would I?"
But he managed, all the same, at least to eliminate some of the things
he didn't mean, "Oh, not dresses or hats," and in a moment, after
another sip at the liqueur, to give a little more definite idea of what
he did, "Something going on, social life; what girls of nineteen are
supposed to want."
"Oh, you needn't bother. I get enough of that," she answered, "between
Mrs. Marbury and Eugenia and Madame Vallery." She was surprised at her
father's interest. They seldom talked together, except of what they were
to eat, had eaten, or were eating, or of the interminable games of chess
which occupied any leisure moments of his and hers which chanced to
coincide. He seemed to have something on his mind now. And he always
hated the effort of bringing out what was in his mind. He stopped
beating about the bush now and said heavily, "You're no fool, Marise. I
don't know any of the roundabout ways to say it to you, that a woman
would have, but you won't mind that. What I mean is, I suppose--I
imagine that's what's at the bottom of all of it--is this. Are you
getting a chance to meet the right sort of young man, the kind you'd
want to marry? For you will be marrying before long, I suppose."
Marise waited a long time before she spoke, so that she would not flame
out as she felt. That would not be speaking in her father's vernacular,
and if there was one thing which every instinct of Marise's taught her,
it was to speak to every one in his own language. Nothing in the world
would have induced her to expose her own to other people's casual
comments, her own, in which she spoke to herself, bitterly, caustically,
skeptically, tragically, as no one had ever heard her speak aloud. When
she could command herself to select the right phrase out of her father's
vocabulary, she remarked, pushing her tiny coffee-cup away with a
gesture of finality, "I don't believe I'm very much of a marrying sort."
Her father's comment on this was to say stolidly, "Oh, every girl thinks
that." But if he thought he could get a rise out of Marise with this
provocation, he was mistaken. She now turned away from the little table
and began with an indifferent air to arrange the coal-fire in the grate.
They were sitting in the salon.
"Don't you like men?" he asked presently.
She laughed a little, "To dance with."
He looked at her more keenly than he had and asked, "Don't you trust
men?"
She turned this off by riposting lightly, "How much is it safe to trust
anybody?"
It was as though a chance stroke had cut through the dyke and let out in
a rush, waters that had lain sleeping.
"Never trust anybody but yourself," he told her urgently, the words
heavy with the intensity of his conviction.
A moment later he added, more deliberately, his manner tinged with his
habitual saturnine humor, "And it's not safe to trust yourself very
far."
It wasn't at all what he had meant to say to her. But it was such an
undertaking to say anything. And what was there to say anyhow? He
decided to let it go at that, drank the last of his liqueur, fell back
in his armchair and reached for the chess-board.
"I hope you got a good supply of that Chartreuse," he said, beginning to
set up the men. "It's very much better than what we've been having. Not
so syrupy. I do loathe syrupy things."
After the game was over, he took up his Paris Herald and Marise, freed
from the necessity to make talk, went to the piano. She began to play,
not Chopin as she would have liked, but a dance from the Arlesienne
Suite. Father detested melancholy music.
After she had finished, she sat still, sunk together on the piano stool,
staring at the music but not seeing it. She heard her father rustle his
newspaper as if he had lowered it to look at her. But for once she made
no attempt to arouse herself. She continued to present to him a silent,
dejected back.
He must have considered this for some minutes when he finally remarked,
"I suppose there are people who _like_ birthdays!" Then with a yawn,
"But for me, they always make me think of all the ones I have still to
get through with, year after year, one by one."
Marise's shoulders bowed under the weight of his words and his accent.
She still said nothing.
He took up the newspaper again, but before he began to read he exhorted
her, "Oh, well, stick it out! Stick it out, Molly, as best you can. It
doesn't last so very long."