The Little French Girl/Part 2/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
A table had been laid in a corner of the verandah, and a stout woman, bareheaded and in savates, was carrying out tea and coffee.
Madame Vervier rearranged the tray, setting the tongs on the sugar, the strainer on a cup, placing the plate of madeleines here, the brioches there; all mildly, with no savour of criticism for Albertine's haphazard methods. In England such a ministrant at the tea-table would have been felt as a flaw on the prevailing perfection; yet Albertine, Giles divined, was also the cook; and a bevy of trim, capped English maids could hardly have evolved the lustre of cleanliness that reigned throughout the lovely little house. It was difficult to think of madame Vervier as poor; and more difficult to think of her doing things for herself. Yet all the loveliness had, he felt, been gathered together with something of the same mild dexterity that now brought order and comeliness to the tea-table. Madame Vervier was the sort of person who would pick up lovely things for a song; the Louis Quinze bedstead, the voile de Gênes, the tall cream-white cafetière, like one he had seen in a picture by—Chardin, wasn't it?—and the teapot with a delicate spray of grey flowers, just touched with gilt, on its side—had all, he could imagine, been brought to her nest by the unerring instinct that leads the bird to select the white feather or the lichen. Alix had said, he remembered, that part of their revenue was derived from the rent of the fairy-tale house; he was sure that it was an investment that paid well. And she had probably herself made the dresses she and Alix wore. She could be extravagant if the money were there; if it were not, she was careful. One felt in her the essential freedom from material bondage.
Monsieur de Maubert was still in his shady corner with the Nouvelle Revue Française on his knee. The young artist had reappeared and was sitting on the steps, his chin on his hands, looking out at the sea. Madame Vervier took her place at the tea-table, monsieur de Maubert drew his chair beside her, and Giles's friend strolled up from the cliff-path accompanied by yet another noticeable personage.
This was a youngish woman, though younger in form than in face, bareheaded and wearing a very short white skirt and a flame-coloured silk jacket. It was almost like seeing a tongue of electric fire, brilliant, supple, cold, run in among them, so different was she from the sunlight which seemed so completely madame Vervier's element. It did not surprise Giles to gather, presently, that mademoiselle Blanche Fontaine was an actress, and a distinguished one. She was charming; he had seen that at once; but he had seen as soon that it was a charm with which he had nothing at all to do; the sort of charm one expected to pay ten-and-six for the sight and sound of and to feel, while it operated upon you, safely barred away from by a row of footlights. A presence so brilliant could not be said to cast a chill, but for Giles it certainly cast a discomfort. Who was she? What did she mean? Where had she come from, this young woman so lean, so white, so sickly-looking, yet so tough? Her smile, as she bit into her madeleine, brought a long dimple that was almost a wrinkle into her cheek and her long, pale eyes scintillated under darkened lashes. He realized how noticeably independent of artificial aids to significance was madame Vervier from noting how frankly mademoiselle Fontaine had made use of them. She might even, by nature, he surmised, be a swarthy woman; but art had transformed her to a dazzling whiteness and her crinkled hair, that might be really black, repeated the lustrous flame of her jacket. Something in the fervour of her thin, gay lip, in the vigour of her thin, questing nose, even suggested to Giles a Semitic strain; but upon the racial edifice she had laid a pattern of strange, chiming colour that seemed in its vehemence and oddity to alter the very contour of her face. She had made of herself what she would; what she was, was unfathomable by any plummet in Giles's possession.
They were all talking and laughing, all except Alix, who sat silent beside her mother, and the young artist with the dark, suffering head. He drank coffee; three cups of it, and black. Monsieur de Maubert's sonorous tones were lifted by a note of drollery.
“He has lost himself in the clouds of mysticism.” They were talking of the book of a friend. “To stumble among rocks is less disconcerting than to stumble among clouds. Il erre—il erre— One sees him wandering away into the fog of his own imaginations.”
“Did you enjoy yourself in England, mademoiselle Alix?” mademoiselle Fontaine asked. “Did you make good studies there?”
“Yes. I went to a Lycée with the sisters of monsieur Bradley,” said Alix.
She looked more of a child, seen in this setting, than Giles had ever seen her look. Her silence was childlike; and her attitude, leaning slightly against her mother, her chair placed a little behind her. Yet, at the same time, Giles had never felt her manner more mature. She was familiar with mademoiselle Fontaine. She knew her of old. Yet what a sense of distance there was between them. Giles could not tell whether it was kept there, so unerringly, more by her manner or by mademoiselle Fontaine's. They knew their place; both of them. Giles suddenly perceived that people in England did not know their places with anything like the same accuracy as people in France. Mademoiselle Fontaine was the distinguished actress. Alix was the toute jeune fille; under her mother's wing. They might meet for years and never advance by a hair's-breadth to greater intimacy.
“Ah. Yes. You were with the family of monsieur.” The dimple came for Giles. The brilliant eyes circled round him; pierced him; cogitated; deduced; summed him up probably, Giles felt—(so much more shrewd was he than mademoiselle Fontaine could guess, for all her brilliancy)—as “Jeune homme respectable et tant soit peu lourd.”
“You must bring monsieur to tea with Grand'mère, Maman, and me, one day mademoiselle Alix,” she said. It was surprising to find that mademoiselle Fontaine was so immersed in family ties. “I have un petit 'foaks'.” So she pronounced the French term for fox terrier. “Tout-à-fait charmant. He will delight you.”
“There is a charming 'fox' in the family of monsieur,” said Alix.
“Some admirable work is being done in England,” said Giles's friend, whose name, he now gathered, was monsieur le vicomte de Valenbois. “Your school of Bloomsbury. They are remarkable writers. They have invented a new method; oh, deep, crafty; though it seems to blow as easily as a flower. But then a flower has always its roots; its soil.—Tchekov, do you think? Dostoievsky?—They are much inspired, one feels, for all their sincerity, by the Russians. Or is it truly indigenous? Do the pavements of Bloomsbury really grow it quite spontaneously? That delicious Bloomsbury,” monsieur de Valenbois mused, his happy eyes on Giles, “of the Museum, the squares where Thackeray walks, the smell of fogs and jam.”
Giles was much bewildered. He did not remember ever having heard of a school of Bloomsbury.
Monsieur de Valenbois enlightened him and went on, putting Giles's best foot forward for him, since it was evident that he did not know how to put it forward for himself. “And then your extraordinary Joyce. Ireland is his soil, indubitably, and no alien pollen has visited him. What a talent! Solitary; morose; erudite. He will found a school here among nos jeunes. That is already evident. You have writers to be proud of. It is true we have our Proust to put beside them. You admire our Proust?”
“I'm sorry to say I don't know him; or the morose Irishman either,” said Giles, with a genial grin for his own discomfiture.
“Monsieur Giles is a philosopher,” Alix now suddenly and surprisingly contributed. Though so withdrawn she had been listening, watching, and it was evident that she had a different conception of Giles's best foot. “He is going to found a school, too. At Oxford.”
“I say! Draw it mild!” cried Giles, casting a glance of delighted amusement at his young friend.
“But is it not true, Giles, that the old philosopher, with the beard, thinks that you will found a school?” said Alix.
“I'm afraid he only hopes I'll follow his,” said Giles.
“Philosophy is, indeed, a magnificent subject,” smiled monsieur de Valenbois, all gentle respect. “To follow a school adequately is often to find that one has founded a new one.—Does our Bergson interest you?”
Giles said that he did, very much, and found that Alix had succeeded in putting his best foot forward, for they now all talked about philosophy. Monsieur de Maubert, he gathered, was a disciple of Croce's; monsieur de Valenbois had read William James and the Pragmatists; and madame Vervier had attended Bergson's pre-war lectures at the Sorbonne. She found the élan vital in too much of a hurry.
“We gallop, we gallop,” she remarked;—“but if I may not see my goal, let me linger by the way.”
“As for me,” cried mademoiselle Fontaine, “give me le bon vieux Papa de bon Dieu of my childhood! With him, at all events, one knows what to expect and where one is.”
The young artist had made no attempt to join the conversation and, now that he had finished his coffee, he got up, taking an easel, a camp-stool, and a box of paints, and went away out on to the cliffs. His morose profile passed along against the frieze of floating sea-gulls and madame Vervier, sadly shaking her head, said that Jules was in one of his humeurs noires.
“Pauvre cher!” sighed monsieur de Valenbois.
It seemed that the young artist had an adored wife who was in a madhouse.
“I saw her before leaving Paris,” said madame Vervier. “She is quite gentle. She allowed me to hold her hand.—But lost; altogether lost; she was like a tame bird that has strayed from its cage and cannot find its way in the forest. There it sits, on a branch, and stares into the darkness. It is pitiful.”
A silence fell for a while after that, and Giles heard in it the echoes of the compassionate voice beating softly against each heart.
“He will do great things,” said monsieur de Maubert presently. It was as if he turned away from the gloomy fact and displayed for their comfort the golden coin it had minted. “It is an authentic genius.”
“Yes. If we can keep him alive to give it to us,” said madame Vervier.
“If anyone can keep him alive it is you, Hélène,” said monsieur de Maubert.
Charming people they were, and compassionate and wise, thought Giles, sitting there among them in the pellucid shadow while the gulls floated past in the golden light. Strains of Gluck's “Orpheus” floated with the gulls through his mind. The thought of the young painter's wife, lost in the shades, suggested that music, perhaps. But it was an Elysian scene.
When they were dispersed, all driving in monsieur de Valenbois' car to Allongeville for tennis, all except monsieur de Maubert who withdrew to his room—to sleep, Giles imagined—Giles himself did not write letters. He wandered along the cliff-path and saw the lovely shore curving, far away, in azure bays beneath the gold-white cliffs. He looked at the scene and was not consciously absorbed in thought; but a process of testing, of reëstablishing, went on within him as if he felt about his roots to see that they were firm. He would have need of firmness, and the figure of Toppie went with him as an exorcising presence.
It was late when the party returned and assembled for a supper of consommé, chicken salad and a cream for which Albertine, saturnine yet complacent, was warmly praised. Alix looked drugged with happiness and fatigue and madame Vervier soon sent her to bed. Mademoiselle Blanche Fontaine, in the drawing-room with madame Vervier and monsieur de Maubert, read aloud the manuscript of a new play; the young artist went away to his hotel on the place, and monsieur de Valenbois sat for a little while with Giles on the steps of the verandah to look at the fading dyes of the sunset and to talk of Scriabin, Stravinsky, and the Russian ballet. Giles had to own that he did not care much about the Russian ballet. He was always having to own things to monsieur de Valenbois who showed the happiest interest in his lapses, giving utterance, now and then, to a gentle long-drawn “Tiens!” Giles himself was very tired, however, and felt that he could not adequately defend his theories which rested upon an objection to the use of the body as a means of primitive expressionism. He soon said good-night and went up to his wonderful little room.
After he had gone to bed he lay for a long time awake, a fold of the coarse cool linen that smelt of orris root against his cheek. He heard mademoiselle Fontaine go away to her own villa, escorted by the other three. Then, when they returned, the Sacre du Printemps came softly humming up the stairs, showing him that monsieur de Valenbois was also going to bed. After that the only voices left below were those of monsieur de Maubert and his hostess, sitting in quiet converse on the verandah.
They talked meditatively with pauses of appreciation for the beauty of the night, and madame Vervier must once have risen to advance and look out into the starry vastness, for Giles heard her say “Tiens;—qu'elle est grande, notre étoile, ce soir!”
It was late before the final words were vaguely wafted up to him: “Bonsoir, mon ami.” “Bonne nuit, ma chère Hélène.”