“She has demanded a new lamp: I told you she would!” This communication was made me by Madame Beaurepas a couple of days later. “And she has asked for a new tapis de lit, and she has requested me to provide Célestine with a pair of light shoes. I remarked to her that, as a general thing, domestic drudges aren’t shod with satin. That brave Célestine!”
“Mrs. Church may be exacting,” I said, “but she’s a clever little woman.”
“A lady who pays but five francs and a half shouldn’t be too clever. C’est déplacé. I don’t like the type.”
“What type then,” I asked, “do you pronounce Mrs. Church’s?”
“Mon Dieu,” said Madame Beaurepas, “c’est une de ces mamans, comme vous en avez, qui promènent leur fille.”
“She’s trying to marry her daughter? I don’t think she’s of that sort.”
But Madame Beaurepas shrewdly held to her idea. “She’s trying it in her own way; she does it very quietly. She doesn’t want an American; she wants a foreigner. And she wants a mari sérieux. But she’s travelling over Europe in search of one. She would like a magistrate.”
“A magistrate?”
“A gros bonnet of some kind; a professor or a deputy.”
“I’m awfully sorry for the poor girl,” I found myself moved to declare.
“You needn’t pity her too much; she’s afine mouche—a sly thing.”
“Ah, for that, no!” I protested. “She’s no fool, but she’s an honest creature.”
My hostess gave an ancient grin. “She has hooked you, eh? But the mother won’t have you.”
I developed my idea without heeding this insinuation. “She’s a charming girl, but she’s a shrewd politician. It’s a necessity of her case. She’s less submissive to her mother than she has to pretend to be. That’s in self-defence. It’s to make her life possible.”
“She wants to get away from her mother”—Madame Beaurepas so far confirmed me. “She wants tocourir les champs.”
“She wants to go to America, her native country.”
“Precisely. And she’ll certainly manage it.”
“I hope so!” I laughed.
“Some fine morning—or evening—she’ll go off with a young man; probably with a young American.”
“Allons donc!” I cried with disgust.
“That will be quite America enough,” pursued my cynical hostess. “I’ve kept a boarding-house for nearly half a century. I’ve seen that type.”
“Have such things as that happened chez vous?” I asked.
“Everything has happened chez moi. But nothing has happened more than once. Therefore this won’t happen here. It will be at the next place they go to, or the next. Besides, there’s here no young American pour la partie—none except you, monsieur. You’re susceptible but you’re too reasonable.”
“It’s lucky for you I’m reasonable,” I answered.“It’s thanks to my cold blood you escape a scolding!”
One morning about this time, instead of coming back to breakfast at the pension after my lectures at the Academy, I went to partake of this meal with a fellow student at an ancient eating-house in the collegiate quarter. On separating from my friend I took my way along that charming public walk known in Geneva as the Treille, a shady terrace, of immense elevation, overhanging a stretch of the lower town. Here are spreading trees and well-worn benches, and over the tiles and chimneys of theville bassea view of the snow-crested Alps. On the other side, as you turn your back to the view, the high level is overlooked by a row of tall sober-facedhôtels, the dwellings of the local aristocracy. I was fond of the place, resorting to it for stimulation of my sense of the social scene at large. Presently, as I lingered there on this occasion, I became aware of a gentleman seated not far from where I stood, his back to the Alpine chain, which this morning was all radiant, and a newspaper unfolded in his lap. He wasn’t reading, however; he only stared before him in gloomy contemplation. I don’t know whether I recognised first the newspaper or its detainer; one, in either case, would have helped me to identify the other. One was theNew York Herald—the other of course was Mr. Ruck. As I drew nearer he moved his eyes from the stony succession, the grey old high-featured house-masks, on the other side of the terrace, and I knew by the expression of his face just how he had been feeling about these distinguished abodes. He had made up his mind that their proprietors were a “mean” narrow-minded unsociable company that plunged its knotted roots into a superfluous past. I endeavoured therefore, as I sat down beside him, to strike a pleasanter note.
“The Alps, from here, do make a wondrous show!”
“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Ruck without a stir, “I’ve examined the Alps. Fine thing in its way, the view—fine thing. Beauties of nature—that sort of thing. We came up on purpose to look at it.”
“Your ladies then have been with you?”
“Yes—I guess they’re fooling round. They’re awfully restless. They keep sayingI’mrestless, but I’m as quiet as a sleeping child tothem. It takes,” he added in a moment dryly, “the form of an interest in the stores.”
“And are the stores what they’re after now?”
“Yes—unless this is one of the days the stores don’t keep. They regret them, but I wish there were more of them! They told me to sit here a while and they’d just have a look. I generally know what that means—it’stheirform of scenery. But that’s the principal interest for ladies,” he added, retracting his irony. “We thought we’d come up here and see the cathedral; Mrs. Church seemed to think it a dead loss we shouldn’t see the cathedral, especially as we hadn’t seen many yet. And I had to come up to the banker’s anyway. Well, we certainly saw the cathedral. I don’t know as we’re any the better for it, and I don’t know as I should know it again. But we saw it anyway, stone by stone—and heard about it century by century. I don’t know as I should want to go there regularly, but I suppose it will give us in conversation a kind of hold on Mrs. Church, hey? I guess we want something of that kind. Well,” Mr. Ruck continued, “I stepped in at the banker’s to see if there wasn’t something, and they handed me out an oldHerald.”
“Well, I hope theHerald’sfull of good news,” I returned.
“Can’t say it is. Damned bad news.”
“Political,” I inquired, “or commercial?”
“Oh hang politics! It’s business, sir. Thereain’tany business. It’s all gone to—” and Mr. Ruck became profane. “Nine failures in one day, and two of them in our locality. What do you say to that?”
“I greatly hope they haven’t inconvenienced you,” was all I could gratify him with.
“Well, I guess they haven’t affected me quite desirably. So many houses on fire, that’s all. If they happen to take place right where you live they don’t increase the value of your own property. When mine catches I suppose they’ll write and tell me—one of these days when they get round to me. I didn’t get a blamed letter this morning; I suppose they think I’m having such a good time over here it’s a pity to break in. If I could attend to business for about half an hour I’d find out something. But I can’t, and it’s no use talking. The state of my health was never so unsatisfactory as it was about five o’clock this morning.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said, “and I recommend you strongly not to think of business.”
“I don’t,” Mr. Ruck replied. “You can’tmakeme. I’m thinking of cathedrals. I’m thinking of the way they used to chain you up under them or burn you up in front of them—in those high old times. I’m thinking of the beauties of nature too,” he went on, turning round on the bench and leaning his elbow on the parapet. “You can get killed over there I suppose also”—and he nodded at the shining crests. “I’m thinking of going over—because, whatever the danger, I seem more afraid not to. That’s why I do most things. How do you get over?” he sighed.
“Over to Chamouni?”
“Over to those hills. Don’t they run a train right up?”
“You can go to Chamouni,” I said. “You can goto Grindelwald and Zermatt and fifty other places. You can’t go by rail, but you can drive.”
“All right, we’ll drive—you can’t tell the difference in these cars. Yes,” Mr. Ruck proceeded, “Chamouni’s one of the places we put down. I hope there are good stores in Chamouni.” He spoke with a quickened ring and with an irony more pointed than commonly served him. It was as if he had been wrought upon, and yet his general submission to fate was still there. I judged he had simply taken, in the face of disaster, a sudden sublime resolution not to worry. He presently twisted himself about on his bench again and began to look out for his companions. “Well, theyaretaking a look,” he resumed; “I guess they’ve struck something somewhere. And they’ve got a carriage waiting outside of that archway too. They seem to do a big business in archways here, don’t they? They like to have a carriage to carry home the things—those ladies of mine. Then they’re sure they’ve got ’em.” The ladies, after this, to do them justice, were not very long in appearing. They came toward us from under the archway to which Mr. Ruck had somewhat invidiously alluded, slowly and with a jaded air. My companion watched them as they advanced. “They’re right down tired. When they look like that it kind o’ foots up.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Ruck, “I’m glad you’ve had some company.” Her husband looked at her, in silence, through narrowed eyelids, and I suspected that her unusually gracious observation was prompted by the less innocent aftertaste of her own late pastime.
Her daughter glanced at me with the habit of straighter defiance. “It would have been more proper ifwehad had the company. Why didn’t you come after us instead of sneaking there?” she asked of Mr. Ruck’s companion.
“I was told by your father,” I explained, “that youwere engaged in sacred rites.” If Miss Ruck was less conciliatory it would be scarcely, I felt sure, because she had been more frugal. It was rather because her conception of social intercourse appeared to consist of the imputation to as many persons as possible—that is to as many subject males—of some scandalous neglect of her charms and her claims. “Well, for a gentleman there’s nothing so sacred as ladies’ society,” she replied in the manner of a person accustomed to giving neat retorts.
“I suppose you refer to the cathedral,” said her mother. “Well, I must say we didn’t go back there. I don’t know what it may be for regular attendants, but it doesn’t meet my idea of a really pleasant place of worship. Few of these old buildings do,” Mrs. Ruck further mentioned.
“Well, we discovered a little lace-shop, where I guess I could regularly attend!” her daughter took occasion to announce without weak delay.
Mr. Ruck looked at his child; then he turned about again, leaning on the parapet and gazing away at the “hills.”
“Well, the place was certainly not expensive,” his wife said with her eyes also on the Alps.
“We’re going up to Chamouni,” he pursued. “You haven’t any call for lace up there.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you’ve decided to go somewhere,” Mrs. Ruck returned. “I don’t want to be a fixture at an old pension.”
“You can wear lace anywhere,” her daughter reminded us, “if you put it on right. That’s the great thing with lace. I don’t think they know how to wear lace in Europe. I know how I mean to wear mine; but I mean to keep it till I get home.”
Mr. Ruck transferred his melancholy gaze to her elaborately-appointed little person; there was a great deal of very new-looking detail in Miss Ruck’sappearance. Then in a tone of voice quite out of consonance with his facial despondency, “Have you purchased a great deal?” he inquired.
“I’ve purchased enough for you to make a fuss about.”
“He can’t make a fuss aboutthat,” said Mrs. Ruck.
“Well, you’ll see!”—the girl had unshaken confidence.
The subject of this serenity, however, went on in the same tone: “Have you got it in your pocket? Why don’t you put it on—why don’t you hang it round you?”
“I’ll hang it roundyouif you don’t look out!” cried Miss Ruck.
“Don’t you want to show it off to this gentleman?” he sociably continued.
“Mercy, how you do carry on!” his wife sighed.
“Well, I want to be lively. There’s every reason for it. We’re going up to Chamouni.”
“You’re real restless—that’s what’s the matter with you.” And Mrs. Ruck roused herself from her own repose.
“No, I ain’t,” said her husband. “I never felt so quiet. I feel as peaceful as a little child.”
Mrs. Ruck, who had no play of mind, looked at her daughter and at me. “Well, I hope you’ll improve,” she stated with a certain flatness.
“Send in the bills,” he went on, rising to match. “Don’t let yourself suffer from want, Sophy. I don’t care what you do now. We can’t be more than gay, and we can’t be worse than broke.”
Sophy joined her mother with a little toss of her head, and we followed the ladies to the carriage, where the younger addressed her father. “In your place, Mr. Ruck, I wouldn’t want to flaunt my meanness quite so much before strangers.”
He appeared to feel the force of this rebuke, surely deserved by a man on whom the humiliation of seeing the main ornaments of his hearth betray the ascendency of that character had never yet been laid. He flushed and was silent; his companions got into their vehicle, the front seat of which was adorned with a large parcel. Mr. Ruck gave the parcel a poke with his umbrella and turned to me with a grimly penitent smile. “After all, for the ladies, that’s the principal interest.”
Old M. Pigeonneau had more than once offered me the privilege of a walk in his company, but his invitation had hitherto, for one reason or another, always found me hampered. It befell, however, one afternoon that I saw him go forth for a vague airing with an unattended patience that attracted my sympathy. I hastily overtook him and passed my hand into his venerable arm, an overture that produced in the good old man so rejoicing a response that he at once proposed we should direct our steps to the English Garden: no scene less consecrated to social ease was worthy of our union. To the English Garden accordingly we went; it lay beyond the bridge and beside the lake. It was always pretty and now was really recreative; a band played furiously in the centre and a number of discreet listeners sat under the small trees on benches and little chairs or strolled beside the blue water. We joined the strollers, we observed our companions and conversed on obvious topics. Some of these last, of course, were the pretty women who graced the prospect and who, in the light of M. Pigeonneau’s comprehensive criticism, appeared surprisingly numerous. He seemed bent upon our making up our minds as to which might be prettiest, and this was an innocent game in which I consented to take a hand.
Suddenly my companion stopped, pressing my armwith the liveliest emotion. “La voilà, la voilà, the prettiest!” he quickly murmured; “coming toward us in a blue dress with the other.” It was at the other I was looking, for the other, to my surprise, was our interesting fellow pensioner, the daughter of the most systematic of mothers. M. Pigeonneau meanwhile had redoubled his transports—he had recognised Miss Ruck. “Oh la belle rencontre, nos aimables convives—the prettiest girl in the world in effect!” And then after we had greeted and joined the young ladies, who, like ourselves, were walking arm in arm and enjoying the scene, he addressed himself to the special object of his admiration, Mees Roque. “I was citing you with enthusiasm to my young friend here even before I had recognised you, mademoiselle.”
“I don’t believe in French compliments,” remarked Miss Sophy, who presented her back to the smiling old man.
“Are you and Miss Ruck walking alone?” I asked of her companion. “You had better accept M. Pigeonneau’s gallant protection, to say nothing of mine.”
Aurora Church had taken her hand from Miss Ruck’s arm; she inclined her head to the side and shone at me while her open parasol revolved on her shoulder. “Which is most improper—to walk alone or to walk with gentlemen that one picks up? I want to do what’s most improper.”
“What perversity,” I asked, “are you, with an ingenuity worthy of a better cause, trying to work out?”
“He thinks you can’t understand him when he talks like that,” said Miss Ruck. “But Idounderstand you,” she flirted at me—“always!”
“So I’ve always ventured to hope, my dear Miss Ruck.”
“Well, if I didn’t it wouldn’t be much loss!” cried this young lady.
“Allons, en marche!” trumpeted M. Pigeonneau, all gallant urbanity and undiscouraged by her impertinence. “Let us make together the tour of the garden.” And he attached himself to Miss Ruck with a respectful elderly grace which treated her own lack even of the juvenile form of that attraction as some flower of alien modesty, and was ever sublimely conscious of a mission to place modesty at its ease. This ill-assorted couple walked in front, while Aurora Church and I strolled along together.
“I’m sure this is more improper,” said my companion; “this is delightfully improper. I don’t say that as a compliment to you,” she added. “I’d say it to any clinging man, no matter how stupid.”
“Oh I’m clinging enough,” I answered; “but I’m as stupid as you could wish, and this doesn’t seem to me wrong.”
“Not for you, no; only for me. There’s nothing that a man can do that’s wrong, is there?En morale, you know, I mean. Ah, yes, he can kill and steal; but I think there’s nothing else, is there?”
“Well, it’s a nice question. One doesn’t know how those things are taken till after one has done them. Then one’s enlightened.”
“And you mean you’ve never been enlightened? You make yourself out very good.”
“That’s better than making one’s self out very bad, as you do.”
“Ah,” she explained, “you don’t know the consequences of a false position.”
I was amused at her great formula. “What do you mean by yours being one?”
“Oh I mean everything. For instance, I’ve to pretend to be a jeune fille. I’m not a jeune fille; no American girl’s a jeune fille; an American girl’san intelligent responsible creature. I’ve to pretend to be idiotically innocent, but I’m not in the least innocent.”
This, however, was easy to meet. “You don’t in the least pretend to be innocent; you pretend to be—what shall I call it?—uncannily wise.”
“That’s no pretence. Iamuncannily wise. You could call it nothing more true.”
I went along with her a little, rather thrilled by this finer freedom. “You’re essentially not an American girl.”
She almost stopped, looking at me; there came a flush to her cheek. “Voilà!” she said. “There’s my false position. I want to be an American girl, and I’ve been hideously deprived of that immense convenience, that beautiful resource.”
“Do you want me to tell you?” I pursued with interest. “It would be utterly impossible to an American girl—I mean unperverted, and that’s the whole point—to talk as you’re talking to me now.”
The expressive eagerness she showed for this was charming. “Please tell me then! How would she talk?”
“I can’t tell you all the things she’d say, but I think I can tell you most of the things she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t reason out her conduct as you seem to me to do.”
Aurora gave me the most flattering attention. “I see. She would be simpler. To do very simply things not at all simple—that’s the American girl!”
I greatly enjoyed our intellectual relation. “I don’t know whether you’re a French girl, or what you are, but, you know, I find you witty.”
“Ah, you mean I strike false notes!” she quite comically wailed. “See how my whole sense for such things has been ruined. False notes are just what I want to avoid. I wish you’d always tell me.”
The conversational union between Miss Ruck and her neighbour, in front of us, had evidently not borne fruit. Miss Ruck suddenly turned round to us with a question. “Don’t you want some ice-cream?”
“Shedoesn’t strike false notes,” I declared.
We had come into view of a manner of pavilion or large kiosk, which served as a café and at which the delicacies generally procurable at such an establishment were dispensed. Miss Ruck pointed to the little green tables and chairs set out on the gravel; M. Pigeonneau, fluttering with a sense of dissipation, seconded the proposal, and we presently sat down and gave our order to a nimble attendant. I managed again to place myself next Aurora; our companions were on the other side of the table.
My neighbour rejoiced to extravagance in our situation. “This is best of all—I never believed I should come to a café with two strange and possibly depraved men! Now you can’t persuade me this isn’t wrong.”
“To make it wrong,” I returned, “we ought to see your mother coming down that path.”
“Ah, my mother makes everything wrong,” she cried, attacking with a little spoon in the shape of a spade the apex of a pink ice. And then she returned to her idea of a moment before. “You must promise to tell me—to warn me in some way—whenever I strike a false note. You must give a little cough, like that—ahem!”
“You’ll keep me very busy and people will think I’m in a consumption.”
“Voyons,” she continued, “why have you never talked to me more? Is that a false note? Why haven’t you been ‘attentive’? That’s what American girls call it; that’s what Miss Ruck calls it.”
I assured myself that our companions were out of ear-shot and that Miss Ruck was much occupied witha large vanilla cream. “Because you’re always interlaced with that young lady. There’s no getting near you.”
Aurora watched her friend while the latter devoted herself to her ice. “You wonder, no doubt, why I should care for her at all. So does mamma; elle s’y perd. I don’t like her particularly; je n’en suis pas folle. But she gives me information; she tells me about her—your—everything butmy—extraordinary country. Mamma has always tried to prevent my knowing anything about it, and I’m all the more devoured with curiosity. And then Miss Ruck’s so very fresh.”
“I may not be so fresh as Miss Ruck,” I said, “but in future, when you want information, I recommend you to come to me for it.”
“Ah, but our friend offers to take me there; she invites me to go back with her, to stay with her. You couldn’t do that, could you?” And my companion beautifully faced me on it. “Bon, a false note! I can see it by your face; you remind me of an outraged maître de piano.”
“You overdo the character—the poor American girl,” I said. “Are you going to stay with that delightful family?”
“I’ll go and stay with any one who will take me or ask me. It’s a real nostalgie. She says that in New York—in Thirty-Seventh Street near Fourth Avenue—I should have the most lovely time.”
“I’ve no doubt you’d enjoy it.”
“Absolute liberty to begin with.”
“It seems to me you’ve a certain liberty here,” I returned.
“Ah,this? Oh I shall pay for this. I shall be punished by mamma and lectured by Madame Galopin.”
“The wife of the pasteur?”
“His digne épouse. Madame Galopin, for mamma,is the incarnation of European opinion. That’s what vexes me with mamma, her thinking so much of people like Madame Galopin. Going to see Madame Galopin—mamma calls that being in European society. European society! I’m so sick of that expression; I’ve heard it since I was six years old. Who’s Madame Galopin—who the devil thinks anything of her here? She’s nobody; she’s the dreariest of frumps; she’s perfectly third-rate. If I like your America better than mamma I also know my Europe better.”
“But your mother, certainly,” I objected a trifle timidly—for my young lady was excited and had a charming little passion in her eye—“your mother has a great many social relations all over the continent.”
“She thinks so, but half the people don’t care for us. They’re not so good as we and they know it—I’ll do them that justice—so that they wonder why we should care for them. When we’re polite to them they think the less of us; there are plenty of people like that. Mamma thinks so much of them simply because they’re foreigners. If I could tell you all the ugly stupid tenth-rate people I’ve had to talk to for no better reason than that they werede leur pays!—Germans, French, Italians, Turks, everything. When I complain mamma always says that at any rate it’s practice in the language. And she makes so much of the most impossible English too; I don’t know whatthat’spractice in.”
Before I had time to suggest an hypothesis as regards this latter point I saw something that made me rise—I fear with an undissimulated start—from my chair. This was nothing less than the neat little figure of Mrs. Church—a perfect model of the femme comme il faut—approaching our table with an impatient step and followed most unexpectedly in her advance by the pre-eminent form of Mr. Ruck, whosehigh hat had never looked so high. She had evidently come in search of her daughter, and if she had commanded this gentleman’s attendance it had been on no more intimate ground than that of his unenvied paternity to her guilty child’s accomplice. My movement had given the alarm and my young friend and M. Pigeonneau got up; Miss Ruck alone didn’t, in the local phrase, derange herself. Mrs. Church, beneath her modest little bonnet, looked thoroughly resolute though not at all agitated; she came straight to her daughter, who received her with a smile, and then she took the rest of us in very fixedly and tranquilly and without bowing. I must do both these ladies the justice that neither of them made the least little “scene.”
“I’ve come for you, dearest,” said the mother.
“Yes, dear mamma.”
“Come for you—come for you,” Mrs. Church repeated, looking down at the relics of our little feast, on which she seemed somehow to shed at once the lurid light of the disreputable. “I was obliged to appeal to Mr. Ruck’s assistance. I was much perplexed. I thought a long time.”
“Well, Mrs. Church, I was glad to see you perplexed once in your life!” cried Mr. Ruck with friendly jocosity. “But you came pretty straight for all that. I had hard work to keep up with you.”
“We’ll take a cab, Aurora,” Mrs. Church went on without heeding this pleasantry—“a closed one; we’ll enter it at once. Come, ma fille.”
“Yes, dear mamma.” The girl had flushed for humiliation, but she carried it bravely off; and her grimace as she looked round at us all and her eyes met mine didn’t keep her, I thought, from being beautiful. “Good-bye. I’ve had a ripping time.”
“We mustn’t linger,” said her mother; “it’sfive o’clock. We’re to dine, you know, with Madame Galopin.”
“I had quite forgotten,” Aurora declared. “That will be even more charming.”
“Do you want me to assist you to carry her back, ma’am?” asked Mr. Ruck.
Mrs. Church covered him for a little with her coldest contemplation. “Do you prefer then to leave your daughter to finish the evening with these gentlemen?”
Mr. Ruck pushed back his hat and scratched the top of his head. “Well, I don’t know. How’d you like that, Sophy?”
“Well, I never!” gasped Sophy as Mrs. Church marched off with her daughter.
I had half-expected a person of so much decision, and above all of so much consistency, would make me feel the weight of her disapproval of my own share in that little act of revelry by the most raffish part of the lakeside. But she maintained her claim to being a highly reasonable woman—I couldn’t but admire the justice of this pretension—by recognising my practical detachment. I had taken her daughter as I found her, which was, according to Mrs. Church’s view, in a very equivocal position. The natural instinct of a young man in such a situation is not to protest but to profit; and it was clear to Mrs. Church that I had had nothing to do with Miss Aurora’s appearing in public under the compromising countenance, as she regarded the matter, of Miss Ruck. Besides, she liked to converse, and she apparently did me the honour to consider that of all the inmates of the Pension Beaurepas I was the best prepared for that exercise. I found her in the salon a couple of evenings after the incident I have just narrated, and I approached her with a view to making my peace with her if this should prove necessary. But Mrs. Church was as gracious as I could have desired; she put her marker into her inveterate volume and folded her plump little hands on the cover. She made no specific allusion to the English Garden; she embarked rather on those general considerations in which her cultivated mind was so much at home.
“Always at your deep studies, Mrs. Church,” I didn’t hesitate freely to observe.
“Que voulez-vous, monsieur? To say studies is to say too much; one doesn’t study in the parlour of a boarding-house of this character. But I do what I can; I’ve always done what I can. That’s all I’ve ever claimed.”
“No one can do more, and you appear to have done a great deal.”
“Do you know my secret?” she asked with an air of brightening confidence. And this treasure hung there a little temptingly before she revealed it. “To care only for thebest! To do the best, to know the best—to have, to desire, to recognise, only the best. That’s what I’ve always done in my little quiet persistent way. I’ve gone through Europe on my devoted little errand, seeking, seeing, heeding, only the best. And it hasn’t been for myself alone—it has been for my daughter. My daughter has had the best. We’re not rich, but I can say that.”
“She has hadyou, madam,” I pronounced finely.
“Certainly, such as I am, I’ve been devoted. We’ve got something everywhere; a little here, a little there. That’s the real secret—to get something everywhere; you always can if youaredevoted. Sometimes it has been a little music, sometimes a little deeper insight into the history of art; sometimes into that of literature, politics, economics: every little counts, you know. Sometimes it has been just a glimpse, a view, a lovely landscape, a mere impression. We’ve always been on the look-out. Sometimes it has been a valued friendship, a delightful social tie.”
“Here comes the ‘European society,’ the poor daughter’s bugbear,” I said to myself. “Certainly,” I remarked aloud—I admit rather hypocritically—“if you’ve lived a great deal in pensions you must have got acquainted with lots of people.”
Mrs. Church dropped her eyes an instant; taking it up, however, as one for whom discrimination was always at hand. “I think the European pension system in many respects remarkable and in some satisfactory. But of the friendships that we’ve formed few have been contracted in establishments of this stamp.”
“I’m sorry to hear that!” I ruefully laughed.
“I don’t say it for you, though I might say it for some others. We’ve been interested in Europeanhomes.”
“Ah there you’re beyond me!”
“Naturally”—she quietly assented. “We have the entrée of the old Genevese society. I like its tone. I prefer it to that of Mr. Ruck,” added Mrs. Church calmly; “to that of Mrs. Ruck and Miss Ruck. To that of Miss Ruck in particular.”
“Ah the poor Ruckshaveno tone,” I pleaded. “That’s just the point of them. Don’t take them more seriously than they take themselves.”
Well, she would see what she could do. But she bent grave eyes on me. “Are they really fair examples?”
“Examples of what?”
“Of our American tendencies.”
“‘Tendencies’ is a big word, dear lady; tendencies are difficult to calculate.” I used even a greater freedom. “And you shouldn’t abuse those good Rucks, who have been so kind to your daughter. They’ve invited her to come and stay with them in Thirty-Seventh Street near Fourth Avenue.”
“Aurora has told me. It might be very serious.”
“It might be very droll,” I said.
“To me,” she declared, “it’s all too terrible. I think we shall have to leave the Pension Beaurepas. I shall go back to Madame Chamousset.”
“On account of the Rucks?” I asked.
“Pray why don’t they go themselves? I’ve given them some excellent addresses—written down the very hours of the trains. They were going to Appenzell; I thought it was arranged.”
“They talk of Chamouni now,” I said; “but they’re very helpless and undecided.”
“I’ll give them some Chamouni addresses. Mrs. Ruck will send for achaise à porteurs; I’ll give her the name of a man who lets them lower than you get them at the hotels. After that theymustgo.”
She had thoroughly fixed it, as we said; but her large assumptions ruffled me. “I nevertheless doubt,” I returned, “if Mr. Ruck will ever really be seen on the Mer de Glace—great as might be the effect there of that high hat. He’s not like you; he doesn’t value his European privileges. He takes no interest. He misses Wall Street all the time. As his wife says, he’s deplorably restless, but I guess Chamouni won’t quiet him. So you mustn’t depend too much on the effect of your addresses.”
“Is it, in its strange mixture of the barbaric and the effete, a frequent type?” asked Mrs. Church with all the force of her noble appetite for knowledge.
“I’m afraid so. Mr. Ruck’s a broken-down man of business. He’s broken-down in health and I think he must be broken-down in fortune. He has spent his whole life in buying and selling and watching prices, so that he knows how to do nothing else. His wife and daughter have spent their lives, not in selling, but in buying—with a considerable indifference to prices—and they on their side know how to do nothing else. To get something in a ‘store’ that they can put on their backs—that’s their one idea; they haven’t another in their heads. Of course they spend no end of money, and they do it with an implacable persistence, with a mixture of audacity and of cunning. They do it in his teeth and they do it behind hisback; the mother protects the daughter, while the daughter eggs on the mother. Between them they’re bleeding him to death.”
“Ah what a picture!” my friend calmly sighed. “I’m afraid they’re grossly illiterate.”
“I share your fears. We make a great talk at home about education, but see how little that ideal has ever breathed on them. The vision of fine clothes rides them like a fury. They haven’t an idea of any sort—not even a worse one—to compete with it. Poor Mr. Ruck, who’s a mush of personal and private concession—I don’t know what he may have been in the business world—strikes me as a really tragic figure. He’s getting bad news every day from home; his affairs may be going to the dogs. He’s unable, with his lost nerve, to apply himself; so he has to stand and watch his fortunes ebb. He has been used to doing things in a big way and he feels ‘mean’ if he makes a fuss about bills. So the ladies keep sending them in.”
“But haven’t they common sense? Don’t they know they’re marching to ruin?”
“They don’t believe it. The duty of an American husband and father is to keep them going. If he asks them how, that’s his own affair. So by way of not being mean, of being a good American husband and father, poor Ruck stands staring at bankruptcy.”
Mrs. Church, with her cold competence, picked my story over. “Why, if Aurora were to go to stay with them she mightn’t even have a goodnourriture.”
“I don’t on the whole recommend,” I smiled, “that your daughter should pay a visit to Thirty-Seventh Street.”
She took it in—with its various bearings—and had after all, I think, to renounce the shrewd view of a contingency. “Why should I be subjected to such trials—so sadly éprouveé?” From the momentnothing at all was to be got from the Rucks—not even eventual gratuitous board—she washed her hands of them altogether. “Why should a daughter of mine like that dreadful girl?”
“Doesshe like her?”
She challenged me nobly. “Pray do you mean that Aurora’s such a hypocrite?”
I saw no reason to hesitate. “A little, since you inquire. I think you’ve forced her to be.”
“I?”—she was shocked. “Ineverforce my daughter!”
“She’s nevertheless in a false position,” I returned. “She hungers and thirsts for her own great country; she wants to ‘come out’ in New York, which is certainly, socially speaking, the El Dorado of young ladies. She likes any one, for the moment, who will talk to her of that and serve as a connecting-link with the paradise she imagines there. Miss Ruck performs this agreeable office.”
“Your idea is, then, that if she were to go with such a person to America she could drop her afterwards?”
I complimented Mrs. Church on her quickly-working mind, but I explained that I prescribed no such course. “I can’t imagine her—when it should come to the point—embarking with the famille Roque. But I wish she might go nevertheless.”
Mrs. Church shook her head lucidly—she found amusement in my inappropriate zeal. “I trust my poor child may never be guilty of so fatal a mistake. She’s completely in error; she’s wholly unadapted to the peculiar conditions of American life. It wouldn’t please her. She wouldn’t sympathise. My daughter’s ideal’s not the ideal of the class of young women to which Miss Ruck belongs. I fear they’re very numerous; they pervade the place, they give the tone.”
“It’s you who are mistaken,” I said. “There areplenty of Miss Rucks, and she has a terrible significance—though largely as the product of her weak-kneed sire and his ‘absorption in business.’ But there are other forms. Go home for six months and see.”
“I’ve not, unfortunately, the means to make costly experiments. My daughter,” Mrs. Church pursued, “has had great advantages—rare advantages—and I should be very sorry to believe thatau fondshe doesn’t appreciate them. One thing’s certain: I must remove her from this pernicious influence. We must part company with this deplorable family. If Mr. Ruck and his ladies can’t be induced to proceed to Chamouni—a journey from which no traveller with the smallest self-respect can dispense himself—my daughter and I shall be obliged to retire from the field.Weshall go to Dresden.”
“To Dresden?” I submissively echoed.
“The capital of Saxony. I had arranged to go there for the autumn, but it will be simpler to go immediately. There are several works in the gallery with which Aurora has not, I think, sufficiently familiarised herself. It’s especially strong in the seventeenth-century schools.”
As my companion offered me this information I caught sight of Mr. Ruck, who lounged in with his hands in his pockets and his elbows making acute angles. He had his usual anomalous appearance of both seeking and avoiding society, and he wandered obliquely toward Mrs. Church, whose last words he had overheard. “The seventeenth-century schools,” he said as if he were slowly weighing some very small object in a very large pair of scales. “Now do you suppose theyhadschools at that period?”
Mrs. Church rose with a good deal of majesty, making no answer to this incongruous jest. She clasped her large volume to her neat little bosom and looked at our luckless friend more in pity thanin anger, though more in edification than in either. “I had a letter this morning from Chamouni.”
“Well,” he made answer, “I suppose you’ve got friends all round.”
“I’ve friends at Chamouni, but they’re called away. To their great regret.” I had got up too; I listened to this statement and wondered. I’m almost ashamed to mention my wanton thought. I asked myself whether this mightn’t be a mere extemporised and unestablished truth—a truth begotten of a deep desire; but the point has never been cleared. “They’re giving up some charming rooms; perhaps you’d like them. I would suggest your telegraphing. The weather’s glorious,” continued Mrs. Church, “and the highest peaks are now perceived with extraordinary distinctness.”
Mr. Ruck listened, as he always listened, respectfully. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know as I want to go up Mount Blank. That’s the principal attraction, ain’t it?”
“There are many others. I thought I would offer you an exceptional opportunity.”
“Well,” he returned, “I guess you know, and if I couldletyou fix me we’d probably have some big times. But I seem to strike opportunities—well, in excess of my powers. I don’t seem able to respond.”
“It only needs a little decision,” remarked Mrs. Church with an air that was a perfect example of this virtue. “I wish you good-night, sir.” And she moved noiselessly away.
Mr. Ruck, with his long legs apart, stood staring after her; then he transferred his perfectly quiet eyes to me. “Does she own a hotel over there? Has she got any stock in Mount Blank?” Indeed in view of the way he had answered her I thought the dear man—to whom I found myself becoming hourly more attached—had beautiful manners.
The next day Madame Beaurepas held out to me with her own venerable fingers a missive which proved to be a telegram. After glancing at it I let her know that it appeared to call me away. My brother had arrived in England and he proposed I should meet him there; he had come on business and was to spend but three weeks in Europe. “But my house empties itself!” the old woman cried on this. “The famille Roque talks of leaving me and Madame Cheurche nous fait la réverénce.”
“Mrs. Church is going away?”
“She’s packing her trunk; she’s a very extraordinary person. Do you know what she asked me this morning? To invent some combination by which the famille Roque should take itself off. I assured her I was no such inventor. That poor famille Roque! ‘Oblige me by getting rid of them,’ said Madame Cheurche—quite as she would have asked Célestine to remove a strong cheese. She speaks as if the world were made for Madame Cheurche. I hinted that if she objected to the company there was a very simple remedy—and at present elle fait ses paquets.”
“She really asked you to get the Rucks out of the house?”
“She asked me to tell them that their rooms had been let three months ago to another family. She has an aplomb!”
Mrs. Church’s aplomb caused me considerable diversion; I’m not sure that it wasn’t in some degree to laugh at my leisure that I went out into the garden that evening to smoke a cigar. The night was dark and not particularly balmy, and most of my fellow pensioners, after dinner, had remained indoors. A long straight walk conducted from the door of the house to the ancient grille I’ve described, and I stood here for some time looking through the iron bars at the silent empty street. The prospect was not enlivening and I presently turned away. At this moment I saw in the distance the door of the house open and throw a shaft of lamplight into the darkness. Into the lamplight stepped the figure of an apparently circumspect female, as they say in the old stories, who presently closed the door behind her. She disappeared in the dusk of the garden and I had seen her but an instant; yet I remained under the impression that Aurora Church, on the eve of departure, had come out to commune, like myself, with isolation.
I lingered near the gate, keeping the red tip of my cigar turned toward the house, and before long a slight but interesting figure emerged from among the shadows of the trees and encountered the rays of a lamp that stood just outside the gate. My fellow solitary was in fact Aurora Church, who acknowledged my presence with an impatience not wholly convincing.
“Ought I to retire—to return to the house?”
“If you ought,” I replied, “I should be very sorry to tell you so.”
“But we’re all alone. There’s no one else in the garden.”
“It’s not the first time, then, that I’ve been alone with a young lady. I’m not at all terrified.”
“Ah, but I?” she wailed to extravagance. “I’veneverbeen alone—!” Quickly, however, she interrupted herself. “Bon, there’s another false note!”
“Yes, I’m obliged to admit that one’s very false.”
She stood looking at me. “I’m going away to-morrow; after that there will be no one to tell me.”
“That will matter little,” I presently returned. “Telling you will do no good.”
“Ah, why do you say that?” she all ruefully asked.
I said it partly because it was true, but I said it for other reasons, as well, which I found hard to define. Standing there bareheaded in the night air, in the vague light, this young lady took on an extreme interest, which was moreover not diminished by a suspicion on my own part that she had come into the garden knowing me to be there. I thought her charming, I thought her remarkable and felt very sorry for her; but as I looked at her the terms in which Madame Beaurepas had ventured to characterise her recurred to me with a certain force. I had professed a contempt for them at the time, but it now came into my head that perhaps this unfortunately situated, this insidiously mutinous young creature was in quest of an effective preserver. She was certainly not a girl to throw herself at a man’s head, but it was possible that in her intense—her almost morbid—desire to render operative an ideal charged perhaps after all with as many fallacies as her mother affirmed, she might do something reckless and irregular—something in which a sympathetic compatriot, as yet unknown, would find his profit. The image, unshaped though it was, of this sympathetic compatriot filled me with a semblance of envy. For some moments I was silent, conscious of these things; after which I answered her question. “Because some things—some differences—are felt, not learned. To you liberty’s not natural; you’re like a person who has bought a repeating watch and is, in his satisfaction,constantly taking it out of his pocket to hear it sound. To a real American girl her liberty’s a very vulgarly-ticking old clock.”
“Ah, you mean then,” said my young friend, “that my mother has ruined me?”
“Ruined you?”
“She has so perverted my mind that when I try to be natural I’m necessarily indecent.”
I threw up hopeless arms. “That again’s a false note!”
She turned away. “I think you’re cruel.”
“By no means,” I declared; “because, for my own taste, I prefer you as—as—”
On my hesitating she turned back. “As what?”
“As you are!”
She looked at me a while again, and then she said in a little reasoning tone that reminded me of her mother’s, only that it was conscious and studied, “I wasn’t aware that I’m under any particular obligation to please you!” But she also gave a clear laugh, quite at variance with this stiffness. Suddenly I thought her adorable.
“Oh there’s no obligation,” I said, “but people sometimes have preferences. I’m very sorry you’re going away.”
“What does it matter to you? You are going yourself.”
“As I’m going in a different direction, that makes all the greater separation.”
She answered nothing; she stood looking through the bars of the tall gate at the empty dusky street. “This grille is like a cage,” she said at last.
“Fortunately it’s a cage that will open.” And I laid my hand on the lock.
“Don’t open it”; and she pressed the gate close. “If you should open it I’d go out. There you’d be, monsieur—for I should never return.”
I treated it as wholly thrilling, and indeed I quite found it so. “Where should you go?”
“To America.”
“Straight away?”
“Somehow or other. I’d go to the American consul. I’d beg him to give me money—to help me.”
I received this assertion without a smile; I was not in a smiling humour. On the contrary I felt singularly excited and kept my hand on the lock of the gate. I believed, or I thought I believed, what my companion said, and I had—absurd as it may appear—an irritated vision of her throwing herself on consular tenderness. It struck me for a moment that to pass out of that gate with this yearning straining young creature would be to pass to some mysterious felicity. If I were only a hero of romance I would myself offer to take her to America.
In a moment more perhaps I should have persuaded myself that I was one, but at this juncture I heard a sound hostile to the romantic note. It was nothing less than the substantial tread of Célestine, the cook, who stood grinning at us as we turned about from our colloquy.
“I ask bien pardon,” said Célestine. “The mother of mademoiselle desires that mademoiselle should come in immediately. M. le Pasteur Galopin has come to make his adieux to ces dames.”
Aurora gave me but one glance, the memory of which I treasure. Then she surrendered to Célestine, with whom she returned to the house.
The next morning, on coming into the garden, I learned that Mrs. Church and her daughter had effectively quitted us. I was informed of this fact by old M. Pigeonneau, who sat there under a tree drinking his café-au-lait at a little green table.
“I’ve nothing to envy you,” he said; “I had the last glimpse of that charming Mees Aurore.”
“I had a very late glimpse,” I answered, “and it was all I could possibly desire.”
“I’ve always noticed,” rejoined M. Pigeonneau, “that your desires are more under control than mine. Que voulez-vous? I’m of the old school. Je crois que cette race se perd. I regret the departure of that attractive young person; she has an enchanting smile. Ce sera une femme d’esprit. For the mother, I can console myself. I’m not sureshewas a femme d’esprit, though she wished so prodigiously to pass for one. Round, rosy, potelée, she yet had not the temperament of her appearance; she was a femme austère—I made up my mind to that. I’ve often noticed that contradiction in American ladies. You see a plump little woman with a speaking eye and the contour and complexion of a ripe peach, and if you venture to conduct yourself in the smallest degree in accordance with theseindices, you discover a species of Methodist—of what do you call it?—of Quakeress. On the other hand, you encounter a tall lean angular form without colour, without grace, all elbows and knees, and you find it’s a nature of the tropics! The women of duty look like coquettes, and the others look like alpenstocks! However, we’ve still la belle Madame Roque—a real femme de Rubens, celle-là. It’s very true that to talk to her one must know the Flemish tongue!”
I had determined in accordance with my brother’s telegram to go away in the afternoon; so that, having various duties to perform, I left M. Pigeonneau to his ethnic studies. Among other things I went in the course of the morning to the banker’s, to draw money for my journey, and there I found Mr. Ruck with a pile of crumpled letters in his lap, his chair tipped back and his eyes gloomily fixed on the fringe of the green plush table-cloth. I timidly expressed the hope that he had got better news from home; whereupon hegave me a look in which, considering his provocation, the habit of forlorn patience was conspicuous.
He took up his letters in his large hand and, crushing them together, held it out to me. “That stack of postal matter,” he said, “is worth about five cents. But I guess,” he added, rising, “that I know where I am by this time.” When I had drawn my money I asked him to come and breakfast with me at the little brasserie, much favoured by students, to which I used to resort in the old town. “I couldn’t eat, sir,” he frankly pleaded, “I couldn’t eat. Bad disappointments strike at the seat of the appetite. But I guess I’ll go with you, so as not to be on show down there at the pension. The old woman down there accuses me of turning up my nose at her food. Well, I guess I shan’t turn up my nose at anything now.”
We went to the little brasserie, where poor Mr. Ruck made the lightest possible dejeuner. But if he ate very little he still moved his lean jaws—he mumbled over his spoilt repast of apprehended facts; strange tough financial fare into which I was unable to bite. I was very sorry for him, I wanted to ease him off; but the only thing I could do when we had breakfasted was to see him safely back to the Pension Beaurepas. We went across the Treille and down the Corraterie, out of which we turned into the Rue du Rhône. In this latter street, as all the world knows, prevail those shining shop-fronts of the watchmakers and jewellers for its long list of whom Geneva is famous. I had always admired these elegant exhibitions and never passed them without a lingering look. Even on this occasion, preoccupied as I was with my impending departure and with my companion’s troubles, I attached my eyes to the precious tiers that flashed and twinkled behind the huge clear plates of glass. Thanks to this inveterate habit I recordeda fresh observation. In the largest and most irresistible of these repositories I distinguished two ladies, seated before the counter with an air of absorption which sufficiently proclaimed their identity. I hoped my companion wouldn’t see them, but as we came abreast of the door, a little beyond, we found it open to the warm summer air. Mr. Ruck happened to glance in, and he immediately recognised his wife and daughter. He slowly stopped, his eyes fixed on them; I wondered what he would do. A salesman was in the act of holding up a bracelet before them on its velvet cushion and flashing it about in a winsome manner.
Mr. Ruck said nothing, but he presently went in; whereupon, feeling that I mustn’t lose him, I did the same. “It will be an opportunity,” I remarked as cheerfully as possible, “for me to bid good-bye to the ladies.”
They turned round on the approach of their relative, opposing an indomitable front. “Well, you’d better get home to breakfast—that’s whatyou’dbetter do,” his wife at once remarked. Miss Sophy resisted in silence; she only took the bracelet from the attendant and gazed at it all fixedly. My friend seated himself on an empty stool and looked round the shop. “Well, we’ve been here before, and you ought to know it,” Mrs. Ruck a trifle guiltily contended. “We were here the first day we came.”
The younger lady held out to me the precious object in her hand. “Don’t you think that’s sweet?”
I looked at it a moment. “No, I think it’s ugly.”
She tossed her head as at a challenge to a romp. “Well, I don’t believe you’ve any taste.”
“Why, sir, it’s just too lovely,” said her mother.
“You’ll see it some dayonme, anyway,” piped Miss Ruck.
“Not very much,” said Mr. Ruck quietly.
“It will be his own fault, then,” Miss Sophy returned.
“Well, if we’re going up to Chamouni we want to get something here,” said Mrs. Ruck. “We mayn’t have another chance.”
Her husband still turned his eyes over the shop, whistling half under his breath. “We ain’t going up to Chamouni. We’re going back to New York City straight.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” she made answer. “Don’t you suppose we want to take something home?”
“If we’re going straight back I must have that bracelet,” her daughter declared. “Only I don’t want a velvet case; I want a satin case.”
“I must bid you good-bye,” I observed all irrelevantly to the ladies. “I’m leaving Geneva in an hour or two.”
“Take a good look at that bracelet, so you’ll know it when you see it,” was hereupon Miss Sophy’s form of farewell to me.
“She’s bound to have something!” her mother almost proudly attested.
Mr. Ruck still vaguely examined the shop; he still just audibly whistled. “I’m afraid he’s not at all well,” I took occasion to intimate to his wife.
She twisted her head a little and glanced at him; she had a brief but pregnant pause. “Well, I must say I wish he’d improve!”
“A satin case, and a nice one!” cried Miss Ruck to the shopman.
I bade her other parent good-bye. “Don’t wait for me,” he said, sitting there on his stool and not meeting my eye. “I’ve got to see this thing through.”
I went back to the Pension Beaurepas, and when an hour later I left it with my luggage these interesting friends had not returned.