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Henry James >> The Pension Beaurepas
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 thinking 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."
"But haven't they common sense? Don't they know they are ruining
themselves?"
"They don't believe it. The duty of an American husband and father
is to keep them going. If he asks them how, that's his own affair.
So, by way of not being mean, of being a good American husband and
father, poor Ruck stands staring at bankruptcy."
Mrs. Church looked at me a moment, in quickened meditation. "Why, if
Aurora were to go to stay with them, she might not even be properly
fed!"
"I don't, on the whole, recommend," I said, laughing, "that your
daughter should pay a visit to Thirty-Seventh Street."
"Why should I be subjected to such trials--so sadly eprouvee? Why
should a daughter of mine like that dreadful girl?"
"DOES she like her?"
"Pray, do you mean," asked my companion, softly, "that Aurora is a
hypocrite?"
I hesitated a moment. "A little, since you ask me. I think you have
forced her to be."
Mrs. Church answered this possibly presumptuous charge with a
tranquil, candid exultation. "I never force my daughter!"
"She is nevertheless in a false position," I rejoined. "She hungers
and thirsts to go back to her own country; she wants 'to come' out in
New York, which is certainly, socially speaking, the El Dorado of
young ladies. She likes any one, for the moment, who will talk to
her of that, and serve as a connecting-link with her native shores.
Miss Ruck performs this agreeable office."
"Your idea is, then, that if she were to go with Miss Ruck to America
she would drop her afterwards."
I complimented Mrs. Church upon her logical mind, but I repudiated
this cynical supposition. "I can't imagine her--when it should come
to the point--embarking with the famille Ruck. But I wish she might
go, nevertheless."
Mrs. Church shook her head serenely, and smiled at my inappropriate
zeal. "I trust my poor child may never be guilty of so fatal a
mistake. She is completely in error; she is wholly unadapted to the
peculiar conditions of American life. It would not please her. She
would not sympathise. My daughter's ideal is not the ideal of the
class of young women to which Miss Ruck belongs. I fear they are
very numerous; they give the tone--they give the tone."
"It is you that are mistaken," I said; "go home for six months and
see."
"I have not, unfortunately, the means to make costly experiments. My
daughter has had great advantages--rare advantages--and I should be
very sorry to believe that au fond she does not appreciate them. One
thing is certain: I must remove her from this pernicious influence.
We must part company with this deplorable family. If Mr. Ruck and
his ladies cannot be induced to go to Chamouni--a journey that no
traveller with the smallest self-respect would omit--my daughter and
I shall be obliged to retire. We shall go to Dresden."
"To Dresden?"
"The capital of Saxony. I had arranged to go there for the autumn,
but it will be simpler to go immediately. There are several works in
the gallery with which my daughter has not, I think, sufficiently
familiarised herself; it is especially strong in the seventeenth
century schools."
As my companion offered me this information I perceived Mr. Ruck come
lounging in, with his hands in his pockets, and his elbows making
acute angles. He had his usual anomalous appearance of both seeking
and avoiding society, and he wandered obliquely toward Mrs. Church,
whose last words he had overheard. "The seventeenth century
schools," he said, slowly, as if he were weighing some very small
object in a very large-pair of scales. "Now, do you suppose they HAD
schools at that period?"
Mrs. Church rose with a good deal of precision, making no answer to
this incongruous jest. She clasped her large volume to her neat
little bosom, and she fixed a gentle, serious eye upon Mr. Ruck.
"I had a letter this morning from Chamouni," she said.
"Well," replied Mr. Ruck, "I suppose you've got friends all over."
"I have friends at Chamouni, but they are leaving. To their great
regret." I had got up, too; I listened to this statement, and I
wondered. I am almost ashamed to mention the subject of my
agitation. I asked myself whether this was a sudden improvisation,
consecrated by maternal devotion; but this point has never been
elucidated. "They are giving up some charming rooms; perhaps you
would like them. I would suggest your telegraphing. The weather is
glorious," continued Mrs. Church, "and the highest peaks are now
perceived with extraordinary distinctness."
Mr. Ruck listened, as he always listened, respectfully. "Well," he
said, "I don't know as I want to go up Mount Blank. That's the
principal attraction, isn't it?"
"There are many others. I thought I would offer you an--an
exceptional opportunity."
"Well," said Mr. Ruck, "you're right down friendly. But I seem to
have more opportunities than I know what to do with. I don't seem
able to take hold."
"It only needs a little decision," remarked Mrs. Church, with an air
which was an admirable example of this virtue. "I wish you good-
night, sir." And she moved noiselessly away.
Mr. Ruck, with his long legs apart, stood staring after her; then he
transferred his perfectly quiet eyes to me. "Does she own a hotel
over there?" he asked. "Has she got any stock in Mount Blank?"
CHAPTER IX.
The next day Madame Beaurepas handed me, with her own elderly
fingers, a missive, which proved to be a telegram. After glancing at
it, I informed her that it was apparently a signal for my departure;
my brother had arrived in England, and proposed to me to meet him
there; he had come on business, and was to spend but three weeks in
Europe. "But my house empties itself!" cried the old woman. "The
famille Ruck talks of leaving me, and Madame Church nous fait la
reverence."
"Mrs. Church is going away?"
"She is packing her trunk; she is a very extraordinary person. Do
you know what she asked me this morning? To invent some combination
by which the famille Ruck should move away. I informed her that I
was not an inventor. That poor famille Ruck! 'Oblige me by getting
rid of them,' said Madame Church, as she would have asked Celestine
to remove a dish of cabbage. She speaks as if the world were made
for Madame Church. I intimated to her that if she objected to the
company there was a very simple remedy; and at present elle fait ses
paquets."
"She really asked you to get the Rucks out of the house?"
"She asked me to tell them that their rooms had been let, three
months ago, to another family. She has an APLOMB!"
Mrs. Church's aplomb caused me considerable diversion; I am not sure
that it was not, in some degree, to laugh over it at my leisure that
I went out into the garden that evening to smoke a cigar. The night
was dark and not particularly balmy, and most of my fellow-
pensioners, after dinner, had remained in-doors. A long straight
walk conducted from the door of the house to the ancient grille that
I have described, and I stood here for some time, looking through the
iron bars at the silent empty street. The prospect was not
entertaining, and I presently turned away. At this moment I saw, in
the distance, the door of the house open and throw a shaft of
lamplight into the darkness. Into the lamplight there stepped the
figure of a female, who presently closed the door behind her. She
disappeared in the dusk of the garden, and I had seen her but for an
instant, but I remained under the impression that Aurora Church, on
the eve of her departure, had come out for a meditative stroll.
I lingered near the gate, keeping the red tip of my cigar turned
toward the house, and before long a young lady emerged from among the
shadows of the trees and encountered the light of a lamp that stood
just outside the gate. It was in fact Aurora Church, but she seemed
more bent upon conversation than upon meditation. She stood a moment
looking at me, and then she said, -
"Ought I to retire--to return to the house?"
"If you ought, I should be very sorry to tell you so," I answered.
"But we are all alone; there is no one else in the garden."
"It is not the first time that I have been alone with a young lady.
I am not at all terrified."
"Ah, but I?" said the young girl. "I have never been alone--" then,
quickly, she interrupted herself. "Good, there's another false
note!"
"Yes, I am obliged to admit that one is very false."
She stood looking at me. "I am going away to-morrow; after that
there will be no one to tell me."
CHAPTER X.
"That will matter little," I presently replied. "Telling you will do
no good."
"Ah, why do you say that?" murmured Aurora Church.
I said it partly because it was true; but I said it for other reasons
as well, which it was hard to define. Standing there bare-headed, in
the night air, in the vague light, this young lady looked extremely
interesting; and the interest of her appearance was not diminished by
a suspicion on my own part that she had come into the garden knowing
me to be there. I thought her a charming girl, and I felt very sorry
for her; but, as I looked at her, the terms in which Madame Beaurepas
had ventured to characterise her recurred to me with a certain force.
I had professed a contempt for them at the time, but it now came into
my head that perhaps this unfortunately situated, this insidiously
mutinous young creature, was looking out for a preserver. She was
certainly not a girl to throw herself at a man's head, but it was
possible that in her intense--her almost morbid-desire to put into
effect an ideal which was perhaps after all charged with as many
fallacies as her mother affirmed, she might do something reckless and
irregular--something in which a sympathetic compatriot, as yet
unknown, would find his profit. The image, unshaped though it was,
of this sympathetic compatriot, filled me with a sort of envy. For
some moments I was silent, conscious of these things, and then I
answered her question. "Because some things--some differences are
felt, not learned. To you liberty is not natural; you are like a
person who has bought a repeater, and, in his satisfaction, is
constantly making it sound. To a real American girl her liberty is a
very vulgarly-ticking old clock."
"Ah, you mean, then," said the poor girl, "that my mother has ruined
me?"
"Ruined you?"
"She has so perverted my mind, that when I try to be natural I am
necessarily immodest."
"That again is a false note," I said, laughing.
She turned away. "I think you are cruel."
"By no means," I declared; "because, for my own taste, I prefer you
as--as--"
I hesitated, and she turned back. "As what?"
"As you are."
She looked at me a while again, and then she said, in a little
reasoning voice that reminded me of her mother's, only that it was
conscious and studied, "I was not aware that I am under any
particular obligation to please you!" And then she gave a clear
laugh, quite at variance with her voice.