by Henry James
Suddenly M. Pigeonneau stopped, pressing my arm with the liveliest emotion. “La voila, la voila, the prettiest!” he quickly murmured, “coming toward us, in a blue dress, with the other.” It was at the other I was looking, for the other, to my surprise, was our interesting fellow-pensioner, the daughter of a vigilant mother. M. Pigeonneau, meanwhile, had redoubled his exclamations; he had recognised Miss Sophy Ruck. “Oh, la belle rencontre, nos aimables convives; the prettiest girl in the world, in effect!”
We immediately greeted and joined the young ladies, who, like ourselves, were walking arm in arm and enjoying the scene.
“I was citing you with admiration to my friend even before I had recognised you,” said M. Pigeonneau to Miss Ruck.
“I don’t believe in French compliments,” remarked this young lady, presenting her back to the smiling old man.
“Are you and Miss Ruck walking alone?” I asked of her companion. “You had better accept of M. Pigeonneau’s gallant protection, and of mine.”
Aurora Church had taken her hand out of Miss Ruck’s arm; she looked at me, smiling, with her head a little inclined, while, upon her shoulder, she made her open parasol revolve. “Which is most improper—to walk alone or to walk with gentlemen? I wish to do what is most improper.”
“What mysterious logic governs your conduct?” I inquired.
“He thinks you can’t understand him when he talks like that,” said Miss Ruck. “But I do understand you, always!”
“So I have always ventured to hope, my dear Miss Ruck.”
“Well, if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be much loss,” rejoined this young lady.
“Allons, en marche!” cried M. Pigeonneau, smiling still, and undiscouraged by her inhumanity. “Let as make together the tour of the garden.” And he imposed his society upon Miss Ruck with a respectful, elderly grace which was evidently unable to see anything in her reluctance but modesty, and was sublimely conscious of a mission to place modesty at its ease. This ill-assorted couple walked in front, while Aurora Church and I strolled along together.
“I am sure this is more improper,” said my companion; “this is delightfully improper. I don’t say that as a compliment to you,” she added. “I would say it to any man, no matter how stupid.”
“Oh, I am very stupid,” I answered, “but this doesn’t seem to me wrong.”
“Not for you, no; only for me. There is nothing that a man can do that is wrong, is there? En morale, you know, I mean. Ah, yes, he can steal; but I think there is nothing else, is there?”
“I don’t know. One doesn’t know those things until after one has done them. Then one is enlightened.”
“And you mean that you have never been enlightened? You make yourself out very good.”
“That is better than making one’s self out bad, as you do.”
The young girl glanced at me a moment, and then, with her charming smile, “That’s one of the consequences of a false position.”
“Is your position false?” I inquired, smiling too at this large formula.
“Distinctly so.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, in every way. For instance, I have to pretend to be a jeune fille. I am not a jeune fille; no American girl is a jeune fille; an American girl is an intelligent, responsible creature. I have to pretend to be very innocent, but I am not very innocent.”
“You don’t pretend to be very innocent; you pretend to be—what shall I call it?—very wise.”
“That’s no pretence. I am wise.”
“You are not an American girl,” I ventured to observe.
My companion almost stopped, looking at me; there was a little flush in her cheek. “Voila!” she said. “There’s my false position. I want to be an American girl, and I’m not.”
“Do you want me to tell you?” I went on. “An American girl wouldn’t talk as you are talking now.”
“Please tell me,” said Aurora Church, with expressive eagerness. “How would she talk?”
“I can’t tell you all the things an American girl would say, but I think I can tell you the things she wouldn’t say. She wouldn’t reason out her conduct, as you seem to me to do.”
Aurora gave me the most flattering attention. “I see. She would be simpler. To do very simple things that are not at all simple—that is the American girl!”
I permitted myself a small explosion of hilarity. “I don’t know whether you are a French girl, or what you are,” I said, “but you are very witty.”
“Ah, you mean that I strike false notes!” cried Aurora Church, sadly. “That’s just what I want to avoid. I wish you would always tell me.”
The conversational union between Miss Ruck and her neighbour, in front of us, had evidently not become a close one. The young lady suddenly turned round to us with a question: “Don’t you want some ice-cream?”
“SHE doesn’t strike false notes,” I murmured.
There was a kind of pavilion or kiosk, which served as a cafe, and at which the delicacies procurable at such an establishment were dispensed. Miss Ruck pointed to the little green tables and chairs which were set out on the gravel; M. Pigeonneau, fluttering with a sense of dissipation, seconded the proposal, and we presently sat down and gave our order to a nimble attendant. I managed again to place myself next to Aurora Church; our companions were on the other side of the table.
My neighbour was delighted with our situation. “This is best of all,” she said. “I never believed I should come to a cafe with two strange men! Now, you can’t persuade me this isn’t wrong.”
“To make it wrong we ought to see your mother coming down that path.”
“Ah, my mother makes everything wrong,” said the young girl, attacking with a little spoon in the shape of a spade the apex of a pink ice. And then she returned to her idea of a moment before: “You must promise to tell me—to warn me in some way—whenever I strike a false note. You must give a little cough, like that—ahem!”
“You will keep me very busy, and people will think I am in a consumption.”
“Voyons,” she continued, “why have you never talked to me more? Is that a false note? Why haven’t you been ‘attentive?’ That’s what American girls call it; that’s what Miss Ruck calls it.”
I assured myself that our companions were out of earshot, and that Miss Ruck was much occupied with a large vanilla cream. “Because you are always entwined with that young lady. There is no getting near you.”
Aurora looked at her friend while the latter devoted herself to her ice. “You wonder why I like her so much, I suppose. So does mamma; elle s’y perd. I don’t like her particularly; je n’en suis pas folle. But she gives me information; she tells me about America. Mamma has always tried to prevent my knowing anything about it, and I am all the more curious. And then Miss Ruck is very fresh.”
“I may not be so fresh as Miss Ruck,” I said, “but in future, when you want information, I recommend you to come to me for it.”
“Our friend offers to take me to America; she invites me to go back with her, to stay with her. You couldn’t do that, could you?” And the young girl looked at me a moment. “Bon, a false note I can see it by your face; you remind me of a maitre de piano.”
“You overdo the character—the poor American girl,” I said. “Are you going to stay with that delightful family?”
“I will go and stay with any one that will take me or ask me. It’s a real nostalgie. She says that in New York—in Thirty-Seventh Street- -I should have the most lovely time.”
“I have no doubt you would enjoy it.”
“Absolute liberty to begin with.”
“It seems to me you have a certain liberty here,” I rejoined.
“Ah, THIS? Oh, I shall pay for this. I shall be punished by mamma, and I shall be lectured by Madame Galopin.”
“The wife of the pasteur?”
“His digne epouse. Madame Galopin, for mamma, is the incarnation of European opinion. That’s what vexes me with mamma, her thi
nking so much of people like Madame Galopin. Going to see Madame Galopin— mamma calls that being in European society. European society! I’m so sick of that expression; I have heard it since I was six years old. Who is Madame Galopin—who thinks anything of her here? She is nobody; she is perfectly third-rate. If I like America better than mamma, I also know Europe better.”
“But your mother, certainly,” I objected, a trifle timidly, for my young lady was excited, and had a charming little passion in her eye- -“your mother has a great many social relations all over the Continent.”
“She thinks so, but half the people don’t care for us. They are not so good as we, and they know it—I’ll do them that justice—and they wonder why we should care for them. When we are polite to them, they think the less of us; there are plenty of people like that. Mamma thinks so much of them simply because they are foreigners. If I could tell you all the dull, stupid, second-rate people I have had to talk to, for no better reason than that they were de leur pays!— Germans, French, Italians, Turks, everything. When I complain, mamma always says that at any rate it’s practice in the language. And she makes so much of the English, too; I don’t know what that’s practice in.”
Before I had time to suggest an hypothesis, as regards this latter point, I saw something that made me rise, with a certain solemnity, from my chair. This was nothing less than the neat little figure of Mrs. Church—a perfect model of the femme comme il faut—approaching our table with an impatient step, and followed most unexpectedly in her advance by the pre-eminent form of Mr. Ruck. She had evidently come in quest of her daughter, and if she had commanded this gentleman’s attendance, it had been on no softer ground than that of his unenvied paternity to her guilty child’s accomplice. My movement had given the alarm, and Aurora Church and M. Pigeonneau got up; Miss Ruck alone did not, in the local phrase, derange herself. Mrs. Church, beneath her modest little bonnet, looked very serious, but not at all fluttered; she came straight to her daughter, who received her with a smile, and then she looked all round at the rest of us, very fixedly and tranquilly, without bowing. I must do both these ladies the justice to mention that neither of them made the least little “scene.”
“I have come for you, dearest,” said the mother.
“Yes, dear mamma.”
“Come for you—come for you,” Mrs. Church repeated, looking down at the relics of our little feast. “I was obliged to ask Mr. Ruck’s assistance. I was puzzled; I thought a long time.”
“Well, Mrs. Church, I was glad to see you puzzled once in your life!” said Mr. Ruck, with friendly jocosity. “But you came pretty straight for all that. I had hard work to keep up with you.”
“We will take a cab, Aurora,” Mrs. Church went on, without heeding this pleasantry—”a closed one. Come, my daughter.”
“Yes, dear mamma.” The young girl was blushing, yet she was still smiling; she looked round at us all, and, as her eyes met mine, I thought she was beautiful. “Good-bye,” she said to us. “I have had a LOVELY TIME.”
“We must not linger,” said her mother; “it is five o’clock. We are to dine, you know, with Madame Galopin.”
“I had quite forgotten,” Aurora declared. “That will be charming.”
“Do you want me to assist you to carry her back, ma am?” asked Mr. Ruck.
Mrs. Church hesitated a moment, with her serene little gaze. “Do you prefer, then, to leave your daughter to finish the evening with these gentlemen?”
Mr. Ruck pushed back his hat and scratched the top of his head. “Well, I don’t know. How would you like that, Sophy?”
“Well, I never!” exclaimed Sophy, as Mrs. Church marched off with her daughter.
CHAPTER VIII.
I had half expected that Mrs. Church would make me feel the weight of her disapproval of my own share in that little act of revelry in the English Garden. But she maintained her claim to being a highly reasonable woman—I could not but admire the justice of this pretension—by recognising my irresponsibility. I had taken her daughter as I found her, which was, according to Mrs. Church’s view, in a very equivocal position. The natural instinct of a young man, in such a situation, is not to protest but to profit; and it was clear to Mrs. Church that I had had nothing to do with Miss Aurora’s appearing in public under the insufficient chaperonage of Miss Ruck. Besides, she liked to converse, and she apparently did me the honour to believe that of all the members of the Pension Beaurepas I had the most cultivated understanding. I found her in the salon a couple of evenings after the incident I have just narrated, and I approached her with a view of making my peace with her, if this should prove necessary. But Mrs. Church was as gracious as I could have desired; she put her marker into her book, and folded her plump little hands on the cover. She made no specific allusion to the English Garden; she embarked, rather, upon those general considerations in which her refined intellect was so much at home.
“Always at your studies, Mrs. Church,” I ventured to observe.
“Que voulez-vous? To say studies is to say too much; one doesn’t study in the parlour of a boarding-house. But I do what I can; I have always done what I can. That is all I have ever claimed.”
“No one can do more, and you seem to have done a great deal.”
“Do you know my secret?” she asked, with an air of brightening confidence. And she paused a moment before she imparted her secret— “To care only for the BEST! To do the best, to know the best—to have, to desire, to recognise, only the best. That’s what I have always done, in my quiet little way. I have gone through Europe on my devoted little errand, seeking, seeing, heeding, only the best. And it has not been for myself alone; it has been for my daughter. My daughter has had the best. We are not rich, but I can say that.”
“She has had you, madam,” I rejoined finely.
“Certainly, such as I am, I have been devoted. We have got something everywhere; a little here, a little there. That’s the real secret— to get something everywhere; you always can if you are devoted. Sometimes it has been a little music, sometimes a little deeper insight into the history of art; every little counts you know. Sometimes it has been just a glimpse, a view, a lovely landscape, an impression. We have always been on the look-out. Sometimes it has been a valued friendship, a delightful social tie.”
“Here comes the ‘European society,’ the poor daughter’s bugbear,” I said to myself. “Certainly,” I remarked aloud—I admit, rather perversely—”if you have lived a great deal in pensions, you must have got acquainted with lots of people.”
Mrs. Church dropped her eyes a moment; and then, with considerable gravity, “I think the European pension system in many respects remarkable, and in some satisfactory. But of the friendships that we have formed, few have been contracted in establishments of this kind.”
“I am sorry to hear that!” I said, laughing.
“I don’t say it for you, though I might say it for some others. We have been interested in European homes.”
“Oh, I see!”
“We have the entree of the old Genevese society I like its tone. I prefer it to that of Mr. Ruck,” added Mrs. Church, calmly; “to that of Mrs. Ruck and Miss Ruck—of Miss Ruck especially.”
“Ah, the poor Rucks haven’t any tone at all,” I said “Don’t take them more seriously than they take themselves.”
“Tell me this,” my companion rejoined, “are they fair examples?”
“Examples of what?”
“Of our American tendencies.”
“‘Tendencies’ is a big word, dear lady; tendencies are difficult to calculate. And you shouldn’t abuse those good Rucks, who have been very kind to your daughter. They have invited her to go and stay with them in Thirty-Seventh Street.”
“Aurora has told me. It might be very serious.”
“It might be very droll,” I said.
“To me,” declared Mrs. Church, “it is simply terrible. I think we shall have to leave the Pension Beaurepas. I shall go back to Madame Chamousset
.”
“On account of the Rucks?” I asked.
“Pray, why don’t they go themselves? I have given them some excellent addresses—written down the very hours of the trains. They were going to Appenzell; I thought it was arranged.”
“They talk of Chamouni now,” I said; “but they are very helpless and undecided.”
“I will give them some Chamouni addresses. Mrs. Ruck will send a chaise a porteurs; I will give her the name of a man who lets them lower than you get them at the hotels. After that they MUST go.”
“Well, I doubt,” I observed, “whether Mr. Ruck will ever really be seen on the Mer de Glace—in a high hat. He’s not like you; he doesn’t value his European privileges. He takes no interest. He regrets Wall Street, acutely. As his wife says, he is very restless, but he has no curiosity about Chamouni. So you must not depend too much on the effect of your addresses.”
“Is it a frequent type?” asked Mrs. Church, with an air of self- control.
“I am afraid so. Mr. Ruck is a broken-down man of business. He is broken down in health, and I suspect he is broken down in fortune. He has spent his whole life in buying and selling; he knows how to do nothing else. His wife and daughter have spent their lives, not in selling, but in buying; and they, on their side, know how to do nothing else. To get something in a shop that they can put on their backs—that is their one idea; they haven’t another in their heads. Of course they spend no end of money, and they do it with an implacable persistence, with a mixture of audacity and of cunning. They do it in his teeth and they do it behind his back; the mother protects the daughter, and the daughter eggs on the mother. Between them they are bleeding him to death.”
“Ah, what a picture!” murmured Mrs. Church. “I am afraid they are very-uncultivated.”
“I share your fears. They are perfectly ignorant; they have no resources. The vision of fine clothes occupies their whole imagination. They have not an idea—even a worse one—to compete with it. Poor Mr. Ruck, who is extremely good-natured and soft, seems to me a really tragic figure. He is getting bad news every day from home; his business is going to the dogs. He is unable to stop it; he has to stand and watch his fortunes ebb. He has been used to doing things in a big way, and he feels mean, if he makes a fuss about bills. So the ladies keep sending them in.”
