Paris, May, 1907.
"Wouldn't you _think_," asked Eugenia, looking about her, "that anybody
who could get up such a room as this, such a perfect room, would know
how to get herself up better?"
"You don't suppose for a minute that she doesn't know how to!" Marise
rejoined. She added after a moment, to tease Eugenia, "Perhaps she
thinks it ordinary to be chic. Perhaps she thinks it is more
distinguished to have her very own genre."
Eugenia said with a nettled accent, "Well, wouldn't you think if she
were going in for a genre of her own, she'd pick out one that was a
little more ornamental than her flat-chested, old-maid, provincial
school-teacher variety?"
Marise laughed. It always gave her a little malicious amusement to make
Eugenia uneasy. To make her still more so, she added, "Yet you know well
enough, Eugenia, in any room full of people, let Mme. Vallery come in
with that mild, oh-I'm-nobody, don't-mind-me sort of air of hers, and
everybody else looks like a dressmaker's mannequin."
Eugenia, alarmed for her standards, annoyed and aroused, disputed the
point with warmth, "That's only because you know who she is. If you
didn't, you'd take her for the concierge's country cousin."
Marise shook her head exasperatingly, "No you wouldn't. She has
_cachet_. You can see it a mile away."
Eugenia suddenly conceded the point with grudging wonder, "How does she
_do_ it?" she marveled, unreconciled.
"Personality," diagnosed Marise, and then seeing that Eugenia's face
looked really clouded, she stopped her teasing abruptly, ashamed of the
unkind impulse which drove her to it, and of the malicious pleasure she
took in it. What was the inner irritation with everything that kept her
so aware of other people's weak points and so easily led into playing
ill-naturedly on them. Now, here and now, let her resolve she would
never tease Eugenia again.
But she knew she would.
She did, however, resist an easy opening, given her by the next remark
of Eugenia's, as she looked across the beautiful room, "What _makes_ it
all so just right? I'm going to start in at that corner, and look at
every single thing, and find out _what_ makes it right."
Marise restrained the mocking words on the tip of her tongue, and turned
away to the half-open window, near which she stood. Across the empty
street in the pale gold of the spring sunshine, the vaporous young green
of the Luxembourg showed like a mist through the tall iron palings. The
light blue sky above was veiled with hazy white clouds, stirred by a
young little spring breeze, which blew languorously on the girl's cheek.
It came over her, all of it, with a soft rush, the invitation to life,
the lovely, treacherous, ever-renewed invitation to live. And she drew
back from it, with her ever-renewed determination not to be taken in by
it. It was always too horribly lovely in May. It made her ache, it made
her want to cry, it made her horribly unhappy. How detestable to have it
so lovely, looking so seductive as though this were only the promise of
something lovelier ... when there wasn't anything to redeem the promise,
when it was all just a part of the general scheme to fool you.
Behind her Eugenia's voice said enviously, "Where did she get all these
terribly quaint Louis XVI things?"
How thoroughly Eugenia's English diction teacher had rooted out that
"turribly" of Eugenia's, thought Marise.
Aloud she answered, "She began collecting years ago, before anybody else
thought of it."
"I shouldn't think a teacher would have much money to collect."
"Oh, she picked them up for nothing, in corners of whatever province
she happened to be in, out of barns and chicken-houses and attics."
Eugenia said complainingly, "It seems to me she always has been able to
pick up something for nothing. Look at her husband."
Marise said over her shoulder, "Oh, she didn't get much, when she got
him. He never would have been anything except his good looks, if she
hadn't taken him up. And she didn't get him for nothing--not much! Mlle.
Hasparren says--every one who knows them says--that she made him. She
writes his speeches now. I've seen her. And never bothers him by being
jealous."
"I should hope _not_," commented Eugenia. "She's ages older than he. And
he's such a ripping good-looker."
Marise found Eugenia's fervent accent rather distasteful. Not that she
minded her latest fad of finding married men so much more interesting
subjects than the others. Eugenia's affairs never lasted more than a
minute anyhow. But she wished Eugenia would pick out somebody with more
brains than Mme. Vallery's husband, somebody not so well satisfied with
himself.
"He's an awful imbecile," she said.
"What did Mme. Vallery marry him for, if she's so terribly intelligent?"
challenged Eugenia. She delighted in using the words she had formerly
mis-pronounced, and giving them the purest, most colorless intonation.
There was not a trace now, in her speech, of the sweet, thick,
unstrained honey of her original southern accent.
"She has brains for two," said Marise shortly, displeased by the
direction of the talk. As a matter of fact, Mme. Vallery had once
informed her why she had married her handsome, unintelligent husband.
She had said warningly one day, when Marise had drawn back from a match
Mme. Vallery had proposed for her, "Don't carry that too far, dear
child. You will have to give in to the flesh sooner or later. You might
as well do it young, before the growth of your intelligence spoils your
enjoyment of it, as wait till you're driven to it, as I was. It's not
amusing in the least, to have to take it all mixed with the contempt of
your brains. You'll find you have to take your share, one way or
another."
Marise looked out frowningly at a great beech tree bursting into life in
the garden across the street. It held its huge, flowering crest proudly
into the spring air. To look at it was like hearing a flourish of
trumpets, triumphal, exulting.
That was all very well for trees, thought Marise, that stupid, yearly
emergence into a life that promised so much and brought futility.
Along the gravel-walk, inside the Luxembourg, under the hedge of lilacs,
under the new splendor of the great beech, a young man and a girl in a
pale gray dress were strolling. They looked at each other, and smiled.
"That's the way my father and mother probably walked together," thought
Marise, wincing. "That" was one of the clumsiest, most obvious parts of
the general conspiracy to fool you. But when you had the key to the
code, as Marise had, there was little danger that you would be taken in.
"I think I hear them coming," said Eugenia, "I do hope Monsieur is with
her! Not that he ever condescends to pay the slightest attention to me!"
She assumed carefully a pose of unconscious ease on her small,
spindle-legged chair. Marise turned around from the window and looked at
her with appreciation. Was it only two years ago, that Eugenia had
scrambled up from the crumpled bed on which she had lain a-sprawl?
"Nobody can say _your_ genre is not decorative, Eugenia," she remarked
with the sincere intention of pleasing the other girl, "that's a
perfectly glorious toilette, just right. And oh, how divinely that
broadcloth is tailored."
Eugenia looked at her resentfully, with a flash of her old suspicion
that she was not being treated as an equal.
"I haven't any _cachet_, and you know it," she said, "if Mme. Vallery
can have _cachet_ do you suppose I'm going to be satisfied with just
chic?"
Marise felt one of her claps of laughter rising within her, but kept it
back, as the beautifully proportioned paneled door opened to admit their
hostess. A tall, spare, stooped, gray-haired woman, dressed plainly in
fine black, with a shrewd, wrinkled, fresh-colored face, well-washed and
guiltless of the smallest trace of powder. She looked like an elderly
Jesuit, one who wields a great deal more power than he likes to show.
"Good-day, my children," she greeted the girls in a clear voice, with
the utmost simplicity and directness of intonation. "Have we kept you
waiting long? I told Auguste that we were a little late."
Auguste, magnificently tall and magnificently bearded, having now
followed her in, the four sacramental hand-shakes were accomplished,
Eugenia's this time the promptest of all.
After the equally sacramental exchange of salutations and questions and
answers had been achieved, questions as to health and general news,
which did not in the least denote any interest in these matters, answers
which were pronounced with perfunctory indifference and received in the
same way, the necessary civilized preliminaries were considered disposed
of, and the first moves of the game could be taken. M. Vallery's gambit
was to say, looking admiringly at Eugenia, "Such a piece of the month of
May oughtn't to be within four walls. Come over to the balcony a moment,
and let me show you your sister, the Luxembourg, in flower."
Mme. Vallery's move was to sit in the winged, brocaded, deep-cushioned
_bergere_, and motion Marise to sit beside her.
"Let's get our business done and off our hands first of all," she said,
smiling up at the tall girl in an admiration as frank as her husband's
for Eugenia, and for Marise, vastly more valuable.
The others, in a little chiming burst of chatter and high spirits, moved
off towards the balcony. Mme. Vallery glanced after them with an
inscrutable expression and then at Marise with a brisk, business-like
manner.
The matter at issue just then, the occasion of the girls' call, was a
fete de charite at the lycee, over which Mme. Vallery's sister was
Directrice, shoved up to that position, so the lycee teachers said, by
the political pull of Madame Vallery herself. But even they could not
deny that the connection was highly advantageous for the lycee. There
was not another one in Paris, which felt itself more "protege" in high
places, more sure of its standing with the Ministry of Education. And
its annual charity fete, from being the usual small-bourgeois bazar with
home-made aprons and pin-cushions on sale, and perhaps an inexpensive
conjuror pulling rabbits out of silk hats in the assembly-room to amuse
the children, had become one of the most elaborate and unique annual
events of the city. A good part of Tout-Paris lent its highly ornamental
presence to these affairs, and helpless before Mme. Vallery's energy and
acumen, always left much more of the contents of its purse than it had
the slightest intention of leaving in the amusingly decorated stalls
where pretty, well-trained amateur salesgirls sold the goods furnished
at cost (under pressure from Mme. Vallery), by the most fashionable
shops in Paris.
This year Marise had been asked to play, along with two other de la
Cueva pupils, in the afternoon concert which was the _clou_ of the three
days' fete. Mme. Vallery had written her to ask her to come to talk over
the choice of music, and to Eugenia's surprise and extreme pleasure had
mentioned casually that she would be glad to see her pretty friend, Miss
Mills, also. Marise had instantly wondered what she wanted to get out of
Eugenia, and now behind her fresh, open, unlined young face she was
hiding a determination to find out what, and to keep Eugenia from being
unduly exploited. She might tease Eugenia herself, but she had an
elder-sister feeling of protective care towards her. Eugenia was so
awfully defenseless, in spite of her money, and so naive still in spite
of the sophisticated lore and manners which she had so energetically
acquired. She had not learned that thorough-going suspicion of
everything, which is the only valid protection against life.
But Mme. Vallery said nothing whatever about Eugenia, other than to
comment in passing on how excessively pretty she was, a real
late-Regence type, such as one seldom sees nowadays. Marise found
herself, as usual, quite helpless before the Vatican antechamber suavity
of the older woman, and reflected, not without some resentment, that she
probably seemed as naive to Mme. Vallery, as Eugenia did to her.
After some desultory talk about other features of the fete, they got out
a pile of music, went together to the piano, where Marise tried the
effects of various combinations, and finally decided on a desirable one.
All this time M. Vallery and Eugenia spent on the balcony, leaning over
the railing, the sound of their voices and occasional laughter coming in
pleasantly through the open windows. They came in together, when Mme.
Vallery summoned them to share the Muscat and hard sweet biscuits which
it was part of her genre to serve at four o'clock instead of the newly
introduced tea.
"Business is over," she announced, settling herself in the chair back of
the little stand, where the tray stood. "Now for some talk." She put her
hand to the crystal carafe and held it there for a moment. Another of
the ecclesiastical details of her appearance was the beauty of her
hands, white and shapely.
M. Vallery seated the girls and then himself, smiling into his
beautiful, glistening brown beard. Eugenia too was smiling, with a
dazzled look of pleasure. Mme. Vallery looked down at the wine she was
pouring. Marise suppressed a qualm of distaste for M. Vallery, and
started the talk by laughing outright as at a sudden recollection of
something comic. She explained that she had just had a letter from
America, from an old cousin of her father, who always kept her au
courant of the quaint and humorous goings-on of the country-side.
"Her letters are as good as a comic paper," said Marise, sipping her
wine.
"Translatable?" asked M. Vallery, "most of the comic things that happen
in the French country-side aren't. But they're very funny for all of
that." He laughed reminiscently and stroked his beard.
Memories of Jeanne and Isabelle, and what they considered comic stories
rose blackly to Marise's mind. She turned a gay, laughing face to M.
Vallery and translated for his benefit Aunt Hetty's latest story about
what happened when a skunk got into the hen-house, and she and Agnes
went to the rescue at midnight in their night-gowns and night-caps. It
was as much to drown out what was going on inside her own mind, as to
amuse the others that she did her liveliest best by the story, telling
it with the gusto and brio which made her a favorite with people who
liked youthful high spirits. It was broad farce, nothing else, and she
did not draw back from the farcical color it needed to carry it off. It
was a story, she told herself, that either made people laugh _aux
eclats_, or it was a failure. Her audience was certainly laughing _aux
eclats_ when she finished the account of the homeric night-battle,
laughing and wiping their eyes.
"That reminds me," said M. Vallery, his eyes glistening with mirth, "of
a story about a love-sick dog that my uncle used to have."
"You're not going to tell that story here," announced his wife, with the
calm accent of mastery, which once in a while slipped from her in an
unguarded moment. He went through the form of protesting, claiming that
it was nothing--nowadays people were not prudish--but his wife settled
the matter by taking the floor herself, turning to the girls, and saying
laughingly, "That uncle of my husband's--he was one of the old
school--out of a Balzac novel of the provinces. There aren't any more
like him. It was through a to-the-death quarrel with him that Auguste
and I met each other."
This slid her easily along into talk of early days, a quarter of a
century before, when she was in one of the first lycees, at the time
when lay-school teachers were an abomination and a hissing to the decent
church-going bourgeois.
Dryly, with the inimitable terse picturesqueness of phrase which made
her famous as a talker with people who demanded a great deal more than
youthful high spirits, she took them back with her, twenty years, into
the remote provincial city where she had encountered every narrowness
possible to bigotry and reaction, and had wound it all around her little
finger. Through her highly amusing recital of how she had played on the
prejudices of those provincials, how adroitly she had employed against
them their very vices, their jealousy and suspicion of each other, their
grasping avarice, their utter dumb-beast ignorance of what modern
education meant, through all this played, like a little sulphurous
flame, her acrid scorn and contempt for them, her vitriolic satisfaction
in having cheated and beaten them, in having turned them inside out and
made fools of them, without their ever once suspecting it. Her husband's
admiration of her powers was boundless.
"That is now one of the most prosperous and successful lycees in eastern
France," he told the girls, "and every year they have a big dinner with
my wife as guest of honor, with speeches and things, and somebody lays a
wreath on her as though she were a statue. Quite a joke, hein?"
"Well, that must be an enjoyable occasion indeed," thought Marise,
seeing the scene as though she had been there; the simple-minded
provincials, trying simple-mindedly to honor the founder of their lycee;
Mme. Vallery sitting at the right hand of their Mayor, with her mild air
of deprecating the too-great honor done her--and her little sulphurous
flame of vitriolic contempt playing over the convolutions of her brain.
"Yes, it is a very pretty world we live in," thought Marise, laughing
heartily at Mme. Vallery's satirical imitation of one of the clumsy
speeches made in her honor on the last occasion.
* * * * *
She thought it still a prettier world, when in the cab as she was
accompanying Eugenia back to Auteuil, Eugenia said, radiating
satisfaction, "I'm to have my part in the fete-de-charite, too!"
"You _are_!" said Marise, "what are you going to do?"
"I'm going to give the money to pay for the appearance of a Russian
dancer ... the very newest thing. It will be the _clou_ of the entire
fete. And my name is going on the program!"
"Eh bien!" cried Marise in the liveliest surprise, "why, I didn't hear a
word about all this."
"No, it was in talking with M. Vallery that the plan was made. He hadn't
dreamed of their being able to afford such a thing. It was my own idea.
He was quite carried away by it, couldn't see how I came to think of
it."
Marise was silent, meditating profoundly on the prettiness of the world
in which we are called upon to live. The more she meditated, the hotter
grew her resentment. It was all very well to be cynical, and it was
foolish and raw to be surprised at cynicism, but this was a little ...
really a _little_ excessive! She flushed angrily as she went over in her
mind the oiled exactitude with which each cog had slipped into the next,
the casual invitation to Eugenia, M. Vallery's admiration of her beauty,
the talk on the balcony ... oh, poor Eugenia! what a fool she must have
seemed, with her naive impression that it was her own idea! And how that
fatuous barber's model must have laughed with his wife after they had
left! The shameless team-work with which they had turned the talk to
something far-away, and kept it there ... and, she flinched, her vanity
cut to the quick, her own naive blindness to the little game they were
putting up on her. Well, she would know better next time. She had
unpeeled one more layer from this pretty, pretty world of ours.
Speaking on impulse, she now said rather abruptly, to Eugenia, "I
wouldn't have much to do with the Vallerys, if I were you. He's really
an awful cad."
Eugenia looked at her with a knowing smile, "You're jealous," she said
laughing, "he didn't take _you_ off to show you the Luxembourg in
spring!"
Marise was for an instant stricken so speechless by this idea that she
could only stare. And by the time she could have spoken, she perceived
that there was nothing to say, no comment on the prettiness of the world
and the people who live in it, that began to be adequate.
At the great gates of the school-parc, Eugenia and her maid descended.
Eugenia kissed Marise good-by, the correct kiss on each cheek this time.
Nothing annoyed Eugenia more than any reference, intended or imaginary,
to the time when she had gone about kissing her school-mates on the
mouth.
After the other two had rung the clanging bell and been admitted, Marise
stood for a moment, hesitating. Then she decided to walk home, although
home was a long, long way from Auteuil. It would do her good, she
thought, setting out at the powerful, swinging gait she had for the long
walks which for her, as for the more energetic of her classmates, had
been the only form of outdoor sport accessible.
She had decided to walk so that she could cool off, and think over the
Vallerys' manoeuver, and as she walked she had it out with herself,
going deep. By the end of the first mile she knew it was foolish and
futile to resent the afternoon's comedy. That was the sort of thing
everybody tried to do, only few people were as successful as Mme.
Vallery. She knew well enough what she would get, if she pelted right in
on them now, as they sat laughing over their little triumph. They would
never dream of denying it, any more than she or her father would deny
being the author of a far-laid plan in chess, which led to an opponent's
defeat.
It was all a part of the game, and she might as well make up her mind to
it, and renew her determination to keep out of the game as far as she
personally was concerned. They were no worse than other people, only
more intelligent and more interesting. She could tell, to the very turn
of the phrase, what Mme. Vallery would say to her if she should have the
crassness to go in and make a scene.
"My dear child, no power on earth can protect naivete! It is a lamb
whose wool belongs to the best shearer. Let her sharpen her wits, your
young friend. She'll need to, sooner or later. It ought to have been the
best of practice for her, a little skirmish like the one we just
furnished her. She would do well to practise before she gets into a
serious skirmish with somebody who _really_ wants something out of her.
What is this fete-de-charite for? To please me? Not at all. To make some
money for poor people, mothers and anaemic babies. Show me another woman
in our circle who puts herself out as much as I do for the poor! Your
pretty friend has more money than is good for her. I'm only securing a
little of it for the needy."
That was true, too, thought Marise. Mme. Vallery really did a lot of
good, and very unostentatiously. If people were only far enough beneath
her in intelligence and social position and money, she would do anything
for them, very simply, in the nicest sort of way. And if she took a
rather horrid delight in making fools of people more pretentious, what
had Marise to reproach her with--she who could not refrain from
malicious teasing! It was part of the same thing. Everything was part of
the same thing. And the same thing always turned out to be very much the
same. Also, Mme. Vallery had really always been very kind to Marise,
seemed really fond of her, had given her innumerable opportunities which
otherwise she would never....
"What does she want to get out of _me_?" Marise suddenly asked herself,
struck by a sudden suspicion and wondering why she had never thought of
this before.
Pondering this, unpeeling another layer, an acrid odor in her nostrils,
she struck out into a longer, swifter gait, at her old futile trick of
trying to hurry away from what was inside her heart.
* * * * *
The tall, slim, lithe girl, walking swiftly through the sweet spring
twilight looked like the personification of spring-time with her fresh
young face, her dewy dark eyes, her sensitive mobile young mouth, red as
a dark red rose. She looked like Youth itself, welcoming in the new
season. Several people glanced after her, and smiled with sympathy for
her freshness and bloom and untouched virginal candor.