CHAPTER XXXVII
"Holá … p-s-st! Allen!" called Marthe Tollet, as Marise passed through the glass-covered verandah, on her way to the street door. In her haste to stop Marise, she used the abrupt surname hail which the girls thought so very chic and truly English, which the older teachers forbade as rude and barbarous, a typical manifestation of the crumbling down of civilized French ways under the onslaught of modern Anglo-Saxon roughness.
"Eh bien, the little Tollet, what is it?" asked Marise in the same vernacular, pausing in front of the concierge's door. Marthe left the Swedish ladder, where she was twisting her flexible young body in and out of the rungs, and coming up to Marise remarked casually, "Oh, I just thought maybe you'd like to go to the dormitory and see that little compatriot of yours. She's crying like everything, la pauvre, and nobody can do a thing with her."
"The pretty little girl with blonde hair?" asked Marise, somewhat vague as to the younger girls in the lower classes. "What's the matter with her?"
"A perfectly horrible attack of homesickness, they say. The English teacher is up there—she's the only one who can talk to her; but you know how likely the MacMurray will be to put balm on a sore heart, eh? And you could make a wooden man split his sides laughing, once you get started. You could cheer her up."
Marise hesitated, looked in at the clock in the concierge's loge, and nodded. She started towards the door of the dormitory building, stopped and called back, "O là, the little Tollet, what's her name?
"Eugénie," said the other, "Eugénie Mille."
As she climbed the dark, winding, well-waxed stairs, Marise reflected that that didn't sound like an American name, and made a guess that, as had happened to her before, she would find that the "American girl" was from Martinque, or Peru or Saõ Paulo.
But it was English, sure enough, that Miss MacMurray was talking, as she bent over the sobbing blue-serge heap, on the narrow iron bed. She was saying helplessly, "There now, it's verra har-rd, I know, I'm far from home, mysel'," patting the heaving shoulders with one hand, and anxiously looking at her watch. She was due at a private lesson in ten minutes, and a private lesson meant five irreplaceable francs.
She welcomed the tall American girl with relief, "Ah, that's right, that's right, you'll know how to get her quieted down," and fled before Marise could protest that she did not even know the homesick child.
Rather at a loss, and very unenthusiastically, Marise stood looking down on the crumpled, untidy bed, and the mass of disordered golden hair, noting the fineness of the tailored blue serge, and the excellently made small shoes. They were unmistakably North American in their shapeliness. Nothing Peruvian or Brazilian about them!
What could you do for somebody who was homesick? She certainly did not know from experience. Nobody had ever done anything for her. She sat down on the edge of the bed, laid her arm over the narrow shoulders, and said cheerfully, "Hallo there, what's the matter? You'll run out of tears, if you aren't careful!"
At the sound of her voice the sobbing stopped abruptly. The girl on the bed started, dashed the floating brilliant hair from her face, and turned on Marise, blue eyes dimmed with tears. She looked exhausted by her passion of sobbing.
"Why, you poor kid!" said Marise compassionately. She hadn't thought it was as serious as all that!
The other with a rough, scrambling sprawl, got herself to her knees and sat up, rubbing the tears away from her eyes with the backs of her hands, and drawing long, quivering breaths. Her lips were swollen, her cheeks fiery and glazed.
Marise was touched, and putting out her arms drew the other into them. "Here, you must let me help you get used to things. I've been homesick, too."
The girl tried to speak, was on the point of bursting into tears again, struggled wildly to get the better of her excitement and emotion, and finally brought out in a strangled voice, "I'm not homesick! I hate my home! I wouldn't go back theah for anything!"
The words in themselves were sufficiently astonishing to Marise, and the raging accent with which they were cast out made them even more disconcerting. She felt that the little quivering body in her arms was clinging desperately to her, and sat silent, holding the unhappy child close, because she did not know what else to do with her.
Presently, however, she ventured to ask, "Where is your home?"
"It was in Arkansas," said the other, in a muffled, defiant tone. "It isn't anywheah now. It's heah."
Marise not being very intimately acquainted with the shades and phases of certain American prejudices, saw nothing peculiar in having one's home in Arkansas. Why not?
Apparently some hint of this reached the other, for after a moment of silent, expectant tension, she lifted her face from Marise's shoulder and looked up searchingly into her face. How pretty she must be, thought Marise, when she hadn't been crying. She must look like a pink lily in the midst of the dark-skinned, dark-haired, city-sallow little girls of her class.
"Have you any of your family here in Paris with you?" she asked now.
"I haven't any family left, only some lawyers and guardians and things," said the other. She spoke as though she were glad of it, Marise thought, so that she suppressed the "oh!" of sympathy which she was on the point of uttering. What a strange little thing!
The strange little thing now looked up at her. "Do you know what I was crying for just now?" she said. Marise could not understand why she asked this in an accusing tone of blame.
"No!" said Marise, as utterly at a loss as ever in her life. "How could I?"
"Because I hate myself so, because I hate my looks and my clothes and everything!" the other burst out passionately, "I feel like po' white trash. They had plenty of money! Why didn't they send me here befoah?"
"Before!" cried Marise. "Why, you're only a child now."
"I'm almost as old as you are," said the other. "I'm seventeen and you're eighteen."
She flung it out like a grievance.
"Eh bien!" cried Marise in great astonishment. She had not thought the other girl over fourteen.
She said now, sitting up straight and looking wistfully at Marise, "Will you be friends? You came of your own accord to be nice to me. Tell me about things. Everything! I want so like sin to know! I'll do anything to learn."
"Know what?" asked Marise, bewildered, looking about her, as if she might catch a glimpse of the things the other wanted to know.
"What they all know oveh heah … everything you know."
Marise drew back with an abrupt gesture, "No, indeed!" she cried, her face darkening, the words leaping out before she could stop them.
"Oh, I don't mean your secrets. I don't care about that. And I don't mean the way you play the piano, although I know some of the girls are envious of that. And I'd despise to have to study as hard as you-all in the upper classes do. I mean the right way to sit down and hold your hands and speak and weah clothes."
Marise began to laugh, "I don't know how to wear clothes. What do you want anyhow? You're, prettier than any girl in the school, and you are wearing a dress that cost more than anybody's else, and finer shoes than you could buy in all Paris."
"But they're not right," the girl said petulantly, "or else I don't weah them right, or something! I hate them! I have lots of money, but I don't know how to buy what I want." She flung herself again on Marise, holding her closely, "Help me!" she begged, "help me buy what I want."
Marise was touched by the loneliness which underlay the other girl's appeal. She knew what it was to be lonely! It was the first time that any one had broken through into her loneliness as this quivering, passionate, unhappy little thing had done; the first time anybody had asked her for help. From the very first word of their talk, the light chaffing manner which was her usual shield had been torn into shreds by the other girl's driving directness. She looked deep into the other's eyes, fixed breathlessly on her, and said seriously, "Yes, Eugénie, I'll help you … all I can."
"There!" said the other, "that's a specimen. My name's not Eugénie. It's Eugenia. Isn't that turrible?"
Marise did not follow this at all. "It's just the same thing, only in English, isn't it?"
"Yes, but it's horrid and common in English, and it's lovely in French. Why can't I have it Eugenie?" She looked up keenly and searchingly into Marise's face, and at what she caught there, she contradicted herself hastily, before Marise could open her lips.
"No, no, I see. It would be silly to change it—to pretend. I'd better make the best of it. There! There's one fool mistake you kept me from making, you see!"
Marise felt that the talk was on a plane different from hers, so that she did not get its meaning, although the words were clear enough. What was all that about Eugenia and Eugénie? She hadn't caught the point of that, at all.
Being only eighteen, she found her bewilderment rather comic, and began to laugh. "I still don't see that Eugenia isn't just as good as Eugénie!" she said, "I honestly don't know what you're talking about, Eugenia, but if 'you do, it's all right."
"Oh, I do," said the other with conviction.
Marise was relieved to see that her small, pretty face, although still flushed from her fit of tears no longer looked distraught.
"How strange!" thought Marise. They had never spoken a word to each other ten minutes before, and now they were sitting side by side, hand in hand, like sisters.
"I'm awfully glad I came in," she said.
"So am I," said Eugenia, "I'd been just crazy to talk to you, but you're so many classes higher than me. Oh, how I hate my class—to be put back with all those young ones! And study such turribly stupid things! And the teacher! Such an old frump. And I'm not having anything of what I want. I'm not getting on a bit. What do I care what France did in India before the English got there? I didn't come to France to learn those sort of things! Marise—please can I call you Marise? Do you suppose I'll ever, ever speak French as you do?"
"Why, of course," Marise answered her reasonably, "everybody does, who lives here. Why shouldn't you?" The echo of the famished, burning accent of the other struck now oddly in her ear. She repeated, "Of course you will, if you care to," and went on, "but why should you bother to care so much? What difference does it make? They don't bother themselves to learn English."
Eugenia flashed a look of quick astonishment at her. Apparently this was an entirely new idea to her. After an instant's silent consideration of it,, she flung it away with the aggrieved cry, "Oh, but you do! You do!" as though, thought Marise, that incapacitated her from having a valid opinion about it. But this too, like the Eugénie-Eugenia discussion had somehow taken place in another dimension than the one she knew. She was not allowed to ponder the question, however, receiving at this point another impassioned embrace from Eugenia, who cried, "You don't know how glad I am you came! Now it'll be all right. And I've been so- miserable. Let's, talk! Let's talk!"
"I must soon be going to a music-lesson," said Marise, glancing at the little jewel-crusted watch, which hung on a black ribbon around the, other girl's neck.
Eugenia caught at her despairingly. "Oh, don't go away. I haven't begun yet! I haven't said a word!" Then struck by another possibility, "Can't I go with you? We could talk in the cab, and I wouldn't say a word at your lesson. Yes, do let me."
"I wasn't going to take a cab," protested Marise, "I don't go round in cabs except when I'm dressed up in the evenings. It would be pretty expensive, ma foi! to take a cab everywhere I went in the daytime. Mostly I walk."
"Oh, I hate to walk, let me take the cab," the other girl begged, beginning hastily to arrange her hair. "I've got plenty of money. It's the only thing I have got." She paused, the brush in her hand. "Haven't you?" she asked, addressing herself to Marise's reflection in the glass.
Marise was passably astonished at the unceremonious question, but answered it simply, "I haven't any of my own. I live with my father. And he hasn't any either, but he makes a good deal, gets a good salary, I mean. He lets me have all I need."
Eugenia's comment on this was to say bitterly, "Think of not knowing more than to ask such a question! I told you I don't know anything. But I can learn. I can learn in a minute if only I get the chance. I learned then … from the way you looked. I'll never make that fool mistake again."
She pinned on a very pretty, costly hat, and Marise saw that she really did not look like a child, after all. She ran her arm under Marise's now, and gave it an ecstatic squeeze. "Oh, I'm so happy!" she cried, "I wish I could buy you a diamond necklace!"
The talk in the cab as they clattered over the big paving-stones of the quiet, half-deserted left-bank streets turned on the school, and very soon Marise was led to say, "But, see here, I don't believe, Eugenia, you've got into the right school at all. It's not a bit chic, you know, to go to a girl's lycée, and ours is one of the plainest of them all. The teachers are terrible grinds, the girls are fearfully serious-minded. They don't care a thing about their looks. All they want is to pass the competitive exams, for the Ecole Normale at Sèvres, and get in there for four more years of grind, lots and lots worse than at the lycée, You'd better believe there's nothing but what France did in India before the English got there, et ainsi de suite."
Eugenia made a gesture of despair. "There!" she lamented, "that's it! Not even to know enough to pick out the right school!"
And then a curious expression of suspicion coming into her eyes, she said skeptically, "but you go to that school! If it's good enough for•you …!"
Here again was something in that baffling other dimension, and this time though she understood it as little as ever, Marise did not like it at all. She said stiffly, "I'm going because you can get serious instruction in some things I need to enter the classes at the Sorbonne next year."
Eugenia sprang at her, remorsefully crying, "I won't again. I don't know what made me." She kissed her once more, rubbing her cheek against the other's shoulder.
Her bewildering alternations of mood, the reckless way in which she threw herself on Marise to embrace her; and the way, very startling to a girl brought up in France, in which Eugenia kissed her on the mouth like a lover, were very exciting to Marise. Not since Jeanne's big double kisses had she been so fondled and caressed, and never had she been kissed on the lips before. That was something closely associated in her mind with secrecy and passion. It made her feel very queer; partly stand-offish and startled, partly moved and responsive—altogether shaken up, more alive, but apprehensively uncertain of what was coming next.
"And what is the Sorbonne?"
"It's the University," Marise explained, "I was half-way through a woman's college in America, when we came abroad again. So I wanted to go on and study some more here although I have to work so many hours a day on my music that I can't ever hope to have a degree."
"College? University?" Eugenia was horrified. "Mercy! What makes you want to do that? And music lessons, too. I should think you'd be working every minute."
"I do," said Marise.
"Just study, study, study, and practise, practise, practise?" asked the other, astonished.
"Mostly," said Marise.
"Why, that's turrible!" cried Eugenia, beginning to look alarmed.
"That's the way everybody does over here," said Marise.
"They do!" cried Eugenia, aghast and astounded. "Why, I thought they …"
Marise corrected herself, "Oh, of course not. What am I talking about? I mean the kind of folks I know. There are millions of others, I suppose, yes, of course, all the rue de la Paix clientèle, who don't work at all."
Eugenia was relieved at this, and relapsed for a moment into silence, which she finally broke by asking, "Well, wheah would you go to school, if you were me?"
Marise had been thinking of this, and was ready, "There's a very grand private school, I've heard about out at Auteuil, in what was somebody's country estate, when Auteuil was the country, with a château and a park. It's fearfully expensive and so it must be very chic. The girls never go out by themselves, always have a maid, or a teacher with them; the old ideas, aristocratic, you know, that ordinary French people don't hold to any more. Mrs. Marbury could tell you all about it."
"Who? … Mrs. Mahbury?"
"Oh, she's an American, who's always lived over here, in the American colony. Her husband and my father are in the same sort of business. We know her. She'd be sure to know what was chic."
"Well, I'll go to that school," announced Eugenia. "I just knew there'd be a place like that, if I could only find out wheah. I bet you I won't have to study French history theah."
Marise laughed, "Youll probably have to work like a dog, for the teacher who teaches la tenue."
"What's that?"
"Oh, all I know about it is what the dancing teacher used to make us do in the convent-school I went to in Bayonne; walk into a room, pretend to greet somebody, step into a make-believe carriage and out of it, sit down with him for a talk; and first he'd pretend to be a girl like you, and then he'd pretend to be an older woman, and then he'd pretend to be a man (only of course he really was that), and you'd have to have the right manner for each one.… All that kind of foolishness, you know."
"No, I don't know!" cried Eugenia angrily.
The cab drew up and stopped. "I suppose we're theah," said Eugenia, "you tell him to wait till we come out."
She was cautiously silent during the introduction to Mme. de la Cueva, and during the hour of the lesson. But if she gave her tongue little employment, she kept her eyes busy, absorbing every detail of the long, bare room, with its four long windows opening on a balcony overlooking the little, dank, unkempt Jardin de Cluny. After the lesson, Mme. de la Cueva stepped into another room to get some music, and Marise, rather pale with fatigue, walked wearily out on the balcony for a breath of fresh air. Eugenia sprang to follow her, as if she had been wishing to do this, and had not known if it were allowable. But before she looked down on the medieval building below them she said in a whisper to Marise, "You're dog-tired. Why, I wouldn't work that hard for anybody And for that fat old dowd!"
Marise looked down at her astonished. "I'm not working for her!" she exclaimed. But this was, evidently, from the look of Eugenia's face a fourth dimensional remark for her, for she made no answer, turning instead to look at the gray-black old mass of Cluny.
"What is it?" Eugenia asked.
Marise had not yet wholly emerged from a struggle with an exercise which she had not been able to execute with the inhuman, neat-fingered velocity demanded by Mme. de la Cueva. The hour in that other world to which music always transported her had broken the continuity of her impressions of her new friend. She stared rather blankly at Eugenia's question, and looked from her to the well-known medieval pile below them. It did not for the instant occur to her, that the other girl did not recognize what the building was. The turn of her phrase suggested an inquiry about the architecture, and though she had never thought about Cluny before, the look of it stirred recollections of a certain fierce history teacher, whose specialty had been the transitions of the reign of Louis XII. She looked down on the stone lacework opposite, and said doubtfully, "What is it? Domestic Gothic, shouldn't you think? But some of it pretty late. Those square dormer-windows are Louis Douze, aren't they?"
She looked away from the Cluny and down at Eugenia as she finished, and had once more a shock of astonishment. The other's eyes were flaming. "Theah, that's it," she said fiercely, showing her white teeth as she spoke, but not in a smile. "That's it. That's just it! Wheah did you learn that?"
She dashed the question in Marise's face as though it had been her fist.
Marise positively drew back from her. Too startled to be anything but literal, she answered, "Why, why, I don't know where I did. Oh, yes, in my French history class, I suppose. They make you learn everything so hard, you know. You yourself were saying what a grind it is."
Eugenia breathed hard and said, "History again, darn it! But I didn't dream you'd learn that sort of thing in it." She added defiantly, and for Marise quite cryptically, "Well, I'm going to learn it without! "
Mme. de la Cueva came back with the music in her hand. "Voilà, mon enfant," she said, shaking Marise's hand heartily. She reached for Eugenia's hand too, which was hanging at her side, till Eugenia, seeing the meaning of the other's gesture, brought it up with an awkward haste, a painful red burning in her cheeks.
Some one came in as they went out, another student evidently, for he had a roll of music in his hand. He stopped and stood aside with a deep bow to let the two girls pass.
"Good-day, Mlle. Allen," he said, looking at her intently.
"Good-day, M. Boudoin," she answered. Neither girl spoke as they went down the endless, winding stairs and passed out to the street.
As they turned into the Boulevard, and jogged past the Jardin de Cluny, Eugenia asked tensely, "What are those queer looking broken-down walls?"
Marise answered circumspectly, fearing another out-burst, "I think they're Roman ruins … what's left of the baths the Romans had here."
Eugenia made no answer, but looked at them hard.
Marise went on, "Awfully interesting, isn't it, to see Roman ruins right in Paris, across the street from a café. But I suppose they'd look like small potatoes to anybody who's seen Rome. Mme. Vallery says they look comically small, after Rome."
Eugenia put her arm around her neck, and kissed her once more, fervently, disturbingly, on the lips, "Would you like to go to Rome? I'll take you to Rome. I'll hire a private car for the two of us."
And before Marise could answer, before she could even bring out the laugh which rose to her lips, Eugenia said with another of her abrupt leaps, "That young man is in love with you. The one who came in afterwards. He's awfully good-looking, too." She looked into Marise's face with her avid, penetrating gaze, and said, "But you don't like him!"
"I never thought about him in my life," cried Marise, exasperated. She was beginning to feel desperately tired of the mental gymnastics of such talk.
"But there was something you didn't like as I spoke about him. Don't you like men? Don't you like men to be in love with you? I do, I love it." She made another flying leap, and asked, "Are many French women like your music-teacher—so fat—no style?"
"She's not French, Madame de la Cueva."
"What, then?"
"A Levantine."
"A what? What's a Levantine?"
Marise considered, "What is a Levantine, anyhow? A little of everything, I should say, and all more or less oriental and southern. She's part Spanish, part Jewish from Asia Minor, brought up in Cairo and Paris."
Eugenia sheered off on another tack, "And who is Madame Va … Va … something?"
"Madame Vallery? She's a … she's a sort of friend of mine. Yes, she's a friend. My old music-teacher, when I was a little girl, got us together. She's the wife of a Deputy, you know, like our Congressmen."
"Is she chic, too," asked Eugenia, "like Mrs. Marbury? Is she young? Is she pretty?"
Marise laughed, "No, she's not pretty or young. She must be fifty years old."
Eugenia was shocked. "And a friend of youah's!"
Marise explained, "She has more brains than you and I and forty other girls rolled into one. And I've met more interesting people at her house than …"
"Will you take me sometime—will you take me?" asked Eugenia.
"Yes, if you like," said Marise.
Eugenia looked around her wildly, as if to find some way of saying her thanks. Something in the street caught her eye. They were passing a florist's shop. She slammed the door open, curved her flexible little body around the frame, and caught at the driver's coat-tails. "Stop a minute!" she cried to him and dashed into the shop. When she came out she had a huge bunch of mauve-colored orchids in her arms.
"For you, for you," she cried, elated at her idea, thrusting them into Marise's hands, and kissing her again. And then, suddenly downcast, "Oh, it oughtn't to have been orchids! What? Roses? Lilies? Violets? … Yes, violets."
This time Marise protested energetically against this assumption of meanings in her face.
"I don't know what makes you say such things," she cried out helplessly, half-angrily. "Orchids are lovely—beautiful. How could anything be better? I never had any before in my life."
But the other was not to be comforted. "Yes, it ought to have been violets," she murmured, and then squaring her jaw, "And it will be violets, the next time. You just see!"