Chapter VII

Old M. Pigeonneau had more than once offered me the privilege of a walk in his company, but his invitation had hitherto, for one reason or another, always found me hampered. It befell, however, one afternoon that I saw him go forth for a vague airing with an unattended patience that attracted my sympathy. I hastily overtook him and passed my hand into his venerable arm, an overture that produced in the good old man so rejoicing a response that he at once proposed we should direct our steps to the English Garden: no scene less consecrated to social ease was worthy of our union. To the English Garden accordingly we went; it lay beyond the bridge and beside the lake. It was always pretty and now was really recreative; a band played furiously in the centre and a number of discreet listeners sat under the small trees on benches and little chairs or strolled beside the blue water. We joined the strollers, we observed our companions and conversed on obvious topics. Some of these last, of course, were the pretty women who graced the prospect and who, in the light of M. Pigeonneau’s comprehensive criticism, appeared surprisingly numerous. He seemed bent upon our making up our minds as to which might be prettiest, and this was an innocent game in which I consented to take a hand.

Suddenly my companion stopped, pressing my arm with the liveliest emotion. “La voilà, la voilà, the prettiest!” he quickly murmured; “coming toward us in a blue dress with the other.” It was at the other I was looking, for the other, to my surprise, was our interesting fellow pensioner, the daughter of the most systematic of mothers. M. Pigeonneau meanwhile had redoubled his transports—he had recognised Miss Ruck. “Oh la belle rencontre, nos aimables convives—the prettiest girl in the world in effect!” And then after we had greeted and joined the young ladies, who, like ourselves, were walking arm in arm and enjoying the scene, he addressed himself to the special object of his admiration, Mees Roque. “I was citing you with enthusiasm to my young friend here even before I had recognised you, mademoiselle.”

“I don’t believe in French compliments,” remarked Miss Sophy, who presented her back to the smiling old man.

“Are you and Miss Ruck walking alone?” I asked of her companion. “You had better accept M. Pigeonneau’s gallant protection, to say nothing of mine.”

Aurora Church had taken her hand from Miss Ruck’s arm; she inclined her head to the side and shone at me while her open parasol revolved on her shoulder. “Which is most improper—to walk alone or to walk with gentlemen that one picks up? I want to do what’s most improper.”

“What perversity,” I asked, “are you, with an ingenuity worthy of a better cause, trying to work out?”

“He thinks you can’t understand him when he talks like that,” said Miss Ruck. “But I _do_ understand you,” she flirted at me—“always!”

“So I’ve always ventured to hope, my dear Miss Ruck.”

“Well, if I didn’t it wouldn’t be much loss!” cried this young lady.

“Allons, en marche!” trumpeted M. Pigeonneau, all gallant urbanity and undiscouraged by her impertinence. “Let us make together the tour of the garden.” And he attached himself to Miss Ruck with a respectful elderly grace which treated her own lack even of the juvenile form of that attraction as some flower of alien modesty, and was ever sublimely conscious of a mission to place modesty at its ease. This ill-assorted couple walked in front, while Aurora Church and I strolled along together.

“I’m sure this is more improper,” said my companion; “this is delightfully improper. I don’t say that as a compliment to you,” she added. “I’d say it to any clinging man, no matter how stupid.”

“Oh I’m clinging enough,” I answered; “but I’m as stupid as you could wish, and this doesn’t seem to me wrong.”

“Not for you, no; only for me. There’s nothing that a man can do that’s wrong, is there? _En morale_, you know, I mean. Ah, yes, he can kill and steal; but I think there’s nothing else, is there?”

“Well, it’s a nice question. One doesn’t know how those things are taken till after one has done them. Then one’s enlightened.”

“And you mean you’ve never been enlightened? You make yourself out very good.”

“That’s better than making one’s self out very bad, as you do.”

“Ah,” she explained, “you don’t know the consequences of a false position.”

I was amused at her great formula. “What do you mean by yours being one?”

“Oh I mean everything. For instance, I’ve to pretend to be a jeune fille. I’m not a jeune fille; no American girl’s a jeune fille; an American girl’s an intelligent responsible creature. I’ve to pretend to be idiotically innocent, but I’m not in the least innocent.”

This, however, was easy to meet. “You don’t in the least pretend to be innocent; you pretend to be—what shall I call it?—uncannily wise.”

“That’s no pretence. I _am_ uncannily wise. You could call it nothing more true.”

I went along with her a little, rather thrilled by this finer freedom. “You’re essentially not an American girl.”

She almost stopped, looking at me; there came a flush to her cheek. “Voilà!” she said. “There’s my false position. I want to be an American girl, and I’ve been hideously deprived of that immense convenience, that beautiful resource.”

“Do you want me to tell you?” I pursued with interest. “It would be utterly impossible to an American girl—I mean unperverted, and that’s the whole point—to talk as you’re talking to me now.”

The expressive eagerness she showed for this was charming. “Please tell me then! How would she talk?”

“I can’t tell you all the things she’d say, but I think I can tell you most of the things she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t reason out her conduct as you seem to me to do.”

Aurora gave me the most flattering attention. “I see. She would be simpler. To do very simply things not at all simple—that’s the American girl!”

I greatly enjoyed our intellectual relation. “I don’t know whether you’re a French girl, or what you are, but, you know, I find you witty.”

“Ah, you mean I strike false notes!” she quite comically wailed. “See how my whole sense for such things has been ruined. False notes are just what I want to avoid. I wish you’d always tell me.”

The conversational union between Miss Ruck and her neighbour, in front of us, had evidently not borne fruit. Miss Ruck suddenly turned round to us with a question. “Don’t you want some ice-cream?”

“_She_ doesn’t strike false notes,” I declared.

We had come into view of a manner of pavilion or large kiosk, which served as a café and at which the delicacies generally procurable at such an establishment were dispensed. Miss Ruck pointed to the little green tables and chairs 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 Aurora; our companions were on the other side of the table.

My neighbour rejoiced to extravagance in our situation. “This is best of all—I never believed I should come to a café with two strange and possibly depraved men! Now you can’t persuade me this isn’t wrong.”

“To make it wrong,” I returned, “we ought to see your mother coming down that path.”

“Ah, my mother makes everything wrong,” she cried, 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’ll keep me very busy and people will think I’m 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 ear-shot and that Miss Ruck was much occupied with a large vanilla cream. “Because you’re always interlaced with that young lady. There’s no getting near you.”

Aurora watched her friend while the latter devoted herself to her ice. “You wonder, no doubt, why I should care for her at all. 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 her—your—everything but _my_—extraordinary country. Mamma has always tried to prevent my knowing anything about it, and I’m all the more devoured with curiosity. And then Miss Ruck’s so 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.”

“Ah, but our friend offers to take me there; she invites me to go back with her, to stay with her. You couldn’t do that, could you?” And my companion beautifully faced me on it. “Bon, a false note! I can see it by your face; you remind me of an outraged maître de piano.”

“You overdo the character—the poor American girl,” I said. “Are you going to stay with that delightful family?”

“I’ll go and stay with any one who will take me or ask me. It’s a real nostalgie. She says that in New York—in Thirty-Seventh Street near Fourth Avenue—I should have the most lovely time.”

“I’ve no doubt you’d enjoy it.”

“Absolute liberty to begin with.”

“It seems to me you’ve a certain liberty here,” I returned.

“Ah, _this_? Oh I shall pay for this. I shall be punished by mamma and lectured by Madame Galopin.”

“The wife of the pasteur?”

“His digne épouse. 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’ve heard it since I was six years old. Who’s Madame Galopin—who the devil thinks anything of her here? She’s nobody; she’s the dreariest of frumps; she’s perfectly third-rate. If I like your America better than mamma I also know my 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’re not so good as we and they know it—I’ll do them that justice—so that they wonder why we should care for them. When we’re 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’re foreigners. If I could tell you all the ugly stupid tenth-rate people I’ve 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 most impossible 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—I fear with an undissimulated start—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, whose high hat had never looked so high. She had evidently come in search of her daughter, and if she had commanded this gentleman’s attendance it had been on no more intimate ground than that of his unenvied paternity to her guilty child’s accomplice. My movement had given the alarm and my young friend and M. Pigeonneau got up; Miss Ruck alone didn’t, in the local phrase, derange herself. Mrs. Church, beneath her modest little bonnet, looked thoroughly resolute though not at all agitated; she came straight to her daughter, who received her with a smile, and then she took the rest of us in very fixedly and tranquilly and without bowing. I must do both these ladies the justice that neither of them made the least little “scene.”

“I’ve 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, on which she seemed somehow to shed at once the lurid light of the disreputable. “I was obliged to appeal to Mr. Ruck’s assistance. I was much perplexed. I thought a long time.”

“Well, Mrs. Church, I was glad to see you perplexed once in your life!” cried Mr. Ruck with friendly jocosity. “But you came pretty straight for all that. I had hard work to keep up with you.”

“We’ll take a cab, Aurora,” Mrs. Church went on without heeding this pleasantry—“a closed one; we’ll enter it at once. Come, ma fille.”

“Yes, dear mamma.” The girl had flushed for humiliation, but she carried it bravely off; and her grimace as she looked round at us all and her eyes met mine didn’t keep her, I thought, from being beautiful. “Good-bye. I’ve had a ripping time.”

“We mustn’t linger,” said her mother; “it’s five o’clock. We’re to dine, you know, with Madame Galopin.”

“I had quite forgotten,” Aurora declared. “That will be even more charming.”

“Do you want me to assist you to carry her back, ma’am?” asked Mr. Ruck.

Mrs. Church covered him for a little with her coldest contemplation. “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’d you like that, Sophy?”

“Well, I never!” gasped Sophy as Mrs. Church marched off with her daughter.