CHAPTER XXXVIII
As Marise started up the front stair-way she saw Biron emerging on the run from the foot of the servants' stairway, his apron half-off, a net marketing-bag in his hand. His broad, red face looked cross and anxious. Something must have gone wrong. She turned back, meeting him in front of the concierge's door.
"Oh, Mademoiselle, God be praised you're back in time. Desolation and ruin! The sole has turned—it has been so hot to-day. I swear on my soul as a Christian it was fresh when I got it—unless that blackguard Gagnan changed.…"
When Biron turned his torrent of objurgation on the trades-people who sold him eatables there was no stopping him. Marise cut in now.
"Were you going out for another? Do you want me to go?"
"Yes, yes—only not for a sole—there wouldn't be one left—and the dinner was planned for sole!"
He ground his teeth, white and sound as a wolf's, "I could send Mélanie if she had the intelligence of an angle-worm—and yet to leave her with my sauce till I get back—I was right in the midst of a sauce piquante for the …"
He turned as if to rush back upstairs, distractedly, and turned again as if to rush distractedly out into the street.
Marise put out her hand for the market-bag and spoke with the peremptory decision that was always necessary to unloosen Biron from his temperamental tangles.
"Go right back to your sauce, Biron. I'll have the fish here in five minutes. And have plenty of onion in that sauce. My father thought the last not well-balanced, too much vinegar. He likes his sauces suave."
"But not a sole, Mademoiselle, not a sole! Any sole that is left on the market at six of the evening is left because nobody would buy it. But the dinner was planned for sole!" He stamped his huge, felt-slippered feet in exasperation.
"A mackerel," suggested Marise, "they're good at this time of the year."
He flung his arms over his head. "A mackerel! A gross, fat, dark monster like a mackerel to replace a sole!"
"Oh, no, of course not." Marise saw his point. "I didn't think. Nor salmon, of course."
He shuddered away from the idea of salmon.
They stood staring at each other, thinking hard, the cook's big, parboiled fist clenched on his mouth, his brows knit together, like those of the Penseur.
"Some merlans?" suggested Marise. "You can cook them au gratin just like a sole."
"But will I have time!" he groaned. "Who knows whether the oven is hot enough?"
"Well, hurry back and brighten the fire, while I rush out and get the fish."
He fled back up the stairs, his slippers flapping. She left her roll of music in the concierge's care and darted out into the street, market-bag in hand. Twenty minutes later the fish were being disposed with a religious care on a bed of chopped parsley, shallots, mushrooms and butter. Biron shoved the baking-pan tenderly into the oven, wiped the sweat from his face, and stopped storming at his wife.
"You were not to blame, after all, Melanie," he told her magnanimously, and with a long breath, "But it was a close call, by God, a close call."
In the salon Marise was pouring an apéritif for her father, brightly dishing up the news of the day with the sauce of lively comment, and saying nothing about culinary close calls. Her father listened to her, sipping his Dubonnet with an air of intense satisfaction. He took plenty of time for it, allowing each mouthful to deliver all its complicated burden of tang and bitterness and heat before he took another one into his mouth.
"Excellent stuff, Dubonnet," he said appreciatively.
"I'm glad you like it," said Marise. She envied her father his enjoyments. They were, comparatively speaking, so easy to get.
Looking at her seemed to remind him of something. He reached into a vest pocket (with some difficulty, for his vests were more and more tightly packed with each year of good living), and took out a little jeweller's box.
"It's your birthday to-day," he remarked, taking another careful sip of his apéritif.
Marise looked at the present, a little wrist-watch, from a very good house.
"Oh, that's awfully good of you. Father," she said, trying it on.
"You can have one if that funny little friend of yours can," he advanced.
"Oh, if you start giving me everything Eugenia has.…!" protested Marise.
"Somebody ought to make her a present of a little ordinary sense," he commented, with no great interest in the subject. "I've seen her kind before. They tear things loose till they get what they want, and then they don't like it."
"Eugenia just loves it, every bit of it," Marise objected.
"Well, let her," he dismissed her from consideration with his usual nonchalance, and taking the last of the Dubonnet, he rose to go into his room.
In a moment Marise heard an indignant roar, "Mélanie has forgotten my hot water again!" Her father came to the door of his room, vast and bulging in his shirt and trousers, outraged by the oversight.
"Oh, yes," said Marise, in annoyance. "You might have known she would. Biron has been in another tantrum and taking her head off. It gets her so rattled she forgets her own work."
"I don't see what that has to do with my hot water," cried the master of the house aggrieved.
"It hasn't! It hasn't!" cried Marise hastily, running to tell Mélanie of her crime.
Not till the hot water was safely delivered, and her father's comments on bad service diminished to a distant solitary mutter, did Marise go into her own room to dress. She had no hot water, either, but she washed in cold, scorning with all her heart the childishness of men, and laughing childishly at the picture her father had made, shouting and indignant, billowing in his shirt and trousers. He and Biron! One had always to be smoothing them down and wrapping them up in the little things they wanted. It must be truly lovely to be married to one, as poor Mélanie was! But, after all, Father did his best to be good to her, when everything about the house was all right and he could think of it. She hoped the dinner would be all right. It was too bad about that sole. Sole was so expensive too. Not that Father ever objected to anything the table cost. Oh, flûte! she had forgotten to see if Biron had exchanged that Bénédictine for Chartreuse. Father would raise the roof if they served him Bénédictine again. She put on her dress hurriedly, and hooking it up as she went, she stepped hastily down the hall to the kitchen. She never had any help from Melanie in dressing, not even costumes that hooked up on the shoulders and under the arms, because it was important not to disturb the small quantity of gray matter Mélanie had, at the hour of serving a meal. It was all needed for the matter in hand.
Dinner was over, and had been acceptable. Her father had partaken of everything with his careful appraising attention, and had found no adverse comment to make. Coffee had been served, and the Chartreuse—Biron had not forgotten.
Out in the kitchen Biron (first, taught by much experience, loosening the sash which bound his mighty paunch), was sitting with his wife at table, eating and drinking like a page out of Rabelais. The dinner had pleased his exacting and irritable master (Biron immensely respected him for being exacting and irritable), and it also had pleased Biron. There was plenty of it left and this was a house where the cook was never subjected to the indignity of having inquiries made about les restes. He leaned back in his chair, undid the button at his throat, and smiled at his wife, over his glass of excellent Burgundy.
"Life is good, hein, old lady?" he said.
She nodded in agreement, keeping her thoughts to herself in the usual stealthy, secretive, feminine fashion.
Over the coffee and Chartreuse, facing another well-satisfied man sat another secretive woman, talking in one key, feeling in another, and finding the process far from enlivening. Down below the surface of the sparkling, chatting Marise, drooped a listless, dispirited Marise for whom a birthday was a most depressing occasion.
"You're nineteen, aren't you, Marise?" asked her father over his cigar.
Marise nodded.
"Well, that's another one gone! Congratulations on every one you get over with," he commented, sipping the stinging green fire of his liqueur with satisfaction.
Marise thought of nothing amusing to say and was silent.
Her father stirred his big body, with the air of some one arousing himself to an effort. The effort seemed to be to say, "Is there anything you want I can get for you?"
His daughter was at a loss before the comprehensiveness of this blanket question. "What kind of a thing?" she inquired.
He professed himself more at a loss than she. "If I had any idea what, I wouldn't need to ask you, would I?"
But he managed, all the same, at least to eliminate some of the things he didn't mean, "Oh, not dresses or hats," and in a moment, after another sip at the liqueur, to give a little more definite idea of what he did, "Something going on, social life; what girls of nineteen are supposed to want."
"Oh, you needn't bother. I get enough of that," she answered, "between Mrs. Marbury and Eugenia and Madame Vallery." She was surprised at her father's interest. They seldom talked together, except of what they were to eat, had eaten, or were eating, or of the interminable games of chess which occupied any leisure moments of his and hers which chanced to coincide. He seemed to have something on his mind now. And he always hated the effort of bringing out what was in his mind. He stopped beating about the bush now and said heavily, "You're no fool, Marise. I don't know any of the roundabout ways to say it to you, that a woman would have, but you won't mind that. What I mean is, I suppose—I imagine that's what's at the bottom of all of it—is this. Are you getting a chance to meet the right sort of young man, the kind you'd want to marry? For you will be marrying before long, I suppose."
Marise waited a long time before she spoke, so that she would not flame out as she felt. That would not be speaking in her father's vernacular, and if there was one thing which every instinct of Marise's taught her, it was to speak to every one in his own language. Nothing in the world would have induced her to expose her own to other people's casual comments, her own, in which she spoke to herself, bitterly, caustically, skeptically, tragically, as no one had ever heard her speak aloud. When she could command herself to select the right phrase out of her father's vocabulary, she remarked, pushing her tiny coffee-cup away with a gesture of finality, "I don't believe I'm very much of a marrying sort."
Her father's comment on this was to say stolidly, "Oh, every girl thinks that." But if he thought he could get a rise out of Marise with this provocation, he was mistaken. She now turned away from the little table and began with an indifferent air to arrange the coal-fire in the grate. They were sitting in the salon.
"Don't you like men?" he asked presently.
She laughed a little, "To dance with."
He looked at her more keenly than he had and asked, "Don't you trust men?"
She turned this off by riposting lightly, "How much is it safe to trust anybody?"
It was as though a chance stroke had cut through the dyke and let out in a rush, waters that had lain sleeping.
"Never trust anybody but yourself," he told her urgently, the words heavy with the intensity of his conviction.
A moment later he added, more deliberately, his manner tinged with his habitual saturnine humor, "And it's not safe to trust yourself very far."
It wasn't at all what he had meant to say to her. But it was such an undertaking to say anything. And what was there to say anyhow? He decided to let it go at that, drank the last of his liqueur, fell back in his arm-chair and reached for the chess-board.
"I hope you got a good supply of that Chartreuse," he said, beginning to set up the men. "It's very much better than what we've been having. Not so syrupy. I do loathe syrupy things."
After the game was over, he took up his Paris Herald and Marise, freed from the necessity to make talk, went to the piano. She began to play, not Chopin as she would have liked, but a dance from the Arlésienne Suite. Father detested melancholy music.
After she had finished, she sat still, sunk together on the piano stool, staring at the music but not seeing it. She heard her father rustle his newspaper as if he had lowered it to look at her. But for once she made no attempt to arouse herself. She continued to present to him a silent, dejected back.
He must have considered this for some minutes when he finally remarked, "I suppose there are people who like birthdays!" Then with a yawn, "But for me, they always make me think of all the ones I have still to get through with, year after year, one by one."
Marise's shoulders bowed under the weight of his words and his accent. She still said nothing.
He took up the newspaper again, but before he began to read he exhorted her, "Oh, well, stick it out! Stick it out, Molly, as best you can. It doesn't last so very long."