Chapter Twenty-One I
By the time Cornelia’s answer reached Paris, Claude had taken Janet to Brussels. The immediate cause of this move was a stringency in Claude’s funds. A brief and somewhat acrid correspondence between father and son had followed hard on the latter’s international adventure. After much shilly-shallying on Claude’s part, Mr. Fontaine had laid down the terms on which alone he proposed to continue polite relations.
Mr. Fontaine proceeded on the theory that in some cases the most effective sort of moral force is material force. He did not demand that Claude abandon Janet, although this was the goal of his desire. He simply made it emphatic that until his son did leave Janet, the old days of independence coupled with generous financial supplies were over.
Meanwhile, he made a point of thwarting Claude at every turn. Claude longed for leisure and also for a fairly free hand with the Fontaine Company’s bankers in Europe; Mr. Fontaine offered him definite work at a far from princely salary. Claude wanted to travel (as heretofore) in the role of a commanding member of the firm; Mr. Fontaine allowed him no choice but a paltry assistancy to one of Fontaine’s European agents. Claude vastly preferred the conspicuous agency in Paris, if an agency he had to be reduced to; Mr. Fontaine detailed him peremptorily to the humble agency in Brussels. And so on.
Clearly, Mr. Fontaine believed that a series of pin pricks, tirelessly administered here and there, would serve his purpose much better than a dagger inserted under the fifth rib.
Claude, having some means of his own, planned a summary rejection of his father’s terms. But his available funds were pitifully inadequate to his tastes and habits. It was in vain that Janet threw herself sturdily into the task of retrenchment. She lacked experience; and as for Claude, he was born to the purple and had inherited the aristocratic idea that economy consists in making lesser people do the saving. He could not refrain from living on a handsome scale or from entertaining his Parisian friends at costly parties. The day of atonement drew swiftly nearer.
And came in due course. All his pecuniary sins were visited upon him at one and the same inopportune moment (when ordering a dinner at the Ritz in honor of the Prince de Cluny). At that moment he experienced the novel sensation of finding himself suddenly without a single penny of credit. Had the ground been abruptly withdrawn from his feet, the shock could not have been greater.
There was nothing for it but an immediate acceptance of the terms on which his father had proposed a truce. The Brussels agency was in charge of a hard-headed Walloon between whom and Claude little love was lost. The pin pricks were warranted to do their work to a nicety.
Thus it was that in no very amiable frame of mind Claude set foot in the Belgian capital and reported to the Fontaine agent there. Janet shared his contracted fortunes, accompanying him from Paris in spite of a series of quarrels which had chequered the weeks preceding their departure.
She accused herself of weakness for remaining with Claude. But she felt she could hardly leave him when he was so completely down on his luck. True, their quarrels furnished her with a pretext, but not with a worthy one. They were all in the nature of petty bickerings, trumpery matters seemingly unrelated to the real issue.
But she began to suspect that the real issue between herself and Claude would never be brought into the open.
II
Their hotel was in the aristocratic Quartier Leopold. Scarcely a year had elapsed since the armistice was proclaimed, yet the Boulevard Anspach and other central highways were again the glittering rendezvous of international idlers indefatigably bent on expunging the last unpleasant memories of Armageddon. This expunging process appeared to involve the consumption of much bad food and the production of much loud noise.
Early in the morning of his seventh day in Brussels, Claude was awakened by the penetrating backfire of a motor car in the street. Having already been aroused by disturbances twice, he sprang from one of the twin beds in the room and closed each window with a furious bang. Janet, in the other bed, changed from her right side to her left, but was too deep in sleep to wake up.
“Damnation!” he called out, first towards the street and then, as this bore no fruit, in the direction of the occupied bed.
Getting no response he stalked to the sleeper’s side.
“How can a man get any rest,” he shouted angrily, “with pandemonium in the streets and every window in the place wide open?”
The world in general showed no interest in this conundrum propounded by a very good-looking young man in pajamas. And Janet, after stirring uneasily for a moment, returned to a motionless slumber. The street noises had kept her, as well as Claude, awake until the small hours of the morning. Once asleep, however, she slept soundly and could defy Bedlam.
Seeing no prospect of petting or sympathy from this quarter, Claude nursed his anger to leviathan size. He paced the room like a madman, distributing a liberal supply of imprecations on everything and everybody as fast as the images raced into his thoughts. This proceeding relieved him of a part of his fury. The rest he sublimated in the act of tidying up the room.
He went at this task with breakneck speed. His method was to set chairs and tables in and out of place with vicious thumps; then to pile books, newspapers, brushes, combs, wearing apparel and the like into roughly classified heaps. He took special pains to pick up Janet’s scattered articles of underwear and to fling each one on top of the last with the force of an invective.
Under this steady percussion and repercussion, Janet finally woke up.
“What’s the matter?” she murmured drowsily, pushing the rebellious dark curls from her face.
Claude bombarded her with reproaches.
“The matter! The matter is that you have the nerves of a rhinoceros. I can’t sleep with the windows open, while you could sleep with them shut. But it means nothing to you that I haven’t slept a wink for seven nights running, just because you insist upon keeping the windows open.”
(Janet’s hands gestured: “Oh dear, another tempest in a teapot!”) She sat up in bed and, with her feet tucked under her and her hands folded over her knees, braced herself for the storm.
“I thought we agreed to compromise by changing off,” she said mildly. “The windows have only been kept open every other night.”
“Compromise! Compromise!” He sprang from his chair with a violent laugh. “How can oil and water compromise?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. I’m not a chemist. They don’t mix, but they may get along very amicably together side by side, for all I can tell. What difference does it make, anyway? The real trouble is that you’ve been made nervous and irritable by your father’s letters. If you’d only let us talk the whole matter over sensibly and in good humor—”
“My father’s letters have nothing to do with the case,” he cut in savagely. “The trouble is with your idiotic superstition that the sooty, dusty air from the street is more important than peace and quiet.”
“What is the use of saying the same thing over and over,” said Janet, with a touch of asperity in her clear, soft tones. “You are in a perfectly childish temper, Claude. If I were your wife I’d have to put up with it. As I don’t have to, I won’t.”
“My wife! If you were my wife, you wouldn’t dare to be so selfish, or to ignore my rights so shamelessly.”
“Luckily, I’m not your wife.”
“No, thank Heaven. It’s also lucky that you’re so well satisfied with your limitations and your sorry future. Like all the Barrs of Brooklyn, you may well glory in your irresponsibility. It’s all you have.”
“Oh, I have my freedom. I glory in that, too. If I were married to you, I dare say I should have to cringe and even ask your forgiveness. As it is, before this day is over, you will probably ask mine.”
“Don’t flatter yourself! I’m going for good. That’ll spike your prophecy.”
He began to dress posthaste in order to put time and space between his threat and its retraction.
Janet watched him through the long dark lashes of her half-closed gray eyes. He was spoilt, tyrannical, contemptible. Yet his energetic masculine beauty and the seductive ring of his voice still had power over her.
“Don’t imagine I can’t see through your game,” he flung out, recklessly scattering the heaps he had so painfully assembled, in a frenzied search for a necktie. “Your fine pretense of not wanting to marry me is a clever way of getting me to do it. Exceedingly, overwhelmingly clever! But it hasn’t fooled me. Not a bit! There are some things I don’t swallow.”
“Thank goodness. Perhaps you won’t swallow me then, though you seem on the point of doing so.”
She lay down again. Her averted face permitted only her dark curly head to show.
“I might have married you,” he shouted, brandishing the recovered necktie at the bed. “I might, if you hadn’t shown yourself in your true colors. Thank God, I found you out in time.”
“Yet you don’t seem a bit pleased.”
“You little serpent! Is there no escaping your sting?”
“A minute ago I was a rhinoceros, now I am a serpent. A pretty swift evolution, isn’t it? Of course, the ‘Descent of Woman’ would beat the ‘Descent of Man’ all hollow.”
And she turned her back upon him contemptuously. Stung by her disdain, he moderated his temper somewhat and said:
“It is the trick of women to put men subtly in the wrong. You fight, but you never fight in the open. You send us into a devil of a temper, and slyly perpetuate the quarrel until you can make capital out of our degraded condition. Patient Griseldas, martyred angels, persecuted saints! If only you’d drop the pose of injured innocence!”
This impassioned speech was really a bid for a truce. But Janet, her heart hardened, lay quite still, the back of her head expressing defiance.
The silence maddened him more than a flood of reproaches, and he continued dressing fortissimo. Finally, he reached for his hat, sending her, at the same time, a parting shot.
“Keep it up,” he said, “and you’ll be a past mistress in the art of demoralizing a man.”
He went out with a spectacular exhibition of bad manners.
Poor Claude! He did not feel entirely guiltless. But he was absolutely certain that the fault lay vastly more on her side than on his. In the breviary of love, he had pledged his soul to an eternity of devotion, but not his temper to a five minutes’ trial.
III
The door had scarcely been closed before Janet turned out of bed and began to put on her stockings. She got no further than the first one before she heard returning footsteps. Quick as a flash she resumed her former position in bed, so that when the door opened, her face was buried in the pillows and the back of her head was one obstinate, unconciliatory curve.
Claude had come back on the pretext of getting his walking stick, really in the hope of finding Janet penitent or at least willing to placate him. When he saw that all the advances would have to come from his side, he turned sharply on his heels and marched out, in his anger forgetting his cane.
Janet now waited until she was sure that he had gone in good earnest. Then she finished dressing, reflecting the while that for the third time within a week she was left quite alone. It was the discord that troubled her, not the solitude. Solitude had no terrors for her, although it had a drawback of a practical sort.
Namely, in the matter of the language. She was almost totally ignorant of French, her opportunities in Paris for acquiring the vernacular having been extremely few. She knew that Claude expected his absence to make a virtual prisoner of her. In fact, with this punishment in view, he had stayed away until late at night on the two occasions of their recent quarreling. And she did not doubt that he meant to punish her in the same manner again.
She went downstairs to breakfast full of pity for herself and of indignation against Claude.
Breakfast changed her mood completely. It occurred to her that Claude might feel the discord between them as keenly as she did, though he might not be as conscious of the reasons. This led her to feel sorry for him and to wonder whether she might not have been more conciliatory.
Her nature was so essentially sound that she was inclined to look on Claude’s outbursts of rage as symptoms of a mental disorder. She told herself that her equable temper gave her an immense advantage over him, an advantage she ought not to exploit too far.
It was Robert who had first made her conscious of the worth of her well-poised temperament, not to mention other good qualities which had seemed as inevitably her own as her two arms and two legs. Lately, since realizing what a surprisingly large number of people were ill-humored and bad tempered, she had begun to prize her even-mindedness for the rare gift it was.
Her self-esteem improving, her spirits followed suit. It was too fine a day to spend indoors. And, Claude or no Claude, she made up her mind to gratify a desire to wander through the fashionable shopping district.
She bethought herself of a pocket English-French dictionary, and a little “Colloquial French in Ten Lessons,” which she had picked up at Brentano’s in Paris. Thus equipped, she sallied out on an adventurous journey in the direction of the Hotel de Ville.
Her course from the Quartier Leopold to the Boulevard Anspach was intentionally zigzag. Walking leisurely and observing critically she was able to confirm or correct impressions of the capital gathered while riding with Claude in taxis or motor buses.
It struck her that Brussels was cleaner, wholesomer and more competently managed than either New York or Paris. Had the Bruxellois taken a leaf out of the book of Prussian efficiency or were they a more competently executive people?
Brussels was, of course, much smaller than Paris, less ostentatiously “grand” or “cosmopolitan.” Janet did not agree with the orthodox tourist opinion that the Belgian capital was merely a pocket edition of the Gallic. Brussels was lively without being chaotic, and picturesque without being dirty. Paris, on the other hand, was in some respects a very American city. Its Rue Royales, Champs Elysees, Faubourg St. Germains and other show sections were perhaps more numerous and certainly more beautiful than the corresponding show sections in New York. But apart from these picked quarters, Paris and New York had the same tawdry glitter, the same rag-bag dishevelment, the same noisy, neurotic people, the same morbid chase after pleasure.
These results of modern civilization seemed by no means entirely missing from Brussels, but they existed in a smaller degree, even in proportion to the city’s size. Life on the streets of Brussels still had an appearance of being orderly, sane. You could walk along the main thoroughfares without the sensation that you were steering your way through scurrying, erratic, homicidal pedestrians. In a crowd in New York or Paris you might well become a prey to the fear that Darwin was right, after all, and that the evolution of man was guided chiefly by the principle of chance, Nature being a sort of brute Junker force which imposed Kultur on the survivors.
With these reflections, Janet sailed along, and though remembrance of the quarrel with Claude gave her an occasional sinking feeling, this was but the ground swell after the storm.
IV
At the Grands Magasins de la Bourse, Janet experienced little difficulty in making several minor purchases. Not because she had memorized a score of colloquial questions and answers from her little book, “French Guaranteed in Ten Lessons.” For the questions and answers which she had conned so trippingly from the text were amazingly inapplicable to her needs. In the realm of trade or barter the phrases she needed always called for a subtly different twist from the high-flown phrases in the text-book. The book model advised her to say: “Sir (or Madam), have the kindness to direct me to the street by which one may proceed to the Rue Royale.” She actually wanted to say: “What’s a good short-cut to the Rue Royale?” But as to this racier version the text-book was mute.
These difficulties proved no insuperable barrier to Janet. A glance, an eloquent gesture, and a copious use of the phrase comme ça, bridged the worst gaps in the course of communication. Comme ça alone, used at the end of the index finger, so to speak, worked wonders. Single-handed, it was mightier than a whole battalion of text-book phrases. Yet Janet flattered herself that she could, at a pinch, have dispensed even with this omnipotent demonstrative. To be sure, she was far swifter at divining other people’s wishes than at getting her own wishes divined. Still, though she had a genius for the first process, she had at least a talent for the second.
“It would be strange,” she thought, “if a New Yorker could not talk inarticulately in more languages than one.”
The shop assistants met her attempts to communicate with them fully halfway. Their friendliness and courtesy in difficult situations astonished her. So did their efforts to comply with her precise wishes.
It was all very different from the American shop men and girls that she was accustomed to. A New York salesman, who slept in a hall room in the Bronx and lunched at Child’s, on a ham sandwich and tea or on griddle cakes and skimmed milk, was professionally guiltless of every effort save one, and that was an effort to convey to each customer a sense of the latter’s abysmal insignificance; also an intimation of his supreme good luck in being waited on by the most distinguished clerk in the metropolis.
Standing at a counter in New York, one might be excused for supposing that the salesman accepted the purchaser’s custom only as a grudging favor to the purchaser. Standing at a similar spot in Brussels, one might hope that the favor would be allowed to be the other way.
Perhaps the Brussels salesmen did not really feel favored. In view of the final disposition of the profits, they probably merely pretended to feel so. If this was the case, their pretense carried conviction, by virtue of the artistry of their politeness. Were there not, then, as many fictions in the life of New York as in the life of Brussels? Yes, but they were neither convincing fictions nor polite ones.
Artistry and politeness, Janet concluded, though they might be minor virtues, were not the minor virtues of an industrial republic.
Her last errand in the Grand Magasins was to buy Claude several pair of socks. The redoubtable comme ça, in a choice variety of modulations, did yeoman service in facilitating the selection of the correct color, quality, size.
She was sure Claude did not deserve the pains she was taking over him, particularly in view of his conduct that morning. But Janet’s indignation had failed to blot from her mind a picture of the night before at bedtime, when Claude had pathetically drawn attention to the spectacle of both his great toes protruding rudely from the tips of his socks. This picture of Claude walking about Brussels with protruding toes offended her sense of the fitness of things. And, as she did not believe that the fitness of things should be tempered with revenge, she made the necessary purchases without pluming herself on her magnanimity.
Parcels in hand, she came close to a section set apart by a low railing. A somewhat depressed looking woman in front of the railing was talking humbly to a magnificent young man behind it. From a sign which read Bureau d’Emploi, Janet guessed that this was the section in which applications for employment were received.
If only she knew the language well enough to apply for a position herself, what a lot of problems this would solve!
The magnificent young man, who was patently the absolute monarch of the section, looked disapprovingly at the somewhat slatternly applicant who was abasing herself before him. With an air as superb as his sartorial equipment, he concluded the interview. So Cophetua might have concluded an interview with an unavailable beggar maid.
The dismissed applicant was the picture of dejection as she walked past Janet, who pitied her from her soul.
Suddenly Cophetua saw Janet.
Was she a lady or was she a beggar maid? He reasoned that ladies rarely burden their arms with a load of parcels, nor were they in the habit of making lingering stops in front of a Bureau d’Emploi. On the other hand, the object of his speculation was young, supple, well dressed; her gray eyes glancing his way thrilled him as no salesgirl beggar-maid had ever thrilled him before.
Decidedly, if she was a beggar maid, she was a most uncommon one. Cophetua saw that she was still looking at him, not artfully, and yet not disinterestedly either. The problem was disconcerting and insoluble; the call of the blood was peremptory and imperious.
He resolved to chance it.
Unbending as much as so magnificent a young man could unbend, he called out to Janet in a most inviting tone.
Alas, she couldn’t understand a single word. All she could catch was the note of interrogation.
“Je ne comprends pas français—I’m sorry, but I don’t understand,” she informed him in polyglot. She wondered whether he could possibly be offering her employment, although she doubted this, for his glances were far from businesslike.
Again Cophetua spoke, more slowly. Yet on the same suave, interrogative note. He eyed her with immense favor. She understood his looks; and, as it was clearly not a case for the use of her pet comme ça, she lost all desire to understand his words.
Flushing and not quite knowing what to make of it all, she prepared to walk away, discretion seeming to be the better part of valor.
“Can I be of assistance?” said a gentleman who had suddenly stopped on his way past her.
She saw a short, robust, handsome man with an auburn beard and somewhat darker hair faintly tinged with gray. He took off his hat and bowed.
“I can speak a little English,” he said, fluently enough, though to Janet’s ears the accent sounded rather German.
Then he and Cophetua rapidly exchanged a few sentences in French. From the latter’s frigid manner, nothing was plainer than that he regarded the stranger’s mediation with extreme distaste.
“He merely wishes to know whether you are seeking a position,” said Janet’s self-appointed interpreter.
“How could I be? I don’t know a word of the language, as you can see,” she said, with one of her fascinating gestures.
This reply was duly conveyed to the chief of the employment bureau who, with a thousand daggers in his parting smile, withdrew majestically into his shell.
“It is impossible to know the reason for a mistake so deplorable,” said he of the auburn beard, apologizing for Cophetua.
He lifted his hat again, and made as if to go. But he did not go.
“Oh, I don’t mind a bit,” said Janet, laughing unaffectedly. “If only I knew French, I should like nothing better than to take some position or other.”
For a second, they looked into each other’s eyes with mutual approval. Then he said boldly:
“In that case—would you like to be—what do the English call it—tutor to my little girl?”
From Cophetua, looming in the background, came mesmeric waves of hostility. Sensing this, they walked away together. He gave her a card inscribed with the name of Anton St. Hilaire. He told her he was an Alsatian, a widower with one child of about fourteen years. His wife had died during his absence on service at the front. His daughter having sickened, he had been to Italy with her. Now he meant to make a long stay in Brussels in order to be near a famous specialist for children. Later he and Henriette would travel.
Henriette had a nurse who for many reasons was unsatisfactory. His wish had long been to place the child in charge of a cultivated woman who should be a friend to her rather than a mere attendant, and who should inspire him with entire confidence. After a few not very searching questions, he professed to have entire confidence in Janet. He waved aside as immaterial the objection in respect of Janet’s ignorance of French. She would pick up French as quickly as Henriette picked up English. Henriette had already had some English instruction; and Janet, for her part, had no doubt of her ability to manage the child as far as the linguistic difficulty went. Had she not proved up to the hilt her genius for making foreigners understand her when such was her desire?
“I could get along with a Choctaw,” she said to herself, exultantly.
They talked as they proceeded along the Boulevard Anspach. The long and the short of it was that Janet agreed to consider the offer. She promised to pay a visit next day to M. St. Hilaire’s apartments in order to meet Henriette. She would then make up her mind whether to take the position or not.
Upon this understanding the Alsatian left her.
Janet, all agog with her adventure, gave up shopping for the day.
The encounter appeared to her to be a godsend.
She liked M. St. Hilaire. If she also liked his daughter, if she and Henriette took to each other enough to make the proffered place attractive, she would be in a position to part company with Claude immediately.
As she had a strong conviction (backed by plenty of experience) that she could get along with any halfway tolerable human being, she considered the step as good as taken.
True, she anticipated a bad quarter of an hour in having it out with Claude. But what a jolly thing it was to be in possession of a powerful weapon like economic independence. It was the last argument against tyrants, in this case against Claude and the special set of circumstances that made her absolutely dependent upon him.
She wished she could be candid with Claude and tell him all about the Alsatian. But this was impossible. Claude’s capacity for candor was like some people’s capacity for alcohol. A little of it went to his head and made him quarrelsome.
She was not like that! She could stand being told any amount of truth (or so she flattered herself). This was why so many people made her their confidante. Having an illusion stripped away might give acute pain, but it never outraged her. Witness her disenchantment with the theory of free love. But Claude, in common with most people, was like the famous prisoner who had spent years in a dungeon and who, when released, was quite overpowered by the fresh air. An unusual supply of truth all but killed the average man.
In this matter, the only one she had ever met like herself was Robert Lloyd. How she had underestimated Robert! Worse, how she had underestimated the strength of her attachment to him! Her partnership with Claude, a partnership of infatuation, had been a weak thing. A breath had made it, and a breath had blown it away. But her partnership with Robert, a partnership of work and mutual interests, had been a bond of adamant. Time could not wither it nor custom stale its precious memory.
She had a passionate longing to write Robert and pour out her heart to him as in the old days of the firm of Barr & Lloyd.
But no. This would never do. In questions of sex, Robert was as fanatic as any average American business man. The scene on the East River pier came back to her vividly. There he had stood like a reincarnation of Cato the Elder (Cornelia’s nicknames certainly did hit the bull’s-eye at times!) lecturing her and saying:
“I sha’n’t have anything to do with free love or with a woman who has had a free lover.”
The remembrance caused a wave of bitter feeling to surge through her.
By this time she had reached the Place Rogier. There she took a bus to the office of the American Express Company in order to inquire for mail. The one letter handed to her had been forwarded from Paris. The superscription was in Cornelia’s handwriting, and Janet tore open the envelope without delay.