Rough-Hewn/Chapter 40
CHAPTER XL
I
Eugenia had been complaining that her new teacher in advanced French diction was very ill-natured and exacting, and had asked Marise to go with her to a lesson to back her up in a protest against his unreasonable demands.
The two girls drove up to the Français in Eugenia's inevitable cab, and leaving her inevitable maid to wait in it, passed through the dingy little side-door into an ill-lighted corridor and felt their way toilsomely up a stair-way not lighted at all. A dingy, stone-colored corridor with painted and numbered doors on each side, like a needy old-man's home or ill-kept reformatory. A knock at one of these, opened by a bald, pale, elderly man, with a knobby nose and several chins, A tiny, cluttered, stuffy room, with a lumpy sofa, two chairs, an easel and a window.
After her presentation to M. Vaudoyer, Marise sat down on one of the hard chairs to await developments. The actor was in a long, paint-stained blouse, and excused himself by saying that his pupil was a little ahead of time, "A real American," he said, smiling at both of them. He had been painting, he explained, waving a wrinkled old hand towards a canvas on an easel.
"Oh, you are twice an artist," remarked Marise, doing as she had been taught to do, automatically turning a pretty speech. As a matter of fact, she thought the sketch anything but artistic.
The old man's face clouded. "To be a painter, that was all I ever wanted," he said, looking with affection at the very mediocre landscape, and adding sadly, "All my life … all my life."
"But to have been—to be such an artist as you are on the stage—surely that ought to be enough," said Marise. This time she spoke sincerely, out of a very genuine admiration for his acting.
"One does what one can, what one can," said the old man, resignedly, unbuttoning his blouse and dragging it off, revealing snuffy and crumpled black garments. He looked, thought Marise, like the parish priest of a very poor and neglected parish. And he had been for years—why, for a life-time, one of the most solidly esteemed and admired actors in the finest theatrical company in the world. "What more does any man want?" Marise asked herself, wondering why his face in repose was so bitter and melancholy.
Before beginning his lesson, he gave a last look at his painting, "What do you think of it? What do you think of it?" he asked suddenly, turning on Marise, the question like a loaded revolver at her temple.
Much practice had steadied Marise's nerves against any sort of hold-up that could be practised in social relations. She said instantly, "I think it shows one of the most charming landscapes I ever saw. Where in the world is there such a delightful composition?"
She was dealing with some one infinitely more practised than she, who was not in the least taken in by her evasion. Sighing, he turned the canvas with its face to the easel, and told her over his shoulder, "It's in my own country, where I ought to have stayed and been a dumb-beast, and happy. Nowhere you ever heard of, a far corner of the Pyrenees. Saint-Sauveur is the name." And as if, in spite of himself, to pronounce the name moved him, he broke out, "It's the most beautiful place—a little heaven on earth—why should any one leave it to spend his life in this boulevard hell of malignity? Such noble lines in its mountains, such grand pacifying harmony in the valleys—enough to reconcile a man to being alive! Such details as it has too! There is a gorge there where the gave de Gavarnie rushes down. Always on the hottest, dustiest, most blinding summer day, it is cool there, the air green like Chartres stained-glass, and alive with the thunder of the water."
He frowned, shook his head, put his hand to a book on the table, and said, dismissing his evocation with a shrug, "Eh bien … eh bien …!"
The lesson began but Marise heard not a word of it, not a word. She sat straight on the hard chair, her face a blank, and walked up the street with Jeanne, seeing in the blue twilight, the pale face of Jean-Pierre Garnier approaching them. The alcove curtains hung close before her, and Jeanne's voice was on the other side. And then, the burst of men's laughter from across the landing, cut short by Jeanne's closing the door; and then the heavy, dragging step in the corridor, the loud, harsh breathing. She waited, tense with fright, to see the curtains twitch open, and Jeanne's dreadful face appear … some one was speaking to her, urgently, insistently, by name.…
"Marise, Marise.…" It was Eugenia speaking to her, "Help me explain to M. Vaudoyer that I haven't the least desire to become an actress, or to know every word of Molière by heart! That I simply want lessons in how to pronounce French correctly, the kind of lessons my English-diction teacher gives me." She spoke with an impatient accent, and Marise coming to herself saw the two facing each other with angry looks.
M. Vaudoyer said indignantly, "It's not worth my while to give instruction to a student who will not do the necessary work."
"I will do any necessary work," Eugenia answered hotly, "but what has reading a lot of deadly dull old books to do with pronouncing French correctly? And if I'm not going to be an actress or a singer, what is the use of all those idiotic ah! ah! oh! oh! fee! fee! exercises?"
M. Vaudoyer sat down abruptly, and reaching for a large red-and-white checked hankerchief,, mopped his bald head and perspiring face with it. He was evidently containing himself with difficulty and waiting till he could be sure of speaking with moderation before he opened his lips.
Eugenia explained to Marise with dignity, glad of the opportunity to state her case, "I come to M. Vaudoyer for lessons in diction. I don't come to study singing or seventeenth-century history. I hate history and all those dull studies. I don't see why everybody should always be trying to force me into them. M. Vaudoyer gets very angry because I will not practise singing lessons and because I cannot find the time to spend hours in the Bibliothèque Nationale reading all about everything that happened in Molière's time. What do I care what happened in Molière's time? What I want, what I am paying for, is a very simple thing. Instruction in French diction. I don't see that I am getting it."
Her accent showed that she considered her case unassailably good and reasonable.
M. Vaudoyer listened with attention, looking at her very hard, and when she had finished he nodded, "You are right, Miss Mills. I am not the teacher for you. I am a poor, old, impractical Frenchman, incapable of satisfying a practical American girl, who knows what she wants and has the money to buy it. You are the race of the future, you Americans, I of the past. There is no common ground between us." He spoke mildly. Eugenia stared. Marise winced.
"What do you mean, M. Vaudoyer?" asked Eugenia. "Are you sending me away?"
He said with a little smile, "You have sent me away. Miss Mills, far away. And as to what I mean, if you like, I will try to tell you. But you will not understand. I cannot talk the American language. I can only speak the French language." He paused, wiping his perspiring forehead again with his checked handkerchief. "There are two parts to every art. One is the thorough command of your medium; the other is the personality you express through your medium. Neither has the slightest value without the other. Neither is to be had without paying the price of all you have … all, all!
"You must have perfect command of your medium, just in itself, as a tool. Listen," he stood up, his heavily jowled face grim and stern, drew a long breath, as if he were about to speak, and then as at a sudden thought, paused, the expression of his face changing with comical suddenness to a broad smile, and began to laugh. The girls stared at him in amazement, wondering if he had taken leave of his senses. Apparently something very funny had popped into his mind, just as he was about to go on with his statement to them. It must have been really very fumy indeed, for he could not stop his laughter, try as he might. It was too much for him. Both hands on his hips, throwing back his head, he pealed out an irresistible, "Ha! Ha!" as though he would burst if he did not laugh. Seeing their astonished faces, he tried to stop to tell them the joke, choked himself down to rich chuckles, opened his mouth to speak, and, the joke striking him afresh, went off again in a huge roar of mirth that made them both smile and then laugh outright in sympathy.
At this, his face instantly resumed its sad, stern expression, and he was looking at them severely as before, breathing quickly, it is true, as though he had been running, but without a trace of any feeling.
"There you see," he said drily. "That is an example of what I mean by command of a medium. To be master of my tool I must not only be able to laugh, when I feel like it, but whenever I need to laugh, whether I feel like it or not. And I assure you, young ladies, I do not feel in the least like laughing now, having had this glimpse of the future as it will be, shaped to the American mold, by the people of the future."
The girls were stricken silent by all this, their lips, frozen in astonishment, still curving in the set smile that was all that was left of their foolish, induced mirth. Marise was nettled and angry. He had no business playing tricks like that on them. She had been made to appear foolish, horribly foolish, and she resented it.
"Well, Miss Mills," he went on, addressing Eugenia, "you cannot get such a control of your medium, you cannot learn to speak any language beautifully, without long, long dull hours of the oh! oh! ah! ah! practice that you scorn. You cannot buy such a command of your medium, not for millions of your great round dollars. No, not the wealthiest, sharpest American who ever lived can possess European culture, by buying little pieces of it here and there, and hanging it up on his wall. By changing the very fibre of your being, that is the only way to become anything that is worth becoming. And you cannot change the fibre of your being without dying a thousand deaths and knowing a thousand births."
He puffed out a scornful breath and went on, "And for the other half, Miss Mills. You want to learn diction by reading to me. But what you read has sense. It is not just consonants and vowels. And to read it well, you must understand it. And to understand it, you must know something—do you understand me? You must know something. I soon found that you could not understand Molière, because you know no history, no literature, nor anything else you should have been learning. You cannot read with any over-tones in your voice, unless you understand the over-tones of what you are reading. You cannot read Moliere, or anybody else, as if you were reading,
"'Barbara; celarent; darii; ferio; baralipton.'
"Or at least—" His carefully repressed indignation burst for a moment from his control; he said in a roar, "At least you cannot in my loge—not, not even an American, not even a representative of the people of the future!"
He had risen to his feet, trembling with his anger, a high-priest rebuking a blasphemy. The girls shrank back, startled.
At once he extinguished the flame, went for a moment to the window, and when he turned back, said quietly, "You must excuse an old man's bad temper. Miss Mills, and you must look for a politer, more practical teacher. I can give you the address of one who will suit you. I can, in fact," he said smoothly, "give you the addresses of several hundred who will suit you perfectly. I will send the addresses of several to you. Good-day, Miss Mills. Good-by, Miss …" He was vague as to Marise's name, but murmured something with an absent courtesy. He stepped to the door, opened it with an urbane inclination of the head.
Eugenia held in her hand the sealed envelope which contained the usual fee for a lesson, and now looked down at it, uncertain whether she dared offer it. He saw her glance at it, and relieved her of her uncertainty, "No, no fee to-day, Miss Mills. I have given you no lesson." As they passed before him, he added under his breath, "No lesson, that is, that will be of any value to you."
Marise glancing over her shoulder, saw him turn at once to the easel and reach for his palette and brushes. He had dropped them from his mind. It was the airy, finishing touch to their humiliation. She burned with anger and shame.
They groped their way down the darkened stairs in silence, neither trusting herself to speak, lest she burst into tears.
At the bottom Marise said neutrally, "I have a music lesson now. Would you like to come along?"
Eugenia said in a loud, quavering voice, "I should think not! I have had enough of their hatefulness for one day!" She went on, her voice shaken by suppressed sobs which did not at all fit what she was saying, "And I h-have an appointment w-with the hairdresser anyhow." She fumbled with a desperate haste in her little gold-beaded hand-bag, jerked out a lacy handkerchief and wiped her eyes angrily. But more tears came, a flood of nervous, excited tears, which ran down in big drops. She flung her arms around Marise's neck and hiding her face on her shoulder, cried out pitifully, "Oh, Marise, don't you ever just want to go back home?"
Marise's heart was very full of compassion, very barren of consolation. "I haven't any home to go back to, any more than you," she said in a whisper.
Eugenia reached up, pulled her head down and kissed her, still sobbing. Marise kept her cheek pressed against the other's tear-wet face, aching with her helplessness, burning to find some word of comfort, finding nothing but loving silence to express her tenderness and pity.
A door opened upstairs, laughing voices sounded on the landing above. The two girls drew apart and moved towards the door hand in hand.
II
Mme. de la Cueva had been crying and Marise guessed that she was getting ready to have a new husband. She seemed to have had bad luck in husbands. The one who had just been put to the door was the second Marise had known in the four years of her study with the pianist, and there had been at least two before that. It was a terrible grief to her always to find out that she no longer cared for the one she had; but she faced the facts with courage, allowing herself no dissembling, no bourgeoise timidity. The old one disappeared, and in a few months a new one was there.
"Good-day, my child," said the pianist affectionately, pulling Marise down to kiss her on both cheeks. "No lesson to-day nor to-morrow," she spoke solemnly, the tears in her eyes.
She began to cry openly.
Marise sat down by her, startled out of her own mood of resentment. "Why, dear Madame de la Cueva, why?" she asked, "What has happened?"
"I am going to America," said the older woman. "Georges Noel and I are booked for a concert tour of the world. We will be married in Australia."
The inevitable first thought of the magnificent egotism of youth was for itself, "Why, what shall I do?" cried Marise aggrieved.
Mme. de la Cueva did not resent this. She never resented anything which she recognized as natural. And this seemed to her pre-eminently natural and proper. She took Marise's hand in hers tenderly, maternally.
"It is for your good, my dear child, the change, though I know how you will miss me. You need some one else. A year with the old Visconti will be the making of you."
"The old Visconti!" cried Marise, "but he lives in Rome!"
"But it is perfectly possible for other people to live in Rome too! My dear child, a year in Rome at your age … it will be the making of you! You will always bless your poor old de la Cueva who secured it for you. Youth, talent, beauty, Rome!" she drew the picture with envious admiration of its possibilities.
There was no use trying to reason with her, as one would with any one else, Marise knew that from experience—no use trying to show the material, practical obstacles in the way. What would her father say? How could she go alone to Rome to live? Not that Mme. de la Cueva would have hesitated at any age to go anywhere alone to live—but she would not long have remained alone! How like Mme. de la Cueva to dispose of her so calmly! Even as Marise said all this to herself she was aware by a sudden warm gush of pleasure and excitement in her heart that she was delighted beyond measure with the plan, that she had been longing for some change in her life, that she had been growing deathly stale in the same old round, the absurdly life-and-death consultations with Biron in the kitchen, the same old professors at the Sorbonne with the same old glass of sugar-and-water and the same high-keyed nasal delivery of the same old lectures, even Mme. de la Cueva with her same old clichés about mass and bulk in the bass. She felt no guilt about this last, for if there were one person in the world who understood entirely the fatigue at the recurrence of the same old things, it was Mme. de la Cueva! The pianist looking at her young disciple with discerning and experienced eyes, saw something of this and smiled sympathetically.
"You have been working, working, working, and now it is time to run a little free, my Marisette," she said, patting her hand, "you are … how old?"
"Twenty-one to-day," said Marise.
"Exactly! As though Fate had timed it. Very likely Fate did." She had a great faith in Fate provided one did not hang back before the doors Fate set open before one. Personally she had never hesitated to step through every one that had been even ajar.
"A year in Rome with the old Visconti, who has the most wonderful sense of rhythm of any man alive—the real, the living rhythm—the life, the personality of music! Make yourself a docile little pair of ears and nothing else when he talks to you of rhythm! And pay no attention, none, do you hear, to his fingering! It is infecte, ignoble! Then after a year, I shall be here again to see what else you need before I launch you—good old Maman de la Cueva will be thinking of you all the time.…"
"But I am not in the least sure I can manage a year in Rome," protested Marise, breaking in with a hurried protest against this taking-for-granted of everything, "I never dreamed of going to Rome! My father …"
"Oh, you can manage it," Madame de la Cueva assured her carelessly, "one can always manage whatever one really wants to do. Especially if it depends on a man."
She crossed the room now to pull at a bell-cord and to order tea of the stout, elderly maid who came. Such a cosmopolitan as Madame de la Cueva would of course have tea.
"We shall have tea together, my dear, to celebrate your birthday and my new plans, and to have a last talk together, the last talk before you grow up."
Her tears were forgotten. They had been shed, and that was the end of them. It was thus that one should live, she believed, crying heartily when one felt like it, and having it over with. She detested what she called the "brain-sickening Anglo-Saxon mania of bottling up emotion till it grows so intense you get no enjoyment out of it," and she was much given to cautioning against this mania those few of her pupils whom she took seriously and for whom she labored her valiant best, pouring out for them all her wisdom, musical and otherwise.
She came back now, and sat before the piano, her amplitude overflowing the stool as a mighty inflooding wave overflows a rock.
"While Giuseppina is making our tea, I'll play to you," she announced. She put her beautiful hands on the keys like a millionaire plunging his hands into a coffer of jewels and offering a choice between pearls and rubies, "What will you have? What do you feel like?"
Marise felt more like an earthquake in full activity than anything else, and chose accordingly, "If I'm going to Rome for a year, I feel like fireworks," she said with a rather breathless laugh, "something Hungarian … Liszt, perhaps."
Madame de la Cueva settled herself and was off, Marise's heart galloping beside her in the wild rush over the plain. The little lean, wiry, ewe-necked horse under her tore along, sure-footed, as carried away by the stampede as his rider. There was a lance in her hand, a lance with a little blood-red, ragged flag, fluttering loudly against the wind of their forward rush like a bird struggling to escape and fly. Marise heard its throbbing struggle above the rhythmic thunder of the hoofs and felt her heart fluttering like a caught bird in sympathy. And now, with a long, rending slide from bass to treble, it tore itself loose, the wind caught it and whirled it up high over their heads as they plunged along. There it rode among the clouds, like a scarlet storm-bird, sinking and falling and advancing to a longer, nobler, more ample rhythm than that of their many-hoofed clattering. Marise's heart soared up with it, soared out of the noisy clattering, up to the clouds, to the noble, long curves of the wind's soundless advance … soundless … the piano was silent. Madame de la Cueva had played the last half-heard, velvet note that was prolonged, prolonged by the sweep of that noble line. She and Marise floated with it for a moment, and then as it swept on and left them, they slowly eddied down to the ground like dry leaves.
Giuseppina came in with the tea. Madame de la Cueva turned round on the piano-stool, a fat, elderly woman with three chins.
"Not so bad for the old lady, hein?" she said, well-pleased with herself and with Marise's dazzled look.
Marise attempted no thanks, no comment. Silently, like a person hypnotized she took the proffered cup, nodding her desire for two lumps and lemon; and silently, like a person hypnotized she listened to Madame de la Cueva's monologue. The music like a rich wine had unloosed the musician's tongue. In a mood like this she "turned the faucet and it ran."
"My little one," she said fondly to Marise, "my little one, so here you are on the beach ready to take the plunge—twenty-one to-day! And your poor old de la Cueva will not be here to advise you. Oh well, there's only one mistake that is worse than giving advice, and that is taking it. Never take anybody's advice, my darling, nobody's at all."
She drank the half of her cup of tea, not by any means noiselessly, wiped her mustache with the tiny, beautifully fine, embroidered tea-napkin, and hanging lovingly over the plate of patisseries, chose the fluffiest with a sigh of satisfaction.
"The only thing not to do, the only mistake possible to make, is to stand shivering on the beach, not to plunge in and breast the waves. Breast the waves!" she showed by a wide gesture of her powerful arm what she meant.
"And you can't swim with anything or anybody hanging around your neck. The moment they begin to weigh on you … p-f-f-t! off with them! Nothing you can do will help people who can't swim themselves. They'll only drag you down with them.
"My dear child, remember this, that if there is an element in life hateful to the free human soul it is what is called permanence. The only permanent thing any human being should recognize is his tomb. From everything else he must climb out and go on, go on.
"Above all, beware of permanence in love. It is a paradox ever to speak of love and permanence in the same breath. Life and death! They cannot exist together. Women as a rule, all women who are not artists, make their mistakes in that way. You are a woman now, and an artist, it is the duty of an older woman and an artist to warn you against it. The only way not to be a life-long victim of men is to take love as they it … for the pleasure. Men wish nothing from love but their pleasure. It is a vain and foolish striving to try and give them more, or to try and get more from them."
She took another éclair and said on a softer note, "I don't deny that women are more naturally given to the folly of seeking permanence in love than men. I myself have a weakness in that direction." Marise looked down into her cup to hide an involuntary smile at this. "Each time I love, the illusion is that it is now for eternity. Each time the wrench costs me tears.… You saw my tears, my dear!
"No, the only thing to do is to use it, as men do, to feed one's art. You heard how superbly I played that Liszt! That is Georges, that is the new flame leaping up from a lamp that was burning out!"
She poured another cup, and seasoned it with care. Marise ventured to say mildly, "I'm afraid I'm rather cold. I don't … I haven't ever cared much for men."
Madame de la Cueva shook her head, "Every unawakened girl thinks that. And once in a while there is a monster born, sometimes a man, more often a woman, who is born really cold—like a born half-wit or a two-headed cat. But any one of experience can feel them in the room, as you feel a snake. You are not cold, my darling. No one who can play The Tragica as you do, is cold. You are only a child. You Anglo-Saxons take so long to ripen. But all the better for your technique—that quaint prolongation of infancy. But now," she put down her cup and looked at Marise deeply and masterfully, "now your infancy has lasted long enough. In with you! Dive from the nearest rock! Head over heels! I shall hear the splash from across the world and rejoice."
Marise laughed a little nervously, partly because she was amused and partly because she was excited. That great mass of personality, radiating magnetism, would excite a statue on a tomb, she thought to herself, even though you didn't at all share her tastes, or like the things she did.
"And when I say, 'in with you,' I don't mean any of the sentimental slip-noose business of becoming a house-mother with children—oh, whatever else, my dear, no children. The only artists who can afford to have children are men, because men never really love their children and can abandon them at any time they need to. No woman can do that. Even I could never have done that!
"You see, carissima mea, in love a man always keeps most of himself for himself, as in everything else. You must do the same if you are not to be cheated in every bargain that life offers you. It is a hard lesson to learn. It will cost you many tears. But tears are valuable. You cannot live and be an artist, without tears. Shed them freely and you will see how you will grow."
She looked at her watch, "I expect Georges at five," she explained, and swept on to her peroration, "Remember, think of all I tell you when your wise old friend who knows life is far away. Remember! None of your Anglo-Saxon nonsense about trying to get along without sex-life. Take it, take all you need of it, but keep it separate from your real life as a man does, and it will never poison or embitter you." She laughed a little, triumphantly, "You will do all the embittering instead of enduring it. You have beauty. You can buy anything you want with it, if you learn how to use it. You have what will advance you more than any talent for music! You have a nice talent, but you will go ten times as far as a woman with a big nose and poor hair. Make your brain a little mint, my darling, coin your good looks into legal tender, and buy success."
She kissed the girl and dismissed her, with another look at her watch and then into the mirror.
Marise stumbled down the stairs, a little dizzied by the sudden removal of that pressing, urgent, magnetic personality. To step out suddenly from under it, was like stepping into a vacuum. Her ears rang.
At the street-door she paused, waiting for the mist to clear from before her eyes. She peered out into the quiet street, as if she were looking into life itself, the life that Madame de la Cueva had so magisterially set before her. And she loathed in anticipation everything that was waiting for her there.
There lay the world, grown-up life, Rome, her career, before her, and apparently there was nothing in it which she would not detest. Love … the love that Madame de la Cueva had shown her how to get … she shrank away from it with a proud, cold scorn, her nostrils quivering. Music … there was no music in that program, only an exploitation of music to buy personal success for her. And she loved music … fiercely she clung to that, as the one thing that would not betray her, the one thing she dared love with all her heart.
She stood on the threshold of the street-door, dreading to take even one step forward into it all, till the concierge looked at her hard, with a disagreeable smile, suspecting a rendezvous with a lover. Marise saw the look, knew what it meant, felt it push her forward, knew in anticipation how that sort of look and what lay back of it would be always pushing her forward into what she hated.
With a long breath she stepped into the street, into the road that stretched before her. She held her head high, with an angry pride. The concierge-soul of the world must never know what was inside her life. The thing to do, the only thing she saw that was tolerable to do, was to take care that she was not being fooled. Well, she thought with a grave, still bitterness, she certainly ought to know something about that.