Rough-Hewn Part 7

CHAPTER IX

_Round-robin Letter to Mrs. Horace Allen's Neighbors and Friends in Belton, New Jersey_

Bayonne, France, May 25, 1898.

MES CHeRE AMIES:

Je vous demande pardon for being so late with this letter, I know I promised to write just as soon as we got here. But, chere amies, I know you would forgive me if you knew how _marvelous_ our new life is here in this old, beautiful, _civilized_ world. I have just been letting myself go in it, just _grabbing_ at its charm and wonder, and all I can tell you is that Europe is even more _wonderful_ than I thought. I just wish every one of you could persuade your husbands, as I did, to take a position that will bring you across the seas to this "fabled old land of story and art." _You owe it to your children_ to give them the culture which they would get here.

But let me begin first with the material things. Mr. Allen, you know, felt sort of badly because the position here didn't seem to be as important and have as big a salary as the job the Company offered him in Chicago--_Chicago_! Well, you cannot imagine anything like the cheapness of the life here. We have two flats of six rooms each, on the same floor, just the landing between them, twelve rooms in all, furnished elaborately down to the last little things in the kitchen even, and we pay about half the rent we paid in Belton for our unfurnished house.

There is perhaps a little old-world dinginess about the wall-paper and the curtains and things, but that only adds to the delightful _atmosphere_ and makes you realize that you are really in old Europe and not raw young America.

We have two maids for _less than three dollars a week_ each, and such maids! In America we haven't any idea what it is to have good servants.

I am not expected to lift my hand or think about the housekeeping. My old cook, the most _fas_cinating creature, in a quaint peasant's costume, takes _all_ the responsibility on her own shoulders. She gets up frightfully early in the morning, and goes off to market with a big, flat basket, and comes bringing it in _on her head_ all filled with the loveliest things to eat you ever saw, and bought for almost nothing! But she buys just as closely for me as she would for herself. Servants identify themselves with the family of their masters here, and are glad to! I know the word "masters" sounds very un-American; but one so soon gets used to the vocabulary of the country. Pardonnez moi!

Jeanne--that is our cook--brings our breakfast to us _in bed_, all except of course for Mr. Allen, who can't seem to adapt himself to other ways of living. The first morning when she started to, he just jumped out of bed as though the house were on fire, and slammed the door shut in her face. He can't get over his Anglo-Saxon prudishness. But we have separate rooms now, and I have my tray in bed, and read my mail there, and between you and me, it makes me feel just like a heroine in a novel, to lie there in my pretty negligee--you know in America we don't realize what negligees are for. When do you ever have a chance to wear one except when you are sick? And then you don't care. Marise has hers--her breakfast I mean--in her room, too, as she dresses, and Jeanne always expects to help her dress, so I don't have to think at all about getting her off to school! Oh, mes amies, _what_ a rest to one's nerves that is!

Not to have that horrid, hurried hour trying to find clothes and books and get Marise off in time. I just lie in bed reading the mail or a book and Marise comes in, all fresh and combed (Jeanne is wonderful with her hair), and kisses me and says, "Au revoir, Maman." We always try to speak French together for the practice.

Then, as I am getting dressed, Jeanne comes in, with a clean ap.r.o.n to "take her orders," in the good old European way. And from that minute on, I have no more bother about it. Everything is set on the table at the right time, beautifully cooked, the house is kept clean and in the most _perfect_ order.

Perhaps you are wondering why I call Mary, "Marise?" It is a quaint nickname for her that the servants have, and I have picked it up from them. Isn't it delightful? I never liked Mary, and I detest "Molly."

Both the maids are devoted to Marise, and it is the European custom for the servants to do a great deal more for the children of the house than our girls ever dream of doing. Without a word, Jeanne has simply taken over the care of Marise's clothes as a part of her regular work, and she is always ready to go out with her, for it seems that no nice children go alone on the streets here. Every morning, Jeanne takes Marise to her school, and goes for her in the afternoon and brings her back. Marise is perfectly happy here, in a splendid school, and having wonderful opportunities. I am so happy about her advantages. It is not a public school (the "lay" schools as they say, because all the others are run by Catholic nuns). It seems the public schools are something quite new in France, and n.o.body sends children to them except the poor, or people who are queer in some way, with unbalanced ideas. I can easily believe this, since I had a call the other day from a school-teacher in the public schools, who also gives music lessons. She is a very queer and dowdy person, with the most awful hat you ever saw. Didn't you think that all Frenchwomen wore pretty, stylish hats? Not in the least. Quite the contrary. Her sister was with her, quite middle-cla.s.s, both of them, and not at all like the other ladies who have called on me.

For they _have_ called! Do you remember that little old French teacher who came to see me about getting a job in our High School, how discouraging she was about our coming to live in France, and how she said n.o.body would come to see me, at all? Well, if you ever see her, just tell her she is _entirely mistaken_. People are just as cordial as _they can be_, with the most beautiful manners you ever saw.

Do you wonder how I manage about the language? It is _much_ easier to get along than I expected. Of course my thorough reading and writing knowledge of the language is a great help. And I have been making _won_derful progress in speaking it. Being right in the midst of the language all the time it just soaks into you. No one here speaks any English; not from provincial ignorance, the sort we have in America, but from choice, because of their concentration on their own perfect language. They are all deeply cultured. It is _won_derful to be in the midst of cultured people, to be able in casual afternoon calls to discuss De Maupa.s.sant with one lady and Gothic architecture with another.

For we have here in Bayonne--you notice that I already say "We,"--a simply splendid Gothic cathedral, the first one of my life. It is right up the street from where we live, and it is _won_derful. Chere amies, think what it means for a town to have in its midst such a marvelous thing! Think what people must be like who live right close to it, go in and out of it every day, and feel its "beauty and puissant power" (as Matthew Arnold says). The South Portal is especially fine, _starred by Baedeker_, which means a great deal, as you know. I make a pilgrimage there every day, to just _gaze_ at that South Portal. _I_ have a life-time of arrears to make up, not having lived with it from childhood, as these fortunate people have. It is no wonder that you meet here people absolutely _won_derful in their polish, like a lady who called on me the other day, the Marquise de Charmieres. Her husband's family dates back to the days of Louis XII. I am ashamed to say I had to go and look up who Louis XII was, after she had gone. She had with her a nun, who lives with her, by special permission, the dearest old thing with her sweeping black robes and the quaint, quilled, picturesque head-dress. I suppose they used, in the old days, the Charmieres did, to live in the _won_derful old castle, just across the street from us, which is another of my great admirations. Think of living across the street from a real castle! It was constructed in 1100, on the remains of the _old Roman wall_, if you please, for Bayonne is very, very old. And it is right there, just the way it always was, with battlements and a real drawbridge and everything, just as it was in feudal times. Many famous people have lived there, Richard Coeur de Lion, Louis Quatorze, and others. It was there that Catherine de Medicis planned the St.

Bartholomew ma.s.sacre, and in a house on this very street that Napoleon took the Spanish crown away from the King, and gave it to his brother.

Isn't it marvelous to think of?

I have had some of the curtains taken down in our _salon_ (the French simply swathe their windows in curtains, simply _swathe_ them!) and I often stand at the window and just gaze out at those old castle walls and try to imagine the splendid life that went on here then, the streets full of people in costumes and knights in armor and everything. I see the modern crowds coming and going under those ma.s.sive walls, and I keep thinking how proud they must be of such an inheritance from the past, and how they must often wish the good old feudal days back again, when "life had color," as a writer said in a book I was reading the other day. No such inspiriting reminders of past glories in America! No such past glories! Nothing but what Ruskin calls the drab, dead level of democracy.

There is a fine Museum here too, with perfectly splendid works of art in it, pictures by Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, Ribera, Murillo, Poussin, Delacroix, Ingres, Troyon, Meissonier, Corot, Isabey, Bonnat, Bouguereau, Gervex, and many others. I am simply _studying_ them, absorbing them, I go every day with a handbook on art which I bought here (in French, of course), and just gaze at them till their very spirit enters into me. I must tell you that Bouguereau is considered very much out of fashion here, and not at all admired any more. The Meissonier are simply _mar_velous. You could take a microscope to them, and still not see any brush-marks. Indeed it is said that he painted with a microscope. There is a _perfect_ copy here of the Mona Lisa, which people who know say is just as good as the original. Mes chere amies, think what a privilege it is to sit there, right before her, with the book in my hand, looking up into that mysterious face, and reading those wonderful words of Pater's, which I have studied with you so often. "Here is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the eyelids are a little weary. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Ste. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands."

Mes amies, we have often read and studied this marvelous pa.s.sage together, and now I can only say to you _that it is true_! But every bit of culture means so much more to me than it ever did before and now that I know what European life is, I can understand why they are more cultured than we are. It is because they have _leisure_. Here the working cla.s.ses _expect to work_, as our American working cla.s.s does not. And the material cares are just taken right off the shoulders of the upper cla.s.ses. _We_ are _expected_ to occupy ourselves with higher things. I am reading, reading, reading as never before, and getting a closer knowledge of French literature, even than our studies together gave me. It all _means_ so much more to me, now that I am right among the very people who are described in it. Think of looking up from a volume of Zola, and having a caller come in, who might be a character right out of the book. I often tell Mr. Allen, that the life around me ill.u.s.trates and explains the literature, and the literature ill.u.s.trates and explains the life. It is a wonderful, _won_derful experience!

I have just finished De Maupa.s.sant's "Notre Coeur," and I am not surprised that we found it impossible to get hold of the French edition in America. Our strait-laced, old-fashioned, Puritanic America doesn't know enough to appreciate such a picture of this _free_ European world, where relations between men and women are different from those between high school boys and girls. At home the girls rule the roost, if you will excuse a vulgar expression. But not here. Here they are put off in a corner, till they get a husband, and _then_ they are allowed to blossom out. A woman of my age, so a French gentleman told me the other day, is considered _just at the right age_ for being fascinating. And he a.s.sured me he didn't say that because it might apply to me, but _because it is so_. The men have temperament here. They really look at you, and are just as different as can be from the American business-man who never thinks of any woman but his wife, and never pays any attention to _her_!

Here the men positively sparkle in conversation, and they all say they would hardly know I am an American, I have acquired the French manner so entirely. Here a woman is not expected to have become a mummy, because she puts on a wedding-ring. _Quite the contrary_, I a.s.sure you!

But this is a terribly long letter. I have poured out my heart to you in untrammeled spontaneity, such as comes to you in the free intellectuality of this finished civilization.

May you all be able some day to enjoy it!

Your devouee friend,

FLORA ALLEN.

P.S.--Mr. Allen says the business part seems to be all right.

CHAPTER X

As happens to us all, there were certain moments which stayed alive in Marise's memory for years; and as is always the case, those moments did not at all correspond with apparently important events. Such events come, seem of great consequence, happen, and therewith sink down into the featureless ma.s.s of things which happen only once and then are in the past forever. The other moments, those queerly, heterogeneously tumbled-together impressions, are the things which happen over again every time one thinks of them.

One of Marise's fantastic notions was that the things which had happened were piled up in a big junk-heap in your memory in front of a great black curtain. But there were pinholes in the curtain, and if you put your eye to one, there, right before you, one of the things that had happened was alive again, and your heart knocked and your throat felt queer just as it did the first time. This notion may have come to her in this form because it was generally in the night that she experienced the vivid living-over of some long past moment. Wakened from a sound sleep by the hoa.r.s.e whistle of one of the steamers in the Adour, taking advantage of a favorable tide to weigh anchor and be off, she saw in the instant while she drew a long breath and turned over in bed, one of those living scenes again, as actual, as piercingly real to her as though it were happening for the first time. Some of these she greatly dreaded, some set her to ringing all through with happiness, others she never understood at all.

I

One of the very happy ones was the moment when she had first really heard music. She had been "taking lessons" of Mlle. Hasparren for weeks and months. Mlle. Hasparren taught as Marise thought all the teachers in France taught, the hardest possible way; scales, scales, scales and then thumping, monotonous exercises, played over forty, fifty, sixty times, till Marise felt as though there wasn't anything left of her except that exercise, pound, pound, pound all over her. Marise saw nothing in music except hatefully numerous little black dots on white paper, and heard nothing in it beyond a combination of sounds as interesting to hear as a problem in arithmetic is to look at.

She rather liked Mlle. Hasparren, although Maman thought she didn't have a bit of style; but she certainly did hate the three-times-a-week music lesson. She never could have kept on with it in America, but here everything was hard work, and if you weren't working at your music lesson, they'd expect you to be working at something else. And then, too, there was what Father had said about keeping at what you were doing until you got it just right. Marise's bed-room seemed to have taken up the sound of Father's voice as he said that, so that many times, as she sat there doing her lessons and not thinking of it, all of a sudden, the very curtains and walls and chairs seemed to be reminding her of it.

That was really what kept her going, as day by day she sat down heavily before the piano, prodding her mind up to keep it fixed on the little black dots.

That at least was what had kept her at it till the evening which came back to Marise so clearly. Father and Maman had gone out to dinner; she had eaten alone, with Jeanne's chatter for company, and then on her way back to her room, had wandered into the salon, candle-stick in hand, sort of hoping she could think of something nice to do before she settled down to study.

But there was certainly nothing nice to do in the salon. It was awfully lonely in there, the chairs all empty and stiff, standing around heavily, the thick curtains drawn close over the tall windows, and in front of the alcove where Maman's writing-desk stood, the polished floor shining hard and bright, the stands, the table with one of Maman's yellow-covered books on it, the dark little cave of a fireplace. Marise set her candle down on a stand, and herself sank down on the piano stool, her back towards the keys, staring at the lonesome looking room.

How perfectly dead it did look. Marise could hear faintly in the distance an echo of the brisk voice of Jeanne and Isabelle, laughing and carrying on over the dishes. But in here, in the empty salon, there wasn't a sound. Her ears fairly rang with the nothingness all around her. Her heart was big and heavy.

At school that day, the girls had started up a new fad, the "wishbook."

You got a little blank book, and then went around asking everybody to write down in it what she most wished to be. Marise was astonished at what the other girls wrote; one, "I wish I could be a great actress,"

another, "I wish I could marry a millionaire," another, "I wish I could be a great and holy saint." Marise had not been able to understand why everybody did not write what she did, instantly, instantly, something she had always known she wanted. What she had written in everybody's book was, "I wish I could be happy." She thought of this now, and in the empty, cold, echoing room cried it aloud, "I wish I could be happy."

There was no answer from the stiff stuffed chairs, from the well-polished tables, from the black hole of the fireplace. Marise had expected no answer, would not have expected one if her parents had been there, never expected one. What answer could Father give, Father who apparently never thought of such a thing as being happy, and never hoped for anything more than to be a little less tired and bored. And if Maman had been there, she wouldn't even have heard what Marise said, busy as she always was with thinking something of her own. Maman wasn't nearly so cheerful as she had been. What _was_ it Maman was thinking about when she sat so still and her face got dark and drawn? Certainly not about Marise.

The little girl sat on the piano stool, dangling her long legs and looking straight ahead into the empty room, which looked back at her, she thought, as though it had a low opinion of her and a very high opinion of its own importance and elegance. She knew she ought to get up and go into her own room and study a very long lesson on the reign of Henri IV. But she couldn't seem to get up the strength to do this, sitting fallen together on the piano stool, her heart heavier and heavier.

She looked hard at the empty chairs, and thought to herself that it wasn't any worse to see them empty, than to see the people that usually sat on them--not one who could help a little girl to be more happy.

There wasn't a single person she knew, whom she'd wish sitting there now, unless it might be Cousin Hetty! Marise felt a knot come in her throat, and the corners of her mouth began to tremble. She would _like_ to get up in Cousin Hetty's lap again.

But Cousin Hetty was not there. There was nothing there but the circle of unfriendly chairs and tables and the empty, silent room. The trembling of her lips got worse; Marise was afraid she was going to cry.

She turned round on the piano stool, put one bent arm up on the music which stood there, and hid her face in it. She was not crying; though she wished she could, because the ache in her heart and the knot in her throat hurt too much.

The silent, motionless room stood aloof and meaningless about the silent, motionless child. Marise pressed her face closer against her arm. She was trembling now, all over her body.

The silence was intense.

And then it seemed to her that the silence had been broken by a voice, a beautiful, quivering voice, deep and true, which went straight to her heart, as though some one had spoken a strong, loving word. At the sound she stopped trembling and sat motionless.

Before she could draw her breath in wonder, she knew what it had been ... only a note of music. Her own hand falling on a key of the piano had struck a note, which was even then echoing in her ears.

But the first impression was ineffaceable. That, too, rang in her ears.

It seemed as though it was the first time she had ever heard a note of music. Really, really that was so. She had never been _still_ enough before to hear how a note sounded. How it rang and rang in the stillness, its deep vibration stirring echoes deep within Marise's heart! She had thought it was a voice. Why, it was like a voice, a voice speaking to her, just when she had been so sure that there wasn't any voice she could possibly expect to hear.