Rough-Hewn Part 16

He smiled at her rea.s.suringly, and put his watch back. Dear Maman! How she did spoil him! How he had missed her, missed his home, those two years in America. He thought of the boarding-house on 59th Street with a qualm. How good it was to get back to a real home.

But there were fine things in America, too, even if they did not know how to create real homes, even if the men did not know how to love their mothers, or cherish their wives. He had learned a great deal there, a great deal even beyond the revelation of new business methods. What he had learned commercially was enormous! He faced his future here in France, sure of success.

But he had taken in other things too--he was thankful that he had been to Marise's native country and had learned something about the att.i.tude towards women there--not that he would ever, ever treat Marise as American wives were treated, with that rough-and-ready, cowboy lack of ceremony, nor would he ever neglect her, leave her out of his life, as American husbands did. He would know how to combine the American honesty and sincerity with what no American ever felt or showed, with what no American woman ever experienced--tenderness, cherishing tenderness. He would be tender for Marise as no other human being could be; he would find the most exquisite ways to surround her with tenderness, to protect that sweet mouth of hers from bitterness or sorrow, or knowledge of the world's evil.

He looked down steadily at the floor, a knot in his throat, his heart aching, and swallowed hard.

Three wooden thumps sounded from the platform, and the curtain drew itself aside, showing the stage decorated with a stand, two potted palms, an armchair, and a sprawling black grand piano with two cane-bottomed chairs before it.

From the wings trudged in a red-cheeked young girl, with a large bust, and brawny rough arms, hanging down over her starched white dress.

Behind her trotted a short withered elderly woman, a black silk waist crossed over her flat chest, her scanty gray hair smoothed down in thin bandeaux over her ears. They sat down before the piano, opened the music, carried by the older woman, waited till she had adjusted drooping eye-gla.s.ses on her high thin nose, and had peeringly found her place.

Then the young girl began to pound out the Raindrop Prelude while the other turned over the pages.

The audience preserved a respectful silence, bestowing a minute attention on the hang of the player's skirt, the fit of her bodice, the crimped waves of her light brown hair, her over-plump hands, and the bulging patent-leather shoes, which she pressed nervously up and down on the pedals.

Something seemed to break and clear away in Jean-Pierre's head, like fumes drifting away from a shattered retort. So this was a school-girl, this solid, unformed lump of human flesh, neither child nor woman, who had lost a child's poetry and had not yet come to woman's seductiveness.

He looked coolly at the girl (his mother whispered her name, the younger sister of a lycee friend of his), dissecting her with his eyes, immeasurably relieved. Was it for an amorphous creature like this, too old to kiss on the cheek, too young to kiss on the mouth, that he had suffered? Why, it was nothing; a mere morbid whim of his ignorant boyhood. How right Maman had been in making Papa send him away from it!

He had grown to be a man without realizing it, a man of the world, in no danger of losing his head over chits.

The Prelude was finished. The player got to her feet, and bowed self-consciously to the muted thuddings of gloved palms on gloved palms which greeted the cessation of her activities. She got herself off the stage, walking heavily in her too-tight slippers. Jean-Pierre, who sat at one side could see a little behind the scenes and observed that as soon as she thought she was out of sight of the audience, she gave way to childish relief that the ordeal was over, and skipped forward, running. He suppressed a supercilious smile of aesthetic scorn. Her body, as large and heavy as a woman's, no longer expressed the impulses of the child she still was. She skipped clumsily, with an inelastic energy of gesture like a cow capering in a spring-time pasture. Jean-Pierre felt the keenest pleasure in his ruthless perception of her lack of grace.

This was emanc.i.p.ation!

"She plays very nicely," murmured his mother, on the general chance that some member of her family might be sitting within earshot.

"Yes, very agreeably," he concurred.

Neither of them had heard a note of the music.

They continued to sit in decorous silence, looking with vacant faces straight before them, till the next performer appeared. This was Elise Fortier, whom they were both prepared to detest because of her father and mother and brother. They did detest her, everything about her from her thin, dry hair, frizzed out to imitate abundance, to her shifty eyes exactly like her mother's, from her stooping shoulders, to her long bony hands, which clattered out loudly the Schubert Marche Militaire. When she had finished, "Really quite a talent," observed Mme. Garnier taking pains to be audible; and, "Remarkable for her age," agreed Jean-Pierre.

He was relaxing morally, in an inexpressible ease at finding his head clear, his heart at rest. To own yourself, to look at life from behind a stout wall of critical cynicism--it was to be in safety at last! He barely glanced at the next player, a nondescript, precocious child, who murdered a Moment Musical, her short thin legs dangling from the stool.

And the next, the one who played the Liebestraum, a tall young lady with the self-admiring graces and manners of an opera singer on the concert platform. He looked at his watch again and wondered how long it would be before the stupid school performance would be over, and he could get away for an aperitif at the Cafe du Grand Bouleau on the Place d'Armes and an evening with----

He saw that another player was coming forward, a slim tall girl with thick shining dark hair held back by a white ribbon like the others. She stood for an instant to bow to the audience before sitting down at the piano, and he could look up full into her unconscious face, gazing out over his head impersonally with shy, liquid, dark eyes. She was breathing a little rapidly, her young breast rising and falling under the filmy white of her dress. A timid propitiatory smile curved her sensitive mouth and arched her long, finely-drawn eyebrows.

Not a muscle of Jean-Pierre's face changed; every line of his careless, confident att.i.tude froze taut as it was. And underneath this motionless exterior, he felt his heart hotly, joyfully weeping in a pa.s.sion of thanksgiving, like a frightened lost child who has come into the right way. He lost all sense of connection with his body and yearning, worshipping, clamoring, imperiously calling, humbly beseeching, he gazed out from the bars of his immobile, well-dressed external self at the girl sitting before the piano. Two years, two long years of exile, how could life ever make up to him for those two lost years? How he had starved! His famished eyes fed ravenously on what they saw, the supple, elastic slimness of the young body, the fine, thin ankle and shapely foot, the creamy forearm, the agile, strong, white fingers, so bravely flinging out harmonies beyond the comprehension of the smooth broad brow, inviolate, intact, innocent, ignorant, which bent its full child's curve over the keys.

Jean-Pierre looked and looked, prostrating himself in awe before the revelation of divine, stainless youth. Never till that moment, he told himself, had he understood the meaning of the holy word, virgin.

And he had thought, those two long years, that he had always held her before his eyes! He had remembered nothing, nothing of what she was.

Yet, how could he have divined what she was becoming--that mouth, her pure girl's mouth, cleanly drawn in scarlet against the flower-like flesh perfumed with youth. Would he--would he know the first cool touch of those young lips ... he found that he could see her no more, for a mist before his eyes, and yet he continued to strain his eyes through the mist towards where she sat.

Some one touched him on the arm. It was Maman--Maman who looked at him in tender sympathy. As their glance met, she smiled at him, and nodded her head once, rea.s.suringly. She looked as she had when he was a little boy, and she had yielded at last to some desperately held whim of his.

Dearest Maman! It was a promise she gave him silently, a promise to help him towards his happiness. She too had succ.u.mbed to Marise. Who would not? He pressed her hand gently, and smiled in return. A calm peace came upon him.

Madame Garnier knew very well beforehand when the little American girl was to come on the program, and after that ill-bred, over-dressed Yvonne Bredier had wriggled and grinned her way off the stage, she felt an anxious, nervous expectation. Jean-Pierre had no idea what was coming.

She could feel that. Although she dared not change her position to look at him, she was acutely aware of the relaxed careless pose of his body, and of the nonchalant turn of his head as he glanced at the girl who now came forward on the stage.

And then she felt with that sixth sense of her pa.s.sion for Jean-Pierre that he had been struck, had been pierced, as though a knife had thrust him through and through. Although he had not moved--because he had not moved, had not changed a line of his careless att.i.tude, she divined that he had been stricken into immobility. What was it? Was it the shock of disillusion, of disappointment at prosaic reality after a long, romantic dream? Or did he still find in the girl whatever strange sorcery had so bewitched his boyish fancy?

She herself sat as stiffly motionless as he, suffering so exquisite a torture of suspense that she dared not bring herself to end it by a look at his face.

Some one back of her coughed, and the sound broke the spell. She drew a long breath and resolutely turned her head towards her son.

"Oh, my Jean-Pierre, oh, my little boy! is it so you feel? Oh, my darling, do you want her, do you want anything in the world like that?

My little boy, a man! To think that it is my little boy, thus burning with a man's desire! Oh, yes, Jean-Pierre, you shall have her ... what is your mother for but to help you have what you want? Oh, poor boy, poor boy, to look at any woman so.... Oh, Jean-Pierre, if you knew women, how they only live to fool men ... no woman on earth is worth...."

She saw now that his flaming young eyes were veiled with tears. She touched his arm, she smiled at him, closer to him than since his early childhood. And he took her hand, he smiled back, he looked at her as he had not once since his infatuation began--like her son, her only son once more letting her into his heart. She held tightly to his hand, now happy and at peace.

Thus together, hand in hand, they were looking up at the stage when the girl struck the final chord, and rising, turned once more towards the front to make her bow in acknowledgment of the applause. The excitement, the effort, had brought a sh.e.l.l-like color into her subtly modeled cheeks. Once more she looked out into the audience impersonally and then, as she turned to go, unconsciously drawn by the intense gaze of the couple in the second row, her dark eyes dropped to them for an instant's glance of friendly recognition. Madame Garnier felt her son draw a sudden, gasping breath through half-open lips and tighten his hold on her hand.

During the rest of the program her thoughts and plans rose in a busy circling swarm. After all, there were advantages. It might be much worse! Impressionable, sensitive, inexperienced as Jean-Pierre was, it might very well have been some mature married woman in search of a new sensation who had thus caught his first young pa.s.sion. Or even not his pa.s.sion at all. Even if he himself had felt nothing, any woman could have victimized him by working on that foolish sensibility of his. If she could make him think--and his mother always had a scared sense of how easy that would be--that she was in love with him, he would never know how to retreat, as more brutal men knew so well how to do. She had always been afraid of some such entanglement as that, in which Jean-Pierre's weakness (in her heart she called it plainly that, and not chivalry or sensibility) would make him a helpless victim of a woman either an old fool herself or a calculating sensualist. Heavens! How many dangers there were in the world for one's son! And sons could not be guarded like daughters, by keeping them under your thumb. There were also, for such a romantic, unworldly boy as Jean-Pierre, all the variations on the Camille theme. How easily some shrewd woman of the demi-monde could have pulled the wool over his eyes! Madame Garnier had no doubts that Jean-Pierre knew such women. Her son was a man like all other men, for all his poetic, high-strung ideas, and had certainly had his part of an ordinary man's life, especially those last two years away from home, irresponsible and alone. Oh, yes, the more she thought shudderingly of the dangers he had escaped, the more harmless appeared this fancy for a school girl. And if his fancy was to light on a young girl, in some ways it was more convenient to have her a foreigner with no family, so to speak, rather than a girl of Bayonne society, whose family would expect to have much to say about all the arrangements of Jean-Pierre's life. Heavens! suppose it had been Elise Fortier--think of Jean-Pierre saddled with Madame Fortier as a mother-in-law! Not that that worthless idle American mother-in-law was much better; except that those people _must_ go back to America some time! Everybody did go back to his native country ultimately. And too, she was a weak, foolish thing who would never have the force to make trouble. Look at the way she let herself be run by her servants. Also, until now, she had paid precious little attention to her daughter; there was no reason to think she would develop any more interest in her later on. And the child herself seemed malleable material. There was no doubt she would be a pretty woman, and marrying very young, she would certainly a.s.similate the standards of the Garnier family.

When the concert was over, she said to Jean-Pierre, "If you like, we will wait till the girls come out, and walk home with Danielle and her cla.s.smates." As she spoke she nodded to old Jeanne Amigorena, the cook in the American family, who stood there, also waiting, her young mistress' cloak and hat on her arm. It occurred to her that one of the first things to do would be to eliminate that servant. She probably knew altogether too much about Marise's family. It would not be prudent to have her around a young menage; and anyhow, old servants were an intolerable nuisance with their airs of belonging to the family.

Behind the scenes where the girls were waiting for the concert to begin, there had been a deal of giggling and whispering and rustling.

Mademoiselle Vivier, chosen to turn the pages for the players because she was so severe it was thought she could keep them in order, was "gend'arming around" as the girls called it, pouncing on one group for laughing too loud, and on another for making too much noise as they executed grotesque caricatures of the way they intended to make their entries on the stage. The moment her back was turned, they whispered and giggled and pranced more wildly than ever, turning deep bows into pirouettes, shaking out their full skirts and whirling about like dervishes. Everybody took care to lose her music and get it all mixed up with everybody's else, just to see Mlle. Vivier go into the air.

"Here's that missing sheet from your Schubert, Marguerite! Oh, no, it's Gabrielle's Chopin!"

"Oh, all the scherzo pages have gone from my Delibes!"

"Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle, I feel so faint, I don't believe I _can_ play."

"Oh, Mademoiselle, I forgot to bring my--oh, yes, here it is, right under Danielle! Get up, Danielle! Get up! _Mademoiselle!_ Danielle Garnier won't get off my music! Oh, Mademoiselle, can't I play my Nocturne instead of the Autumn Leaves! I _feel_ like a nocturne; just ready to go to sleep."

Poor Mademoiselle Vivier, single-handed as she was, grew more and more frantic, rushing about, a dark red flush on her thin face, crying, "Sh, _sh_!" much more loudly than the girls were whispering, exhorting them angrily to have some manners, not to behave like so many barbarians, and to realize the seriousness of the occasion, the Gambert music prize at stake!

But one of those flint-like school traditions originating G.o.d only knows how, and utterly impervious to exhortations from any faculty, decreed in that school that the Gambert music prize was a joke, a scream of a joke.

The girls would kill themselves with work and worry to win any other prize, for dramatic recitation, for dancing, even for French composition, much as they hated that, but care who won the music prize they would not; although, of course, it was exciting to have no cla.s.ses that afternoon, to wear your best white dress and parade out on the stage. They had handed down from one school generation to another the fixed idea that M. Gambert had been short, red-faced and ridiculously fat, and they enraged their teachers by drawing on the margins of their music, impudent sketches of a paunchy, bald little man ceremoniously bestowing a huge wreath on a knock-kneed, scrawny girl. Whereas, as a matter of historic fact, M. Gambert had been a very good-looking bourgeois, who in his youth had been a dashing lieutenant under Napoleon I. Also the Gambert prize was not a wreath at all but an alb.u.m of piano music, beautifully bound in bright red leather, which, because the Mother Superior feared arousing the vanity of the winner, was privately bestowed behind the scenes. But historic facts have no bearing on a cherished school joke of long standing. For the girls, the Gambert prize continued always to be one gigantic lark, one of those perennial farces, the indestructible quality of which so endears them to fourteen and fifteen year olds.

This year they had a new variation on their usual fooleries. Elise Fortier told them that her grown-up young lady cousin had discovered something as good as the rouge which was so strictly forbidden to them by the Sisters, that its very name was not allowed to be p.r.o.nounced in school. If you bent over double and hung your head upside down, way over, thus, till it was on the same level with your knees, and held it there till you felt as though you'd burst, you'd have the loveliest color in your cheeks, just like an actress.

Of course they all wanted to look like actresses. What could be more delightful than to look like an actress!

In an instant the horrified Mademoiselle Vivier was treated to an appalling spectacle. All of her charges utterly forgetting their manners or even decency, were stooping double, their full starched skirts sticking out at acute angles behind, and to the tune of m.u.f.fled shrieks of laughter were dangling and shaking their heads, like so many lunatics, their carefully dressed hair sweeping the floor. She rushed at the nearest one, Marise Allen, and forced her back to an upright position. But this did not improve things. When Marise caught a glimpse of the others, like great white mushrooms, stooping and shaking, she burst out into anything but a m.u.f.fled shout of laughter, which brought them all up, one after another, to gaze and scream, and lean, convulsed and hysterical, against the walls.

It was a critical moment. The curtain was due to go up, and the girls were really out of hand. Mademoiselle Vivier could do nothing with them.

They had lost control of themselves; her experienced eye knew the signs. In a moment more, one of the more high-strung ones would begin to cry and then.... Good G.o.d! what a mess! What diabolically infernal creatures girls were to handle! How sick she was of their imbecility!

She ran hastily around to the side door and beckoning in the Mother Superior told her what was happening. The nun nodded understandingly, meditated for an instant, casting about in her mind, and then, her aged face taking on an expression of majestic calm, she swept back to the little room behind the stage. The girls were startled to see her and alarmed by the intense gravity of her face.