Part 16 (1/2)
He smiled at her rea.s.suringly, and put his watch back. Dear Maman! How she did spoil him! How he had missed her, missed his home, those two years in America. He thought of the boarding-house on 59th Street with a qualm. How good it was to get back to a real home.
But there were fine things in America, too, even if they did not know how to create real homes, even if the men did not know how to love their mothers, or cherish their wives. He had learned a great deal there, a great deal even beyond the revelation of new business methods. What he had learned commercially was enormous! He faced his future here in France, sure of success.
But he had taken in other things too--he was thankful that he had been to Marise's native country and had learned something about the att.i.tude towards women there--not that he would ever, ever treat Marise as American wives were treated, with that rough-and-ready, cowboy lack of ceremony, nor would he ever neglect her, leave her out of his life, as American husbands did. He would know how to combine the American honesty and sincerity with what no American ever felt or showed, with what no American woman ever experienced--tenderness, cheris.h.i.+ng tenderness. He would be tender for Marise as no other human being could be; he would find the most exquisite ways to surround her with tenderness, to protect that sweet mouth of hers from bitterness or sorrow, or knowledge of the world's evil.
He looked down steadily at the floor, a knot in his throat, his heart aching, and swallowed hard.
Three wooden thumps sounded from the platform, and the curtain drew itself aside, showing the stage decorated with a stand, two potted palms, an armchair, and a sprawling black grand piano with two cane-bottomed chairs before it.
From the wings trudged in a red-cheeked young girl, with a large bust, and brawny rough arms, hanging down over her starched white dress.
Behind her trotted a short withered elderly woman, a black silk waist crossed over her flat chest, her scanty gray hair smoothed down in thin bandeaux over her ears. They sat down before the piano, opened the music, carried by the older woman, waited till she had adjusted drooping eye-gla.s.ses on her high thin nose, and had peeringly found her place.
Then the young girl began to pound out the Raindrop Prelude while the other turned over the pages.
The audience preserved a respectful silence, bestowing a minute attention on the hang of the player's skirt, the fit of her bodice, the crimped waves of her light brown hair, her over-plump hands, and the bulging patent-leather shoes, which she pressed nervously up and down on the pedals.
Something seemed to break and clear away in Jean-Pierre's head, like fumes drifting away from a shattered retort. So this was a school-girl, this solid, unformed lump of human flesh, neither child nor woman, who had lost a child's poetry and had not yet come to woman's seductiveness.
He looked coolly at the girl (his mother whispered her name, the younger sister of a lycee friend of his), dissecting her with his eyes, immeasurably relieved. Was it for an amorphous creature like this, too old to kiss on the cheek, too young to kiss on the mouth, that he had suffered? Why, it was nothing; a mere morbid whim of his ignorant boyhood. How right Maman had been in making Papa send him away from it!
He had grown to be a man without realizing it, a man of the world, in no danger of losing his head over chits.
The Prelude was finished. The player got to her feet, and bowed self-consciously to the muted thuddings of gloved palms on gloved palms which greeted the cessation of her activities. She got herself off the stage, walking heavily in her too-tight slippers. Jean-Pierre, who sat at one side could see a little behind the scenes and observed that as soon as she thought she was out of sight of the audience, she gave way to childish relief that the ordeal was over, and skipped forward, running. He suppressed a supercilious smile of aesthetic scorn. Her body, as large and heavy as a woman's, no longer expressed the impulses of the child she still was. She skipped clumsily, with an inelastic energy of gesture like a cow capering in a spring-time pasture. Jean-Pierre felt the keenest pleasure in his ruthless perception of her lack of grace.
This was emanc.i.p.ation!
”She plays very nicely,” murmured his mother, on the general chance that some member of her family might be sitting within earshot.
”Yes, very agreeably,” he concurred.
Neither of them had heard a note of the music.
They continued to sit in decorous silence, looking with vacant faces straight before them, till the next performer appeared. This was Elise Fortier, whom they were both prepared to detest because of her father and mother and brother. They did detest her, everything about her from her thin, dry hair, frizzed out to imitate abundance, to her s.h.i.+fty eyes exactly like her mother's, from her stooping shoulders, to her long bony hands, which clattered out loudly the Schubert Marche Militaire. When she had finished, ”Really quite a talent,” observed Mme. Garnier taking pains to be audible; and, ”Remarkable for her age,” agreed Jean-Pierre.
He was relaxing morally, in an inexpressible ease at finding his head clear, his heart at rest. To own yourself, to look at life from behind a stout wall of critical cynicism--it was to be in safety at last! He barely glanced at the next player, a nondescript, precocious child, who murdered a Moment Musical, her short thin legs dangling from the stool.
And the next, the one who played the Liebestraum, a tall young lady with the self-admiring graces and manners of an opera singer on the concert platform. He looked at his watch again and wondered how long it would be before the stupid school performance would be over, and he could get away for an aperitif at the Cafe du Grand Bouleau on the Place d'Armes and an evening with----
He saw that another player was coming forward, a slim tall girl with thick s.h.i.+ning dark hair held back by a white ribbon like the others. She stood for an instant to bow to the audience before sitting down at the piano, and he could look up full into her unconscious face, gazing out over his head impersonally with shy, liquid, dark eyes. She was breathing a little rapidly, her young breast rising and falling under the filmy white of her dress. A timid propitiatory smile curved her sensitive mouth and arched her long, finely-drawn eyebrows.
Not a muscle of Jean-Pierre's face changed; every line of his careless, confident att.i.tude froze taut as it was. And underneath this motionless exterior, he felt his heart hotly, joyfully weeping in a pa.s.sion of thanksgiving, like a frightened lost child who has come into the right way. He lost all sense of connection with his body and yearning, wors.h.i.+pping, clamoring, imperiously calling, humbly beseeching, he gazed out from the bars of his immobile, well-dressed external self at the girl sitting before the piano. Two years, two long years of exile, how could life ever make up to him for those two lost years? How he had starved! His famished eyes fed ravenously on what they saw, the supple, elastic slimness of the young body, the fine, thin ankle and shapely foot, the creamy forearm, the agile, strong, white fingers, so bravely flinging out harmonies beyond the comprehension of the smooth broad brow, inviolate, intact, innocent, ignorant, which bent its full child's curve over the keys.
Jean-Pierre looked and looked, prostrating himself in awe before the revelation of divine, stainless youth. Never till that moment, he told himself, had he understood the meaning of the holy word, virgin.
And he had thought, those two long years, that he had always held her before his eyes! He had remembered nothing, nothing of what she was.
Yet, how could he have divined what she was becoming--that mouth, her pure girl's mouth, cleanly drawn in scarlet against the flower-like flesh perfumed with youth. Would he--would he know the first cool touch of those young lips ... he found that he could see her no more, for a mist before his eyes, and yet he continued to strain his eyes through the mist towards where she sat.
Some one touched him on the arm. It was Maman--Maman who looked at him in tender sympathy. As their glance met, she smiled at him, and nodded her head once, rea.s.suringly. She looked as she had when he was a little boy, and she had yielded at last to some desperately held whim of his.
Dearest Maman! It was a promise she gave him silently, a promise to help him towards his happiness. She too had succ.u.mbed to Marise. Who would not? He pressed her hand gently, and smiled in return. A calm peace came upon him.