Lady Barbarina Part 43

"Nor to Canterbury Cathedral?"

Bessie lost herself for a little in this. "We can stop there on our way to Paris," she then said.

Lord Lambeth didn't tell Percy Beaumont that the contingency he was not prepared at all to like had occurred; but that gentleman, on hearing that the two ladies had left London, wondered with some intensity what had happened; wondered, that is, till the d.u.c.h.ess of Bayswater came a little to his a.s.sistance. The two ladies went to Paris-when Mrs. Westgate beguiled the journey by repeating several times: "That's what I regret; they'll think they petrified us." But Bessie Alden, strange and charming girl, seemed to regret nothing.

THE PENSION BEAUREPAS

I

I was not rich-on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas was cheap. I had further been told that a boarding-house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I was inclined to a literary career and a friend had said to me: "If you mean to write you ought to go and live in a boarding-house: there's no other such way to pick up material."

I had read something of this kind in a letter addressed by the celebrated Stendhal to his sister: "I have a pa.s.sionate desire to know human nature, and a great mind to live in a boarding-house, where people can't conceal their real characters." I was an admirer of _La Chartreuse de Parme_, and easily believed one couldn't do better than follow in the footsteps of its author. I remembered, too, the magnificent boarding-house in Balzac's _Pere Goriot_-the "pension bourgeoise des deux s.e.xes et autres,"

kept by Madame Vauquer, nee de Conflans. Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the establishment, as an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, and I hoped for better things from the Pension Beaurepas.

This inst.i.tution was one of the most esteemed in Geneva and, standing in a little garden of its own not far from the lake, had a very homely comfortable sociable aspect. The regular entrance was, as one might say, at the back, which looked upon the street, or rather upon a little _place_ adorned, like every _place_ in Geneva, great or small, with a generous cool fountain. That approach was not prepossessing, for on crossing the threshold you found yourself more or less in the kitchen-amid the "offices" and struck with their a.s.sault on your nostril.

This, however, was no great matter, for at the Pension Beaurepas things conformed frankly to their nature and the whole mechanism lay bare. It was rather primitive, the mechanism, but it worked in a friendly homely regular way. Madame Beaurepas was an honest little old woman-she was far advanced in life and had been keeping a pension for more than forty years-whose only faults were that she was slightly deaf, that she was fond of a surrept.i.tious pinch of snuff, and that, at the age of seventy-four, she wore stacks of flowers in her cap. There was a legend in the house that she wasn't so deaf as she pretended and that she feigned this infirmity in order to possess herself of the secrets of her lodgers. I never indeed subscribed to this theory, convinced as I became that Madame Beaurepas had outlived the period of indiscreet curiosity.

She dealt with the present and the future in the steady light of a long experience; she had been having lodgers for nearly half a century and all her concern with them was that they should pay their bills, fold their napkins and make use of the doormat. She cared very little for their secrets. "J'en ai vus de toutes les couleurs," she said to me. She had quite ceased to trouble about individuals; she cared only for types and clear categories. Her large observation had made her acquainted with a number of these and her mind become a complete collection of "heads."

She flattered herself that she knew at a glance where to pigeonhole a new-comer, and if she made mistakes her deportment never betrayed them.

I felt that as regards particular persons-once they conformed to the few rules-she had neither likes nor dislikes; but she was capable of expressing esteem or contempt for a species. She had her own ways, I suppose, of manifesting her approval, but her manner of indicating the reverse was simple and unvarying. "Je trouve que c'est deplace!"-this exhausted her view of the matter. If one of her inmates had put a.r.s.enic into the _pot-au-feu_ I believe Madame Beaurepas would have been satisfied to remark that this receptacle was not the place for a.r.s.enic.

She could have imagined it otherwise and suitably applied. The line of misconduct to which she most objected was an undue a.s.sumption of gentility; she had no patience with boarders who gave themselves airs.

"When people come chez moi it isn't to cut a figure in the world; I've never so flattered myself," I remember hearing her say; "and when you pay seven francs a day, tout compris, it comprises everything but the right to look down on the others. Yet there are people who, the less they pay, take themselves the more au serieux. My most difficult boarders have always been those who've fiercely bargained and had the cheapest rooms."

Madame Beaurepas had a niece, a young woman of some forty odd years; and the two ladies, with the a.s.sistance of a couple of thick-waisted red-armed peasant-women, kept the house going. If on your exits and entrances you peeped into the kitchen it made very little difference; as Celestine the cook shrouded herself in no mystery and announced the day's fare, amid her fumes, quite with the resonance of the priestess of the tripod foretelling the future. She was always at your service with a grateful grin: she blacked your boots; she trudged off to fetch a cab; she would have carried your baggage, if you had allowed her, on her broad little back. She was always tramping in and out between her kitchen and the fountain in the _place_, where it often seemed to me that a large part of the preparation for our meals went forward-the wringing-out of towels and table-cloths, the washing of potatoes and cabbages, the scouring of saucepans and cleansing of water-bottles. You enjoyed from the door-step a perpetual back-view of Celestine and of her large loose woollen ankles as she craned, from the waist, over into the fountain and dabbled in her various utensils. This sounds as if life proceeded but in a makeshift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas-as if we suffered from a sordid tone. But such was not at all the case. We were simply very bourgeois; we practised the good old Genevese principle of not sacrificing to appearances. Nothing can be better than that principle when the rich real underlies it. We had the rich real at the Pension Beaurepas: we had it in the shape of soft short beds equipped with fluffy _duvets_; of admirable coffee, served to us in the morning by Celestine in person as we lay rec.u.mbent on these downy couches; of copious wholesome succulent dinners, conformable to the best provincial traditions. For myself, I thought the Pension Beaurepas local colour, and this, with me, at that time, was a grand term. I was young and ingenuous and had just come from America. I wished to perfect myself in the French tongue and innocently believed it to flourish by Lake Leman.

I used to go to lectures at the Academy, the nursing mother of the present University, and come home with a violent appet.i.te. I always enjoyed my morning walk across the long bridge-there was only one just there in those days-which spans the deep blue out-gush of the lake, and up the dark steep streets of the old Calvinistic city. The garden faced this way, toward the lake and the old town, and gave properest access to the house. There was a high wall with a double gate in the middle and flanked by a couple of ancient ma.s.sive posts; the big rusty grille bristled with old-fashioned iron-work. The garden was rather mouldy and weedy, tangled and untended; but it contained a small thin-flowing fountain, several green benches, a rickety little table of the same complexion, together with three orange-trees in tubs disposed as effectively as possible in front of the windows of the salon.

II

As commonly happens in boarding-houses the rustle of petticoats was at the Pension Beaurepas the most familiar form of the human tread. We enjoyed the usual allowance of economical widows and old maids and, to maintain the balance of the s.e.xes, could boast but of a finished old Frenchman and an obscure young American. It hardly made the matter easier that the old Frenchman came from Lausanne. He was a native of that well-perched place, but had once spent six months in Paris, where he had tasted of the tree of knowledge; he had got beyond Lausanne, whose resources he p.r.o.nounced inadequate. Lausanne, as he said, "_manquait d'agrements_." When obliged, for reasons he never specified, to bring his residence in Paris to a close, he had fallen back on Geneva; he had broken his fall at the Pension Beaurepas. Geneva was after all more like Paris, and at a Genevese boarding-house there was sure to be plenty of Americans who might be more or less counted on to add to the resemblance.

M. Pigeonneau was a little lean man with a vast narrow nose, who sat a great deal in the garden and bent his eyes, with the aid of a large magnifying gla.s.s, on a volume from the _cabinet de lecture_.

One day a fortnight after my adoption of the retreat I describe I came back rather earlier than usual from my academic session; it wanted half an hour of the midday breakfast. I entered the salon with the design of possessing myself of the day's _Galignani_ before one of the little English old maids should have removed it to her virginal bower-a privilege to which Madame Beaurepas frequently alluded as one of the attractions of the establishment. In the salon I found a new-comer, a tall gentleman in a high black hat, whom I immediately recognised as a compatriot. I had often seen him, or his equivalent, in the hotel-parlours of my native land. He apparently supposed himself to be at the present moment in an hotel-parlour; his hat was on his head or rather half off it-pushed back from his forehead and more suspended than poised. He stood before a table on which old newspapers were scattered; one of these he had taken up and, with his eye-gla.s.s on his nose, was holding out at arm's length. It was that honourable but extremely diminutive sheet the _Journal de Geneve_, a newspaper then of about the size of a pocket-handkerchief. As I drew near, looking for my _Galignani_, the tall gentleman gave me, over the top of his eyegla.s.s, a sad and solemn stare. Presently, however, before I had time to lay my hand on the object of my search, he silently offered me the _Journal de Geneve_.

"It appears," he said, "to be the paper of the country."

"Yes," I answered, "I believe it's the best."

He gazed at it again, still holding it at arm's-length as if it had been a looking-gla.s.s. "Well," he concluded, "I suppose it's natural a small country should have small papers. You could wrap this one up, mountains and all, in one of our dailies!"

I found my _Galignani_ and went off with it into the garden, where I seated myself on a bench in the shade. Presently I saw the tall gentleman in the hat appear at one of the open windows of the salon and stand there with his hands in his pockets and his legs a little apart.

He looked infinitely bored, and-I don't know why-I immediately felt sorry for him. He hadn't at all-as M. Pigeonneau, for instance, in his way, had it-the romantic note; he looked just a jaded, faded, absolutely voided man of business. But after a little he came into the garden and began to stroll about; and then his restless helpless carriage and the vague unacquainted manner in which his eyes wandered over the place seemed to make it proper that, as an older resident, I should offer him a certain hospitality. I addressed him some remark founded on our pa.s.sage of a moment before, and he came and sat down beside me on my bench, clasping one of his long knees in his hands.

"When is it this big breakfast of theirs comes off?" he inquired.

"That's what I call it-the little breakfast and the big breakfast. I never thought I should live to see the time when I'd want to eat two breakfasts. But a man's glad to do anything over here."

"For myself," I dropped, "I find plenty to do."

He turned his head and glanced at me with an effect of bottomless wonder and dry despair. "You're getting used to the life, are you?"

"I like the life very much," I laughed.

"How long have you tried it?"

"Do you mean this place?"

"Well, I mean anywhere. It seems to me pretty much the same all over."

"I've been in this house only a fortnight," I said.

"Well, what should you say, from what you've seen?" my companion asked.

"Oh you can see all there is at once. It's very simple."

"Sweet simplicity, eh? Well then I guess my two ladies will know right off what's the matter with it."

"Oh everything's very good," I hastened to explain. "And Madame Beaurepas is a charming old woman. And then it's very cheap."

"Cheap, is it?" my friend languidly echoed.

"Doesn't it strike you so?" I thought it possible he hadn't inquired the terms. But he appeared not to have heard me; he sat there, clasping his knee and absently blinking at the sunshine.

"Are you from the United States, sir?" he presently demanded, turning his head again.

"Well, I guess I am, sir," I felt it indicated to reply; and I mentioned the place of my nativity.

"I presumed you were American or English. I'm from the United States myself-from New York City. Many of our people here?" he went on.

"Not so many as I believe there have sometimes been. There are two or three ladies."

"Well," my interlocutor observed, "I'm very fond of ladies' society. I think when it's really nice there's nothing comes up to it. I've got two ladies here myself. I must make you acquainted with them." And then after I had rejoined that I should be delighted and had inquired of him if he had been long in Europe: "Well, it seems precious long, but my time's not up yet. We've been here nineteen weeks and a half."

"Are you travelling for pleasure?" I hazarded.

Once more he inclined his face to me-his face that was practically so odd a comment on my question, and I so felt his unspoken irony that I soon also turned and met his eyes. "No, sir. Not much, sir," he added after a considerable interval.

"Pardon me," I said; for his desolation had a little the effect of a rebuke.

He took no notice of my appeal; he simply continued to look at me. "I'm travelling," he said at last, "to please the doctors. They seemed to think _they'd_ enjoy it."

"Ah, they sent you abroad for your health?"

"They sent me abroad because they were so plaguey muddled they didn't know what else to do."

"That's often the best thing," I ventured to remark.