Eugenia looked at her with a knowing smile, "You're jealous," she said laughing, "he didn't takeyouoff 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 walkswhich 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' manœuver, 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 naïveté! 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 whoreallywants something out of her. What is this fête-de-charité for? To please me? Not at all. To make some money for poor people, mothers and anæmic 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 ofme?" 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.
I
Paris, May, 1908.
Eugenia had been complaining that her new teacher in advanced French diction was very ill-natured and exacting, and had asked Marise to go with her to a lesson to back her up in a protest against his unreasonable demands.
The two girls drove up to the Français in Eugenia's inevitable cab, and leaving her inevitable maid to wait in it, passed through the dingy little side-door into an ill-lighted corridor and felt their way toilsomely up a stairway not lighted at all. A dingy, stone-colored corridor with painted and numbered doors on each side, like a needy old-man's home or ill-kept reformatory. A knock at one of these, opened by a bald, pale, elderly man, with a knobby nose and several chins. A tiny, cluttered, stuffy room, with a lumpy sofa, two chairs, an easel and a window.
After her presentation to M. Vaudoyer, Marise sat down on one of the hard chairs to await developments. The actor was in a long, paint-stained blouse, and excused himself by saying that his pupil was a little ahead of time, "A real American," he said, smiling at both of them. He had been painting, he explained, waving a wrinkled old hand towards a canvas on an easel.
"Oh, you are twice an artist," remarked Marise, doing as she had been taught to do, automatically turning a pretty speech. As a matter of fact, she thought the sketch anything but artistic.
The old man's face clouded. "To be a painter, that was all I ever wanted," he said, looking with affection at the very mediocre landscape, and adding sadly, "All my life ... all my life."
"But to have been—to be such an artist as you are on the stage—surely that ought to be enough," said Marise. This time she spoke sincerely, out of a very genuine admiration for his acting.
"One does what one can, what one can," said the old man, resignedly, unbuttoning his blouse and dragging it off, revealing snuffy and crumpled black garments. He looked, thought Marise, like the parish priest of a very poor and neglected parish. And he had been for years—why, for a life-time, one of the most solidly esteemed and admired actors in the finest theatrical company in the world. "What more does any man want?" Marise asked herself, wondering why his face in repose was so bitter and melancholy.
Before beginning his lesson, he gave a last look at his painting, "What do you think of it? What do you think of it?" he asked suddenly, turning on Marise, the question like a loaded revolver at her temple.
Much practice had steadied Marise's nerves against any sort of hold-up that could be practised in social relations. She said instantly, "I think it shows one of the most charming landscapes I ever saw. Where in the world is there such a delightful composition?"
She was dealing with some one infinitely more practised than she, who was not in the least taken in by her evasion. Sighing, he turned the canvas with its face to the easel, and told her over his shoulder, "It's in my own country, where I ought to have stayed and been a dumb-beast, and happy. Nowhere you ever heard of, a far corner of the Pyrenees. Saint-Sauveur is the name." And as if, in spite of himself, to pronounce the name moved him, he broke out, "It's the most beautiful place—a little heaven on earth—why should any one leave it to spend his life in this boulevard hell of malignity? Such noble lines in its mountains, such grand pacifying harmony in the valleys—enough to reconcile a man to being alive! Such details as it has too! There is a gorge there where thegave deGavarnie rushes down. Always on the hottest, dustiest, most blinding summer day, it is cool there, the air green like Chartres stained-glass, and alive with the thunder of the water."
He frowned, shook his head, put his hand to a book on the table, and said, dismissing his evocation with a shrug, "Eh bien ... eh bien...!"
The lesson began but Marise heard not a word of it, not a word. She sat straight on the hard chair, her face a blank, and walked up the street with Jeanne, seeing in the blue twilight, the pale face of Jean-Pierre Garnier approaching them. The alcove curtains hung close before her, and Jeanne's voice was on the other side. And then, the burst of men's laughter from across the landing, cut short by Jeanne's closing the door; and then the heavy, dragging step in the corridor, the loud, harsh breathing. She waited, tense with fright, to see the curtains twitch open, and Jeanne's dreadful face appear ... some one was speaking to her, urgently, insistently, by name....
"Marise, Marise...." It was Eugenia speaking to her, "Help me explain to M. Vaudoyer that I haven't the least desire to become an actress, or to know every word of Molière by heart! That I simply want lessons in how to pronounce French correctly, the kind of lessons my English-diction teacher gives me." She spoke with an impatient accent, and Marise coming to herself saw the two facing each other with angry looks.
M. Vaudoyer said indignantly, "It's not worth my while to give instruction to a student who will not do the necessary work."
"I will do anynecessarywork," Eugenia answered hotly, "but what has reading a lot of deadly dull old books to do with pronouncing French correctly? And if I'm not going to be an actress or a singer, whatisthe use of all those idiotic ah! ah! oh! oh! fee! fee! exercises?"
M. Vaudoyer sat down abruptly, and reaching for a large red-and-white checked handkerchief, mopped his bald head and perspiring face with it. He was evidently containing himself with difficulty and waiting till he could be sure of speaking with moderation before he opened his lips.
Eugenia explained to Marise with dignity, glad of the opportunity to state her case, "I come to M. Vaudoyer for lessons in diction. I don't come to study singing or seventeenth-century history. I hate history and all those dull studies. I don't see why everybody should always be trying to force me into them. M. Vaudoyer gets very angry because I will not practise singing lessons and because I cannot find the time to spend hours in the Bibliothèque Nationale reading all about everything that happened in Molière's time. What do I care what happened in Molière's time? What I want, what I am paying for, is a very simple thing. Instruction in French diction. I don't see that I am getting it."
Her accent showed that she considered her case unassailably good and reasonable.
M. Vaudoyer listened with attention, looking at her very hard, and when she had finished he nodded, "You are right, Miss Mills. I am not the teacher for you. I am a poor, old, impractical Frenchman, incapable of satisfying a practical American girl, who knows what she wants and has the money to buy it. You are the race of the future, you Americans, I of the past. There is no common ground between us." He spoke mildly. Eugenia stared. Marise winced.
"What do you mean, M. Vaudoyer?" asked Eugenia. "Are you sending me away?"
He said with a little smile, "You have sent me away, Miss Mills, far away. And as to what I mean, if you like, I will try to tell you. But you will not understand. I cannot talk the American language. I can only speak the French language." He paused, wiping his perspiring forehead again with his checked handkerchief. "There are two parts to every art. One is the thorough command of your medium; the other is the personality you express through your medium. Neither has the slightest value without the other. Neither is to be had without paying the price of all you have ...all, all!
"You must have perfect command of your medium, just in itself, as a tool. Listen," he stood up, his heavily jowled face grim and stern, drew a long breath, as if he were about to speak, and then as at a sudden thought, paused, the expression of his face changing with comical suddenness to a broad smile, and began to laugh. The girls stared at him in amazement, wondering if he had taken leave of his senses. Apparently something very funny had popped into his mind, just as he was about to go on with his statement to them. It must have been reallyveryfunny indeed, for he could not stop his laughter, try as he might. It was too much for him. Both hands on his hips, throwing back his head, he pealed out an irresistible, "Ha! Ha!" as though he would burst if he did not laugh. Seeing their astonished faces, he tried to stop to tell them the joke, choked himself down to rich chuckles, opened his mouth to speak, and, the joke striking him afresh, went off again in a huge roar of mirth that made them both smile and then laugh outright in sympathy.
At this, his face instantly resumed its sad, stern expression, and he was looking at them severely as before, breathing quickly, it is true, as though he had been running, but without a trace of any feeling.
"There you see," he said drily. "That is an example of what I mean by command of a medium. To be master ofmytool I must not only be able to laugh, when I feel like it, but whenever I need to laugh, whether I feel like it or not. And I assure you, young ladies, I do not feel in the least like laughing now, having had this glimpse of the future as it will be, shaped to the American mold, by the people of the future."
The girls were stricken silent by all this, their lips, frozen in astonishment, still curving in the set smile that was all that was left of their foolish, induced mirth. Marise was nettled and angry. He had no business playing tricks like that on them. She had been made to appear foolish, horribly foolish, and she resented it.
"Well, Miss Mills," he went on, addressing Eugenia, "you cannot get such a control of your medium, you cannot learn to speak any language beautifully, without long, long dull hours of the oh! oh! ah! ah! practice that you scorn. You cannot buy such a command of your medium, not for millionsof your great round dollars. No, not the wealthiest, sharpest American who ever lived can possess European culture, by buying little pieces of it here and there, and hanging it up on his wall. By changing the very fibre of your being, that is the only way to become anything that is worth becoming. And you cannot change the fibre of your being without dying a thousand deaths and knowing a thousand births."
He puffed out a scornful breath and went on, "And for the other half, Miss Mills. You want to learn diction by reading to me. But what you read has sense. It is not just consonants and vowels. And to read it well, you must understand it. And to understand it, you must know something—do you understand me? You mustknowsomething. I soon found that you could not understand Molière, because you know no history, no literature, nor anything else you should have been learning. You cannot read with any over-tones in your voice, unless you understand the over-tones of what you are reading. You cannot read Molière, or anybody else, as if you were reading,
"'Barbara; celarent; darii; ferio; baralipton.'
"Or at least—" His carefully repressed indignation burst for a moment from his control; he said in a roar, "At least you cannot inmyloge—not, not even an American, not even a representative of the people of the future!"
He had risen to his feet, trembling with his anger, a high-priest rebuking a blasphemy. The girls shrank back, startled.
At once he extinguished the flame, went for a moment to the window, and when he turned back, said quietly, "You must excuse an old man's bad temper, Miss Mills, and you must look for a politer, more practical teacher. I can give you the address of one who will suit you. I can, in fact," he said smoothly, "give you the addresses of several hundred who will suit you perfectly. I will send the addresses of several to you. Good-day, Miss Mills. Good-by, Miss...." He was vague as to Marise's name, but murmured something with an absent courtesy. He stepped to the door, opened it with an urbane inclination of the head.
Eugenia held in her hand the sealed envelope which contained the usual fee for a lesson, and now looked down at it, uncertain whether she dared offer it. He saw her glance at it, and relieved her of her uncertainty, "No, no fee to-day, Miss Mills. I have given you no lesson." As they passed before him, he added under his breath, "No lesson, that is, that will be of any value to you."
Marise glancing over her shoulder, saw him turn at once to the easel and reach for his palette and brushes. He had dropped them from his mind. It was the airy, finishing touch to their humiliation. She burned with anger and shame.
They groped their way down the darkened stairs in silence, neither trusting herself to speak, lest she burst into tears.
At the bottom Marise said neutrally, "I have a music lesson now. Would you like to come along?"
Eugenia said in a loud, quavering voice, "I should think not! I have had enough of their hatefulness foroneday!" She went on, her voice shaken by suppressed sobs which did not at all fit what she was saying, "And I h-have an appointment w-with the hairdresser anyhow." She fumbled with a desperate haste in her little gold-beaded hand-bag, jerked out a lacy handkerchief and wiped her eyes angrily. But more tears came, a flood of nervous, excited tears, which ran down in big drops. She flung her arms around Marise's neck and hiding her face on her shoulder, cried out pitifully, "Oh, Marise, don't you ever just want to go backhome?"
Marise's heart was very full of compassion, very barren of consolation. "I haven't any home to go back to, any more than you," she said in a whisper.
Eugenia reached up, pulled her head down and kissed her, still sobbing. Marise kept her cheek pressed against the other's tear-wet face, aching with her helplessness, burning to find some word of comfort, finding nothing but loving silence to express her tenderness and pity.
A door opened upstairs, laughing voices sounded on the landing above. The two girls drew apart and moved towards the door hand in hand.
II
Mme. de la Cueva had been crying and Marise guessed that she was getting ready to have a new husband. She seemed to have had bad luck in husbands. The one who had just been put to the door was the second Marise had known in the four years of her study with the pianist, and there had been at least two before that. It was a terrible grief to her always to find out that she no longer cared for the one she had; but she faced the facts with courage, allowing herself no dissembling, no bourgeoise timidity. The old one disappeared, and in a few months a new one was there.
"Good-day, my child," said the pianist affectionately, pulling Marise down to kiss her on both cheeks. "No lesson to-day nor to-morrow," she spoke solemnly, the tears in her eyes.
She began to cry openly.
Marise sat down by her, startled out of her own mood of resentment. "Why, dear Madame de la Cueva, why?" she asked, "What has happened?"
"I am going to America," said the older woman. "Georges Noel and I are booked for a concert tour of the world. We will be married in Australia."
The inevitable first thought of the magnificent egotism of youth was for itself, "Why, what shallIdo?" cried Marise aggrieved.
Mme. de la Cueva did not resent this. She never resented anything which she recognized as natural. And this seemed to her pre-eminently natural and proper. She took Marise's hand in hers tenderly, maternally.
"It is for your good, my dear child, the change, though I know how you will miss me. You need some one else. A year with the old Visconti will be the making of you."
"The old Visconti!" cried Marise, "but he lives in Rome!"
"But it is perfectly possible for other people to live in Rome too! My dear child, a year in Rome at your age ... it will be the making of you! You will always bless your poor old de la Cueva who secured it for you. Youth, talent, beauty,Rome!" she drew the picture with envious admiration of its possibilities.
There was no use trying to reason with her, as one would with any one else, Marise knew that from experience—no use trying to show the material, practical obstacles in the way. What would her father say? How could she go alone to Rome to live? Not that Mme. de la Cueva would have hesitated at any age to go anywhere alone to live—but she would not long have remained alone! How like Mme. de la Cueva to dispose of her so calmly! Even as Marise said all this to herself she was aware by a sudden warm gush of pleasure and excitement in her heart that she was delighted beyond measure with the plan, that she had been longing for some change in her life, that she had been growing deathly stale in the same old round, the absurdly life-and-death consultations with Biron in the kitchen, the same old professors at the Sorbonne with the same old glass of sugar-and-water and the same high-keyed nasal delivery of the same old lectures, even Mme. de la Cueva with her same old clichés about mass and bulk in the bass. She felt no guilt about this last, for if there were one person in the world who understood entirely the fatigue at the recurrence of the same old things, it was Mme. de la Cueva! The pianist looking at her young disciple with discerning and experienced eyes, saw something of this and smiled sympathetically.
"You have been working, working, working, and now it is time to run a little free, my Marisette," she said, patting her hand, "you are ... how old?"
"Twenty-one to-day," said Marise.
"Exactly! As though Fate had timed it. Very likely Fate did." She had a great faith in Fate provided one did not hang back before the doors Fate set open before one. Personally she had never hesitated to step through every one that had been even ajar.
"A year in Rome with the old Visconti, who has the most wonderful sense of rhythm of any man alive—the real, the living rhythm—the life, the personality of music! Make yourself a docile little pair of ears and nothing else when hetalks to you of rhythm! And paynoattention, none, do you hear, to his fingering! It isinfecte,ignoble! Then after a year, I shall be here again to see what else you need before I launch you—good old Maman de la Cueva will be thinking of you all the time...."
"But I am not in the least sure I can manage a year in Rome," protested Marise, breaking in with a hurried protest against this taking-for-granted of everything, "I never dreamed of going to Rome! My father...."
"Oh, you can manage it," Madame de la Cueva assured her carelessly, "one can always manage whatever one really wants to do. Especially if it depends on a man."
She crossed the room now to pull at a bell-cord and to order tea of the stout, elderly maid who came. Such a cosmopolitan as Madame de la Cueva would of course have tea.
"We shall have tea together, my dear, to celebrate your birthday and my new plans, and to have a last talk together, the last talk before you grow up."
Her tears were forgotten. They had been shed, and that was the end of them. It was thus that one should live, she believed, crying heartily when one felt like it, and having it over with. She detested what she called the "brain-sickening Anglo-Saxon mania of bottling up emotion till it grows so intense you get no enjoyment out of it," and she was much given to cautioning against this mania those few of her pupils whom she took seriously and for whom she labored her valiant best, pouring out for them all her wisdom, musical and otherwise.
She came back now, and sat before the piano, her amplitude overflowing the stool as a mighty inflooding wave overflows a rock.
"While Giuseppina is making our tea, I'll play to you," she announced. She put her beautiful hands on the keys like a millionaire plunging his hands into a coffer of jewels and offering a choice between pearls and rubies, "What will you have? What do you feel like?"
Marise felt more like an earthquake in full activity than anything else, and chose accordingly, "If I'm going to Romefor a year, I feel like fireworks," she said with a rather breathless laugh, "something Hungarian ... Liszt, perhaps."
Madame de la Cueva settled herself and was off, Marise's heart galloping beside her in the wild rush over the plain. The little lean, wiry, ewe-necked horse under her tore along, sure-footed, as carried away by the stampede as his rider. There was a lance in her hand, a lance with a little blood-red, ragged flag, fluttering loudly against the wind of their forward rush like a bird struggling to escape and fly. Marise heard its throbbing struggle above the rhythmic thunder of the hoofs and felt her heart fluttering like a caught bird in sympathy. And now, with a long, rending slide from bass to treble, it tore itself loose, the wind caught it and whirled it up high over their heads as they plunged along. There it rode among the clouds, like a scarlet storm-bird, sinking and falling and advancing to a longer, nobler, more ample rhythm than that of their many-hoofed clattering. Marise's heart soared up with it, soared out of the noisy clattering, up to the clouds, to the noble, long curves of the wind's soundless advance ... soundless ... the piano was silent. Madame de la Cueva had played the last half-heard, velvet note that was prolonged, prolonged by the sweep of that noble line. She and Marise floated with it for a moment, and then as it swept on and left them, they slowly eddied down to the ground like dry leaves.
Giuseppina came in with the tea. Madame de la Cueva turned round on the piano-stool, a fat, elderly woman with three chins.
"Not so bad for the old lady, hein?" she said, well-pleased with herself and with Marise's dazzled look.
Marise attempted no thanks, no comment. Silently, like a person hypnotized she took the proffered cup, nodding her desire for two lumps and lemon; and silently, like a person hypnotized she listened to Madame de la Cueva's monologue. The music like a rich wine had unloosed the musician's tongue. In a mood like this she "turned the faucet and it ran."
"My little one," she said fondly to Marise, "my little one, so here you are on the beach ready to take the plunge—twenty-one to-day! And your poor old de la Cueva will not be here to advise you. Oh well, there's only one mistake that is worse than giving advice, and that is taking it. Never take anybody's advice, my darling, nobody's at all."
She drank the half of her cup of tea, not by any means noiselessly, wiped her mustache with the tiny, beautifully fine, embroidered tea-napkin, and hanging lovingly over the plate of patisseries, chose the fluffiest with a sigh of satisfaction.
"The only thing not to do, the only mistake possible to make, is to stand shivering on the beach, not to plunge in and breast the waves. Breast the waves!" she showed by a wide gesture of her powerful arm what she meant.
"And you can't swim with anything or anybody hanging around your neck. The moment they begin to weigh on you ... p-f-f-t! off with them! Nothing you can do will help people who can't swim themselves. They'll only drag you down with them.
"My dear child, remember this, that if there is an element in life hateful to the free human soul it is what is called permanence. The only permanent thing any human being should recognize is his tomb. From everything else he must climb out and go on, go on.
"Above all, beware of permanence in love. It is a paradox ever to speak of love and permanence in the same breath. Life and death! They cannot exist together. Women as a rule, all women who are not artists, make their mistakes in that way. You are a woman now, and an artist, it is the duty of an older woman and an artist to warn you against it. The only way not to be a life-long victim of men is to take love as they it ... for the pleasure. Men wish nothing from love but their pleasure. It is a vain and foolish striving to try and give them more, or to try and get more from them."
She took another éclair and said on a softer note, "I don't deny that women are more naturally given to the folly of seeking permanence in love than men. I myself have a weakness in that direction." Marise looked down into her cup to hide an involuntary smile at this. "Each time I love,the illusion is that it is now for eternity. Each time the wrench costs me tears.... You saw my tears, my dear!
"No, the only thing to do is to use it, as men do, to feed one's art. You heard how superbly I played that Liszt! That is Georges, that is the new flame leaping up from a lamp that was burning out!"
She poured another cup, and seasoned it with care. Marise ventured to say mildly, "I'm afraid I'm rather cold. I don't ... I haven't ever cared much for men."
Madame de la Cueva shook her head, "Every unawakened girl thinks that. And once in a while there is a monster born, sometimes a man, more often a woman, who is born really cold—like a born half-wit or a two-headed cat. But any one of experience can feel them in the room, as you feel a snake.Youare not cold, my darling. No one who can play The Tragica as you do, is cold. You are only a child. You Anglo-Saxons take so long to ripen. But all the better for your technique—that quaint prolongation of infancy. Butnow," she put down her cup and looked at Marise deeply and masterfully, "now your infancy has lasted long enough. In with you! Dive from the nearest rock! Head over heels! I shall hear the splash from across the world and rejoice."
Marise laughed a little nervously, partly because she was amused and partly because she was excited. That great mass of personality, radiating magnetism, would excite a statue on a tomb, she thought to herself, even though you didn't at all share her tastes, or like the things she did.
"And when I say, 'in with you,' I don't mean any of the sentimental slip-noose business of becoming a house-mother with children—oh, whatever else, my dear, no children. The only artists who can afford to have children are men, because men never really love their children and can abandon them at any time they need to. No woman can do that. EvenIcould never have done that!
"You see, carissima mea, in love a man always keeps most of himself for himself, as in everything else. You must do the same if you are not to be cheated in every bargain that life offers you. It is a hard lesson to learn. It will cost youmany tears. But tears are valuable. You cannot live and be an artist, without tears. Shed them freely and you will see how you will grow."
She looked at her watch, "I expect Georges at five," she explained, and swept on to her peroration, "Remember, think of all I tell you when your wise old friend who knows life is far away. Remember! None of your Anglo-Saxon nonsense about trying to get along without sex-life. Take it, take all you need of it, but keep it separate from your real life as a man does, and it will never poison or embitter you." She laughed a little, triumphantly, "You willdoall the embittering instead of enduring it. You have beauty. You can buy anything you want with it, if you learn how to use it. You have what will advance you more than any talent for music! You have a nice talent, but you will go ten times as far as a woman with a big nose and poor hair. Make your brain a little mint, my darling, coin your good looks into legal tender, and buy success."
She kissed the girl and dismissed her, with another look at her watch and then into the mirror.
Marise stumbled down the stairs, a little dizzied by the sudden removal of that pressing, urgent, magnetic personality. To step out suddenly from under it, was like stepping into a vacuum. Her ears rang.
At the street-door she paused, waiting for the mist to clear from before her eyes. She peered out into the quiet street, as if she were looking into life itself, the life that Madame de la Cueva had so magisterially set before her. And she loathed in anticipation everything that was waiting for her there.
There lay the world, grown-up life, Rome, her career, before her, and apparently there was nothing in it which she would not detest. Love ... the love that Madame de la Cueva had shown her how to get ... she shrank away from it with a proud, cold scorn, her nostrils quivering. Music ... there was no music in that program, only an exploitation of music to buy personal success for her. And she loved music ... fiercely she clung to that, as the one thing that would not betray her, the one thing she dared love with all her heart.
She stood on the threshold of the street-door, dreading to take even one step forward into it all, till the concierge looked at her hard, with a disagreeable smile, suspecting a rendezvous with a lover. Marise saw the look, knew what it meant, felt it push her forward, knew in anticipation how that sort of look and what lay back of it would be always pushing her forward into what she hated.
With a long breath she stepped into the street, into the road that stretched before her. She held her head high, with an angry pride. The concierge-soul of the world must never know what was inside her life. The thing to do, the only thing she saw that was tolerable to do, was to take care that she was not being fooled. Well, she thought with a grave, still bitterness, she certainly ought to know something about that.
1909
Neale sat idly in front of the black-and-white façade of the Orvieto Cathedral, trying idly to make up his mind on a matter of no importance whatever and not getting on very fast. In his pocket was his ticket back to New York and his ship sailed in a week. But, of course, it did not sail from Orvieto. Should he go south to Naples where most of the passengers took ship? If he did, he could stop over four or five days in Rome. It might be interesting to revisit Rome. Or should he go north to Genoa, where the ship was due to stop the day after leaving Naples? He had not seen Genoa at all and he might be missing something worth while. It ought to stir any American's imagination to hang about the docks where a certain visionary, middle-aged sailor-man had gone up and down trying to raise the funds for a mad attempt to prove the world absolutely different from what everybody else had thought.
He sat there looking up at the Cathedral, deciding now for Genoa and now for Rome, and in between times forgetting all about the matter, so evenly balanced were the advantages, so unimportant was the whole business. When he finally stood up to go back to his inn, he remembered that he had still not settled which train to take.
He took a coin out of his pocket. He'd toss up. Heads for Naples, tails for Genoa.
The coin flashed up in the sun, and fell on the stone steps. In the intense, somnolent silence of the little provincial square its tinkle sounded loud and clear. All the loungers turned their heads quickly at the sound. Neale stooped over it.
Heads, Naples. All right. He'd inquire when he got to Rome if they didn't perhaps run a boat-train down, just before sailing time.
As he was unstrapping his suit-case that night in his room inthe Roman pension, it did not greatly surprise him to have Livingstone knock at the door and step in. Livingstone had been at that pension before, during Neale's first leisurely sauntering visit to Rome; Livingstone had turned up at the pension in Florence before Neale left; he had run across Livingstone in a Paris café sitting alone at a table, looking as much like an attaché of the Embassy as he could manage. Livingstone was no tourist but one of the professional inhabitants of Europe; an American, that much he admitted, though neither hints nor direct British questioning had ever extracted from him his birthplace in the States. He was the sort of man who had learned how to cross his long thin legs elegantly so that the toe of one slim foot pointed downward. As at the same time he was wont to fold his arms over his hollowed chest, stoop his shoulders and droop his neck, and as he wore gray gaiters and carried a walking stick he had good reason to flatter himself that he had altogether the distinguished, pinched, sickly, aristocratic look of the traditional promising young-old diplomat. Neale was not surprised to see him in Rome. He would not have been surprised to see him anywhere—except perhaps at work. It was Neale's guess that three or four years from now he would have screwed up his courage to wearing a monocle.
"Hello, Crittenden," he said, "itisyou, is it? When Michele told me you had turned up again, I was sure he must be mistaken. I understood you were on the high seas, on your way back to the land of the free and the home of bad cooking."
Without being invited, he sank down in a chair to watch Neale unpack and wash, asking, "You were going back to New York, weren't you?"
"Yes, I still am. I'm only in Rome for five days. But I won't be long in the States. I'll be on my way to China and the East."
Livingstone was mildly interested. "You don't say so! Well, you might really get there by starting off to New York. But I admit I don't see the connection. Why don't you take a P. and O. for India?"
"A little business to attend to first. A small inheritance to cash in on."
"Inheritance!" cried Livingstone, sitting up straight. "The very word makes my mouth water. Why doesn't that ever happen to me?" The expression on his face was like that of the loungers in front of the Cathedral when they heard the coin drop.
Through the lather of soap-suds on his face, Neale laughed, "A very two-for-a-cent inheritance. An old great-uncle I hardly knew—never saw him but once or twice, years ago when I was a kid, left me his home and his little old-fashioned saw-mill and wood-working plant, back up at the end of nowhere in Vermont."
"No money!" sympathized Livingstone. "But then of course you can sell all that forsomething. But no real money at all?"
"There's what he had in the savings bank—about four thousand dollars, the executor writes. Just enough to do nothing at all with."
Livingstone made a mental calculation. "I wouldn't wonder if you might get fifty dollars a month out of the whole thing. And that's enough. Ma foi! That's enough if you cut corners a little.Ionly have eighty-five. And then you can always give an occasional English lesson to piece out. You won't need ever to do a lick of work or ever live in the States. Mes felicitations! That's the life! You'll be knowing Europe as well as I do, next. How soon will you be back?"
"I'm not coming back," said Neale, buttoning on a clean collar. "When I've cashed in and got what I can out of my uncle's business I'm going overland to San Francisco, and from there to the East."
Livingstone considered this, "Well, they do say that Chinese cooking is super-excellent once you get used to it."
"I'm not going for the cooking."
"No? Whatareyou going for?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Neale rather sharply. "Because I feel like it. Why shouldn't I?"
Livingstone perceived that he had run on a hidden reef andbacked off. "Don't you want to come on into the salon and let me present you to the crowd?" he asked standing up and moving towards the door. "Since you were here some awfully nice people have come over from the Pension Alfierenti. Poor old Alfierenti died suddenly and his place is shut up for the present."
"No, thanks," said Neale. "I'm going up on the roof for a smoke before I go to bed."
"Oh, yes," Livingstone remembered, "you always did prefer the terrazza and your solitary pipe to the society of the ladies. Well, there is a nice view from up there; but between a view and a pretty girl who could hesitate?"
"Who, indeed?" said Neale dryly, going off up the stairs.
The plaster floor and low walls of the terrazza gleamed white and empty. As Neale had hoped there was not a soul there. Below him spread the roofs and domes and streets of Rome, richly-colored even in the white light of the moon, hanging like a great lamp over the city.
He took the corner that had been his favorite before, in the black shadow cast by a thick-leaved grapevine, and perching on the edge of the wall, looked down meditatively on the city as he filled his pipe.
Well, so here he was in Rome—just as if something had pushed him here, where least of all places he had expected to find himself again. Odd that his year of travel should end with a second visit to the first European city that had stirred his imagination, that had given him a hint of what it was he had come to Europe to see. It was during his first stay in Rome that he stopped being a dumb, Baedecker-driven tourist, that he first got the idea of what Europe might teach him better than America could. It was here that he first thought of trying to get from Europe some idea of what men during a good many centuries had found worth doing.
For, unlike America, Europe was crammed full of objects little and big that men alone or in groups had devoted their lives to create. America had tried a number of experiments—once; but Europe had tried them all, so many times, at suchdifferent periods, in so many, so various centers of civilization! Such a crowded graveyard of human endeavor might perhaps suggest a satisfactory motive (if one existed) for going on living.
For a long time he had made no headway, had discovered no general underlying motive—indeed much of what he saw filled him with utter astonishment at the things men had cared for, even to the point of giving their lives to win them.
He still remembered that morning during his first stay, when he had stared with stupefaction at the rows of portrait-busts in the Capitoline Museum. So many men, most of them apparently intelligent had schemed and plotted through long years—and what for? To be the conventional head of an unworkable Empire, top-heavy with administration; to endure the hideous tedium of ceremony and pompous ritual which the office had imposed; to be forced to work through sycophants and grafters, to be exiled from healthy human life into a region where in the nature of things you could never hope to see one spontaneous sincere expression on any human face; where your life, your work, your reputation hung on the whim of the Prætorian Guard or the disgruntled legions on a distant frontier—why, if you lay awake nights you couldn't think of a more thankless job than being a Roman Emperor! And yet for centuries men had sacrificed their friends, their honor, their very lives to hold the office. Those old Romans, for all they looked so like ordinary everyday men you meet in the street, must have had a queer notion of what was worth-while in life!
Then he had left Rome and gone away without plan, anywhere the train would take him; and wherever he had gone he had walked about, silently attentive to what men had done with their lives. That was what he had been looking for as he walked around on battle-fields, or gazed up at Cathedrals or looked seriously at the statues thick-sown as the sands of the sea all over European cities; that was what he had been looking for as he sat alone in a pension bed-room reading a history or a biography that helped him fit together into some sort of a system all the diverse objects he had been considering.
Wherever he went, wherever he looked, he was like an archæologist raking over an inexhaustible kitchen-midden—he was surrounded by relics of innumerable generations crowding the long centuries during which men had lived and died on this old continent. Perhaps if he looked hard enough at what they had left behind them he might find out what men really wanted to do with their lives—perhaps he might get some hint of what he could do with his own life.
That was a subject he had never stopped to consider in America. Nothing in American life had suggested that you might have any choice except between different ways of earning your living. And yet he reflected it was rather an important question—at least as important as which baseball league you were going to root for.
It was so absolutely new to Neale to consider that question—any abstract question indeed—that for some months after he had shut down his desk in the office of the Gates Lumber Company, he felt his head whirl at the notion of trying to find an answer—an answer to any question, let alone so compendious a one as what it was that men wanted to do with their lives. The cogs and wheels of disinterested impersonal thought which had started to work in college, were stiff with disuse and refused to turn. All he had been able to do was to wonder, and stare, and read memoirs and histories, feeling like a strange cat in a very much cluttered garret. Was there anything in Europe that would really mean anything to him, to an American who was not esthetic, who refused to pretend, who frankly thought the average picture-gallery a dreary desert?
And then, very slowly, he had begun to make a guess that there was an arrangement in what looked so wildly hit-or-miss; as on the day when happening upon the little triumphal arch in Rheims he had at last got under his skin the idea of the Roman Empire, far-reaching, permeating with its law, customs, speech, the tiniest crevices of the provinces. To think of Romans living and governing and doing business in a little, one-horse, Gallic town like this! Maybe it hadn't been such a crazy aspiration to want to be Emperor—sort of likebeing President of the Standard Oil Company to-day. You knew in your heart that the job was too big for any man, but it was warming to your imagination even to pretend you were running a machine that covered the whole known world. And probably all of them had an illogical hunch thattheywould get away with it—and, by Jupiter, a lot of them had, and died peacefully in their beds. After all, so far as ordinary horse-sense went, wasn't devoting yourself to gathering together a great deal more money than you could possibly use, at least as odd a way of spending a human life as trying to hang on to the tail of the Roman Empire? And yet there were countless thousands of men all over Europe as well as in the United States who were hoping with all their souls that Fate would allow them to do just that. And a few did get away with it—just as some of the Emperors had. But it killed a great many—the Manager of the Gates Lumber Company, for instance. Every man knew that it might be the death of him, just as in the first century an Emperor knew he'd be lucky if he were killed quick. But nobody hung back for that in either century. Nobody really believed it would gethim! Why, a year ago, Neale Crittenden himself had been tearing along towards it as hard as he could pelt.
Well, good God, you had to dosomething with yourself. You couldn't float along, your boneless tentacles rising and falling with the tides, like that jelly-fish of a Livingstone!
What was there for a man to do with himself? At all times evidently, some men had been satisfied in producing art of some kind or another—that wasn't any good for Neale. He hadn't an ounce of artistic feeling, wasn't even a craftsman, let alone an artist. And many men in every epoch had cared about fighting. That was more his sort—if you were sure you could find something worth fighting for! And many men had wanted to run things—not only for the feeling of personal power, but to straighten out the hopeless muddles humanity was always getting itself into.... He had lost the frail thread of his thought in a maze of speculations, comparisons, half-formulated ambitions.
But he had always come back to his problem. He did nothurry. He had left the Gates Lumber Company so that he would not need to hurry! Sometimes he had caught a glimpse of the thread, lost it, felt it between his closing fingers, let it slip again. And whenever it escaped him and he found himself staring again at a jumbled confusion with no clue to its pattern, he had lit his pipe and smoked reflectively, his eyes fixed on whatever detail of European life chanced to be before them, a stained-glass window at Chartres, a crowded noisy café in Milan, the hydraulic cranes unloading cargoes from the Congo under the tower of Antwerp Cathedral. What men had left behind them looked from the outside like a heaped-up pile of heterogeneous junk, some good and some bad, and no way of guessing how any of it came to be. But Neale hung fast to that guess of his that there might be some meaning for him in it all, if he could only be patient enough and clear-headed enough to pick it out. He had never been an impatient temperament but he certainly had not of late years been especially clear-headed. During this reflective pause in his life, he felt his mind re-acquiring its capacity to do some abstract thinking. Released temporarily as he was from the necessity for immediate activity his head slowly cleared itself from the cloudy fumes given off by energy automatically rushing into action, blindly, planlessly. He began to perceive that he had been carried off his feet by the conviction of his time that activity, any activity at all, is all-sufficient, provided it is taken with speed, energy and decision. Neale had acquired speed, energy and decision in activity, but he'd be damned, he told himself once in a while, if he'd run his legs off any longer without seeing which way he was going.
As he sat now alone on the roof, overlooking the many, many monuments left as token of what men had wanted to do with their lives, he brought up and considered the few conclusions—the guesses at truth—the year had brought him. They didn't seem to amount to much, they were ridiculously slight as the sum-total of a year's earnest thought, but all this sort of thinking was so new and hard for him! At least such as they were, they were his own thoughts—he hadn't taken them on anybody else's say-so; and simple andinadequate as they seemed from the outside, they might be the first step towards understanding the truth—the truth forhim.
To begin with, he hadn't in the least found out what men wanted or why they wanted it—all his classification had been like pressing wild-flowers and sticking them in a herbarium with the right Latin name tacked on—it cleared up some of the clutter, perhaps, but it left you mighty far from understanding life. All that he had learned from his classification was that men wanted a lot of contradictory things, and what one man would sell his soul to get, would break another one's heart to have. Well, wasn't that perhaps a clue? Wasn't it just that innate diversity which was at the root of a great many tragedies? Wasn't the trouble that men wouldn't let themselves act as individuals? Men were so hopelessly tied to the fashion of their century. Yes, men were fashion-ridden: they had no call to laugh at women's continuous-performance-vaudeville of big-sleeves, tight-lacing, hobble-skirts! Women cared about clothes, and every woman except a few dowds was out to look like every other woman, and just a little more so; men cared about the business of the world, and every man except a few freaks felt that he ought to outdo every one else at whatever all the men of his time were doing. And nobody wanted to be a freak. But the truth was that there were all sorts of men in the world all the time—who ought normally to do all sorts of different things. But did they? No, they didn't. No matter what you really wanted to do with your life, no matter what your particular life was best suited for, human tradition was always inflexibly insisting that you try to cut your life by the pattern considered fashionable at the time and in the place where you lived—try to be an Emperor in Imperial Rome, try to be a millionaire in twentieth century New York. People didn't seem able to consider even for a moment that there must be lots of men so made that they would prefer anything to the process of becoming an Emperor or a millionaire.
There rose before Neale now the restless, unhappy face of the young Frenchman he had come to know in Bourges, who one evening as they sat in the park near the Cathedral,poured out to him in a bitter flood his horrified sense of the closing in on him of bonds which he hated, which were being forged around him by the irresistible forces of social tradition and family affection. Fighting helplessly against overwhelming odds, he was slowly being shoved into becoming apetit fonctionnairein Bourges for all his life.... "Here, in thishole!" he had cried looking around him with wild young eyes, like a rat in a trap. But there was his dear Maman's certainty that this feeling was mere youth, that he would soon settle down, and be contented in his office, and always, always be quite close to her; there was the relief of the family far and wide, now that he wassafe, safe for life in a good little position with a nice little pension at the end! "Safe! How I loathe being safe!" he had cried. "Why wasn't I born three hundred years ago, so that I could have gone out with Champlain! Or later with Du Chaillou?"
In spite of all his sympathy for the poor kid, Neale hadn't seen then nor could he see now why anybody need wait for a Champlain or a Du Chaillou to come along. It looked as though the boy's grievance was because what he was meant to do didn't happen to be in fashion when he lived. Neale couldn't see what prevented him from getting right up on his feet from off the bench where he agonized, and marching off to the nearest port to work his way to Senegal, if that was where he thought he'd have the chance to use that latent stifled something in him which could never live in Bourges. Of course, it would give his mother a jolt, but if she was any kind of a mother, she'd want her son to have what was best for him. That was sure, if anything was. And as for the cousins and the aunts and uncles butting in ... to hell with them! What business was it of theirs?
Neale had a suspicion that very likely the boy would be horrified by Senegal, not get on a bit better than in Bourges, and be mighty glad to come back to the safeness and comfort that irked him so now. If he had had pep enough to get on in Senegal, or anywhere else on his own, wouldn't he have had pep enough to cut loose from his leading-strings before this? Now was the time to do it, now or never, before he had acquired any personal responsibilities of his own choosing, that wouldreallybe an insuperable barrier to change. Neale felt nothing but the profoundest sympathy for people who found out they were in the wrong pigeon-hole after they had tied themselves up so they couldn't move. That was so awful a fate, that it did seem as though all grown-ups ought to league together in an impassioned effort to give youth as free a choice as possible. Instead of which—look what they'd done to this poor kid! Neale knew by the look of him how nervously sensitive he was. They'd trained nervous sensibility into him, instead of energy and combativeness. And then they brought to bear on him the thousand-pound-to-the-square-inch pressure of public opinion which provincial and family life in a small French town exerts on youth, to prevent its ever guessing at its essential freedom to seek out its own.
What sheep men were! ... making long detours through open country to get around fences that had long since blown down.
In all the centuries of Roman Emperors had there been a single one of the misfits with good enough sense to see that he had got into the wrong job, and energy enough to pull out? Galba had declined the nomination a term or two, but in the end he'd accepted office—and got his throat cut inside a year. Even a high-class mind like Marcus Aurelius could think of no solution except, after office-hours, to write a book sympathizing with himself, like a fine-haired Corporation President solacing his soul by collecting cloisonné.
Of course the fashion of the country and the century was sure to fit some men. Old man Gates now: hehadwanted to succeed in business, to be a millionaire, as much as Vespasian had wanted to be Emperor, and he had furiously enjoyed every hard-hitting moment of the life-and-death struggle which had carried him up from owning a small saw-mill in Connecticut to being the head of a rich and powerful company. He had died at eighty, as lusty and hard and sound an old condottiere as any other professional fighter who bestrode a bronze horse in an Italian piazza. But how about his son? What perhaps would the "young Mr. Gates" have liked to do withhislife, if it had ever been suggested to him that he might do something else than go on making money by selling lumber for as much as possible above the price that had been paid for it?
What life-long mal-adjustment had resulted in that dreadful, twisted, weeping, elderly face which even now Neale could not forget?
Neale puffed a while silently, staring over at the Janiculum Hill, black with its dense trees beyond the moonlit city, until the distressing memory became less acute and he could go back calmly to his own problem. He was that much to the good anyhow. At least he'd found out what he did not want to do. He did not want to give his life to doing something simply because a lot of other men thought it was the only thing to do. At least he was sure that failure was certain along that road. And he was convinced that happiness—satisfaction, at least—was possible in human life. All his stored-up and accumulated health and strength and vitality made him sure that a sort of happiness was probable, even inevitable, if you had the good sense to get hold of the job you were intended to do. But what did he, Neale Crittenden, want to do? What was he intended for? He had asked himself that question a great many times and never had answered it yet. He looked again over at the Janiculum from which the beacon was flashing its message of red—white—green across Imperial Rome, across the Vatican. Over there stood the Garibaldi monument. There was a man who had known what to do with his life. He had created something. Oh, he was a product of his time, no doubt, and the busy little frock-coated Cavour had played a necessary part, but admitting all that, where would the Risorgimento have been without Garibaldi? In the fire and passion of his great heart, he had forged the sword of Italian Unity. Out of chaos he had created something with an ordered unity of its own. That was real creation. Was there any of it left to do—some little corner that an ordinary man could tackle?
Alone on the roof he pondered this, his hands clasped across his knees, his head tipped back, looking across the ancient city at the man who had kindled a fire in those old ashes.
And then, little by little, as the silence and beauty of the night spread out before his eyes in widening silver circles, he ceased pondering, ceased thinking even vaguely of himself, his life, other men's lives. He sat dreaming, his eyes as wide as a child's, his lips relaxed, his face absent and unconscious of self as that of one who listens absorbed and entranced to distant music. Moonlight—Italy!
Aware that he was no longer alone, he turned his head slowly and saw that a tall girl in white had come silently up the winding iron steps and was standing at the top looking at the sky. The moon shone full and soft upon her, from head to foot. He saw her as clearly as though it had been noon, and yet she looked as unearthly and mysterious as the night. She evidently thought herself alone. She stood perfectly motionless, her dark eyes fixed on a palely distant star. Neale thought he had never in his life seen anything more touching than the profound sadness of her young face.
He had not moved, had scarcely had time to draw breath; but she had felt him there. She turned her face toward where he sat, her head a little bent, searching the darkness of the corner from under long, finely-drawn brows. She saw him, looked straight into his eyes, her own shining deep and soft upon him. He was still too lost in his own enchanted dream to be able to move, to look away. He gazed at her as though she were part of the night, of the beauty.
Without a sound she turned back and sank like a dream from his sight.