The Little French Girl/Part 3/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
The old life flowed round her again, outwardly the same, inwardly so altered. She had been, she saw it, like nothing but a glass of eau sucrée when she had first come to Heathside;—or if that was a simile too insipid for even her youngest consciousness, like eau sucrée with a squeeze of lemon in it. Now the wine of new perceptions, new emotions, tinged her deeply, and because she was enriched she saw a richer world about her. English history, from being a mere flat picture, dull at best compared to the splendid pageantry of France, began to take on depth and distance in her eyes. It was English history she saw now when she went up to Oxford with Giles and Ruth, and English history was English character; whereas event, in French history, played so much more potent a part. Wandering in and out with Giles, the beauty of the town, with its significance, stole upon her mind and senses. Meditative, benign, and so humane, it seemed to smile at you like an old ecclesiastic with kindly eyes for youth. As one sat in a sun-steeped garden or dim, carved chapel, one felt its quiet like that of a tree, full of life and growth, so that, though it was old, it was also young; the sap moved on to fresh leaves while the calm old trunk endured. Time had been distilled and preserved in it without a break or cleavage and its very light, she felt, in this autumnal weather, had that colour of time, as though it came through ancient glass. The quadrangles were brimmed with time and it brooded on the lawns of Saint John's where the Michaelmas daisies growing against the grey stone walls made her think of the ring on the benignant hand of the bishop. “One would grow wise by being here even if one only sat still, like this, and looked at it,” she said to Giles. “I only wish one did!” said Giles. But he felt what she felt and was pleased with her for, at last, understanding his Oxford.
She began to wish for wisdom. Back at Heathside she bicycled to the High School every morning with Rosemary, through the birch-wood, past the red-brick villas of the town—villas upon which time had laid no kindly hand—and all the ugliness that had so fretted her fell into an insignificant background, since, for the first time, the day had its object. Knowledge, of course, was quite different from wisdom. The happy life depended on eyes to see the hands that blessed and the smile on the face of time; but it was knowledge that opened one's eyes and she found in its acquisition a zest and an enfranchisement. It was in order that she might see that smile in France that she worked so hard. The sooner was she equipped, the sooner could she return to France and Maman. Already she outdistanced Rosemary, and she had a touch of kindly malice at seeing her friend of the chaffing complacencies and cheerful bullying left behind.
Rosemary was not ungenerous. She showed her chagrin and her admiration, openly. “It's not even as if it were your own language,” she grumbled. “And you don't seem to take half the trouble over it that I do.”
“Perhaps it is because you are in your own country and I out of mine,” Alix suggested.
“Now what on earth do you mean by that?” Rosemary inquired.
“I have nothing else to do but think about my studies,” said Alix.
Rosemary stared. “You've got the same things to think about that I have. Surely you are at home by now. All the girls like you and you're never left out of anything.”
“It is not anything like that. Everybody is as kind as possible,” said Alix. She could not, she knew, make Rosemary understand. Rosemary, fundamentally, could not take foreign countries seriously—could not believe that anyone lucky enough to be in England should have all their energies bent on leaving it.
“And what do you girls intend to do with yourselves?” Mrs. Bradley asked them one day at the firelit tea-table. She had, as usual, a pile of papers beside her and laid down her fountain pen to pour out the tea. “Alix is doing so well that she can really begin to think of choosing a career and it's not too soon to turn things in that direction.”
Even dear Mrs. Bradley took it for granted that she might be quite satisfied to make a career out of her own country.
“I hope I shall marry when I go back to Maman,” said Alix.
“Now isn't she altogether too priceless, Mummy!” cried Rosemary. “One would have thought that with all the time you've been in England, Alix, you'd have got over those French ideas about marriage.—I suppose you'll actually say that you'd let your mother choose a husband for you.”
“But who would choose one so well?” said Alix. Yet it was not true; it was not true that she still believed this of Maman. England had already changed her so much. But she did not intend that Rosemary should guess it.
“Who would? Why, you yourself!” cried Rosemary. “What can your mother know about it? Aren't you an individual with your own tastes and feelings? And do you seriously think marriage the only career for a woman?—Do you really think getting married the whole meaning of life?”
“It is a sad thing to be a vieille fille, I think,” said Alix.
“Sad? Why sad? You don't call Aunt Bella sad, do you? And there're thousands and thousands more like her. All of 'em as jolly as possible; the unmarried people nowadays. Jollier than the married ones, I think;—and no wonder.”
“In their hearts, you may be sure, they wish they did not have to be quite so jolly,” Alix demurred. “They must feel it sad when they reflect that they have only other people's children to care for—and those not the most interesting. And it must be sad to be alone at one's foyer.”
“One may have one's own children and yet have to take care of the others, too, you know, Alix,” Mrs. Bradley smiled, finishing her tea and taking up a packet of case papers. “All these are other people's children.”
“One needn't care for one's own, or for other people's unless one wants to,” Rosemary commented. “People specialize nowadays and know that some women are maternal and some aren't. I'm sure I'm not. I couldn't be bothered with children, or with a husband either—It's as good as a play to hear you talk, you know, Alix—all your quaint French ideas. What can one hope of a nation that still has them!—Cradles, hearthstones, hubby's socks to mend;—that's what really appeals to you, I suppose.”
“What appeals to me is to be established,” said Alix. “I do not care for babies; but they are a part of marriage, and no doubt one would come to like them when one had them. As for the socks—I should hope to marry well enough to have a maid to do that.”
Rosemary's eyes rounded. “You mean you'd marry for money?”
Alix smiled: “You are so réaliste in some ways, Rosemary, and so romantic in others.”
“I hope, dear, you'd never think of marrying for money,” Mrs. Bradley put in. “Money is a very minor consideration in marriage.”
“Romantic! I romantic!—It's merely a question of one's own dignity!” cried Rosemary; while Alix said: “There would have to be character and taste and position as well;—but don't you think, chère Madame, that it is well to marry suitably?”
“Suitably? Yes, of course.” Mrs. Bradley was gently bewildered. “But the most suitable thing of all is to marry someone one loves.”
Alix, in silence, wondered.
Mr. Westmacott seemed a little better now. She went to the Rectory twice a week and read aloud in French to him and Toppie. He seemed to enjoy it and followed if she read very slowly and distinctly. Toppie sat, her fair head bent over her knitting. She was knitting endless little vests for the poor babies of one of Mrs. Bradley's charities. Alix wondered sometimes what was to become of all those babies. Were they passed on from Mrs. Bradley to more Mrs. Bradleys, until, at last, in one of the hospitals administered by the Aunt Bellas, they closed their eyes? Would some be good citizens and some mere beasts of burden, and some, perhaps, thieves and scoundrels? All were to begin with those little snowy woollen vests, and all were to end in coffins. It made her feel strange to think of it. But when she expressed something of these thoughts to Toppie one day, Toppie looked at her very gravely, and said: “They are all to end in heaven, Alix. We are all of us only that; souls setting out on our journey.” But Alix found it so difficult to think of some people as souls.
The babies' vests were a strange accompaniment to Saint-Simon's “Mémoires.” She found these on Giles's shelves and asked Toppie if they would do. She had so often heard André de Valenbois and monsieur de Maubert and Maman quote Saint-Simon. Neither Toppie nor her father had read him and were quite contented with her choice, and she skipped about and found the people who most interested her. The French was strange, but it seemed to say more than modern French. The strangeness, she saw, was not apparent to Toppie and her father, nor was the acid irony nor the often unconscious humour. Toppie and her father rarely found anything to laugh at. Mr. Westmacott's chief preoccupation was to follow the relationships of the characters and to place them correctly against the background of contemporaneous history, and for this purpose there were many interruptions while Toppie went to fetch the encyclopædia. Alix saw that Toppie sometimes listened with a vague distress. Saint-Simon and the people he wrote of were as alien to her understanding—to say nothing of her sympathies—as the Chinese. To Alix, for all the travesty of their tails and crests, they were clearly recognizable types. She saw the court of Louis Quatorze as a great golden aviary where splendid creatures, plumed, absurd, and beautiful, paced and preened and surreptitiously pecked at each other beneath the proud gaze of the monstrous bird of paradise on the throne. There was something sinister about them, there behind their bars; but something familiar and lovable too. Toppie only saw them as the denizens of a rather disagreeable fairy-tale, though at some moments of the recital, obscure to Alix, she saw that Toppie's eyes rested upon her in a cogitativeness that seemed aware of too much reality. “They are all odious people, Alix,” she said to her one day. “Odious; vindictive; vulgar and wicked.”
“Oh; but not all, Toppie. Some are very good, like Fénelon—though Saint-Simon is unfair to him; and some are charming, like the Duchess de Bourgogne. She was too fond of pleasure, perhaps; but she is so merry and amusing that one can forgive her that.”
“Very much too fond, I am afraid,” said Toppie, colouring above her knitting. “I do not like her, Alix.”
“If you feel the book unsuitable for our young friend, Toppie,” Mr. Westmacott observed, “why should we not read 'Corinne'? I remember finding madame de Staël very interesting and any young girl could read her.”
“But there are wicked people in all history,” cried Alix, aghast at this suggestion. “You all read Shakespeare, though he is full of wickedness. It is the point of view. The point of view of Saint-Simon is not wicked. He is ill-tempered, disagreeable, but upright; he means always to tell the truth. And then he was so devout, Monsieur; he was such a devout Christian.”
This was wily of her, and Mr. Westmacott, easily reassured, agreed; “Yes, yes, I see that.”
When Giles came home for the holidays, Toppie and her father had gone again to Bournemouth. “She might have waited a week longer, so that I could see her,” said Giles sadly. It was still taken happily for granted that Alix should sit with Giles in the mornings. There were fires everywhere this Winter, but she was more than ever glad of the refuge. Ruth had become a rather overwhelming presence. She had made new friends at Somerville and spent the first fortnight of her holidays with them in London, going to art-student dances in Chelsea and medical-student dances in Bloomsbury, and returning to her home with what Alix felt to be many a foolish flourish added to her sensible signature. She addressed Alix as “dear old ass,” and her favourite exclamation was “God!”
“It is so unlike our mon Dieu,” Alix could not forbear writing to Maman. “It is as if one saw a hen suddenly lay an ostrich egg—and so proud of it. I think when English people like Ruth become emancipated, they are very like hens laying ostrich eggs. There is such a strain; and, when it is all over, it is not an interesting object.”
Ruth had been meant by nature to be like Aunt Bella, though with much of beauty added. She was tall and large and brightly fair. She had little gaiety, but she gave an impression of massive cheerfulness; and it knocked you down if you impeded it, and strode, almost gravely, on its way. Alix was pleased to feel that Giles, too, found Ruth irritating. He could be very sharp with her, especially when she patronized her mother. But Ruth now, fortified by her new experience of life and in less awe of a brother, was not to be quelled by sharpness, so that if Giles had not withdrawn into gloomy silences there would often have been quarrels.
“There's no harm in her. She's as good as gold. She'd go to the stake for Mummy if it were necessary, cheerfully and as a matter of course; only she's so insufferably conceited,” Giles grumbled to Alix in the study. “Why didn't you tell her she knew nothing about it, when she was chaffing you about French manners and customs just now? All she knows about French manners are those of the professor's family she stayed with in Paris. Why didn't you tell her to shut up?”
“That would have been rude,” said Alix.
“Well, she was rude.”
“But that is no reason for me,” Alix slightly smiled, looking up at him.
“By Jove, no!” Giles, with a rueful laugh, rubbed his hand through his hair. “Ruth's manners could never be a reason for yours, could they! I say, you know, that's a nasty one, Alix!”
“I do not mean it to be nasty. And she did not mean to be rude,” said Alix. “She meant only to be funny.”
“That makes her stupid, then, as well as conceited,” said Giles.
If she took refuge with Giles, it was curious and touching to Alix to note that before Ruth's assaults Mrs. Bradley more and more took refuge with her. When Ruth, with a shout of laughter, crowed “Victorian!” at her mother, Alix begged that the inferiority of this term should be explained to her. “For in Maman's salon,” she observed, “clever people—I mean the ones your clever people quarrel over in the reviews as to who should claim to have first read them—admire even George Eliot and Ruskin, I assure you. Admire them greatly.”
“Help! Help!” shrieked Ruth. She knew nothing of the clever people in Maman's salon. She had not advanced to the recognition of cleverness beyond her reach; she had advanced only as far as scorn for unfashionable tastes, and in herself, as Alix, musing on her, perceived, she had none of the stuff from which new valuations are made.
“And you know,” Mrs. Bradley, for the sake of historical accuracy put forward—evading by the mere force of her impersonality any altercation—“it wasn't really so long ago when I was young, Ruth. I didn't live in the time of crinolines. I was reading my Dostoievsky in French and my Hardy in English when I was your age, and I don't seem to see that you young people have got beyond them.”
“Oh, Mummy darling, it's not a question of what you read or don't read!” cried Ruth, affectionately ruffling her mother's head. “It's the colour of your mind! It's the pattern of your complexes!”
“There's some truth in that, you know,” Mrs. Bradley observed to Alix when, after this sally, Ruth seized her hockey stick and strode away.
Mrs. Bradley always saw whatever of truth there was to be seen in other people's positions. She felt no impatience or grievance against her merciless daughter. She had not time for such reactions. Her own work occupied all her time. And she hoped for her children that they, too, would find work that would thus become the meaning of their lives. It was wonderful in her, this detachment, Alix thought, yet she found fault with it, and it was the only fault she found in Mrs. Bradley. She should have felt herself more responsible for the uncouthness of her daughter; she should have given less thought to the welfare of the London children, and more to the manners of her own. “It would have been better for them,” thought Alix, “if she could have become very angry with them. How excellent for Ruth and Rosemary if they could have been well whipped from time to time. And it is too late now.”
Mrs. Bradley would have thought whipping irrational and cruel. “She is too wise, too quiet,” thought Alix. “But then the saints were like that; wise and quiet and incapable of anger.”
Alix had never cared at all about the saints, and it was strange to feel that this heretic lady, creedless and uncloistered, made them more real and more lovable to her.
“Do you not think so, too, Giles?” she said to her friend in the study. “Do you not see what I mean? She is like a modern kind of saint; so selfless and dedicated and laborious. She never thinks about being happy.”
“You make her happy, Alix. Did you know that?” said Giles.—“Yes, I see perfectly what you mean. Yet Mummy never seems to me sad. Does she to you?”
“I do not know,” Alix reflected. “She did not begin so quiet, I am sure. Just as the saints did not. At the bottom of her heart she wanted to be loved more; much more;—isn't that what all people want most, Giles?—And then when she found that she was not to be she must have felt very sad.”
“But, I say, you know!”—Giles stared at her from his chair. “You do say the most astonishing things! Not loved enough! Why don't we all love her!”
“Oh, but it would have to be more than that. She would want far more love than English children could ever give to their parents.”
“English children! Surely you don't think that the French love their parents more than we do!”
“But of course we do, Giles,” said Alix in candid surprise. “Our mothers we do; for perhaps fathers do not count for so much with us, either.”
“Oh, come, I can't swallow that.” Giles smiling, yet disturbed, was rubbing his hand over his hair. “You—even you—don't love your mother more than I do mine.”
“I think I do, Giles. I think we are more a part of our mothers in France. You stand more alone in England, in everything.”
Giles in his disturbance of mind had got up and was looking out of the window. “And what about my father, then?” he said. “What about his love for her? That's what we think of in England as counting most in a woman's life. He was devoted to her.”
Alix felt a little shy of sharing with Giles her deepest intuition about Mrs. Bradley's selflessness.
“I am afraid not enough, Giles. Did he really see her as you see her? I am afraid he was not a part of herself, and that is what one expects in England and that is why she must have been sad. And I think she loved best always—if you do not mind my saying so—the ones who were most part of herself—you and Captain Owen and Francis. One cannot help loving most people who are most part of oneself.”
And though she still kept her French scepticism about marriage, the half-unconscious climax of a long process of change within Alix was reached when she added in her own thought: “How sad to be married to someone who is not part of yourself.”