THE PENSION BEAUREPAS (continued 2)

Well, she would see what she could do. But she bent grave eyes on me. “Are they really fair examples?”

“Examples of what?”

“Of our American tendencies.”

“‘Tendencies’ is a big word, dear lady; tendencies are difficult to calculate.” I used even a greater freedom. “And you shouldn’t abuse those good Rucks, who have been so kind to your daughter. They’ve invited her to come and stay with them in Thirty-Seventh Street near Fourth Avenue.”

“Aurora has told me. It might be very serious.”

“It might be very droll,” I said.

“To me,” she declared, “it’s all too terrible. I think we shall have to leave the Pension Beaurepas. I shall go back to Madame Chamousset.”

“On account of the Rucks?” I asked.

“Pray why don’t they go themselves? I’ve given them some excellent addresses—written down the very hours of the trains. They were going to Appenzell; I thought it was arranged.”

“They talk of Chamouni now,” I said; “but they’re very helpless and undecided.”

“I’ll give them some Chamouni addresses. Mrs. Ruck will send for a chaise à porteurs; I’ll give her the name of a man who lets them lower than you get them at the hotels. After that they must go.”

She had thoroughly fixed it, as we said; but her large assumptions ruffled me. “I nevertheless doubt,” I returned, “if Mr. Ruck will ever really be seen on the Mer de Glace—great as might be the effect there of that high hat. He’s not like you; he doesn’t value his European privileges. He takes no interest. He misses Wall Street all the time. As his wife says, he’s deplorably restless, but I guess Chamouni won’t quiet him. So you mustn’t depend too much on the effect of your addresses.”

“Is it, in its strange mixture of the barbaric and the effete, a frequent type?” asked Mrs. Church with all the force of her noble appetite for knowledge.

“I’m afraid so. Mr. Ruck’s a broken-down man of business. He’s broken-down in health and I think he must be broken-down in fortune. He has spent his whole life in buying and selling and watching prices, so that he knows how to do nothing else. His wife and daughter have spent their lives, not in selling, but in buying—with a considerable indifference to prices—and they on their side know how to do nothing else. To get something in a ‘store’ that they can put on their backs—that’s their one idea; they haven’t another in their heads. Of course they spend no end of money, and they do it with an implacable persistence, with a mixture of audacity and of cunning. They do it in his teeth and they do it behind his back; the mother protects the daughter, while the daughter eggs on the mother. Between them they’re bleeding him to death.”

“Ah what a picture!” my friend calmly sighed. “I’m afraid they’re grossly illiterate.”

“I share your fears. We make a great talk at home about education, but see how little that ideal has ever breathed on them. The vision of fine clothes rides them like a fury. They haven’t an idea of any sort—not even a worse one—to compete with it. Poor Mr. Ruck, who’s a mush of personal and private concession—I don’t know what he may have been in the business world—strikes me as a really tragic figure. He’s getting bad news every day from home; his affairs may be going to the dogs. He’s unable, with his lost nerve, to apply himself; so he has to stand and watch his fortunes ebb. He has been used to doing things in a big way and he feels ‘mean’ if he makes a fuss about bills. So the ladies keep sending them in.”

“But haven’t they common sense? Don’t they know they’re marching to ruin?”

“They don’t believe it. The duty of an American husband and father is to keep them going. If he asks them how, that’s his own affair. So by way of not being mean, of being a good American husband and father, poor Ruck stands staring at bankruptcy.”

Mrs. Church, with her cold competence, picked my story over. “Why, if Aurora were to go to stay with them she mightn’t even have a good nourriture.”

“I don’t on the whole recommend,” I smiled, “that your daughter should pay a visit to Thirty-Seventh Street.”

She took it in—with its various bearings—and had after all, I think, to renounce the shrewd view of a contingency. “Why should I be subjected to such trials—so sadly éprouveé?” From the moment nothing at all was to be got from the Rucks—not even eventual gratuitous board—she washed her hands of them altogether. “Why should a daughter of mine like that dreadful girl?”

“Does she like her?”

She challenged me nobly. “Pray do you mean that Aurora’s such a hypocrite?”

I saw no reason to hesitate. “A little, since you inquire. I think you’ve forced her to be.”

“I?”—she was shocked. “I never force my daughter!”

“She’s nevertheless in a false position,” I returned. “She hungers and thirsts for her own great country; she wants to ‘come out’ in New York, which is certainly, socially speaking, the El Dorado of young ladies. She likes any one, for the moment, who will talk to her of that and serve as a connecting-link with the paradise she imagines there. Miss Ruck performs this agreeable office.”

“Your idea is, then, that if she were to go with such a person to America she could drop her afterwards?”

I complimented Mrs. Church on her quickly-working mind, but I explained that I prescribed no such course. “I can’t imagine her—when it should come to the point—embarking with the famille Roque. But I wish she might go nevertheless.”

Mrs. Church shook her head lucidly—she found amusement in my inappropriate zeal. “I trust my poor child may never be guilty of so fatal a mistake. She’s completely in error; she’s wholly unadapted to the peculiar conditions of American life. It wouldn’t please her. She wouldn’t sympathise. My daughter’s ideal’s not the ideal of the class of young women to which Miss Ruck belongs. I fear they’re very numerous; they pervade the place, they give the tone.”

“It’s you who are mistaken,” I said. “There are plenty of Miss Rucks, and she has a terrible significance—though largely as the product of her weak-kneed sire and his ‘absorption in business.’ But there are other forms. Go home for six months and see.”

“I’ve not, unfortunately, the means to make costly experiments. My daughter,” Mrs. Church pursued, “has had great advantages—rare advantages—and I should be very sorry to believe that au fond she doesn’t appreciate them. One thing’s certain: I must remove her from this pernicious influence. We must part company with this deplorable family. If Mr. Ruck and his ladies can’t be induced to proceed to Chamouni—a journey from which no traveller with the smallest self-respect can dispense himself—my daughter and I shall be obliged to retire from the field. We shall go to Dresden.”

“To Dresden?” I submissively echoed.

“The capital of Saxony. I had arranged to go there for the autumn, but it will be simpler to go immediately. There are several works in the gallery with which Aurora has not, I think, sufficiently familiarised herself. It’s especially strong in the seventeenth-century schools.”

As my companion offered me this information I caught sight of Mr. Ruck, who lounged in with his hands in his pockets and his elbows making acute angles. He had his usual anomalous appearance of both seeking and avoiding society, and he wandered obliquely toward Mrs. Church, whose last words he had overheard. “The seventeenth-century schools,” he said as if he were slowly weighing some very small object in a very large pair of scales. “Now do you suppose they had schools at that period?”

Mrs. Church rose with a good deal of majesty, making no answer to this incongruous jest. She clasped her large volume to her neat little bosom and looked at our luckless friend more in pity than in anger, though more in edification than in either. “I had a letter this morning from Chamouni.”

“Well,” he made answer, “I suppose you’ve got friends all round.”

“I’ve friends at Chamouni, but they’re called away. To their great regret.” I had got up too; I listened to this statement and wondered. I’m almost ashamed to mention my wanton thought. I asked myself whether this mightn’t be a mere extemporised and unestablished truth—a truth begotten of a deep desire; but the point has never been cleared. “They’re giving up some charming rooms; perhaps you’d like them. I would suggest your telegraphing. The weather’s glorious,” continued Mrs. Church, “and the highest peaks are now perceived with extraordinary distinctness.”

Mr. Ruck listened, as he always listened, respectfully. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know as I want to go up Mount Blank. That’s the principal attraction, ain’t it?”

“There are many others. I thought I would offer you an exceptional opportunity.”

“Well,” he returned, “I guess you know, and if I could let you fix me we’d probably have some big times. But I seem to strike opportunities—well, in excess of my powers. I don’t seem able to respond.”

“It only needs a little decision,” remarked Mrs. Church with an air that was a perfect example of this virtue. “I wish you good-night, sir.” And she moved noiselessly away.

Mr. Ruck, with his long legs apart, stood staring after her; then he transferred his perfectly quiet eyes to me. “Does she own a hotel over there? Has she got any stock in Mount Blank?” Indeed in view of the way he had answered her I thought the dear man—to whom I found myself becoming hourly more attached—had beautiful manners.

IX

The next day Madame Beaurepas held out to me with her own venerable fingers a missive which proved to be a telegram. After glancing at it I let her know that it appeared to call me away. My brother had arrived in England and he proposed I should meet him there; he had come on business and was to spend but three weeks in Europe. “But my house empties itself!” the old woman cried on this. “The famille Roque talks of leaving me and Madame Cheurche nous fait la réverénce.”

“Mrs. Church is going away?”

“She’s packing her trunk; she’s a very extraordinary person. Do you know what she asked me this morning? To invent some combination by which the famille Roque should take itself off. I assured her I was no such inventor. That poor famille Roque! ‘Oblige me by getting rid of them,’ said Madame Cheurche—quite as she would have asked Célestine to remove a strong cheese. She speaks as if the world were made for Madame Cheurche. I hinted that if she objected to the company there was a very simple remedy—and at present elle fait ses paquets.”

“She really asked you to get the Rucks out of the house?”

“She asked me to tell them that their rooms had been let three months ago to another family. She has an aplomb!”

Mrs. Church’s aplomb caused me considerable diversion; I’m not sure that it wasn’t in some degree to laugh at my leisure that I went out into the garden that evening to smoke a cigar. The night was dark and not particularly balmy, and most of my fellow pensioners, after dinner, had remained indoors. A long straight walk conducted from the door of the house to the ancient grille I’ve described, and I stood here for some time looking through the iron bars at the silent empty street. The prospect was not enlivening and I presently turned away. At this moment I saw in the distance the door of the house open and throw a shaft of lamplight into the darkness. Into the lamplight stepped the figure of an apparently circumspect female, as they say in the old stories, who presently closed the door behind her. She disappeared in the dusk of the garden and I had seen her but an instant; yet I remained under the impression that Aurora Church, on the eve of departure, had come out to commune, like myself, with isolation.

I lingered near the gate, keeping the red tip of my cigar turned toward the house, and before long a slight but interesting figure emerged from among the shadows of the trees and encountered the rays of a lamp that stood just outside the gate. My fellow solitary was in fact Aurora Church, who acknowledged my presence with an impatience not wholly convincing.

“Ought I to retire—to return to the house?”

“If you ought,” I replied, “I should be very sorry to tell you so.”

“But we’re all alone. There’s no one else in the garden.”

“It’s not the first time, then, that I’ve been alone with a young lady. I’m not at all terrified.”

“Ah, but I?” she wailed to extravagance. “I’ve never been alone—!” Quickly, however, she interrupted herself. “Bon, there’s another false note!”

“Yes, I’m obliged to admit that one’s very false.”

She stood looking at me. “I’m going away to-morrow; after that there will be no one to tell me.”

“That will matter little,” I presently returned. “Telling you will do no good.”

“Ah, why do you say that?” she all ruefully asked.

I said it partly because it was true, but I said it for other reasons, as well, which I found hard to define. Standing there bareheaded in the night air, in the vague light, this young lady took on an extreme interest, which was moreover not diminished by a suspicion on my own part that she had come into the garden knowing me to be there. I thought her charming, I thought her remarkable and felt very sorry for her; but as I looked at her the terms in which Madame Beaurepas had ventured to characterise her recurred to me with a certain force. I had professed a contempt for them at the time, but it now came into my head that perhaps this unfortunately situated, this insidiously mutinous young creature was in quest of an effective preserver. She was certainly not a girl to throw herself at a man’s head, but it was possible that in her intense—her almost morbid—desire to render operative an ideal charged perhaps after all with as many fallacies as her mother affirmed, she might do something reckless and irregular—something in which a sympathetic compatriot, as yet unknown, would find his profit. The image, unshaped though it was, of this sympathetic compatriot filled me with a semblance of envy. For some moments I was silent, conscious of these things; after which I answered her question. “Because some things—some differences—are felt, not learned. To you liberty’s not natural; you’re like a person who has bought a repeating watch and is, in his satisfaction, constantly taking it out of his pocket to hear it sound. To a real American girl her liberty’s a very vulgarly-ticking old clock.”

“Ah, you mean then,” said my young friend, “that my mother has ruined me?”

“Ruined you?”

“She has so perverted my mind that when I try to be natural I’m necessarily indecent.”

I threw up hopeless arms. “That again’s a false note!”

She turned away. “I think you’re cruel.”

“By no means,” I declared; “because, for my own taste, I prefer you as—as—”

On my hesitating she turned back. “As what?”

“As you are!”

She looked at me a while again, and then she said in a little reasoning tone that reminded me of her mother’s, only that it was conscious and studied, “I wasn’t aware that I’m under any particular obligation to please you!” But she also gave a clear laugh, quite at variance with this stiffness. Suddenly I thought her adorable.

“Oh there’s no obligation,” I said, “but people sometimes have preferences. I’m very sorry you’re going away.”

“What does it matter to you? You are going yourself.”

“As I’m going in a different direction, that makes all the greater separation.”

She answered nothing; she stood looking through the bars of the tall gate at the empty dusky street. “This grille is like a cage,” she said at last.

“Fortunately it’s a cage that will open.” And I laid my hand on the lock.

“Don’t open it”; and she pressed the gate close. “If you should open it I’d go out. There you’d be, monsieur—for I should never return.”

I treated it as wholly thrilling, and indeed I quite found it so. “Where should you go?”

“To America.”

“Straight away?”

“Somehow or other. I’d go to the American consul. I’d beg him to give me money—to help me.”

I received this assertion without a smile; I was not in a smiling humour. On the contrary I felt singularly excited and kept my hand on the lock of the gate. I believed, or I thought I believed, what my companion said, and I had—absurd as it may appear—an irritated vision of her throwing herself on consular tenderness. It struck me for a moment that to pass out of that gate with this yearning straining young creature would be to pass to some mysterious felicity. If I were only a hero of romance I would myself offer to take her to America.

In a moment more perhaps I should have persuaded myself that I was one, but at this juncture I heard a sound hostile to the romantic note. It was nothing less than the substantial tread of Célestine, the cook, who stood grinning at us as we turned about from our colloquy.

“I ask bien pardon,” said Célestine. “The mother of mademoiselle desires that mademoiselle should come in immediately. M. le Pasteur Galopin has come to make his adieux to ces dames.”

Aurora gave me but one glance, the memory of which I treasure. Then she surrendered to Célestine, with whom she returned to the house.

The next morning, on coming into the garden, I learned that Mrs. Church and her daughter had effectively quitted us. I was informed of this fact by old M. Pigeonneau, who sat there under a tree drinking his café-au-lait at a little green table.

“I’ve nothing to envy you,” he said; “I had the last glimpse of that charming Mees Aurore.”

“I had a very late glimpse,” I answered, “and it was all I could possibly desire.”

“I’ve always noticed,” rejoined M. Pigeonneau, “that your desires are more under control than mine. Que voulez-vous? I’m of the old school. Je crois que cette race se perd. I regret the departure of that attractive young person; she has an enchanting smile. Ce sera une femme d’esprit. For the mother, I can console myself. I’m not sure she was a femme d’esprit, though she wished so prodigiously to pass for one. Round, rosy, potelée, she yet had not the temperament of her appearance; she was a femme austère—I made up my mind to that. I’ve often noticed that contradiction in American ladies. You see a plump little woman with a speaking eye and the contour and complexion of a ripe peach, and if you venture to conduct yourself in the smallest degree in accordance with these indices, you discover a species of Methodist—of what do you call it?—of Quakeress. On the other hand, you encounter a tall lean angular form without colour, without grace, all elbows and knees, and you find it’s a nature of the tropics! The women of duty look like coquettes, and the others look like alpenstocks! However, we’ve still la belle Madame Roque—a real femme de Rubens, celle-là. It’s very true that to talk to her one must know the Flemish tongue!”

I had determined in accordance with my brother’s telegram to go away in the afternoon; so that, having various duties to perform, I left M. Pigeonneau to his ethnic studies. Among other things I went in the course of the morning to the banker’s, to draw money for my journey, and there I found Mr. Ruck with a pile of crumpled letters in his lap, his chair tipped back and his eyes gloomily fixed on the fringe of the green plush table-cloth. I timidly expressed the hope that he had got better news from home; whereupon he gave me a look in which, considering his provocation, the habit of forlorn patience was conspicuous.

He took up his letters in his large hand and, crushing them together, held it out to me. “That stack of postal matter,” he said, “is worth about five cents. But I guess,” he added, rising, “that I know where I am by this time.” When I had drawn my money I asked him to come and breakfast with me at the little brasserie, much favoured by students, to which I used to resort in the old town. “I couldn’t eat, sir,” he frankly pleaded, “I couldn’t eat. Bad disappointments strike at the seat of the appetite. But I guess I’ll go with you, so as not to be on show down there at the pension. The old woman down there accuses me of turning up my nose at her food. Well, I guess I shan’t turn up my nose at anything now.”

We went to the little brasserie, where poor Mr. Ruck made the lightest possible dejeuner. But if he ate very little he still moved his lean jaws—he mumbled over his spoilt repast of apprehended facts; strange tough financial fare into which I was unable to bite. I was very sorry for him, I wanted to ease him off; but the only thing I could do when we had breakfasted was to see him safely back to the Pension Beaurepas. We went across the Treille and down the Corraterie, out of which we turned into the Rue du Rhône. In this latter street, as all the world knows, prevail those shining shop-fronts of the watchmakers and jewellers for its long list of whom Geneva is famous. I had always admired these elegant exhibitions and never passed them without a lingering look. Even on this occasion, preoccupied as I was with my impending departure and with my companion’s troubles, I attached my eyes to the precious tiers that flashed and twinkled behind the huge clear plates of glass. Thanks to this inveterate habit I recorded a fresh observation. In the largest and most irresistible of these repositories I distinguished two ladies, seated before the counter with an air of absorption which sufficiently proclaimed their identity. I hoped my companion wouldn’t see them, but as we came abreast of the door, a little beyond, we found it open to the warm summer air. Mr. Ruck happened to glance in, and he immediately recognised his wife and daughter. He slowly stopped, his eyes fixed on them; I wondered what he would do. A salesman was in the act of holding up a bracelet before them on its velvet cushion and flashing it about in a winsome manner.

Mr. Ruck said nothing, but he presently went in; whereupon, feeling that I mustn’t lose him, I did the same. “It will be an opportunity,” I remarked as cheerfully as possible, “for me to bid good-bye to the ladies.”

They turned round on the approach of their relative, opposing an indomitable front. “Well, you’d better get home to breakfast—that’s what you’d better do,” his wife at once remarked. Miss Sophy resisted in silence; she only took the bracelet from the attendant and gazed at it all fixedly. My friend seated himself on an empty stool and looked round the shop. “Well, we’ve been here before, and you ought to know it,” Mrs. Ruck a trifle guiltily contended. “We were here the first day we came.”

The younger lady held out to me the precious object in her hand. “Don’t you think that’s sweet?”

I looked at it a moment. “No, I think it’s ugly.”

She tossed her head as at a challenge to a romp. “Well, I don’t believe you’ve any taste.”

“Why, sir, it’s just too lovely,” said her mother.

“You’ll see it some day on me, anyway,” piped Miss Ruck.

“Not very much,” said Mr. Ruck quietly.

“It will be his own fault, then,” Miss Sophy returned.

“Well, if we’re going up to Chamouni we want to get something here,” said Mrs. Ruck. “We mayn’t have another chance.”

Her husband still turned his eyes over the shop, whistling half under his breath. “We ain’t going up to Chamouni. We’re going back to New York City straight.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” she made answer. “Don’t you suppose we want to take something home?”

“If we’re going straight back I must have that bracelet,” her daughter declared. “Only I don’t want a velvet case; I want a satin case.”

“I must bid you good-bye,” I observed all irrelevantly to the ladies. “I’m leaving Geneva in an hour or two.”

“Take a good look at that bracelet, so you’ll know it when you see it,” was hereupon Miss Sophy’s form of farewell to me.

“She’s bound to have something!” her mother almost proudly attested.

Mr. Ruck still vaguely examined the shop; he still just audibly whistled. “I’m afraid he’s not at all well,” I took occasion to intimate to his wife.

She twisted her head a little and glanced at him; she had a brief but pregnant pause. “Well, I must say I wish he’d improve!”

“A satin case, and a nice one!” cried Miss Ruck to the shopman.

I bade her other parent good-bye. “Don’t wait for me,” he said, sitting there on his stool and not meeting my eye. “I’ve got to see this thing through.”

I went back to the Pension Beaurepas, and when an hour later I left it with my luggage these interesting friends had not returned.