Lessons in the French Drama
The adorable Sara has been, she has seen, she has conquered. She has nearly done for Guffin.
Guffin is a pork butcher, and there is about as much romance in his nature as in that of Jay Gould. He prefers pigs to poetry, and knows much more about sausages than he does about Shakespeare.
Now, Mrs. Guffin is exactly the opposite. She is æsthetic, she is poetic, she is romantic—in fact, she has a Soul. So has her daughter, and the pair of them go languishing and sighing round the Guffin mansion with their Souls in a way that distracts Guffin, who has more liver than soul. That mansion is situate in a fashionable suburb, far from the prosaic pork-curing establishment where Guffin makes his money—so far, in fact, from business houses of any description that, as Guffin puts it, one has to take a street-car to get a ha’porth of salt. Of course, in this sacred locality all mention of Guffin’s trade is forbidden—Mrs. Guffin’s soul couldn’t stand it. The works of Hogg and Bacon find no place on the shelves of his library, the family never visit the theatre when Ham-let is on, and the fair young Guffin blighted the future of an ardent suitor, because he accidentally referred to the price of pig-iron, in which his father was interested. So there is a polite fiction kept up by the Guffins that Guffin, senior, is in a bank—a sort of director, and for the sake of peace that matter-of-fact pig-sticker has acquiesced in the social fraud. But he has declared he will do so no longer. His blood is up, and he has threatened to slaughter his future porcine victims in the front lawn, cure his bacon in the drawing-room, and decorate the mediæval porch of his country home with strings of sausages.
The ethereal Mlle. Bernhardt was the cause of it all. From the day her appearance at the leading theatre was announced, Guffin has been a martyr to the French dramatic enthusiasm of his feminine accessories. They engaged a tutor who had advertised his proficiency, grammatically and conversationally, in the language of the Gaul. For six weeks the Saxon tongue was unheard in the house, save when some of its most vigorous expletives would escape Guffin, or when Miss G. or Mrs. G. would get stuck in their French. The maid-of-all-work, cook, laundress, housemaid, and generally useful Molly became Marie. It was “Marie, donnez moi la curling-tongs,” or “Marie, avez vous such a thing as a hairpin about you?” the whole day long. Harry Snaffles, groom, stable-boy, gardener, and general help, was Henri, and he was beginning to get gray with such orders as—“Henri, mon garçon, harness le cheval noir, nous avons made up our mind to take a drive apres quatre heures et demi aujourd’hui.” And Harry would go into the stables and bury his head in the straw, and wonder why he was born.
But it wasn’t till after they had seen the shadowy artiste in “La Dame aux Camellias” that the explosion came. They returned home enraptured. Guffin hadn’t been with them. He said he’d been getting enough of French at home for nothing, and he wasn’t going to pay for it. But they told him she was too utterly utter, and the gushing Miss G. showed him how Marguerite interviewed her intended father-in-law, while the Matron Guffin gave an imitation of Sara B. dying of consumption. The latter performance was a failure, however. Mrs. Guffin is fat, she is ponderous, she is florid. Guffin, when he is facetious, says it would be a good investment to let her out in lots. She has a face you could dwell on actually as well as figuratively, and the most lively flea must find it a weary journey from her yard of placid forehead to the foot and a half of solid humanity she calls her chin. She has a neck that Guffin can only fling his arms round once a week, taking a note each day of the point where he leaves off. She has a chest and shoulders you could pitch a tent on.
Once a month the stairs leading to her boudoir have to be repaired, and when a woman like that goes in for acting the consumptive, the result is disappointing.
But she did; so did Miss G., and the next day one or other of them might be encountered about the house gasping and sighing and murmuring very much broken French, and practising faints and back-falls and death-scenes. When Guffin came home the dinner was spoiled; Miss G. was leaning against the banisters of the stairs, one hand pressed against her beating heart, the other scratching her left ear, and her eyes turned upward towards the ceiling in an expression meant to convey unutterable anguish, but which really suggested she was learning to squint; while Mrs. G. awaited her smaller half in the dining-room on the only seat that could accommodate her—the sofa, and looked as consumptive and woe-begone as a woman of her weight possibly could. Guffin had just heard of a failure in the curing trade which touched him, and he was in a morose humor. So when his daughter dragged herself wearily to the table and helped herself with a groan to the potatoes, and when his wife, heaving a monstrous sigh, cut herself a pound and a half or so off the joint, and supplied Guffin with half an ounce or less, he broke into rebellion.
“Look here,” he said, “what are you grunting and groaning about, like a pig in a nightmare?”
“Pig!” shrieked his wife.
“Oh, mon Dieu!” sobbed his daughter.
“Yes, pig,” retaliated Guffin; “it’s a noble animal. You’d neither of you have a shift to your backs if it wasn’t for pigs.”
“You are a brute!” cried Mrs. G. “I shall leave the house this instant. Julia, order the carriage.”
Julia rang the bell with an expression of approaching insanity. The girl responded with an alacrity suggestive of a key-hole performance.
“Marie,” said Julia, “Henri.”
“Well, if you’re hungry,” snarled Guffin, “sit down and eat. What’s Molly got to do with it? Perhaps you don’t like the mutton. Will you have a rasher?”
“Monster, unfeeling monster!” screamed mater-familias. “Let us haste, Julia, to quit this abode of—of—this abode of—this maison du diable, there!” she ejaculated, flinging a parting shot in French at the brutal Guffin.
“You needn’t mind,” said Guffin. “I’m going out myself. Hope you’ll be in your senses when I come back. Get me my hat.”
“Marie,” called Julia from the head of the stairs, “voulez vous bring up la chapeau de mon pere.”
“You needn’t mind a chop or a pair,” retorted Guffin. “I want my hat. And now, Mrs. G., let me tell you one thing. I’ve had enough of your French capers. You’re turning my house into a gibberishing Bedlam. You’ve upset me so much with your d——d rubbishy parley-vooing and moping round that I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to stick a pig with a cheerful heart again. I won’t have it. It’ll drive me mad. Hang it, if you don’t drop this cursed nonsense, I’ll let all the neighbors know what I am. I’ll hang my signboard out of the drawing-room window, I’ll put on a blue apron and my skewer and knife, and I’ll stand on the front door-step all day. D——n me, if I won’t buy all the pigs at the next Smithfield market and anchor them out in the front garden, and I’ll begin killing them the same night, and if their squealing don’t let folks know what I am, I’ll send circulars and samples of bacon to every house for two miles around.”
There was a pause for a few brief moments, and then forgetting their French and their consumption and their æsthetic delicacy, mother and child flung themselves upon the luckless pork purveyor, and they helped themselves to his hair and tore his clothes, and tried to gouge his eyes out, and bit his ears, and finally flung him on the carpet, where the elephantine maternal Guffin sat on him for five minutes. How he survived this crushing operation is a miracle; but he lives still, though he is so flat that he can slide under a door, and only he took the precaution of changing his brown suit, his shop-boy would frequently put him up for a shutter.