AS a young and engaging duckling takes to water, so Edward took to Paris. Nothing surprised him. Everything seemed natural, foreordained and comforting. There must have been. French blood in him. He absorbed words and phrases, remembered them, and from the first spoke them not too badly.
The letters with which Townley had provided him had made many things easy. He had the same rooms—five flights up in the rue des Saints-Pères—that Townley had lived in. He had the same kind old landlady. He traded in the same art store. And many established artists, students in Townley's day, became his friends. His talents were obvious. Young and old agreed that he had only to work hard. And he did.
For a few golden days he tramped Paris with his eyes wide open. Hunger always seemed to overtake him within a few steps of some charming little winey restaurant which nobody had ever found before and which nobody would ever find again. The distances were nothing to his country trained legs. He could go from the Place des Vosges to the Place de L'Etoile and back again without any other feelings than pleasure, wonder and excitement. A few days of time and then behold, he was at work.
A number of Townley's friends, liking the naïve, friendly, talented, enthusiastic boy, had advised him not to join a class but to paint in their studios and pick up what he could from their greater experience.
He painted first with St. André. St. André was excuting a very big and important commission for a new hotel in New York. Blind arches had to be filled with nymphs and goddesses, Plenty, Prosperity, Ceres, the Muse, the Graces and Heaven knows how many other lovely ladies. In the climate of these mural decorations the fig and the olive and the orange flourished, and it was so warm and jolly that the inhabitants hardly ever wore any clothes. St. André invited Edward to work on some of the least important figures. He had two other talented young men similarly employed. It was great fun. St. André himself did all the faces and hands and feet, even of the unimportant figures. His young assistants with much advice and encouragement and now and then a touch from the master hand did the rest.
St. André had one failing. He was economical of models. Three girls, hired cheap because their employment would be long and steady, did all the posing. And naturally you couldn't draw them and paint them just as they were—not once even. You had to make them mature or adolescent, dark, brown or blond, white or sun-kissed precisely as you were directed and as the needs of the composition demanded.
They were patient, intelligent, friendly girls who smoked vigorously during their resting times and earned their money many times over. That they were naked much of the time did not seem to be of any especial interest to them or to anybody else. At first Edward had been interested and embarrassed. That was only natural. Any boy would have been. But the embarrassment wore off quickly and the quality of his interest changed. It became an absorbing interest in planes and color and lights and darks, joints and articulations. He did not at first think that the female body, stripped of everything, was especially beautiful to look at. And he did not until he had made the discovery that neither he nor anybody else had ever drawn or painted anything quite so beautiful. And he learned at this time, definitely and for all time, that the coloring of the young human is lovelier than any combination of pigments that has ever been tried. He saw reds and blues and greens and yellows but in a subtlety which could never be imitated. But sometimes, not often, a piece of his coloring really looked a little like the original and then he was secretly very happy.
Painting those three girls in different poses day after day for weeks and months was splendid training for him. So were the long talks with St. André and the two assistants—Jean Duprés and Armand de Ville.
St. André assured the eager young men that they would all be successful painters. He prided himself on his ability to pick and to develop talent. He had never missed his guess, he said. He had even succeeded in teaching a young woman to paint, but she had come to a bad end. That was not his fault. But it had been a great disappointment.
"So few women," he said, "ever succeed in doing anything worth while. But this girl was a wonder. If she had been ugly she would have become a great master. But she was beautiful. She undertook the portrait of a young baron who was rich and a great figure at Longchamps. In the midst of the sittings they eloped to the Riviera. She left him for a Russian prince who flattered her, and when she had changed hands a good many times she took to narcotics and her talent died in her breast. But women do not appreciate talent. They neither appreciate it in themselves if they happen to have it, nor in their husbands. Least of all does a woman appreciate talent in her sons. I will venture to guess that no man ever became a great artist except in the teeth of his mother's opposition . . . My own mother, for instance, though I send her a comfortable sum of money each month, would rather see me a merchant or an advocate at a tenth of the income . . . How about you, Jean? Did your mother persuade you to come to Paris to study art against your own better judgment?"
Jean Duprés grinned a little sheepishly and said:
"I had persuaded one of the girls about the farm to pose for me in the loft where the pears were ripening. My mother found this out—packed the girl off with a bad character which she had not deserved, burned my poor little supply of artist's materials, and I—when it was dark—climbed out of my bedroom window and footed it all the way to Paris. But when I am successful and begin to send money home she will relent."
"What?" asked Armand de Ville, "became of of the girl?"
"I'm sure I don't know," said Duprés. "And she was only posing for the head and shoulders."
"My mother," said de Ville, "had the same feeling about my wanting to be an artist. But the priest persuaded her to give me a trial . . . If at the end of two years I have not had a picture accepted at the Salon I have promised to return to the farm."
"My boy," said St. André, "you will have a picture accepted—if I have to paint it myself."
Then they all laughed, and St. André asked Edward if his wish to be an artist had met with parental encouragement.
Edward simply shook his head. He did not yet feel equal to an elaborate statement in the French language. But he wondered what Dear Mother would have said and done if she had marched suddenly into the studio and discovered him indefatigably painting nudes.
There was a fat painter—one of the open-air crowd—named Edmond Beaulieu who in the guise of a friendly critic often dropped in to see how the big murals of St. André were getting on. He had words of praise for everyone—for the models, for the assistants and for St. André himself. He preached a jovial gospel of enthusiasm and encouragement. And sometimes he even spoke of his own landscapes in an enthusiastic and encouraging way.
Edward became curious to see some of Beaulieu's work, of which on all hands he heard nothing but the highest praise. And one day he expressed his curiosity and was promptly invited to spend the following Sunday at Beaulieu's home in the country.
Beaulieu lived in a very small Louis Thirteenth hunting lodge in the outskirts of St. Germain. The lodge had some acres of park surrounding it, with what the English call "an ornamental water" and some groups of fine old limes. There were fine old flinty walls draped with ivy, a snailery, an antique glass-house and here and there a graceful urn carved from stone.
In this little park Beaulieu did most of his landscape work, arranging and rearranging nature. He painted many pictures in the course of a year, priced them modestly and sold them readily. Con sequently he was a rich man for an artist and ought to have been very happy.
Madame Beaulieu was only half her husband's age—if he really was her husband—and very pretty. She was a little thing, compactly made, with a rich mouth and smoldering yellowish brown eyes. She made a great fuss over Edward on the occasion of his first visit and of his second. They succeeded in making him feel as much at home as if he had always known them and had always been made welcome in their house. And it was arranged that in the spring, when the St. André murals were finished, he should come to visit them and paint landscapes in the little park, under Beaulieu's direction.
Spring came. It was lovely in Paris and it was lovelier in the country. Feeling that he had learned a whole lot about painting the human form divine, Edward packed his kit and removed himself bag and baggage to the Beaulieus.
Bartow-on-the-Sound seemed a very long way off. Dear Mother's letters under a texture of affection showed a cold and undiminishing resentment. Every letter contained some reference to her health. She no longer, it seemed, ever felt quite herself. She had not of course consulted a doctor. Doctors were always for bed and rest. Others might afford themselves these luxuries, but not Dear Mother. She had to keep going. It was a pity, perhaps, that old age was approaching, that she upon whom others had always leaned should have no one to lean on—no one but James, dear James. He at least would never leave his old mother while she lived—"or," as Edward ungenerously thought, "while any money remained in her purse"—and of course your father. The "and of course your father" was a kind of sneer—of course. And Edward resented it.
At first Alice had written often and Edward had written oftener. Then she had been presented to society and had perhaps begun to lose interest in a young man who so obviously preferred art to herself. And Edward perhaps, so filled with new contacts and enthusiasms, had begun to lose interest in her. Either he had really begun to lose interest or else resentment at the changed tone and diminished frequency of her letters had numbed his feelings for her. There was nothing in her later letters upon which he could have put his finger and said, "But I'm not" or "But I haven't," but nevertheless they had a quality which always made him feel as if he were being found fault with and put upon the defensive. Sometimes he wondered if he had written too frankly about the St. André murals and the nude models. But it couldn't be that. Alice wasn't a fool.
In the Beaulieus' little hunting-lodge he had a stone room in a gable. It had an arched ceiling, a hooded fireplace, leaded windows and walls four feet thick. The door was of oak, bound with highly wrought iron. When the bolt was shot it would have taken artillery to batter it down. His chief window looked out over the ornamental water and at the groups of limes beyond. In the morning sparrows, some of which quarreled and some of which made love, gathered in the ivy outside this window and wakened him. Very soon after the sparrows wakened him there would come an ancient Breton woman wearing upon her head a fabulous cap of starched linen and bearing in her hands a japanned tray delicately set with chocolate and cream and rolls of bread and rose-petals of butter.
By ten o'clock, if it didn't rain, Edward and Beaulieu would be in the park painting. They painted from ten to twelve and from three to five. Every day when it didn't rain Edward painted two small landscapes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Beaulieu believed in painting much boldly rather than a little with infinite pains.
As Edward's landscapes dried he painted other landscapes on top of them, but there was one view of the ornamental water with a group of old limes beyond to which he returned oftenest. This view, especially in the afternoon, furnished a beautiful problem and pattern in lights and shadows and reflections. And one afternoon he solved the problem, and when he had finished, the water that he had painted looked wet and the sunlight looked like sunlight. This miracle persisted even after the little canvas had been carried into the house and examined in the sobering light of the living room. It persisted after the paint had dried and flattened into the canvas. Beaulieu was triumphant.
"It is I who have taught the Master," he said. "I told him never to forget that it was light he was trying to paint—not forms or fabrics, but light. Every morning as we have set up our easels I have said, 'Do not forget,' and every afternoon I have said the same thing. That, with a hint or two about mixing his colors, with a little specific statement upon which colors are permanent and which are not, is all that I have had to do. And now what has he done? He has painted a sunlight more warm and limpid and golden than I am able to paint myself."
Sometimes Madame Beaulieu brought a campstool and a parasol and watched the gentlemen paint. Sometimes she would say, "Pretty." More often she came in silence and watched in silence and went away without saying a word. Beaulieu seemed to adore her. If she had faults he was blind to them or explained them away. If she was extravagant, so were all women. If sometimes she lost her temper about nothing at all and made terrific scenes, so did all women.
Whenever he remembered how tender and loying she could be it was easy to forgive all the little failings. At least she was loyal to him, and faithful. And of all good qualities he prized those most highly.
There was a fine old beech tree in a far corner of the park. At certain hours the leaves of this tree broke the light of heaven into thousands of charming, dappling fragments and scattered them on the ground beneath. It was one of Beaulieu's favorite subjects, and Edward had tackled it more than once.
One day as he was starting to draw it for the third or fourth time Madame Beaulieu came to look on. She watched him for a minute or two and then suddenly she walked out in front of him and leaning toward the trunk of the old tree, turned, rested her hand on the great bole and faced him. She looked very charming in the dappled light.
"Is it to be a portrait?" Edward asked.
Madame nodded. "A surprise for father," she said. "Can it be done in one sitting?"
"In two," said Edward.
And in fact he finished the little open-air portrait in two sittings of two hours each. He had had some good luck, some happy accidents. It was the most likable thing he had ever done. He leaned back and saw that he had done all he could.
"Come and see how pretty you look," he said.
Madame Beaulieu came slowly forward from under the broken light of the tree and stood looking over his shoulder.
"Do I look like that—to you?" she asked.
"Yes," said Edward. "Just like that."
She leaned over until her cheek was close to his. "You are a charming boy," she said.
Her cheek touched his. It must have been by accident. He was sure of that. She laughed and straightened herself.
"Father will be so pleased," she said.
He was. He raved about the portrait. He was the luckiest man in the world. His wife was the most beautiful creature in the world, and his young friend had been able to immortalize her on canvas.
Beaulieu and Madame Beaulieu ought to have been two of the happiest people in the world. And Beaulieu was one. Why Madame Beaulieu could not manage to be happy was one of those little mysteries of female psychology. On the credit side of life (1) she had an amiable, loving and talented husband, a little too fat perhaps, but not too old; (2) she had a house and grounds so charming and coquettish that only much money and several hundred years of time could have duplicated them; (3) she had a charming little apartment in Paris; (4) she was allowed to be extravagant without any complaint; (5) she was pretty and popular; (6) she was really very fond of Beaulieu.
Now what was lacking? What didn't she have that she needed to make her happy? Undoubtedly what she needed was sometimes one thing and sometimes another. Edward was her present source of discontent. He had lived under the same roof with her now for many weeks and she hadn't succeeded in making him fall in love with her.
Why did she want Edward to fall in love with her? Chiefly because he wouldn't. She did not want a serious love affair, an episode which, becoming known, would involve her in scandal and cause a breach with Beaulieu. Her bread was too well buttered for that and she knew it. She wanted Edward to be hopelessly unhappy, while she pretended to be. She wanted his love of her to tinge with melancholy the whole of his remaining life. She wished to play the leading rôle in a drama of passion and renunciation.
Over the portrait painting she had touched Edward's cheek with hers. If her cheek had been a cobweb the contact would have affected him as much and no more. She tried other wiles. And she really charmed the boy very much without touching his heart or his desires.
One day Beaulieu had to go to Paris on business and he suggested for the two who were to remain behind a sketching expedition to the ruins of a St. Bernard monastery—a beautiful tracery of stone arches in the midst of a dark forest.
From Madame Beaulieu's point of view the expedition ought to have been a great success. A violent thunderstorm put an end to Edward's sketching and they took refuge in an ancient Gothic vault. There they were imprisoned for several hours.
At one time the lightning struck close at hand, and following a deafening crash of thunder Madame Beaulieu screamed and flung herself into Edward's arms for protection and pressed her warm, soft body close against him. He comforted her and reassured her as calmly as if she had been one of his own sisters.
The next crash of thunder was farther off. The storm withdrew, sweeping its wet skirts after it. Madame Beaulieu withdrew herself from Edward's cool embrace. She was angry and at the same time amused. What a fool the boy was!
Her next attack was by indirections. "It is curious," she might say to him, "that once in a while there is born into the world a male being with the nature of an iceberg. It may be a man, it may be a dog. Such creatures have no wish beyond eating and drinking and sleeping."
"But," Edward might answer, "wouldn't that be the most comfortable and least offensive creature there could be? It wouldn't ever make any trouble for anybody."
"Sometimes I am afraid we have such a creature living in the house with us. And it isn't Beaulieu. The day de la France brought his pretty daughters to 'five o'clock' it was obvious that the younger girl was taken with you at sight. She is pretty as a flower and yet you observed her and admired her, if you did admire her, much as if she had been a Chinese porcelain. A young man of your age should at least be thinking of marriage."
"On two hundred and fifty francs a month?" Edward smiled.
"You will soon be earning a lot of money. Beaulieu says so. He burst out swearing only the other day. He said: 'Mon dieu! It may sound preposterous, but that boy of ours—that little Edward Eaton—is already one of the first painters in France.'"
"Did he say that—truly?"
Edward blushed deeply and felt for a few moments as if tears were trying to force themselves into his eyes.
"He did so—truly. And what he says he means—the dear old cabbage."
Edward laughed now. "And he said I was little!"
Edward was much bigger than Beaulieu, taller and broader, but without fat.
"You are really a tall, strong man," said Madame. "But one thinks of you as a boy, and sometimes as an idiot."
"Why an idiot?"
"Because you can only be young once. A time will come when you will wish to remember that you were once young. And you will not be able to remember."
"Why won't I?"
"Because you never do anything or start anything that could be worth remembering."
On another occasion she was more direct and Edward could not quite dodge the issue.
"But," he said gravely, "how can a man lead the romantic life you seem to think he ought to lead if he doesn't feel romantic about anybody?"
"Have you never felt romantic about anybody? Tell me the truth."
"Yes," he said, "I have and I do. We were children together. But lately something seems to have happened. Perhaps she thinks that I ought not to have gone away from home for so long to study art."
"And perhaps," said Madame, a little Viciously, "she has interested herself in some more ardent admirer."
"Perhaps," said Edward.
Before the summer ended Madame Beaulieu knew all that there was to be known about the Ruggles; how instead of taking other people's beliefs for granted they asked questions and did their own thinking; how they lived in a city founded by French Huguenots—people who had claimed the same privilege for themselves; and how they had always been kind and helpful to Edward.
One day Edward received a letter from Alice. It was very short and perhaps a little cool, but it caused a sharp disturbance in his breast.
We are coming abroad in October. We shall be in Paris for a while, and we hope that you will be glad to see us and not too busy. Afterwards we go to Rome for the cold weather. I see James sometimes at parties and he gives me more news of you than you do yourself. He's rather attractive, brother James is, in his bold, bad way. Don't you think so? . . .
It was not pleasant for Edward to think that Alice found anything to attract her in his brother James.
He told Madame Beaulieu the news and she pretended to be pleased; but she wasn't. She began at once to consider what she could do to make a little innocent mischief between the lovers.
Autumn was very beautiful that year. The whole of September and the half of October resembled that brief American season which is called Indian summer. It was a warm, hazy, soft, golden time that smelled of pears ripening against walls.
Edward lingered in the Beaulieus' house and painted the autumn. What he should do when he had finished painting out of doors with Beaulieu he did not know. Some of the wise old painters who came to see Beaulieu said one thing and some said another.
There came a friendly letter from Townley. With the letter came a short story by a new writer named Heller and an offer of fifty dollars apiece for three illustrations. The story was about a wasp, and models for the illustrations were always to be found between the hours of sunrise and sunset, among the ripening pears on the south end of the Beaulieu house.
In three days the illustrations were finished and on their way to New York. Even Edward felt that the wasp hero was sufficiently comical and sinister. He was pleased with himself and hoped that Townley would send him some more commissions. He did not wish to be an illustrator, but to a boy earning between forty and fifty dollars a month a hundred and fifty dollars all in a lump, with the possibility of more such lumps in the not too distant future, was rather thrilling.
He hoped that the money would arrive before the Ruggles. He wanted to spend it all on them.
Beaulieu had sent the best of Edward's twohour sketches to an art dealer and several of them had been sold for small sums of money. To Edward the future looked very bright. If the Ruggles encouraged him he would try to scrape together enough money to go to Rome with them. Beaulieu had fired his imagination with descriptions of spring in the old Roman forum—the heavenly color of the sunshine and of the old marbles, the smell of the acacias, the jasmine and the violets.
Alice herself began to haunt his dreams. And it made him remorseful to think how little he had really missed her.
"Edward," said Madame Beaulieu reproachfully, "you should not show any other woman how impatient you are. It isn't polite."
"But they are my oldest friends!" he exclaimed. "And they have always been so charming to me."
"They!" mocked Madame.
She was becoming the victim of nervous, irritable moods. Sometimes she uttered philosophies so reckless and heartless that Beaulieu looked at her with pained amazement. Once or twice he reproved her, very sharply—for him.
And it seemed to Edward that these two dear people who had been so good to him and who had seemed so much in love with each other were no longer getting on so well together.
Madame was often contradictory and difficult to please. Sometimes if her judgment upon a painter or a writer was not accepted without question she flounced off in a huff. She wished that Beaulieu would not smoke cigarettes. She wished that he would not eat so much. One needn't be fat if one didn't choose to be fat. Why did he keep her buried in the country? Why couldn't he give up landscape and be a fashionable portrait painter?
All these fault-findings were quite unnecessary and as disagreeable as they were meant to be.
Beaulieu began to confide in Edward.
"Of course I am too old for her," he would say, "but there is nothing sudden about that. And I was always too fat; but she never complained about it before. Just when everything was going along so merrily and happily she pulls these tantrums. And she doesn't seem to care what she says. She knows very well that if I do not live in the country I cannot paint landscapes. And if I cannot paint landscapes I cannot sell landscapes and we would hardly have any money at all. She knows that at my age I cannot turn to portraiture, and yet she keeps urging me and nagging at me to make the change.
"Why cannot I paint portraits? For a simple reason. I can draw trees and rocks and even cows and sheep and horses, but I cannot draw people. I never could. It is left out of me. The moment I try to draw a face I become confused. My art is baffled. I must try to draw it as it is, when my whole training has been to make 'arrangements.' If I could put both the eyebrows up in one corner of the face and add as many noses as seemed necessary to make an agreeable composition, it would be different. But the rules of portraiture will not permit . . ." Here he would shrug his shoulders in a comic mockery of despair.
Then it would be Madame's turn to confide in Edward; but she made no bones about doing this in her husband's presence.
"He neglects me," she would say. "He thinks only of himself and his work. All I ask for is the little loving attentions that every woman asks for and that I do not get . . . He doesn't make love to me any more . . ."
Here Beaulieu would interrupt, "But I do—all the time—with every thought I think—with every gesture I make."
And Madame would deny the truth of this, and presently there would be as plain-spoken a quarrel as there might have been if a third person had not been present, and Edward would find himself in a painfully embarrassing position.
They were French people. Therefore they were frank. They did not make of love and marriage the same mysteries that the more hypocritical Anglo-Saxon makes of them. And when both were sufficiently exasperated, neither left anything unsaid if the saying of it might score a point against the other.
Their reconciliations were as sudden as their quarrelings. And they were almost equally warm and frank and embarrassing to the puzzled spectator. When the opportunity presented itself Beaulieu would apologize for the quarrel and explain it.
"Every woman is a dramatist. She dramatizes herself and her surroundings. She likes to feel that something terrible is going on and that she is the center of it. No woman really likes the idea of being peaceful and contented and self-effacing. They do not admire good sense for its own sake. When a woman says 'I can't' she means 'I won't.' When she says 'never' she means 'not right now.' And when she says 'forever' she means nothing at all . . .
"I am not talking about bad, spoiled women. I am talking about good women . . . The good God must have made Adam in a hurry since He omitted from him so much that is petty and small and unreasonable; but when He came to make Eve He found that He had all those materials on His hands and He did not let any of them go to waste—not so much as one little malice or uncharitableness . . ."
Edward became uncomfortable in the Beaulieus' house. Where formerly there had been none there were now several quarrels a day. And in the course of these rows the entire history of Beaulieu's relations with Madame was gradually revealed.
They were not married—to each other. Beaulieu was not married at all. Madame Beaulieu had a husband, who because she had abandoned him and their small daughter felt vengeful and would not divorce her.
That didn't matter, Beaulieu said. "We are really married," he said, "because we have loved each other for so long and because we have been faithful to each other. And that, priest or no priest, is a true marriage."
Beaulieu and Madame Beaulieu's husband had been friends. Beaulieu had often stopped with them. Theirs had been a quiet, peaceful country life. Too quiet. Too peaceful. Madeleine's energies had begun to seek diversion. She had fallen in love with Beaulieu. She had finally made him believe that in private her husband was brutal to her and that his affectionate and even-tempered conduct in public was a mask of hypocrisy.
All this Edward picked up bit by bit as the couple in their irritation and anger flung reticence aside and insisted upon washing their dirty linen in public.
But on this point or that there was often disagreement. Had Madeleine's husband really been unkind? At the time Beaulieu had believed so. Now he did not. Whether he had been or not, Madeleine now believed that he had been. Only she could possibly know.
"He was a brute to me," she would say, "but his was a coarse, honest brutishness and not the refined cruelty of this fat painter."
Here Beaulieu almost in tears: "How dare you say that I am ever cruel to you? You know very well that I wouldn't hurt a fly. You shall judge, Edward. Do I strike you as a man capable of cruelty?"
Here Edward might smile faintly and shake his head. He was very miserable and he wanted to escape. He felt as if he was living on the top of a volcano. But when he suggested going they joined forces to prevent him from doing any such thing.
One day he learned about the final break between Madeleine and her husband and her elopement with Beaulieu. Beaulieu told him the story.
"I was much younger," he said, "and I believed all that she told me. I was not in love with her then, but she had touched my deepest sympathies. One night I heard them quarreling. Presently she began to scream as if she was being beaten. The next thing I knew she was hammering on my door with both fists, calling upon me to save her. At the same time I could hear her husband saying in a hoarse, terrible voice: 'I shall not forgive you for this! I shall not be able to forgive you.'
"I unlocked my door and opened it.
"I tried to pacify them. We were all in our nightgowns. We must have looked ridiculous.
"Madeleine flung herself into my arms. My embarrassment was pitiable. I tried to push her away from me. She only clung the closer . . . I give you my word of honor, Edward, that I had never so much as spoken a single word of love to her. Now I listened in a horrified silence while she in her rage and in her determination to hurt him told her husband that for a long time we had been lovers.
"At that awful moment I admired my old friend immensely. He looked for a space like a man who had been suddenly frozen into a statue. Then he spoke in a calm voice:
"'You have accused Beaulieu,' he said, 'of something which I for my part do not believe, but which it would be utterly impossible for a gentleman to deny. To your face and in your presence it would be impossible for him to deny the charge that you have made. But whether you have spoken the truth or whether you have lied, every thing between us is over. I am through. If Beaulieu wishes to risk your selfish, dissatisfied, drama-loving nature he is welcome to. It is nothing to me. I shall not even be angry. You will, however, both of you leave this house in the morning. And you will not either of you come back—ever.'
"Then he said, 'B—rrr! It is cold!' and turned on his bare heel and marched off. We could hear him locking and double-locking the door of their bedroom.
"'See what you have done!' I said. And I tried to take her arms from about my neck. But she only clung the tighter. She said, 'I love you—I love you.'
"When a woman sacrifices her home and her position and her honor for a man what can that man do? In nine cases out of ten he will end by playing her game . . . I cannot tell you, Edward, how sweet she was and how good for years and years—during all the time of my poverty and unsuccess. And now that we have everything she is not contented . . . The next thing we know she will be accusing you of being her lover."
"Oh!" exclaimed Edward, his face paling a little, "she wouldn't do that!"
But she did—the very next night.
It seemed that Madame Beaulieu wished, once more before she died, to have something terrible going on of which she should be the center. All women, it seems, have this wish at times, but there are a few women who are able to resist the temptation. And it is to these few that the whole race of women owes its good reputation as wives and mothers.
Women, like horses, have long memories. Madame Beaulieu had such a memory. She never forgot any little trick or stratagem which she had once worked successfully, and she had supreme faith in her ability to make precisely the same trick work again.
Edward was waked that night by the sound of clenched fists pounding upon his door and the voice of Madame Beaulieu screaming to him for help. Edward was neither sophisticated nor worldly wise; nevertheless that which first flashed into his mind was the truth. His instinct told him that Madame Beaulieu had had a falling out with Beaulieu and that she was about to repeat the episode of long ago. If Edward could have trusted this instinct he would not have opened his door. But he could not trust it—not absolutely. It was just barely possible that Madame Beaulieu was in her right mind and really needed his help. It was possible that Beaulieu, who was fat and middle-aged, had had a stroke. It was possible that the house had caught fire. It was possible that thieves had made an entry. Incredible things were possible. All this flashed through his mind as he rushed to the door, fumbled a moment with the bolt and pulled it open.
Madame Beaulieu pitched forward into the room and Edward caught her as she was falling. If he had been carefully rehearsed he could not better have seconded her will to make trouble. She clung to him and when she began to call him her lover and to count aloud upon his protection he knew without looking that Beaulieu himself had arrived upon the scene.
A lowered gas-jet which burned all night in the upper corridor of the house, and touches of the moon, lighted their faces.
Beaulieu's face was a violent red and a network of swollen veins made him look really terrible. He was so angry that at first he could not articulate.
Madame from the unwilling shelter of Edward's arms called him a brute and a monster and boasted how for weeks with Edward as her guilty partner she had deceived him.
It may be that she really wanted to end her long and happy relationship with Beaulieu and be driven from the house with Edward, who thereafter would be in honor bound to support her and care for her. It is more likely that she had simply lost her temper and preferred to make as many people as possible miserable and did not at the moment care what happened.
Edward was in a state of horrible embarrassment. He wished that the floor would open and swallow him, that he had never been born. Embarrassment began slowly to give place to disgust. The cold of the stone floor was rising through his feet and ankles. And then suddenly and without other warning he did the very wisest thing that he could have done under the circumstances. He screwed his eyes into two knots, opened his mouth wide, tipped his head back and then, with incredible violence, sneezed. He tried to speak and sneezed again.
The swollen veins in Beaulieu's face shrank and he began to speak in a hoarse, jerky way.
"You once worked this game on me," he said, "but you shan't work it on him."
Here Edward sneezed again.
"I know exactly how innocent I was when you accused me of being your lover, and I know that Edward is just as innocent."
Edward's sneeze sounded like a blast of gratitude. Beaulieu went on:
"I've tried everything but one, in the hope of curing your temper. I've tried patience and generosity. That is no good with women. Our ancestors, the ancient Gauls and Romans, had a better way. Their slogan was kill or cure."
He stepped suddenly forward, and as Edward sneezed again and Madame Beaulieu turned her head to see what was going to happen, he hit her under the point of the chin with all his might and main. And for the next two hours Madame Beaulieu was like the dead in Ecclesiastes. She knew nothing.
Edward put on his slippers, stopped sneezing and helped carry Madame Beaulieu back to her bed. Her little face looked as sweet and gentle as a kitten's, and as innocent of wrongdoing.
Edward was for bathing her temples with cold water, but Beaulieu, who was still very angry, said: "Why revive her? She is better this way. She has what she deserves." And he added, "If I've killed her this is of course the end, but if I haven't, then it is perhaps a—beginning." His face softened. "It will be best, my friend," he said, "for you to go back to Paris by the first train in the morning. Heaven knows I am very sorry for what has happened. But it was not my fault."
"And I don't see how it can be mine," said Edward. "I suppose it sounds silly to you, but I've never been any woman's lover."
"It doesn't sound silly," said Beaulieu. "If Solomon at the end of his days had been able to say as much I should have more respect for his wisdom."
Edward went back to his warm bed, but he could not sleep. Mingled with the anger and disgust which he still felt were disturbing memories. Those moments during which he had held, however unwillingly, the charming body of Madame Beaulieu in his arms had marked the end of his childhood.