Part 4 (1/2)
She was just straightening up from reaching back of the wood, when Father came in. He said, ”h.e.l.lo, kid,” and she answered, ”h.e.l.lo, 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 edredon 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 edredon 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 Jeanne 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, flas.h.i.+ng 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 wash-stand 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, s.h.i.+ny 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 lecon 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 edredon. 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.