The Complete Works of Henry James, page 670
“But haven’t they common sense? Don’t they know they are ruining themselves?”
“They don’t believe it. The duty of an American husband and father is to keep them going. If he asks them how, that’s his own affair. So, by way of not being mean, of being a good American husband and father, poor Ruck stands staring at bankruptcy.”
Mrs. Church looked at me a moment, in quickened meditation. “Why, if Aurora were to go to stay with them, she might not even be properly fed!”
“I don’t, on the whole, recommend,” I said, laughing, “that your daughter should pay a visit to Thirty-Seventh Street.”
“Why should I be subjected to such trials—so sadly eprouvee? Why should a daughter of mine like that dreadful girl?”
“DOES she like her?”
“Pray, do you mean,” asked my companion, softly, “that Aurora is a hypocrite?”
I hesitated a moment. “A little, since you ask me. I think you have forced her to be.”
Mrs. Church answered this possibly presumptuous charge with a tranquil, candid exultation. “I never force my daughter!”
“She is nevertheless in a false position,” I rejoined. “She hungers and thirsts to go back to her own country; she wants ‘to come’ out in New York, which is certainly, socially speaking, the El Dorado of young ladies. She likes any one, for the moment, who will talk to her of that, and serve as a connecting-link with her native shores. Miss Ruck performs this agreeable office.”
“Your idea is, then, that if she were to go with Miss Ruck to America she would drop her afterwards.”
I complimented Mrs. Church upon her logical mind, but I repudiated this cynical supposition. “I can’t imagine her—when it should come to the point—embarking with the famille Ruck. But I wish she might go, nevertheless.”
Mrs. Church shook her head serenely, and smiled at my inappropriate zeal. “I trust my poor child may never be guilty of so fatal a mistake. She is completely in error; she is wholly unadapted to the peculiar conditions of American life. It would not please her. She would not sympathise. My daughter’s ideal is not the ideal of the class of young women to which Miss Ruck belongs. I fear they are very numerous; they give the tone—they give the tone.”
“It is you that are mistaken,” I said; “go home for six months and see.”
“I have not, unfortunately, the means to make costly experiments. My daughter has had great advantages—rare advantages—and I should be very sorry to believe that au fond she does not appreciate them. One thing is certain: I must remove her from this pernicious influence. We must part company with this deplorable family. If Mr. Ruck and his ladies cannot be induced to go to Chamouni—a journey that no traveller with the smallest self-respect would omit—my daughter and I shall be obliged to retire. We shall go to Dresden.”
“To Dresden?”
“The capital of Saxony. I had arranged to go there for the autumn, but it will be simpler to go immediately. There are several works in the gallery with which my daughter has not, I think, sufficiently familiarised herself; it is especially strong in the seventeenth century schools.”
As my companion offered me this information I perceived Mr. Ruck come lounging in, with his hands in his pockets, and his elbows making acute angles. He had his usual anomalous appearance of both seeking and avoiding society, and he wandered obliquely toward Mrs. Church, whose last words he had overheard. “The seventeenth century schools,” he said, slowly, as if he were weighing some very small object in a very large-pair of scales. “Now, do you suppose they HAD schools at that period?”
Mrs. Church rose with a good deal of precision, making no answer to this incongruous jest. She clasped her large volume to her neat little bosom, and she fixed a gentle, serious eye upon Mr. Ruck.
“I had a letter this morning from Chamouni,” she said.
“Well,” replied Mr. Ruck, “I suppose you’ve got friends all over.”
“I have friends at Chamouni, but they are leaving. To their great regret.” I had got up, too; I listened to this statement, and I wondered. I am almost ashamed to mention the subject of my agitation. I asked myself whether this was a sudden improvisation, consecrated by maternal devotion; but this point has never been elucidated. “They are giving up some charming rooms; perhaps you would like them. I would suggest your telegraphing. The weather is glorious,” continued Mrs. Church, “and the highest peaks are now perceived with extraordinary distinctness.”
Mr. Ruck listened, as he always listened, respectfully. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know as I want to go up Mount Blank. That’s the principal attraction, isn’t it?”
“There are many others. I thought I would offer you an—an exceptional opportunity.”
“Well,” said Mr. Ruck, “you’re right down friendly. But I seem to have more opportunities than I know what to do with. I don’t seem able to take hold.”
“It only needs a little decision,” remarked Mrs. Church, with an air which was an admirable example of this virtue. “I wish you good- night, sir.” And she moved noiselessly away.
Mr. Ruck, with his long legs apart, stood staring after her; then he transferred his perfectly quiet eyes to me. “Does she own a hotel over there?” he asked. “Has she got any stock in Mount Blank?”
CHAPTER IX.
The next day Madame Beaurepas handed me, with her own elderly fingers, a missive, which proved to be a telegram. After glancing at it, I informed her that it was apparently a signal for my departure; my brother had arrived in England, and proposed to me to meet him there; he had come on business, and was to spend but three weeks in Europe. “But my house empties itself!” cried the old woman. “The famille Ruck talks of leaving me, and Madame Church nous fait la reverence.”
“Mrs. Church is going away?”
“She is packing her trunk; she is a very extraordinary person. Do you know what she asked me this morning? To invent some combination by which the famille Ruck should move away. I informed her that I was not an inventor. That poor famille Ruck! ‘Oblige me by getting rid of them,’ said Madame Church, as she would have asked Celestine to remove a dish of cabbage. She speaks as if the world were made for Madame Church. I intimated to her that if she objected to the company there was a very simple remedy; and at present elle fait ses paquets.”
“She really asked you to get the Rucks out of the house?”
“She asked me to tell them that their rooms had been let, three months ago, to another family. She has an APLOMB!”
Mrs. Church’s aplomb caused me considerable diversion; I am not sure that it was not, in some degree, to laugh over it at my leisure that I went out into the garden that evening to smoke a cigar. The night was dark and not particularly balmy, and most of my fellow- pensioners, after dinner, had remained in-doors. A long straight walk conducted from the door of the house to the ancient grille that I have described, and I stood here for some time, looking through the iron bars at the silent empty street. The prospect was not entertaining, and I presently turned away. At this moment I saw, in the distance, the door of the house open and throw a shaft of lamplight into the darkness. Into the lamplight there stepped the figure of a female, who presently closed the door behind her. She disappeared in the dusk of the garden, and I had seen her but for an instant, but I remained under the impression that Aurora Church, on the eve of her departure, had come out for a meditative stroll.
I lingered near the gate, keeping the red tip of my cigar turned toward the house, and before long a young lady emerged from among the shadows of the trees and encountered the light of a lamp that stood just outside the gate. It was in fact Aurora Church, but she seemed more bent upon conversation than upon meditation. She stood a moment looking at me, and then she said, -
“Ought I to retire—to return to the house?”
“If you ought, I should be very sorry to tell you so,” I answered.
“But we are all alone; there is no one else in the garden.”
“It is not the first time that I have been alone with a young lady. I am not at all terrified.”
“Ah, but I?” said the young girl. “I have never been alone—” then, quickly, she interrupted herself. “Good, there’s another false note!”
“Yes, I am obliged to admit that one is very false.”
She stood looking at me. “I am going away to-morrow; after that there will be no one to tell me.”
CHAPTER X.
“That will matter little,” I presently replied. “Telling you will do no good.”
“Ah, why do you say that?” murmured Aurora Church.
I said it partly because it was true; but I said it for other reasons as well, which it was hard to define. Standing there bare-headed, in the night air, in the vague light, this young lady looked extremely interesting; and the interest of her appearance was not diminished by a suspicion on my own part that she had come into the garden knowing me to be there. I thought her a charming girl, and I felt very sorry for her; but, as I looked at her, the terms in which Madame Beaurepas had ventured to characterise her recurred to me with a certain force. I had professed a contempt for them at the time, but it now came into my head that perhaps this unfortunately situated, this insidiously mutinous young creature, was looking out for a preserver. She was certainly not a girl to throw herself at a man’s head, but it was possible that in her intense—her almost morbid-desire to put into effect an ideal which was perhaps after all charged with as many fallacies as her mother affirmed, she might do something reckless and irregular—something in which a sympathetic compatriot, as yet unknown, would find his profit. The image, unshaped though it was, of this sympathetic compatriot, filled me with a sort of envy. For some moments I was silent, conscious of these things, and then I answered her question. “Because some things—some differences are felt, not learned. To you liberty is not natural; you are like a person who has bought a repeater, and, in his satisfaction, is constantly making it sound. To a real American girl her liberty is a very vulgarly-ticking old clock.”
“Ah, you mean, then,” said the poor girl, “that my mother has ruined me?”
“Ruined you?”
“She has so perverted my mind, that when I try to be natural I am necessarily immodest.”
“That again is a false note,” I said, laughing.
She turned away. “I think you are cruel.”
“By no means,” I declared; “because, for my own taste, I prefer you as—as—”
I hesitated, and she turned back. “As what?”
“As you are.”
She looked at me a while again, and then she said, in a little reasoning voice that reminded me of her mother’s, only that it was conscious and studied, “I was not aware that I am under any particular obligation to please you!” And then she gave a clear laugh, quite at variance with her voice.
“Oh, there is no obligation,” I said, “but one has preferences. I am very sorry you are going away.”
“What does it matter to you? You are going yourself.”
“As I am going in a different direction that makes all the greater separation.”
She answered nothing; she stood looking through the bars of the tall gate at the empty, dusky street. “This grille is like a cage,” she said, at last.
“Fortunately, it is a cage that will open.” And I laid my hand on the lock.
“Don’t open it,” and she pressed the gate back. “If you should open it I would go out—and never return.”
“Where should you go?”
“To America.”
“Straight away?”
“Somehow or other. I would go to the American consul. I would beg him to give me money—to help me.”
I received this assertion without a smile; I was not in a smiling humour. On the contrary, I felt singularly excited, and I kept my hand on the lock of the gate. I believed (or I thought I believed) what my companion said, and I had—absurd as it may appear—an irritated vision of her throwing herself upon consular sympathy. It seemed to me, for a moment, that to pass out of that gate with this yearning, straining, young creature, would be to pass into some mysterious felicity. If I were only a hero of romance, I would offer, myself, to take her to America.
In a moment more, perhaps, I should have persuaded myself that I was one, but at this juncture I heard a sound that was not romantic. It proved to be the very realistic tread of Celestine, the cook, who stood grinning at us as we turned about from our colloquy.
“I ask bien pardon,” said Celestine. “The mother of Mademoiselle desires that Mademoiselle should come in immediately. M. le Pasteur Galopin has come to make his adieux to ces dames.”
Aurora gave me only one glance, but it was a touching one. Then she slowly departed with Celestine.
The next morning, on coming into the garden, I found that Mrs. Church and her daughter had departed. I was informed of this fact by old M. Pigeonneau, who sat there under a tree, having his coffee at a little green table.
“I have nothing to envy you,” he said; “I had the last glimpse of that charming Miss Aurora.”
“I had a very late glimpse,” I answered, “and it was all I could possibly desire.”
“I have always noticed,” rejoined M. Pigeonneau, “That your desires are more moderate than mine. Que voulez-vous? I am of the old school. Je crois que la race se perd. I regret the departure of that young girl: she had an enchanting smile. Ce sera une femme d’esprit. For the mother, I can console myself. I am not sure that SHE was a femme d’esprit, though she wished to pass for one. Round, rosy, potelee, she yet had not the temperament of her appearance; she was a femme austere. I have often noticed that contradiction in American ladies. You see a plump little woman, with a speaking eye, and the contour and complexion of a ripe peach, and if you venture to conduct yourself in the smallest degree in accordance with these indices, you discover a species of Methodist—of what do you call it?—of Quakeress. On the other hand, you encounter a tall, lean, angular person, without colour, without grace, all elbows and knees, and you find it’s a nature of the tropics! The women of duty look like coquettes, and the others look like alpenstocks! However, we have still the handsome Madame Ruck—a real femme de Rubens, celle- la. It is very true that to talk to her one must know the Flemish tongue!”
I had determined, in accordance with my brother’s telegram, to go away in the afternoon; so that, having various duties to perform, I left M. Pigeonneau to his international comparisons. Among other things, I went in the course of the morning to the banker’s, to draw money for my journey, and there I found Mr. Ruck, with a pile of crumpled letters in his lap, his chair tipped back, and his eyes gloomily fixed on the fringe of the green plush table-cloth. I timidly expressed the hope that he had got better news from home; whereupon he gave me a look in which, considering his provocation, the absence of irritation was conspicuous.
He took up his letters in his large hand, and crushing them together, held it out to me. “That epistolary matter,” he said, “is worth about five cents. But I guess,” he added, rising, “I have taken it in by this time.” When I had drawn my money I asked him to come and breakfast with me at the little brasserie, much favoured by students, to which I used to resort in the old town. “I couldn’t eat, sir,” he said, “I—couldn’t eat. Bad news takes away the appetite. But I guess I’ll go with you, so that I needn’t go to table down there at the pension. The old woman down there is always accusing me of turning up my nose at her food. Well, I guess I shan’t turn up my nose at anything now.”
We went to the little brasserie, where poor Mr. Ruck made the lightest possible breakfast. But if he ate very little, he talked a great deal; he talked about business, going into a hundred details in which I was quite unable to follow him. His talk was not angry nor bitter; it was a long, meditative, melancholy monologue; if it had been a trifle less incoherent I should almost have called it philosophic. I was very sorry for him; I wanted to do something for him, but the only thing I could do was, when we had breakfasted, to see him safely back to the Pension Beaurepas. We went across the Treille and down the Corraterie, out of which we turned into the Rue du Rhone. In this latter street, as all the world knows, are many of those brilliant jewellers’ shops for which Geneva is famous. I always admired their glittering windows, and never passed them without a lingering glance. Even on this occasion, pre-occupied as I was with my impending departure, and with my companion’s troubles, I suffered my eyes to wander along the precious tiers that flashed and twinkled behind the huge clear plates of glass. Thanks to this inveterate habit, I made a discovery. In the largest and most brilliant of these establishments I perceived two ladies, seated before the counter with an air of absorption, which sufficiently proclaimed their identity. I hoped my companion would not see them, but as we came abreast of the door, a little beyond, we found it open to the warm summer air. Mr. Ruck happened to glance in, and he immediately recognised his wife and daughter. He slowly stopped, looking at them; I wondered what he would do. The salesman was holding up a bracelet before them, on its velvet cushion, and flashing it about in an irresistible manner.
Mr. Ruck said nothing, but he presently went in, and I did the same.
“It will be an opportunity,” I remarked, as cheerfully as possible, “for me to bid good-bye to the ladies.”
They turned round when Mr. Ruck came in, and looked at him without confusion. “Well, you had better go home to breakfast,” remarked his wife. Miss Sophy made no remark, but she took the bracelet from the attendant and gazed at it very fixedly. Mr. Ruck seated himself on an empty stool and looked round the shop.
