Part 2

One thing, in recalling those early days, I catch myself perpetually thanking our stars for, with a joy the obverse of a terror; and that is that it was mercifully given to us to find her out before she had a chance to do the same by us. Otherwise,—if we had persisted a little longer in our error, and in our consequent modes of speech and conduct, and she had come to understand,—my heart quails to picture the hurt and mortification she would have suffered, the contempt and horror she must have felt for us. But, by a good fortune that we had certainly done nothing to deserve, our eyes were opened to her true colours in the very nick of time; and we made haste to turn over a new leaf before she had been able to spell out the old. I can hardly tell just how it began. It began probably in vague misgivings, dim surmises, that gradually waxed stronger and clearer, and were in the end confirmed by circumstances. Little questions she would ask, little comments she would make, little things she would do, struck us as odd, as hopeless to explain,—unless on an hypothesis that at first seemed quite too far-fetched, but by-and-by forced itself upon us as the only one that would in any way fit the case; the hypothesis, namely, of her stupendous innocence; that, indeed, as Bruant had divined, her presence with us was due to some preposterous misconception; that, in her own perfect soundness and honesty, she was totally unsuspicious of the corruption round about her.

Chalks used to give expression to this growing sentiment of ours, by shaking his head, looking half wise, half mystified, and muttering, “There’s something queer about that girl. I’ll be gol-donged if I can make her out.”

Once for instance, she confided to us that she thought Madame Bourdon must be a very religious person, because she was always with a priest. It was clear that she proffered this remark in entire literalness and good faith, with no ulterior intention of any sort; and we, after staring at it for a minute or two, reflected upon it for a fortnight. True enough, the black robe of Monsieur the Abbé did lend a meretricious air of orthodoxy both to Madame and to her establishment.

Then the fact came out, I can’t remember how, that she was working at Julian’s,—taking “whole days,” too, which means nine or ten hours of heavy labour in the pestilential air of a studio packed with people, where every window is shut, and the temperature hovers between eighty and ninety Fahrenheit. Why should she be breaking her back and poisoning her lungs at Julian’s, if—-?

“There’s something queer about her,” Chalks insisted.

She was always extremely friendly, though, with the other ladies of our household: visited them in their rooms, received them in her own, walked out with them, chatted with them as freely as her French would let her; and this confused us, and deferred our better judgment. It was hard to believe that anybody, no matter how guileless, nor how ill-instructed in their idiom, could rub elbows much with Zélie, Yvonne, Fifine, and not become more or less distinctly aware of the peculiarities of their temperament. If actions speak louder than words, manners nowadays are masters of seven languages.

Yet, one afternoon, in the garden of the Luxembourg, Miss asked of me, “Are they all married, those young ladies at our hotel?”

I looked at her for a moment in a sort of stupefaction. Was it her pleasure to be jocular? No, she had spoken in utmost sobriety.

“Married?” I echoed. “What on earth made you think they’re married?”

“Everybody calls them Madame. I thought in French Madame was only used for married women, like Mrs. with us.”

Some providential instinct in me bade me respect her simplicity, and answer with a prevarication.

“Oh, no,” I said, “not in the Latin Quarter, at any rate. It’s the custom here to call all women Madame.”

“But then,” she proceeded with swift logic, “why do they call me Mademoiselle?”

This was rather a “oner,” but I came up manfully. “Ah, that’s—that’s because you’re English, don’t you see?”

“Oh,” she murmured, apparently accepting the reason as sufficient.

Then I ventured to sound her a little.

“You like them, you find them pleasant, the girls at the hotel?”

“Yes, I like them,” she answered deliberately. “Of course, their ways aren’t quite English, are they? But I suppose one must expect French girls to be different. They seem intelligent and good-natured, and they’ve been very nice to me.”

“I dare say you don’t always understand each other?” I suggested.

“Oh dear no. That is what prevents our being intimate. French is so difficult, and they talk so fast. It’s as much as I can do to understand the masters at the school, though they speak very slowly and clearly, because they know I’m English. But I think I’m learning a little. I can understand a great deal more than I could when I first came. Do all French girls smoke cigarettes? I knew that Spanish and Russian women did, but I didn’t know it was the custom in France.”

“Yes, decidedly,” I said to myself,

“Chalks is right. There’s something ‘queer,’ about her.”

But how to reconcile the theory of her “queerness” with the fact of her residence here alone among us in the Latin Quarter of Paris? Assuming her to be a well brought-up, innocent young English girl, how in the name of verisimilitude had she contrived to get so far astray from her natural orbit?

Nevertheless, in the teeth of difficulties, the theory gained ground. And as it did so, it was amusing to note the way in which the other girls accepted it. They were thoroughly scandalized, poor dears. Their sense of propriety bridled up in indignant astonishment. So long as they had been able to reckon Miss, simply and homogeneously, a case of total depravity,—a specimen of the British variety of their own species,—they had placed no stint upon their affable commendation of her. She was pas mal, très bien, très gentille, très comme il faut, even très chic. But directly the suspicion began to work in their minds that perhaps, after all, appearances had been misleading, and she might prove an entirely vertical member of society,—then perforce they had to wag their heads over her, and cry fie at her goings-on. What! how! a respectable unmarried woman,—a demoiselle, du monde,—a jeune fille bien élevie,—come by herself to Paris,—dwell unchaperoned in the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shakespere,—hob and nob familiarly with you and me,—submit to be tutoyée by Tom, Dick, and Harry! Mais, allons donc, it was really quite too shameless. And they played my ladies Steyne and Bareacres to her inadequate Rebecca; looked askance at her when she came into the room, drew in their precious skirts when they had to pass her, gathered in corners to discuss her, and were, in fine, profoundly and sincerely shocked. For, here below, there are no sterner moralists, no more punctilious sticklers for the prunes and prisms of conventionality, than those harmful, unnecessary cats, the Zélies and the Germaines of the Quartier-Latin.

“Mai’s, enfin, si c’est vrai,—si elle est réellement comme, ça, nest-ce pas,—mais c’est une honte,” was one of their refrains; and “Elle manque complètement de pudeur alors,” was another; to which the chorus: “Oh, pour sur!”

And poor little Miss couldn’t understand it. Observing the frigid and austere reserve with which they met her, feeling their half suppressed disapproval in the atmosphere, she searched her conscience vainly to discover what she could have done to anger them, and was, for a time I fear, exceedingly unhappy.

We men, meanwhile, were cursing ourselves for blockheads, chewing the sharp cud of repentance, and trying in a hundred sheepish, clumsy fashions to make amends. It would have been diverting for an outsider to have watched us; the deference with which we spoke and listened to her, the interest we took in her work, the infinite little politenesses we paid her. When all is said, the sins we were guilty of towards her had been chiefly metaphysical; it was what we had thought, rather than what we had done. But I don’t know that our contrition was on this account any the less acute; we had thought such a lot. We fancied a sister of our own in her position, and we conceived a frantic desire to punch the heads of the men who should have dared to think of her as we, quite nonchalantly and with no sense of daring, had thought of Miss. Our biggest positive transgression was the latitude of speech we had allowed ourselves at the table d’hôte; and the effect of that was happily neutralised (no thanks to us) by the poverty of her French. But, though our salvation lay in the circumstance, I am far from sure that it did not aggravate our remorse. We were profiting by her limitations, taking sanctuary in her ignorance; and that smacked disagreeably of the sneakish.

Our yearning to make amends was singularly complicated by the necessity we were under, as much for her sake as for our own, to prevent her ever guessing how (or even that) we had offended. Not to confess is to shirk the better half of atonement; yet confession in this case was impossible, concealment was imperative. That, if she should get so much as a glimmer of the truth, it would blast us forever in her esteem, was a consideration, but a trifling one to the thought of what her emotions must be like to realise the sort of place she had lately held in ours. No, she must never guess. With the consciousness in our hearts that we had practised a kind of intellectual foul play upon her, and in our minds a vivid picture of the different footing things would be on if she only knew, we must continue cheerfully to enjoy her smiles and her good graces, and try to look as if we felt that we deserved them. It was bare-faced hypocrisy, it was a game of false pretences; but it was Hobson’s choice. We could not even cease to thee-and-thou her, lest she should wonder at the change, and from wonderment proceed to ratiocination.

“One thing we must do, though,” said Chalks, “we must get her out of this so-called hotel. Blamed if I can guess how she ever came here.”

This was before we had found the guidebook in her room, long before we had heard her simple story, which explained everything.

“We’ve acted like a pack of hounds, that’s my opinion,” Chalks went on. “And now we’ve got to step up to the captain’s office and settle.”

His rhetoric was confused, but I dare say we caught the idea.

“We’ve been acting like a pack of poodles latterly,” somebody put in, “following her about, fawning at her feet, fetching and carrying for her.”

“Well, and hadn’t we oughter?” demanded Chalks. “Is there any gentleman here who doesn’t like it?”

“Oh, no, I only mentioned the circumstance as a source of unction,” said the speaker.

“Chalks is right. We must get her out of the hotel,” Campbell agreed. “She mustn’t be exposed any longer to contact with those little beasts of Mimis.”

“That’s all very well, but how are we to manage it?” inquired Norton. “We can’t give her the word to move, without saying why. And as I understand it, that’s precisely the last thing we wish to do.”

“We want to get her out of the mud, without letting her know she’s in it,” said another.

“Yes, that’s the devil of it,” admitted Chalks. “But I’ll tell you what,” he added, with an air of inspiration. “Why not work it from the other end round? Get rid of the Mimis, and let Miss stop?”

This proposition was so radical, so revolutionary, we were inclined to greet it with derision. But Chalks stood by his guns. “How to do it?” he cried. “Why, boycott ‘em. Make this shop too hot to hold ‘em. Cultivate the art of being infernally disagreeable. They’ll clear out fast enough. Then there’d be no harm in Miss staying till the end of time.”

“What’ll Madame say?”

“Oh, we can fill their places up with fellows. I’ll go touting among the men at the school. Easy enough to bag a half a dozen.”

“But what about Lucile?”—Lucile, it will be remembered, was Madame’s niece.

“That’s so,” confessed Chalks, dashed for a moment. “Lucile’s the snag. But I guess on the whole Lucile will have to go too. I’ll hire a man I know to want her room. Madame won’t let family feeling stand in the way of trade. Especially the sky-pilot won’t, not he. And I’d like to know who’s the boss of this shebang, if not Monsieur the Abbé? There’s no love lying around loose between him and Lucile, as it stands. Just let a man turn up and ask for her room, Madame’ll drop her like a hot potato.”

But from the labour of putting such schemes in operation we were saved by a microbe: a mouse can serve a lion. Half of our male contingent went down with the influenza: and our ladies, Lucile included, incontinently fled the ship. They dreaded the infection; and the house was as melancholy as a hospital; and noise being inhibited, they couldn’t properly entertain their friends. Besides, I think they were glad enough of an occasion to escape from the proximity of Miss. She had infused an element of ozone into our moral atmosphere; their systems weren’t accustomed to it; it filled them with a vague malaise: they made a break for fouler air.

And it was at this crisis that Miss came out strong. She laid aside all business and excuses, and constituted herself our nurse.

All day long, and very nearly all night long too, she was at it: flying from room to room, administering medicines to this man, reading aloud to that, spraying eucalyptus everywhere, running for the doctor when somebody appeared to have taken a turn for the worse,—in short, heaping coals of fire upon our heads with a lavish, untiring hand. When we got up from our sick-beds, every mother’s son of us was dead in love with her. From that time to the end she went about like a queen with her body-guard; and there wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t have given his life to spare her a pain in the little finger; and our rewards were her smiles. It is to be noted that she accepted our devotion with the same calm unconsciousness of anything extraordinary that she had shown in the old days to our doubtful courtesy. She wore her crown and wielded her gentle sceptre like one in the purple born, whilst her subjects outdid each other in zeal to please her.

Meantime we had learned her previous history; we had pieced it together from a multitude of little casual utterances. Her father, some five years ago, had died a bankrupt; and she had gone as governess with an English family to the far West of America, where they had a cattle ranch; and now she was on her way home, to seek a new engagement; and she was breaking her pilgrimage with a season of art in Paris (she had always wanted to cultivate her natural gift for painting); and she had chosen the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shakespere because her guide-book recommended it.

Now Norton had a sister married to a squire in Derbyshire; and one day this good lady advertised in the Times for a governess; and Miss, who kept watch on such advertisements (going to Neal’s library to study the English papers), was on the point of answering it, when Norton cut in with a “Let me write that letter for you. Mrs. Clere happens to be my sister.” Of course Miss got the place; and it was to take it, and begin her duties, that she left us last night.

I follow her in fancy upon her journey, and imagine her arrival at the big, respectable, dull country house; and I wonder will she regret a little and think fondly now and then of Madame Bourdon’s hotel and the ragged staff of comrades she has left behind her here. For the present the Rue Racine is an abhorrent vacuum, and I am sick with nostagia for the Paris of yesterday.

THE FUNERAL MARCH OF A MARIONNETTE

“Elle est morte et n’a point vécu.”

Who does not know the sensation that besets an ordinary man on entering a familiar room, where, during his absence, some change has been made?—a piece of furniture moved, an old hanging taken down, a new picture put up?—that teasing sense of strangeness, which, if subordinate to the business of the moment, yet persists, uncomfortably formless, till, for instance, the presiding genius of the place inquires, “How do you like the way we have moved the piano?” or something else happens to crystallise the sufferer’s mere vague feeling into a perception; after which his spirit may be at rest again?

When I woke this morning, here in my own dingy furnished room, in this most dingy lodging-house, I had an experience very like that I mean to suggest: something seemed wrong and unusual, something had been changed overnight. This was the more perplexing, because my door had remained locked and bolted ever since I had tucked myself into bed; and within the room, after all, there isn’t much to change; only the bed itself, and the armoire, and my writing-table, and my wash-hand-stand, and my two dilapidated chairs; and these were still where they belonged. So were the shabby green window-curtains, the bilious green paper on the walls, the dismal green baldaquin above my head. Nevertheless, a tantalising sense of something changed, of something taken away, of an unwonted vacancy, haunted me through the brewing and the drinking of my coffee, and through the first few whiffs of my cigarette. Then I put on my hat, and “went to school,” and forgot about it.

But when I came back, in the afternoon, I found that whatever the cause might be of my curious psychical disturbance, it had not ceased to act. No sooner had I got seated at my table, and begun to arrange my notes, than down upon me settled, stronger if possible than ever, that inexplicable feeling of emptiness in the room, of strangeness, of an accustomed something gone. What could it mean? It was disquieting, exasperating; it interfered with my work. I must investigate it, and put an end to it, if I could.

But just at that moment the current of my ideas was temporarily turned by somebody rapping on my door. I called out, “Entrez!” and there entered a young lady: a young lady in black, with soiled yellow ribbons, and on her cheeks a little artificial bloom. The effect of this, however, was mitigated by a series of flesh-colored ridges running through it; and as the young person’s eyes, moreover, were red and humid, I concluded that she had been shedding tears. I looked at her for two or three seconds without being able to think who she was; but before she had pronounced her “B’jour, monsieur,” I remembered: Madame Germaine, the friend of poor little Zizi, my next-door neighbour. And then, in a flash, the reason appeared to me for my queer dim feeling of something not as usual in my surroundings, I had not heard Zizi cough! That was it! Zizi, the poor little girl in the adjoining room,—behind that door against which my armoire stands,—who for three months past has scarcely left the house, but has coughed, coughed, coughed perpetually: so that every night I have fallen asleep, and every morning wakened, and every day pursued my indoor occupations, to that distressing sound. Oh, our life is not all cakes and ale, here in the Quarter; we have our ennuis, as well as the rest of mankind; and when we are too poor to change our lodgings, we must be content to abide in patience—whatever sounds our neighbours choose to make.

At all events, so it came to pass that the sight of Madame Germaine, in her soiled finery, cleared up my problem for me: Zizi had not coughed. And I said to myself, “Ah, the poor little thing is better, and is spending the day out of doors.” (It has been a lovely day, soft as April, though in midwinter; and my inference, therefore, was not overdrawn.) “And Madame Germaine,” I proceeded rapidly, “has come to see her; and finding her away, has looked in on me.”

Meanwhile my visitor stood still, just within the threshold, and gazed solemnly, almost reproachfully, at me with her big protruding eyes: eyes that, protruding always far more than enough, seemed now, swollen by recent weeping, fairly ready to leave their sockets. What had she been crying for, I wondered. Then I began our conversation with a cheery “Zizi isn’t there?”

“Ah, m’sieu! Ah, la pauv’ Zizi!”! was her response, in a sort of hysterical gasp; and two fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, making further havoc of her rouge. She took a few steps forward, and sank into my arm-chair. “La pauv’ petite!” she sobbed, I was puzzled, of course, and a little troubled. “What is it? What is the matter?” I asked. “Zizi isn’t worse, surely? I haven’t heard her cough all day.”

“Oh, no, m’sieu, she isn’t worse. Oh, no, she—she is dead.”

I don’t need to recount any more of my interview with Madame Germaine, though it lasted a good half-hour longer, and was sufficiently vivacious. I can’t describe to you the shock her announcement caused me, nor the chill and despondency that have been growing on me ever since. Zizi—dead? Zizi and Death!—the notions are too awfully incongruous. I look at the door that separates our rooms,—the door athwart which, in former times, I have heard so many bursts of laughter, snatches of song, when Zizi would be entertaining her——she called them “friends;” and, latterly, that hacking, unyielding cough of hers,—I look at the door, and a sort of cold and blackness seems to creep in from its edges; and then I fancy the darkened chamber beyond it, with the open window, and Zizi’s little form stretched on the bed, stark and dead,—poor little chirping, chattering, ribald Zizi! Oh, it is ghastly. And all her trumpery, twopenny fripperies round about her, their occupation gone: her sham jewels, and her flounces, and her tawdry furs and laces, and her powder-puffs and rouge-pots—though it was only towards the end that Zizi took to rouge. It is as if they were to tell you that a doll is dead: can such things die? They are not wholly inhuman, then?

They have viscera? are made of real flesh and blood? can experience real pains? and—and die? Here are you and I, serious folk, not without some sense of the solemnity and mystery of God’s creation, here are we still working the first degree of our arcana,—Life; and yonder lies that tinselled little gewgaw, admitted to the second! She has passed the dread portals, she has accomplished the miracle of Death! She was vain and shallow and hard: she was malicious: she was shameless in her speech as in her conduct: she was lively, it is true, and merry-mannered, and pretty: but she had no affections, no illusions, no remorse; and lies dropped like toads from her mouth whenever she opened it: yet she is dead! And to-morrow women (who would have shrunk from her in her lifetime, as from something pestilential) will reverently cross themselves, and men (who would have.... ah, well, it is best not to remember what the men would have done) will decently bare their heads, as her poor coffin is borne through the streets on its way to the graveyard. Isn’t it ghastly? Isn’t it quite enough to depress a fellow, to sober him up, when there is only a thin partition, broken by a door, to separate him from such a death-chamber?—Wait; I must tell you something about Zizi, as I have known her.