don’t waste your pity upon me,” wrote old mr. chetwynd to his son raine, an oxford don. “this is not the euxine, and even if it were, there would be compensation.
i have fallen in love in my old age. she is a little brown-haired, brown-eyed, fresh-coloured english girl, who has come lately to sit by me at table. owing to her, a change has come o’er the spirit of my meals.
i say and do all kinds of foolish things. i caught myself yesterday brushing my coat before coming down to dinner. i shall be wearing a flower in my buttonhole before long. i am already supplied with bouquets.
“my young lady’s ignorance is fascinating; it forms a bond between us. the oxford young ladies, who will tell you of their charming talk with the dear professor, little know what wicked satirical thoughts they have left behind in the dear professor’s breast. but this one actually does not want to teach me anything. think of it! she is homeric. i told her she reminded me of nausicaa. instead of taking the allusion as a text to preach the newest theories of female education, she asked me sweetly who nausicaa was. it is wonderful! in brief, my dear raine, if you value the place you hold in your poor old daddy’s heart, you must pay me your promised visit with the utmost celerity.”
he was a striking figure in the pension, this old scholar, whose heart felicia had won. all the ladies knew that he was a professor, wonderfully learned, and that he was writing a learned book, in which pursuit he spent half his days among the musty manuscripts in the geneva university library. in consequence, they looked upon him with a certain awe. they saw very little of him, except at meals, and then only those who were within easy conversational distance profited much by his society. now and then, on rare occasions, he came into the salon after dinner, where he would take a hand at piquet with mme. popea, whose conspicuously best behaviour on these occasions was a subject of satirical pleasure to the others. but as a general rule he retired to his own room and his private avocations.
as a matter of fact, he was an oxford scholar of considerable repute, honoured and welcomed in every common room. in his middle age he had filled a professorial chair in a scotch university, which after some years he had resigned for reasons of climate and failing health. at present he was engaged on critical work dealing with the swiss reformers, and involving accurate documentary research. he had already spent the latter part of the summer at zürich, examining the zwinglius mss., and now he was busy with the calvinistic treasures of geneva. how long his task would last would depend upon his rate of progress. but as he had let his small house in oxford for a year, and as the quiet of the pension boccard suited him, he had decided upon staying at geneva for a considerable time.
a strange anomaly, with his learning and industry, in the midst of the heterogeneous feminine idleness of the pension. in a vague way all the women felt it. his appearance, too, was strikingly suggestive of a personality inaccessible to the trivialities round which their own souls centred. once a strong, thick-set man, he retained at seventy-two, great breadth of bent shoulders. his hair, scanty at the top and long, was still black, as were his heavy eyebrows, beneath which gleamed lustrous black eyes. the sombre depth of the latter and the deep furrowings on; his dark, square face gave it, in moments of repose, a stern expression but when a smile or the play of fancy or interest lit it up, it was like the sunshine breaking upon a granite scaur. the very magic of the change had in it something eerie, incomprehensible. and a rare tenderness could sometimes well from the heart into the eyes, making the old face beautiful; but that was not displayed for the benefit of the ladies of the pension.
the fresh instincts of the young girl, however, divined the underlying tenderness and brought it to the surface. it was a natural intimacy, which cheered both lives. the old scholar’s genial humour, delicate, playful fancy, evoked in felicia spontaneity of merry thought and speech. the meals, which once had been such ordeals, when eaten under the whirlwind of mme. boccard’s half-intelligible platitudes, became invested with a rare charm. instead of sitting shy and silent, she laughed and jested with the inconsequence of twenty. the change was so marked, that one day, when a mock quarrel arose between the old man and herself, over the exact halving of a pear, mme. popea elevated surprised eyebrows, and nudged frau schultz her neighbour.
“voilà bien les femmes! a man—a mummy will suffice—but let it be masculine!”
“and the men, they are all the same,” said frau schultz, in her thick south german. “give them a pretty face, and no matter how old, they are on fire.”
frau schultz applied herself again seriously to her meal, whilst madame popea repeated her own observation to madame boccard, who laughed, and prophesied a wedding in the pension. but as all this was whispered, it did not reach the ears of the parties concerned, at the other end of the table.
mrs. stapleton listened amusedly to the light talk between mr. chetwynd and felicia, though with a certain surprise and wistfulness. charming and courteous as the old man was when the mood for conversation was on him, she had never been able to open in him that light playful vein. what frau schultz had expressed coarsely, katherine, with a finer nature, felt delicately. it was felicia’s fresh maidenhood that had instinctively gladdened the old man—a possession she herself had lost for ever, with which she could gladden no man’s heart. she looked across the table and smiled at her own thought. what did it matter, after all? she had had the roses and lilies in her time, and they had not brought her any great happiness. her life had been lived. still, a woman of thirty mourns her lost youth—all the more if it has been a failure—just as an older woman mourns the death of a scrapegrace son. and though katherine smiled at herself, she wished for some of it back, even to charm such an old, old man as mr. chetwynd. there will ever be much that is feminine in woman.
“you haye made a conquest,” she said soon afterwards to felicia.
“haven’t i?” laughed the girl. “he is so sweet. do you know, i think sweet people, when they grow very, very old, become quite young again.”
“or, in this case, more accurately, isn’t it that extremes touch?”
“do you think i am so very young?” asked felicia, seizing the objective. “i am twenty.”
“happy girl,” said katherine, smiling. “but what i meant was, that if you were thirty and he was fifty, you probably would have fewer points of contact.”
“or, if i were ten and he were eighty, we would play together like kittens,” said felicia, with girlish irreverence. “well, it doesn’t matter. he is the dearest old man in the world, and it was very nice of you to arrange for me to sit next to him.”
“it seems to have brightened you, felicia.”
“oh, yes, wonderfully. i was getting so bored and dull and miserable. it is not very gay now, but i have something to look forward to every day. and your letting me talk to you has made a great difference.”
“i am afraid i am not very entertaining,” said katherine.
“sometimes you are so sad,” said felicia, sympathetically. “i wish i could help you.”
“i am afraid you would have to upheave the universe, my dear.”
felicia looked at her with such wonderful gravity in her brown eyes that katherine broke into a laugh.
“well, you can do it gradually. begin with my work-basket, will you? and find me a spool of no. 100 thread.”
without overstepping the bounds of kindly friendship, they saw much of each other. an imperceptible shadow of reserve in katherine’s manner, a certain variability of mood, a vein of hardness in her nature ever liable to be exposed by a chance thought, checked in the young girl the impulses of a more generous affection. katherine was conscious of this; conscious, too, of no efforts to win more from the girl. now and then she sounded a note of explanation.
once they were talking of the pension’s dreariness—an endless topic. it happened that felicia was disposed to take a cheerful view.
“every cloud has a silver lining,” she said.
“by way of heightening its blackness, my dear,” said katherine. “besides, the lining is turned to heaven and the blackness to earth, so it does not help us much.”
“oh, why are you so bitter?”
“bitter?” echoed katherine, musingly. “oh, no! i am not, really. but perhaps it were better that you should think so.”
but for all her refusal to admit felicia any deeper into her heart, katherine welcomed her companionship frankly. she had looked forward almost shudderingly to the dreary isolation of the winter. whom could she choose as a companion, to exchange a thought with beyond those of ordinary civility? by a process of elimination she had arrived at little miss bunter, with her canaries, her family herald and modern society, her mild spinsterish chit-chat. it was a depressing prospect; but felicia had saved her. her society relieved the monotony of those terrible dreary, idle days, took her out of herself, stilled for a few odd hours the yearnings for a bright full life—yearnings all the more inwardly gnawing by reason of the ever exerted strain to check their outward expression.
she was standing before her glass one morning brushing her hair. she had shaken it back loose; it was fair, long, and thick, and she had taken up the brush languidly. she was not feeling well. frau schultz had unsuccessfully tried to provoke a quarrel the night before; a little graceful experiment in philanthropy that had engaged her attention of late had ignominiously failed; the rain was pouring in torrents outside; the day contained no hope; a crushing sense of the futility of things came over her like a pall. she had roused herself, given her hair a determined shake, and commenced to brush vigorously, looking at herself sideways in the glass. but a weak pity for the weary, delicate face she saw there filled her eyes with tears. her arm seemed heavy and tired. she dropped the brush and sank down on a chair, and spreading her arms on the toilet-table, buried her face in them.
“oh i can’t, i can’t!” she cried, with a kind of moan. “what is the good? why should i get up day after day and go through this weariness? oh, my god! what a life! some day it will drive me mad! i wish i were dead.”
the sobs came and shook her shoulders, hidden by the spreading mass of hair. she could not help the pity for herself.
suddenly there was a knock at the door. she sprang to her feet, glanced hurriedly at the glass, and touched her face quickly with the powder-puff. in a moment she had recovered.
felicia entered in response to her acknowledgment of the knock. she had been out in the rain; her cheeks were glowing above the turned-up collar of her jacket.
“oh, you are only just dressing. i have been up and about for ages. see, i have brought you some flowers. where shall i put them?”
katherine felt gladdened by the little act of kindness. she thanked felicia, and went about the room collecting a few vases.
“arrange them for me, dear, whilst i finish my hair.”
she returned to the looking-glass, and felicia remained by the table busy with the flowers.
“i went as far as the library with mr. chetwynd,” said felicia. “i told him he ought not to go out to-day, but he would go. when ‘raine,’ as he calls him, comes, i shall have to talk to him seriously about his father.”
“the son has definitely settled to come, then?” asked katherine, with a hair-pin between her lips.
“oh, yes. mr. chetwynd can talk of nothing else. he will be here quite soon.”
“it will be a good thing,” said katherine.
“yes; it will do the dear old man good.”
ordinarily katherine would have smiled at the ingenuousness of the reply; but this morning her nerves were unstrung.
“i wasn’t thinking of him. i was thinking of ourselves—us women.”
“i wonder what he’ll be like,” said felicia.
“what does it matter? he will be a man.”
“oh, it does matter. if he is not nice—”
“my dear child,” said katherine, wheeling round, “it does not signify whether he has the face of an ogre and the manners of a bear. he will be a man; and it is a man that we want among us!”
the girl shrank away. to look upon mankind as necessary elements in life had never before occurred to her. she would have been quite as excited if a nice girl had been expected at the pension.
“but surely—” she stammered.
katherine divined her thought; but she was too much under the power of her mood to laugh it away.
“no!” she cried, with a scorn that she felt to be unjust—and that very consciousness made her accent more passionate.
“we don’t want a man to come so that one of us can marry him by force! god forbid! most of us have had enough of marrying and giving in marriage. heaven help me, i am not as bad as that yet, to throw myself into the arms of the first man who came, so that he could carry me away from this aceldama. but we want a man here to make us feel ashamed of the meannesses and pettinesses that we women display before each other, and to make us hide them, and appear before each other as creatures to respect. women are the lesser race; we cannot exist by ourselves; we become flaccid and backboneless and small—oh, so small and feeble! i get to despise my sex, to think there is nothing, nothing in us; no reserve of strength, nothing but a mass of nerves and soft, flabby flesh. oh, my dear child, you don’t know it yet—let us hope you never will know it—this craving for a man, the self-contempt of it, to crave for nothing more but just to touch the hem of his garment to work the miracle of restoring you to the dignity of your womanhood. ah!”
she waved her arms in a passionate gesture and walked about the room with clenched hands. felicia arranged the flowers mechanically. these things were new to her philosophy. she felt troubled by them, but she kept silent. katherine continued her parable, the pent-up disgusts and wearinesses of months finding vehement expression.
“yes, a man, a man. it is good that he is coming. a being without jangling nerves, and with a fresh, broad mind that only sees things in bulk and does not dissect the infinitely little. he will come here like a sea breeze. it is a physical need among us, a man’s presence now and then, with his heavy frame and deep voice and resonant laugh, his strength, his rough ways, his heavy tread, his great hands. ah! you are young; you think i am telling you dreadful things; you may never know it. it is only women who live alone that can know what it is to yearn to have a man’s strong arm, brother or father or husband, to close round you as you cry your poor weak woman’s heart out, and the more humble, self-abasing longing, just to long for a man’s voice. what does it matter what the man is like?”
there was a few moments’ silence. katherine went on with her dressing. the words had relieved her heart, yet she felt ashamed at having spoken so bitterly before the young girl. maxime debetur—. she thought of the maxim and bit her lip. but was she not young too? were they so far apart in age that they could not meet on common grounds? she looked in the glass. her charm had not yet gone. yet she wished she had not spoken.
felicia finished arranging the flowers, and disposed the four little vases about the room. then she went up to katherine and put her arm round her waist.
“i am sorry.”
it was all the girl could say, but it made katherine turn and kiss her cheek.
“i expect mr. chetwynd is going to be very nice if he is anything like his father,” she said in her natural tones. “forgive me for having been disagreeable. i woke up like it. sometimes this pension gets on one’s nerves.”
“it is frightfully dull,” assented felicia. “but you are the busiest of anybody. you are always working or reading or going out to nurse poor sick people. i wish i did anything half as useful.5’
“well, you have made me more cheerful than i was, if that is anything,” replied katherine.
a little later the old man announced to her the speedy arrival of his son raine. katherine listened, made a few polite inquiries, learned the functions of a college tutor, and the difference between a lecturer and a professor.
“he is a great big fellow,” said the old man. “he would make about ten of me. so don’t expect to see a thin, doubled up, elderly young man in spectacles!”
“is your son married?” asked fraulein klinkhardt, who sat next to felicia.
she was a fair, florid woman of over thirty, with strongly hewn features and predisposition for bold effects of attire. the old man, who did not like her, said that her hats were immoral. a glint of gold on one of her front teeth gave a peculiar effect, in the way of suggestion, to her speech.
“he has never told me,” said the old man, with his most courtly smile.
“you will see, she will try to marry him when he comes,” whispered frau schultz to mme. boccard.
but fraulein klinkhardt laughed at the old man’s reply.
“that is a pity, for married men—whom one knows to be married—are always more agreeable.”
“and women, too,” said mme. popea with a little grimace of satisfaction.
“a bachelor is generally more chivalrous,” said miss bunter, who always took things seriously. “he acts more in accordance with his ideals of women.”
“is saul also among the prophets?” asked katherine with a smile, “miss bunter among the cynics?”
“oh, dear! i hope not,” replied miss bunter in alarm; “i did not mean that, but a bachelor always seems more romantic. what do you think, miss graves?”
“i don’t know,” said felicia, laughing;
“i like all men when they are nice, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference whether they are married or not. perhaps it may with very young men,” she added reflectively. “but then very young men are different. for instance, all the young subs in my uncle’s regiment; it would seem as ridiculous to call them bachelors as to call me a spinster.”
“but you are a spinster, miss graves,” said miss bunter, mildly platitudinous.
“oh, please!—” laughed felicia. “a spinster is—” she paused in some confusion, “an old maid,” she was going to add, but she remembered it might be a tender point with miss bunter. frau schultz, however, struck in with her harsh voice,—
“at what age does a woman begin to be a spinster, miss graves?”
frau schultz’s perverted sense of tact was of the quality of genius. old mr. chetwynd came to the rescue of the maiden ladies.
“in england, when their first banns of marriage are published,” he said.
mme. boccard turned to mme. popea to have the reply translated into french. then she explained it volubly to the table.
the question at issue, the relative merits of bachelors and married men, was never beaten out; for at this juncture, the meal being over, old mr. chetwynd rose, turned, and hobbled out’ of the room, taking felicia with him.
an hour later katherine was picking her way through the mud up the long unsightly street in the old part of the town that leads to the hotel de ville. at the ill-kept gateway of a great decayed house, she stopped, and entering, descended the steps at a side doorway beneath to a room on the basement, whose lunette window was on a level with the roadway. a very old woman opened the door to her knock, and welcomed her with an—
“ah, madame! c’est encore vous!” and led her in with many expressions of delight.
it was a poor, squalid enough room, very dark, ill-kept, littered with cooking utensils, cookery, and strange articles of clothing. an old man lay in the great wooden bedstead, his face barely visible in the dim light which was further obscured by the dingy white curtains running on a rope, fixed over the bed.
“jean-marie.” cried the old woman, “here is madame come to read to you. will madame give herself the trouble to sit down? my daughter has not come in yet, so the room is still unmade.”
the old man raised himself on his elbow and grinned at katherine.
“one would say it was an angel when madame comes.”
the old woman broke out again in welcome. it was so good of madame to come. jean-marie could do nothing but talk of her. really jean-marie was right, and she was an angel.
katherine took the venerable wooden armchair that was placed for her near the stove, accepted graciously the pillow that the old woman took from the bed to make her more comfortable, and after a few minutes’ gossip opened the book she had brought with her and began to read. the old man turned so that he could fix his eyes upon her. his old wife sat on a straight-backed chair at the foot of the bed and listened in deep attention. katherine read on amid a rapt silence, only broken now and then by an “oh, la! la!” muttered under the breath, at which she could scarcely repress a smile. she was happier now. her best, kindest, tenderest self only was shown to this poor, broken-down old couple who seemed to worship her.
there was a humour blended with pathos, too, in the situation that appealed to her. for the book in which their whole souls were concentrated was a french translation of “robinson crusoe.”
