CHAPTER XII
JEAN felt no delight at having given up Liane, nor more than a passing flicker of gratified self-esteem at giving up the Bank. He waited with hostile eagerness for the expostulation which he expected would follow; but when no expostulations took place, he deeply resented his immunity from interference. When you have burned your ships it is only natural that you should wish to see someone watching the flames; unfortunately for Jean, no one seemed to notice that there were any. The Director made no reply to Jean’s announcement, and the Comte D’Ucelles went on preserving the sanctity of the home and disregarding the obligations of relationship, with his usual nonchalance.
Jean found himself left to conquer Paris entirely in his own way. His freedom, was limitless and he could satisfy his craving for music all day long. The only trouble was that he hated his freedom nowthat he had it, and he seemed to have entirely lost his craving for music.
He had made a desert, and he could not even begin to call it peace.
Liane sacrificed was Liane present, and the presence of Liane crowded out every other possibility. Everywhere Jean saw her face, not Liane’s face as he had last seen it with the cruel, narrow eyes and the cutting oblivion of her stare, but Liane’s face as it looked out of her picture with the strange entrancing smile, Liane’s eyes as they melted into his, and all the miserable memories of his happy, passionate hours!
Jean began to discover that it was not very easy to give anyone up. He had always considered memory a pleasant faculty belonging to the old; he found now that it was a relentless spirit which pursued the flying soul even of the young. They would not let him go, those cruel hours of joy; they came back upon him pure from the clumsy touch of reality, refined by his own imagination, vivid as visions only can be vivid, in anticipation or in memory. He tried hard to reason with himself, to urge that Liane had never been as beautiful as that, never so tender, and never for a moment half so true; but passion with delirious eyes and empty hands pushed him into perilous falsehoods, and dazzled him with wild desires.
He felt incredibly bitter cravings for the sight and touch of Liane. What freedom does a dogdesire who has lost its master? and what music was left in a world so empty of delight? And Liane was not only a woman, she was a life; she had dragged him from the sordid sadness of his poor room; she had given him his first taste of luxury and the natural love of living as his own class lived, hours full of beauty, and within reach of their own satisfaction.
He had lost Liane, and he had lost through Liane everything else; was it any wonder that he cursed himself for his incredible folly, kicked his piano, and looked at Margot with hostile, vindictive eyes?
Margot lived in three badly-furnished rooms on asixième étage. There was the kitchen, sitting-room, dining-room, all in one. It was filled with crude attempts at a useless prettiness and pervaded by an odour of perpetual cooking. Leading out of it was her bedroom and her mother’s, from which there came the unwholesome smell of one of Madame’s hidden bottles. Jean’s room across the passage was furnished with Spartan simplicity, but irritatingly full of Margot’s desire to please him, which took the form of religious pictures and many superfluous small pieces of embroidery. He would gladly, he assured himself, have borne with poverty—he had simple tastes—if only there had been some escape, some world of sympathy and thought into which he could step down as into a stream, and refresh his parched and jadedsoul. But there was no such stream, there was only Margot’s sitting-room.
In the first moment of his new life, Jean had received two disagreeable shocks. Margot’s mother was one; how could he have expected Margot’s mother to be like that?
Somehow or other he had fancied Margot’s mother to be an older edition of Margot, a creature aged and softened by time; he was more inclined now to think that Margot was merely a younger edition of her mother, temporarily consecrated by the freshness of her youth; he was, of course, wholly unjust in both surmises. Then he was very naturally shocked and horrified at Margot’s dismissal from the theatre. It was an inconceivable and disgusting incident; it looked almost as if he had caused it; it certainly put him under an obligation to the girl. The worst of it was that he saw no way at present of compensating her for the sacrifice (he meant freeing himself from the obligation, but the other way of putting it sounded better). So that he was naturally extremely annoyed with Margot, and ready to quarrel on the first provocation.
“Do you know I have been here three days, and I have not yet given you a lesson?” he observed sternly, one wet morning on which he saw that he must practise, or else face the fact that he hadn’t a career at all. Margot was ironing a tablecloth and her mother was sleeping out,with a systematic zeal which crept through the wall, an unfortunate meeting with a too generous friend the evening before.
“It takes time to settle in,” ventured Margot, looking up from her ironing.
“Of course, if you do not wish for one,” began Jean with great dignity.
“But I do!” cried Margot with immense eagerness and no dignity at all.
“You might, then,” said Jean reproachfully “have said so before.”
Margot hung her head penitently and began to fold up the tablecloth; she hadn’t finished it, but she saw Jean was not in the mood to be kept waiting.
“I think you had better bring your music to my room,” he said, after a pause. “We might disturb your mother.”
Margot flushed. She had not expected Jean to like her mother, but she had hoped that she would not have to see quite so plainly how much he didn’t.
“Very well,” she said simply. She was dressed neatly and prettily, as she always was, and her hair curled over her fresh white forehead; her cheeks were a little less rosy and round, and her eyes looked larger—but this was becoming to her rather than otherwise, and it was perhaps unnecessary for Jean to compare her mentally to Liane, wholly to Margot’s disadvantage.
The truth was that Jean wished to be fascinatedby women, not to be mothered by them, and though Margot did try very hard to please him, she did so intermittently and without calculation, because the desire of her heart was to do and be what was best for him; and that was hardly the kind of thing that a man of Jean’s age could be expected to appreciate. Even as Margot followed him into his room her whole being was absorbed in the consideration of how to cook eggsà l’aurorefor déjeuner. It was Friday, and Jean had said he hated plain eggs. For three days she had been on tip-toe with desire and expectation for this lesson, and now she was hopelessly absorbed in eggs! She looked at Jean with unintelligent eyes; tomato sauce was so expensive, would not a dash of vinegar in thick brown gravy do as well?
“Mademoiselle,” said Jean, with awful calm, “is this what you call your music?”
“O ciel!” cried Margot in horror, throwing her hands above her head. It was the cookery book; they neither of them laughed!
When she returned with her songs, Jean took out a cigarette and looked through them with critical eyes.
“Bah!” he exclaimed. “Haven’t you anything better than these?”
Margot had, after all, some spirit; she did not like Jean’s tone of contempt, and she thought he should have asked her leave to smoke. She was far more particular about such things than Liane.
“Music is not very cheap, Monsieur,” she said, a little sharply. Jean shrugged his shoulders.
“Good music is, however, cheaper than bad,” he said indifferently.
“Not unless you are paid to sing it,” replied Margot, with admirable common sense. Common sense is a quality all women who desire to please should learn to avoid, or at least conceal; they may use it in their private judgments, but it should never be allowed to appear in their conversation. It annoyed Jean extremely.
“Allons!” he said; “commencez donc!” And he pushed all the music on to the floor and began to play scales.
Margot was disappointed, she did not wish to sing scales; her mind returned to the eggs. Did he, she wondered, like them lightly cooked?
“Mademoiselle,” said Jean turning round on the music-stool. “What are you doing with these notes?”
Margot blushed guiltily.
“A note,” said Jean severely, “has a middle, a beginning, and an end. It is not a ghost, that you can run over it without disaster. Strike the middle of the note with your full voice, I entreat; you are fumbling and creeping up to it, and then when I expect it to come out—voilà!—you have swallowed it completely, there is nothing left to come. Try these arpeggios now.Attendez!”
Margot shut her eyes and drew frowning browstogether to show how hard she was trying. Jean looked very cross this morning. He had not slept well and his conscience had worn his nerves to threads; having done the best he could, he felt terribly guilty and disheartened.
“That is better,” said Jean; “but it is not good; one would say your voice was wool-gathering this morning! Now try these chords.”
Margot tried them mechanically. La Mère Pelous at the corner bought fresh eggs from the country twice a week, but then they were very dear; on the other hand, two streets away Madame Claire had a large assortment which she said came direct from her nephew’s farm, only——
Bang! came Jean’s hands down on the keys, a terrible discord!
“You are not singing at all!” he said in a fury. “You are piping! What are you thinking of, then? Are you in love?”
This was really very rude of Jean.
“Monsieur!” said Margot, at once upon her dignity. Jean felt extremely ashamed of himself, far too much ashamed to apologize.
“You must excuse me,” he said sarcastically. “You see, I have supposed you wished to work.”
“I do,” said Margot, with a tremor in her voice. Jean heard the suspicious little break and hurriedly caught up one of the songs. He had not meant to be a brute! Well, not so much of a one as to make her cry, at any rate.
“Bon!let us try a song, then,” he said more gently. “Here is the one you sang the other night. We must have more tone in it and less effort. Now take a long breath, Mademoiselle, before you begin; stand naturally and at rest, and then open your mouth wide.Allons!”
Margot pulled herself together for a final attempt, her knees shook under her and it seemed as if a knot came into her throat. A horrible fear assailed her that she might be going to lose her one talent; she forced her voice against her breath, and it came out a loud, wavering sound without form or music. She was so completely unnerved by the result that she covered her ears with her hands and gazed at Jean with wide-eyed despair.
“But you are not well,” said Jean, as soon as she let her hands fall. “You are upset about something, and you are frightened! Come, tell me what is it?”
Margot, overwhelmed by this sudden return to sympathetic relations, burst into tears.
“Oh, Monsieur,” she sobbed; “do not blame me, I am quite hopeless, I know. You will despise me utterly, but—but I have a question to decide, there is something I must ask you, Monsieur. Oh! Oh! I am afraid you will be very angry with me!”
“But, Mademoiselle Margot, sit down; tell me what is it?” said Jean, now thoroughly roused and touched by her evident distress. “As if I could be angry with you! There! there! dryyour eyes. It is you who should be angry with me, then, for being such a bad-tempered brute of a master! If you cry any more, Margot, I shall think you hate me.”
Margot stopped crying—it would be dreadful if Jean should think she hated him! So she dried her eyes in her handkerchief and smiled at him through her tears.
“It is only like this, Monsieur!” she whispered confidentially. Jean leaned forward to hear; perhaps like him she also had a tragedy, poor little one! “I—I wanted to know if you liked eggsà l’aurore,” she explained with trembling lips, “so that I could go out and try to find some fresh ones!”
“Margot!” cried Jean, and for a moment he said nothing more.
“You’re—you’re not angry, Monsieur?” she pleaded.
Jean laughed.
“Simply horribly angry!” he said, smiling into her eyes. “How dare you think of eggs in the middle of your singing lesson? I’ll eat them any way you like.”
That was the end of the lesson. Jean was very kind to Margot about it; he ate an excellent lunch, but he could not help feeling that she was less of an artist than he had hoped.
Familiarity is a deadly touchstone to the imagination; only the best and noblest impulses can surviveit. To continue to admire what we see daily and know thoroughly we must be either very humble or very loving, and Jean was for the moment neither. He had not yet begun to exact very much from himself, but he expected a good deal from others. The critical instinct is generally vicarious.
Unfortunately Margot belonged to that type of woman who loves to have demands made upon her. She liked Jean to use the best she had to give as a sofa cushion; she was only too glad that it could be used at all. Her mistake lay deeper than his, for she did not realize that she loved a man who did not care very much for sofa cushions, and who would therefore never use even her best for long.