Part 15 (1/2)
She carried the others back and looked hard at the ivory on both sides, making a deft fold or two with her stiff old fingers, to see how it would tie into a bow. She held it out at arm's length, her tightly-coifed, gargoyle-head on one side. She drew a long breath, having been so absorbed in the ribbon that she had forgotten to breathe for some time. ”Well, give me a metre and a half,” she said finally to the clerk, adding scornfully, ”if that's the best you have!”
Cloth-of-gold embroidered with pearls would not have satisfied her.
As she came out, she turned her head sideways to estimate the height of the sun, having a low opinion of the accuracy of clocks, and was startled to find it so late. If she were to get across to the river, to the Holy Ghost Church, to set a candle burning before Our Lady for Marise's success, she would need to hurry, and of late Jeanne had found hurrying not so easy a process as it had been. If Marise was older, so was she, seventy-six her last birthday. It was harder for her to stretch her long legs to the old stride. Something happened to her breathing, all the blood seemed to go to her head and a blackness came before her eyes, so that once or twice she had been obliged like any weakling Parisian to lean against a wall or table till the roaring in her ears stopped and the dull heavy fullness in her head subsided. But Jeanne despised people who gave way to little notions like that, and had no intention of putting on any such airs. Certainly not now, when Marise's welfare was at stake.
Of course she must make her prayer for her darling's success, and set a candle burning before Our Lady. The easy way to do this was to step up the street to the Cathedral but Jeanne did not care for the Cathedral, where all the heretic tourists from Biarritz went to stare, and which was as big and bare as the waiting-room of a railway station. How could Our Lady notice one little candle or one old woman there! No, Jeanne was set on lighting her candle in her own half-ruined, dark Church of the Holy Ghost, where the Basques go on pilgrimages to pray before the holy ”Flight into Egypt.” Our Lady of the Saint-Esprit had already performed many miracles for good Basques.... Oh, for a miracle now!
She began to pray as swiftly and violently as she walked, ”Blessed Mother of G.o.d, be with her this afternoon! Holy Infant Jesus! Help her!
Blessed little Saint Theresa, help my darling!”
She cast herself so vehemently into her supplications that she felt her heart blazing like a torch. She soared high out of her body. She was swinging along through s.p.a.ce among the clouds, wrestling with the Saints, clinging to their knees, dominating them by the fury of her prayers.... No, they would not _dare_ refuse her.... She would not give them an instant's peace...!
”Blessed St. Cecilia, stand at her side! Oh, most Holy Mother of G.o.d, guide her fingers...!”
”... a way out into life? How could she find it? Other people did ...
women in books....” Flora Allen's eyes moving slowly about the room fell on a photograph of the South Portal of the Bayonne Cathedral. It was framed in dark wood with a little Gothic arch at the top. It made her sick to look at it. How much trouble she had taken to get that photograph and to find the frame that would suit it. How eagerly she had hung it on the wall; and then had turned round to find it had made no difference in her life, or in any one's life. She looked at it now, her pretty lips set bitterly. What an idiot she had been! What difference _could_ it have made? What had she ever thought it could do for her, she and the other women of Belton, everlastingly studying something or other, going after culture with such eagerness, bringing it home, hanging it on the wall, and turning round to find it had changed nothing, nothing. How silly they were! n.o.body over here cared anything for ”culture” or art, or sculptures--except badly-dressed, queer people with socialistic ideas, like Marise's music-teacher.
And they were right not to care. What was there in it for any one? What could she ever have thought there was? What earthly difference did the sculptures on the South Portal make to her, Flora Allen, driven along through life, without getting out of it a single one of the things women really wanted? What good did it do any one to go and gape at the paintings in the Museum, most of them ugly, and all of them as dead as dead? When what you wanted was to be alive! To have gaiety and sparkle and cheerfulness in your life, not to vegetate and mold like the primitive lower forms of life around you, like Isabelle; not to dry and harden and become a mere block of wood like old Jeanne!
There was nothing unreasonable in not wanting to shrivel and stagnate.
It was _right_ to want to have an ardent life, full and deep, that carried you out of yourself.
But in her life, as by a fatality, there were never any occasions for emotion, for fresh, living sensations. Nothing ever happened to her that _could_ stir her to anything but petulance and boredom--nothing!
nothing! If anything seemed to promise to--why, Fate always cut it short. Those wonderful afternoons when Sister Ste. Lucie had taken her to the convent to talk to Father Elie! From the first of her Bayonne life she had felt it very romantic to know real Catholics, who used holy-water and believed in saints, and she had loved to go round with Sister Ste. Lucie in her long black gown and frilled white coif, just like a picture out of a book. But this was different. When the dark, gaunt, hollow-eyed, old missionary-priest had given her one somber look and made the sign of the cross over her, she had felt her heart begin to beat faster. And as he talked to her afterwards, in the bare, white-washed parlor of the convent, with the light filtering in through the closed shutters, he had made her tremble with excitement, as he himself had trembled throughout all his thin powerful old body. His deep-set eyes had burned into her, as he talked, his emaciated fingers, scorched brown by tropical suns, shook as he touched the Crucifix. How he had yearned over her as he told her that, never, never would she know what it really was to live, till she cast out her stubborn unbelief and threw herself into the living arms of her true Mother, the Church of G.o.d. Flora had not known that she had any belief in particular to cast out ... she had never thought anything special about religion at all, one way or the other. She only wanted him to go on making her tremble and feel half-faint, while Sister Ste. Lucie clasped her rosary beads and prayed silently, the tears on her cheeks! And then the very next day the Father Superior of his Order had sent him off to Africa. Would he ever come back?
Perhaps she _could_ become a Catholic. Why not? If it moved you like this just to be in contact with the Church--what must it bring you to be intimately of it? She remembered that in a book Sister Ste. Lucie had given her, stories were told of women who lost consciousness from sheer emotion, when they felt the consecrated wafer of Communion on their tongues; others who were caught up among the saints for hours, hearing heavenly music and when they came to themselves, the room was all scented richly with invisible roses....
Also, without a word spoken she thought she had understood that the Marquise de Charmieres and all that old aristocratic set would not be so stand-offish if she were converted.
But as this last idea slid into her mind from behind something else, there came with it as frighteningly as if she had seen the walls of her stone corridor closing in on her, a doubt that cast a stale sallow reflection on all her thoughts;--suppose she were really taken up by the Marquise and all the old aristocratic set, _would things be any different then_? Mightn't that, too, be just something else she had gone out after and brought home and hung on the wall, only to find that it changed nothing? She turned away from this idea, cold and frightened at all it implied ... that life was not deep at all, anywhere, but a shallow mud-hole, and that she had sunk far enough down to touch the bottom.
She heard now the uneven clattering jangle of the bell, heard Isabelle come out of the bed-room and go down the tile-paved corridor. Her sandals dragged at the heel as they always did in the morning before she put on her street shoes. That slatternly flap and drag of Isabelle's sandals made her mistress sick. She had spoken about them a thousand times. She had come to have a nervous hatred of the sound, had actually flown into rages over it, stamping and shrieking at Isabelle as she despised French housekeepers for doing. But how much impression had she made? For one morning, perhaps two, Isabelle laced up her early morning foot-gear, and after that she always forgot, slid back, flop, scuff, flop. That was the sort of sandals all the chambermaids in Bayonne wore for the first cleaning of the morning; that was the kind they always had worn; the American mistress might as well make up her mind to the fact that that was the kind they always would wear. There was about this trivial matter of the sandals, the same nightmare quality of pa.s.sive, inert resistance to the idea of any change, which sagged smotheringly down on Flora Allen everywhere she turned in her French life. They called it stability. She and her friends in Belton had called it a ”background of tradition.”
And yet she knew herself now incapable of going back to live in Belton where she would not be able always to depend on an Isabelle, where at times she would have to sweep her own rooms, and scour her own greasy pots herself. It made her sick to think of living that way again--n.o.body to bring her breakfast in the morning! To get up in a cold house with all the responsibility for everything on her shoulders. She felt weak at the thought of it.
Isabelle scuffed in, the mail in one rough, strong, red hand, and flapped back to her cleaning. This time her mistress made no comment on her laceless sandals.
What might there be in the mail? Nothing interesting, that she knew beforehand. She turned the letters over, recognizing from their very aspect the flatness of their contents. A letter from America? Oh, yes, only from Horace's old Cousin Hetty, for Marise. How she did keep up that correspondence! Did she suppose for a minute that any child could go on remembering some one she hadn't seen for four years, especially a child like Marise, so self-centered and absorbed in her own life, caring really about nothing but her music.
A bill for Marise's school for the last quarter--to be put with Horace's mail; a circular from that something-or-other society Mlle. Hasparren was always fussing over, trying to raise money to keep some quartet running in Bayonne; a bill from the dressmaker; another circular--oh, as bad as Mlle. Hasparren's, that a.s.sociation with the long name, that took care of foundling babies--they were always wanting money too! A notice from the school, another bill? No, the announcement of the music-contest that afternoon. Heavens! Never again for her! Once was enough, to sit silently all a long afternoon on a teetering folding chair in the midst of stodgy, dowdy mothers, whose boring eyes saw right through the fabric of your dress to the safety-pin with which you had replaced a missing petticoat b.u.t.ton, and who had no more interest in the music banged out by the schoolgirls than you had, except to wish ill to every child not their own.
There was one letter, addressed to her in the pointed, fine convent handwriting of Soeur Ste. Lucie. She opened this with more interest. Ah, Father Elie was coming back. And wished to see her to-morrow afternoon.
She felt a little stir of her pulse, the first in so long. What dress would she wear to the convent? Her black voile--and the little close-fitting hat?
Still thinking of this she turned from the letters to the printed matter. There were a couple of battered, out-of-date New York newspapers, weary with their long traveling, and the deadly little Bayonne paper, with its high-flown, pious articles, and its nasty hints at scandals. She stood leaning against the table, looking down scornfully at it, till her eye caught a name, and her face changed.