CHAPTER VII
Marise sat in her room, in front of her table, a copy-book opening blank pages of coarse paper before her, a thin, mean-looking, pale-blue book marked "Mots Usuels" on her lap. It was her own impression that she had stopped for a minute's rest from study (although she had not yet begun), and that she was thinking hard. But she was not thinking. She was feeling.
She sat with her elbows on the table, her chin in her two hands, braced so that she was quite motionless. Her eyes were fixed on the candle flame, burning bright, fluttering and throbbing in the draughts which came into the old room, around the decrepit window-casing, under the door, through the worm-eaten base-board. There seemed to be a thousand wandering puffs from every direction. What Marise called her "thoughts" were burning bright, fluttering and throbbing like the tiny flame at which she stared. They too were blown upon by a thousand breaths from every direction. If they would only hold still for a moment, Marise thought, and give out a steady light that she could see something by! If she only had some shade to put around those flickering thoughts so they wouldn't quiver so! It upset her, jerking around so, from one way of seeing things to another. What she wanted to know was, how did things really look?
Of course it was worse here in France, where everything was so uncertain, but it had started back home in America, it had always been going on ever since she could remember. It had always made her feel queer, as though she were holding an envelope up to a mirror to read the address and saw it wrong end to, the way everything looked different at Ashley the moment Maman came up to Vermont to take her home after vacations with Cousin Hetty. Marise loved it so there at Ashley, the dear darling old house in the mountains, with its nice atticky smell that no other house in the world had! It just fitted all around you, when you went in the door, the way Cousin Hetty's arms fitted around you, when she took you up on her lap, and rocked and sang, "We hunted and we hallooed."
At the memory, Marise's heart gave a great homesick throb. How far away she was from Cousin Hetty and Ashley now! How long since she had sat on anybody's lap.
And yet when Maman came to take you away, from the first minute she went in and looked around her, you could see right through her eyes and what you saw was something different. After all it was just a homely old house with ugly crocheted tidies on the chairs, and splashers done in outline stitch back of the wash-stands, and old red figured carpets on the floors, the way nobody did at home in Belton. And Cousin Hetty talking so queer and Vermonty, her white hair smoothed down flat over her ears instead of all roughed up, fluffy, over a rat the pretty way other ladies did, with her funny clothes, her big cameo pin holding down her little flat round collar, and all other ladies so stylish with high collars under their ears. Yes, of course, the minute Maman looked at her, you saw how ashamed you'd be of Cousin Hetty if she came to visit your school at Belton. And yet there was the other Cousin Hetty you'd been having such a good time with. You just flickered away from Maman's way of seeing it to yours and never could make up your mind which was the real way.
Marise shook her head, drew a long breath and looked down again at her spelling lesson. It was a list of the names of furniture and household utensils, all very familiar to her from old Jeanne's thinking them so terribly important. My! How much more Jeanne cared about her work than any girl they'd ever had in Belton.
"Lit . . . sommier . . . traversin . . ." all the names of the complicated parts of a bed, a sacred French bed. As Marise looked at them on the page she could see Jeanne in the mornings, taking poor stupid little Isabelle's head right off because she didn't make the bed up smoothly enough; and all the time it was about a million times smoother than any bed ever was in America! Marise didn't believe the President of the United States had his bed-clothes pulled so tight and smooth. And she wondered if Jeanne worked in the White House, if she would let even the President's little girl sit down on the bed in the daytime. How particular they were about things in France! About everything. When you bought anything in a store how they did drive you wild with their slowness in getting it put up in the package just so, as if it mattered, when you were going to take it out of the package three minutes later, as soon as you got home. And at school how they did fuss about neatness! The lessons were easy enough to learn. Marise never had any trouble with lessons, but how could anybody ever do things as neatly as they wanted you to. And how the teacher jumped on you if you didn't, ever so much worse than if you got the answer to an arithmetic problem wrong. Mercy! How she did scold! There wasn't anybody in America knew how to scold like that even if they wanted to, and they didn't. It had scared Marise at first, and made her feel like crying, and she never had got entirely used to it although she saw how all the other girls did, just took it and didn't care and did whatever they liked behind her back.
Marise couldn't get used to Jeanne that way either, to her yelling so when she scolded. Marise hated to have people get mad and excited. And how Jeanne did carry on about the house being neat, the part that is, where company could come; (under her kitchen sink it smelled awfully and was full of greasy rags) and yet she'd shine up the salon floor over and over when it was already shiny, and never think of those rags. The least little bit of clutter left around in the dining-room, or even your own room, and how she would scold! And yet she was so awfully good to you, and was always giving you big, smacking kisses, and hugging you, and she always saved over the best things to eat when Maman had a lunch party, and you were at school. Even when Maman had said you couldn't have any of something Jeanne always brought it to your room, under her apron, after you'd gone to bed. It wasn't very nice to do things behind Maman's back, but everybody seemed to be doing things behind everybody else's back. Maman did behind Father's, lots of times, and it was perfectly understood between them that Marise was never to tell Father on her. And it would be telling on Jeanne if you told Mother. And anyhow Marise didn't see Maman so very much any more, to tell her things; it was mostly Jeanne who did things for her.
Marise laid down her book again, lost in one of her recurrent attacks of amazement at there being so many different Jeannes inside that one leathery skin. There was the Jeanne who came every morning to take orders, and folded her hands on her apron, and sort of stooped herself over and said, "Oui, Madame," to everything Maman said. You'd think she was scared to death of Maman, and yet she went away to the kitchen on the other side of the landing and became another Jeanne who never paid the least attention to what Maman had said, but ran the house just the way she thought it ought to be.
There were two Jeannes right there, and there was another one, the outdoor Jeanne, who took her to school every morning—how funny that in France a great girl of eleven had to have somebody tagging along every time she stepped outside the house! This was the most interesting Jeanne of all. She told stories every single minute. Lots of them were about when she had been a little girl—gracious! think of Jeanne ever having been a little girl! That was ever so long ago, before the Emperor and the Empress had made Biarritz the fashion. Jeanne said those were the good days, when the Basques had their country to themselves, and you never saw a hat on any woman's head; they all wore the black kerchief for everyday and mantillas on Sunday for Mass, and lived like Christians. Jeanne could remember when Biarritz was just a little fishing village, a decent place, and now look at it! She could remember just as well when Napoleon and his Spanish wife first began to come down there so the Empress could get as near to Spain as possible. Many and many's the time Jeanne had seen them in their springy barouche, driving right along this very street, he with his eyes as dead as a three-days-caught fish's, and she as handsome as any Basque girl!
They weren't all stories of Jeanne when she was a little girl. Lots of them were of what had happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago around here. There were ever so many stories of witches and ghosts and sorcerers. There were plenty of those still in the Basque country. There was a sorcerer living in that little tumble-down house near the river on the road to St. Barthelémy. Why, Jeanne's own mother, years ago, one day looked up from her spinning and saw a monstrous pig, big and black. She jumped up and ran out to try to catch it. Her grandmother went out too, and there were a lot of the neighbors who were trying to drive the pig away. But it didn't pay a bit of attention, butted at them so fierce when they came near they were afraid, for he was as tall as a calf, and whoever saw a pig as big as that? And then the grandmother made the sign of the cross, Spanish fashion . . . and like snapping your fingers, didn't the pig change, right before their eyes, into a little wee woman they'd never seen, and she went up in the air as thin and light as a loose spider's thread, and drifted away and there was nothing there.
The little American girl knew enough to know that this story couldn't be true, of course. And yet Jeanne's mother and all those people had seen it. They saw a pig and it turned into a wee witch woman.
Marise stopped thinking about that, leaned forward and began kneading the softened tallow at the upper end of the candle. Father could say all he liked about candles being a bother, they were lots of fun. This part up next the flame got just right so you could poke it and it stayed put, any way you wanted it. And it was fun to lean the candle over and drop the melted tallow on your hands in little drops that got hard and you could peel them off.
As she poked at it, a dozen pictures flickered through her mind; the bridge over the Adour with the river flowing yellow and strong under it, and the bright painted vessels loading and unloading; the Sister who opened the door at school, always so calm and silent; the playground at school with the black-aproned girls, their faces twisted up with running and screaming and catching each other; and the same girls at their desks, with their faces all smoothed and empty, looking up at Mademoiselle as though they had never thought of doing anything she told them not to; the school-room itself, battered and gray with age, the old black desks with the slant lids that lifted up; Reverend Mother stopping in to hear a lesson, with her old, old quiet face; Maman so pretty and stylish, looking so sweet when she made mistakes in French that nobody minded, or thought of laughing at her.
Marise tipped the candle over carefully and let some melted tallow fall on the back of her hand. As she set it back and waited for the tallow to harden, she was thinking how very different from home Bayonne was; the Basque fishwomen, with the shiny fish in the round flat baskets on their heads; the white oxen with the sheep-skin on their horns, and their red-striped white canvas covering, pulling those two-wheeled carts; everybody streaking it along in canvas sandals and berets, talking French and Basque and Spanish and never a word of English. And yet, Marise reflected as she slowly peeled off the hardened tallow drops, none of that was the real difference. And there was a real difference. The real difference was something inside you. You felt different, as if you'd looked in the glass and seen somebody not quite you. It was . . .
Somebody was walking slowly down the brick-floored hall to her room. It was Father's heavy step. That was nice! She hadn't thought she would see either Father or Maman, because there had been company to dinner again. She gathered the tallow drops together and dropped them in the base of the brass candle-stick. Then she remembered that Jeanne would scold if she did that. These candle-sticks like everything else in the house had to be just so, or everybody caught it. She swept them out again with her fingers, and stood holding them in her hand, looking around her for some place to put them. The waste-paper basket was too open, they would fall right through on the floor, and what a fuss there would be over that! Oh, there was the fireplace, if you put things way back of the sticks, Jeanne didn't see them.
She was just straightening up from reaching back of the wood, when Father came in. He said, "Hello, kid," and she answered, "Hello, Poppa." They did this for a kind of a joke, to be extra American when Maman couldn't hear them.
Father sat down on the edge of the bed, making a big dent in the fluffed-up crimson, eider-down quilt, which Jeanne rounded so carefully each morning, and which she never let anybody disturb. Not, of course, that Jeanne would dare to say anything to Father, le patron. She would only grumble in Basque, under her breath, and Marise would feel her opinion of Americans going down even lower than it was. Marise could always feel everybody's opinions as they went up and down. And how she did hate to feel them going down, anybody's about anything! She always tried to fix it so they would go up. She now planned to fluff the édredon to a puff again, after Father had gone back. She didn't say anything about it to Father. You never did, about that sort of thing, even Maman didn't, although it made her awfully provoked not to have Father care, and she always said a lot afterwards. Marise didn't even say anything to him about the white down that would be sure to work through the cover of the édredon and get on his clothes. Father wouldn't care if it did. There were such lots of things Father didn't care about. But Maman would. She must remember to brush him off before he went to the salon.
"Having a good time?" asked Father slowly, the way he did, that let you see how he knew perfectly well you weren't.
"Not so very," she answered.
"Neither am I," he returned, "though you needn't mention it to Momma." There were always a great many things that were not to be mentioned to Maman, and a lot of quite other things that were not to be mentioned to Father, and Isabelle told her things she didn't want Jeaime to know, and everything that Jeanne said was not to be mentioned either to Father or Maman. Marise, coming back from school, used to feel when she opened the door of the apartment, as though she were walking into cobwebs spread around in the dark, and you mustn't on any account brush into any one of them.
Father now went on, "What are you doing with yourself?"
Marise looked down at the cahier, its pages as blank as when she had sat down. Her father looked with her. "That's lovely paper, I must say," he commented, always with his way of showing that he meant just the opposite. "Are you supposed to write on it in ink?"
"Oh, yes," cried Marise, flashing up to seize the chance of sympathy for one of her grievances, "they never let you use lead-pencils because in lead-pencil there's a chance to rub out your mistakes. You're not supposed to make any mistakes."
"Doesn't your pen get stuck in it—it must be like writing on mosquito-netting," said Father.
"Yes, it does," complained Marise, "and you spatter the ink all over and break off the tips of the pen, and everything. And the teachers just kill you if it's not perfectly neat."
Father took up the cahier and looked at the paper hard, scratching it a little with his finger-nail. "Well, there's culture in the air, anyhow," he said without smiling, although Marise knew he was quoting Maman. He looked around the room now without saying anything more. Marise followed his eyes and saw with him the dingy, high-ceilinged room, dimly lighted by the one weak candle-flame, the heavy, figured tapestry curtains drawn over the window, the draught, although the window was closed, making them suck in and out; the ugly, ugly wall-paper, dark and scriggly; the stuffed red chair, the only comfortable one, where Jeanne would never let her curl up with her feet under her, because she said the place for shoes was on the floor; the marble-topped washstand with its little chipped white earthen-ware basin and pitcher like the old things at Cousin Hetty's; the clock on the chimney-piece that looked as though it were carved out of greasy, dark-green soap with a greasy dark-green man in a Roman toga on top of it; the shabby, dingy, red-and-white checked curtains hanging over the hooks where Marise hung up her dresses, the tall dark armoire whose slightly greenish mirror reflected all these things as if you were looking at them through water; and finally over the bed, the big, shiny lithograph of Our Lady of Lourdes in her bright blue cloak, standing in front of her grotto.
"Well, maybe it's in the air," said Father. He spoke in his usual tired, slow voice, sagging down on the bed the way he always sat.
But then he surprised Marise very much and said something she never forgot. It gave her such a jump of astonishment to have Father say something as though he really meant it, that she sat up straight at his first words, staring at him. He said in a strong voice, "But look here, Molly, there is something in the air here, by heck, and I wish you'd get it. I mean the way every one of them in this country keeps right after what he's doing, till he's got it just right. That's the way to do, and we're all off the track with our 'that'll do,' the way we say back in America. It's the only thing in their whole darned country I can see, that don't make you sick. Now, look here, kid, you go after it and get it. Start right in now. Learn how to make that infernal note-book perfectly all right in spite of the bad paper. I wish to the Lord I had been taught that."
And then, while Marise was still staring, the words echoing loudly in her ears because of the strangeness of hearing them from Father, he went on in his usual voice, "It might be something to hold on to, and I don't see much else."
Marise had never before known Father in any way to try to "bring her up!" He made Maman so much provoked because he always said that he didn't know, any more than Marise, how she ought to be brought up, and he didn't see that it made so much difference what you did, everything turned out about the same in the long run. Now her little room seemed full of the oddness of his thinking that something did matter, of his telling her so hard that he wished she'd do something. In the loud silence which followed, she could hear his voice and what it said, sinking deeper and deeper into her mind.
After a while Father yawned very wide and rubbed his hair forward and back so that it was all rumpled up the way Maman didn't like to see it. "What did you say you were doing?" he asked again.
"I'm writing down my leçon d'orthographe," said Marise.
"Your what!" said Father.
"My spelling lesson," Marise corrected herself with a jerk. She knew how Father hated to have people mix up their languages.
"Well, I don't know that you're any worse off at that than we are in the sitting-room," said Father. He always called the salon the sitting-room. He added, glancing at her blank note-book, "You haven't got very far, I see." He paused, and smiled a little with one corner of his mouth, "But then neither have we in the sitting-room."
It came into Marise's mind that perhaps Father, seeing he was so specially serious to-night, might tell her some way to keep her thoughts from jiggling around so, from one way of feeling to another, according to what other people thought of things, instead of knowing what she thought of things. But she had no chance to ask him, for when she began, "Well, I sort of forgot about my spelling. I got to thinking," Father broke in, as he got up heavily to go, "I wouldn't advise you to do that, either. It never gets anybody anywhere."
Marise forgot till after he had got clear back to the salon that she had not brushed off the down from the édredon. Maman wouldn't like that a bit, to have him look untidy when company was there! Oh, dear!
But she forgot this as she thought again about the queerness of Father's seeming to care so much about her doing one thing rather than another. It was still there, this wonder at him, when she turned to her book finally to study that spelling lesson. "Lit . . . sommier . . . traversin. . . ." She wrote the words down on the coarse paper, with infinite care, drawing on some deep, unfamiliar store of patience when the pen sputtered and caught its point and stuck. She was going to try to do as Father said. She would take as much trouble with writing those words about a bed, as old Jeanne took in making the bed every morning; and that was more trouble than anybody in America ever took about anything.
Her dark, shining hair fell forward about her cheeks as she leaned over the copy-book, writing slowly, chewing her tongue, frowning in her concentration on the formation of those letters.
She forgot all about her uncertainties as to how things really were; she forgot her loneliness. All her flickering thoughts steadied themselves and grew quiet as she worked. A stillness came over her. She felt happier than she had since they came to France to live.
Later, ever so much later, after she had undressed, washed in the cold water in the little earthen-ware basin, gone to bed and to sleep, the night-time Jeanne tiptoed in to see that she was all right. This Jeanne was very different from all the others, because she was so quiet. Marise half-waked up when she felt the energetic French kiss on her cheek (Jeanne always kissed you so hard), and as she dozed off again, she heard Jeanne saying a prayer over her, half in Basque and half in Latin. Marise couldn't understand either Latin or Basque, but she understood the intention of that nightly prayer at her bed, and she caught sleepily at old Jeanne to return her kiss. It wasn't as good as Cousin Hetty's taking you on her lap and putting her arms around you, but it was enough sight better than nothing. Also she heard Jeanne carefully close the window. Jeanne always did this every night, although Maman said to leave it open. Jeanne was the last one in there always so she had it her way. She didn't think it healthy to let night air into rooms. Marise was too sleepy to get up and open it again. Anyhow Jeanne often told her about the evil spirits, that come in through open bedroom windows, and sit on your chest and suck your life into their black bodies, as you sleep. Marise did not believe this, in the least, of course, and yet . . .