The Little French Girl
PART III
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
Fénélon—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.”