One Woman's Life Part 27

It was the season of that famous Brittany festival, so Baedeker said, and they had seen some evidences of it in the little villages through which they had pa.s.sed. Did Milly know of a good one? The Gilberts were as aesthetically lazy as they were weak in French, and of course quite helpless in Brittany, whose peasants seemed to them dirty baboons with a monkey language. Milly quickly recalled that some of the artists had been talking of the famous _Pardon_ at Poldau, a little fisher-settlement at the extreme tip of the western coast, where the costumes were said to be peculiarly rich and quaint. She had wanted to visit it with Jack, but he had become so much absorbed in his new picture that they had given up the idea. And there was Baby--she did not like to leave her.

"Yvonne will do all right," her husband urged. "Better take the chance--I'll look after Virgie."

So after much encouragement, though with misgivings, Milly consented to accompany the Gilberts in their car for a couple of days and show them the glories of the Brittany countryside.

"I owe Nettie so much," she explained privately to her husband, by way of apology. "I can't very well refuse--and they are so helpless, poor dears!"

"You'll have a bully time," he replied encouragingly. "Don't worry about anything. I'll watch Yvonne like a cat."

"And telegraph me instantly if anything goes wrong."

"Of course.... Don't hurry back if they should want you to go farther.

It'll be good for you."

"Oh, not more than two days--I couldn't."

She did not give a thought to the Russian woman, or to anything but the baby. (Afterwards she became convinced that the whole plan had been arranged with skilful prescience by the wicked Baroness in order that she might have the artist to herself these few days....)

The departure in the freshness of the August morning was a great event.

Every one in the hotel, including the _patron_ in his cook's white costume, the _patronne_, the grinning ape of a waiter, all the artists, and half the village gathered to watch the motor get under way. The lumbering ark of a car was laden with bags and trunks and bundles, for the Americans meant to be comfortable. Then Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert, their natural amplitude swollen by their dust-coats, goggles, and veils, mounted with stately complacency to their respective seats, and Milly tucked herself into a corner. Then the ratlike French chauffeur attempted to crank the engine, and perspiring, red in the face, spluttering with oaths, made many desperate efforts to arouse his monster. There were sympathetic murmurs from the audience. "Now he's got her--ah--oh--no! Hang to it Pierrot, etc." Finally Pierre exploded in a tragic _tirade_ to his employer, who sat stolidly through all the rumpus, merely asking at the end, "What's he saying, Milly?"

"He can do nothing with the cursed beast," Milly abridged.

"That's evident," Gilbert remarked with cynical satisfaction.

"He thinks it's the water; he warned you not to come down here."

It seemed as if Milly's little trip was not to come off, after all, when Bragdon, who had picked up some knowledge of the new machines in his earlier singlestate, tipped up the hood and dove for the carburetor.

After a time he signalled to the Hawaiian to work the crank, and then with a whir, a rumble, at last a clear bellow, the monster responded, trembled, turned its snout up the narrow road, and disappeared. Milly threw a kiss to her husband, who waved his hat in answer. He had saved the day, and she was proud of him.

They had a wonderful time, in spite of Pierre and his balky car, bowling along the winding, leafy roads not far from the sea, through little gray stone villages whose inhabitants turned out _en ma.s.se_, including children and animals, to witness their stately progress of ten miles an hour. They got stuck once in a ford and had to be fished out with three yoke of cream-colored bulls and a long s.h.i.+p's rope. That was about noon, and they decided to lunch at the next inn, though it did not look inviting. However, Milly's French coaxed a tolerable meal from the fat housewife whom they discovered cleaning fish in the kitchen, and even the stodgy Roy mellowed under the influence of fresh fish and a drinkable bottle of wine which he and Milly discovered somewhere.

That evening, without further mishap, they rumbled into the hamlet of Poldau. For the last hour they had seen signs of the coming _fete_. All the natives, arrayed in their best clothes, were drifting westward to the rocky cape, where, perched on a lonely cliff, was the tiny chapel, "Our Lady of the Guard," which was the scene of the _Pardon_ on the morrow. Before they entered Poldau night had fallen, and the long yellow beams from the powerful _Phare_ glanced out across the sullen waters and the level land. It was beneath this lofty lighthouse they slept, in a clean, bare little inn. Milly, lying in her cus.h.i.+ony bed, could hear the waves grumbling around the rocks, and watch the sweep of that golden beam of light,--speaking to the distant pa.s.sers-by upon the Atlantic, warning them of the dangers of this treacherous coast....

It was the first time she had been separated from her family, and she lay awake long hours, restless and sleepless, wondering whether Yvonne would remember to pull up the extra blanket over Virginia before the early morning dampness. And she thought about her husband, fleetingly, contrasting him with Roy Gilbert, who seemed to have grown heavier in mind as well as in person these last years. Roy was surely what the artists called _bourgeois_, but she liked him--he was so kind and good to Nettie. She felt at home, getting back to the familiar _bourgeois_ atmosphere of the Gilberts, where life was made easy and comfortable, and you knew every idea any one would advance before the words were half spoken....

Milly was wakened before dawn by the sound of a drunken quarrel beneath her window. Some Breton evidently had begun to celebrate the _Pardon_ too soon; a shrill woman's voice broke the silence with unintelligible reproaches. There was the sound of blows, of cras.h.i.+ng gla.s.s, a scuffle, sobs,--then silence, broken now and again by fresh sobs. Ah, those men,--men!... The lamp in the _Phare_ went out: it was dawn. Milly fell into a broken sleep.

The _Pardon_ itself, they all agreed, was wonderfully impressive and picturesque, as Baedeker had promised. The little chapel on the cliffs was stuffed with kneeling women in their stiff, starched coifs and heavy velvet-trimmed skirts. The men, slinking up sheepishly, as always to religious ceremonies, fell on their knees on the rocky ground all about the chapel when the priests advanced with the sacred emblems, and prayed vigorously with tight-closed eyes. The strangers, under the guidance of the chauffeur, who maintained a supercilious disdain for these "stupid Brittany pigs," took their position at the apex of the cliff, where they could see everything to advantage. The Gilbert girl kodaked the kneeling throng, which distressed Milly; she thought the people might resent it, but they paid no attention to the Americans.

Her own eyes were filled with unaccountable tears. The symbols of the Catholic religion always affected her in this way; while Nettie Gilbert stared rather disapprovingly at the superst.i.tious ceremony. In spite of its quaint mediaevalism, it seemed to Milly quite human,--the gathering together of suffering, sinning human beings around the gray chapel on the storm-beaten coast--"Our Lady of the Guard"--their prayers, the absolution granted by the robed priests, and the going forth to another year of trials and temptations, efforts and sins.... Just below the chapel, withdrawn only a few feet from the religious ceremony, was a cl.u.s.ter of tents, sheltering hurdy-gurdys, merry-go-rounds, cook-shops, and cider--plenty of cider. A few indifferent males, bedecked in their short coats brightly trimmed with yellow braid, were already feasting, even while the host was being elevated above the kneeling throng. But most of the people, with reverently bent heads and murmuring lips, received the sacrament, kneeling around the gray chapel. It was solemn and moving, Milly thought, and she wished that Jack might have had the experience....

"Baedeker says," Roy Gilbert p.r.o.nounced in her ear, in the midst of the ceremony, "that there must be Spanish blood among these people because their costumes show Spanish designs.... They all look like Irish or monkeys to me."

Milly smiled responsively to him.

"The costumes are lovely, aren't they?"

The crowd of women wors.h.i.+ppers had burst forth from the chapel: there was a swarm of white and black figures over the rocky headland. The faces beneath the broad white caps did not seem to Milly monkeylike.

They were weather-beaten and bronzed like their coast, but eager and smiling, and some of the younger ones quite bonny and sweet. And the young men sidled up to the young women here as elsewhere in the world.

Milly was full of the spirit of forgiveness that the ceremony had taught: men and women must mutually forgive and strive to do better. She said this to Nettie Gilbert, who seemed only moderately impressed with the semi-pagan scene.

They went down the hill to the booths, which were already thronged with a noisy crowd of eating and drinking peasants, and straightway became too evil-smelling for the Americans.

"If the ladies like this barbaric show," the chauffeur confided to Gilbert, "there is an even larger one to be seen a day's run farther north on the coast at the celebrated shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre."

So they went on that afternoon to "the other show," as Gilbert expressed it. Milly's doubts were quickly overborne: they must have her longer now that she was with them; she could return any time if necessary by rail; they would telegraph that evening, etc. And they set forth hopefully again in search of the picturesque. The larger _pardon_ proved disappointing, less religious and characteristic, more like a country fair. The next afternoon they meant to return to Klerac, in time for dinner, but the car balked and finally gave out altogether. All Pierre's ingenuity, as well as his heartfelt curses, availed nothing, and they had to abandon it. They drove to the nearest railroad station, which proved to be many kilometres distant, and waited there half a day for a train.

Milly left the Gilberts at Morlaix. They were bound for Paris, and judging from Roy Gilbert's remarks they would shortly be on their way back to America and "some decent living." Four months of Europe and strange beds was all he could endure at a stretch. Milly laughed at his complaints. The way the rich spent their money had always seemed to her a little stupid. If she and Jack had the Gilberts' money! She mused of all the exciting freedom they could get out of it, while the little one-horse trap she had hired at the station rattled her over the hard road towards Klerac.

She had enjoyed her trip greatly, yet after the five days' absence she was eager to get back and see her child. She even looked forward to the noisy Hotel du Pa.s.sage, with its cluttered table of talkative artists and her own two small rooms. As she had said to Nettie Gilbert, "I'm something of a cat and like my own garret best," even if it were a traveller's garret. And though she had liked being with the Gilberts, going over old Chicago times with Nettie, and had enjoyed the car and the luxurious, easy way of travelling, she suspected that long contact with these good people would be boresome. They were so persistently occupied with how they should sleep and eat, with all their mult.i.tudinous contrivances for comfort, with fear of the dust or of getting tired, that they had little energy for other things. She decided that the Gilbert sort made a fetich of comfort and missed most of the landscape of life in their excessive attention to the roadbed. Perhaps that was what clever folk meant by being _bourgeois_. If so, she hoped that she should never be _bourgeois_ to the extent the Gilberts were.

Thus Milly, in a properly contented frame of mind, urged the peasant lad to whip up his lazy pony and get her more quickly home to her family.

X

THE PAINTED FACE

There was a midsummer silence about the hotel in the early afternoon when Milly arrived. Yvonne, so the _patronne_ informed her, had taken the baby to the dunes, and thither Milly, without stopping to change her dusty dress, set out to find her. She descried her little Brittany maid on the sands safely above tide-water, and by her side a small white bundle that made Milly's heart beat faster.

Virginia received her returned mother with disappointing indifference, more concerned for the moment in the depth of the excavation into the sand which her nurse was making for her benefit. Milly covered her with kisses, nevertheless, while Yvonne explained that all had gone well, "_tres, tres bien, Madame_." _Bebe_, it seemed, had slept and eaten as a celestial _bebe_ should. They were looking for Madame yesterday, but Monsieur had not been disturbed even before the _depeche_ arrived.... And Monsieur was at his work as usual at the other madame's _manoir_.

After a time Milly, wearied of bestowing unreciprocated caresses upon her daughter, left her to the mystery of the hole in the sand and sauntered up the beach. Dotted here and there in the sunlight at favorable points along the dunes were the broad umbrellas of the artists, who were doubtless all busily engaged in trying to transfer a bit of the dazzling sunlight and dancing purple sea to their little squares of canvases. To Milly this ceaseless effort to comment on nature had something of the ridiculous,--perhaps supererogatory would be a better word. It was so much pleasanter to look at the landscape, and easier! Offsh.o.r.e the dun-colored sails of the fis.h.i.+ng fleet dipped and fluttered where the st.u.r.dy men of Douarnenez were engaged in their task of getting the herring from the sea. That seemed to Milly more real and important in a world of fact. Such a view betrayed the _bourgeois_ in her, she suspected, but according to the Hawaiian all women were _bourgeois_ at heart.

After a time her feet turned into one of the lanes, and she followed unconsciously the well-known path until the gray wall of the ruined _manoir_ came in sight. She paused for a moment--she had not meant to go there--then impulsively went forward, crossed the empty courtyard, and finding the garden door ajar pushed it open. The drowsy midsummer silence seemed to possess both house and garden. The place was deserted.

In the corner stood the painter's large canvas on the easel, with the brushes and palette on the bench by its side, as if just abandoned, and one of Madame Saratoff's large hats of coa.r.s.e straw.

Milly went over and examined the picture. It was almost finished, in that last stage where the artist can play with his creation, fondly touching and perfecting infinitesimal details, knowing that the thing has really been "pulled off." And it was triumphantly done! Even to Milly's untutored eyes, the triumph of it was indubitable. There the Russian stood on her thin, lithe haunches, her head tipped a little back disdainfully as in life, the open mouth about to emit some cold brutality, the long curving lip daringly drawn up over the teeth,--the look of "one who eats what she wants," as she herself had said one day.

Milly shuddered before the insolence of the painted face. She felt that this was one of the few creatures on the earth whom she feared and hated. Instinctively she made a gesture as if she would deface the portrait. The face seemed to answer her with a sneer,--"Well, and if you did, what good would that do? Would he love _you_ any more for that?" it said, and she paused.

Even the background and all the details were admirably conceived and rendered,--the crumbling, lichened wall, in cold gray, with the gnarled root of the creeper and the wreath of purple blossoms, in sharp contrast to the pallor of the face and the bold a.s.surance of the figure. The light fell across the canvas, leading down to a slab of vivid purple water in the far distance. There was nothing pretty or affected or conventional about the painting: it was life caught and rendered with the true boldness of actuality. Milly, gazing in fascination at the creation of line and color and light, realized that here was the work of a new man, totally unknown to her. Its maker was no youthful pupil, stumbling at his set task. No dabbler, this one, no trivial ill.u.s.trator or petty drawing-room amuser, but a man who had found within himself something long sought for. She shuddered and turned away. So that was what it was to be an Artist! She understood, and she hated it,--Art and all the tribe of artists big and little. In this strange woman, whom chance had put in his way, he had seen what she had not noticed, and he had projected what he saw. He was able to divine the soul of things beneath their superficial appearance, and he was able, exultantly, to project in material form that hidden meaning for others to see and understand, if they would. And that was what an artist, a real artist, was for.

Naturally Milly did not a.n.a.lyze closely her own troubled mind. Here was plain evidence of her husband's being in which she no longer had the smallest share. She had been slightly jealous, more than she would admit, that other time at the beginning of the portrait because of Jack's absorption in his subject and his work. Her egotism had been wounded. But that was trifling compared with the present feeling. In this completed creation she no more existed than the fly which rested for a moment upon the painted canvas. His creation had nothing whatsoever to do with her. And something deeper than egotism, far deeper than jealousy, rose from the depths of her nature in antagonism--a s.e.x-antagonism to the whole affair. Her husband had a new mistress--not necessarily the Russian woman, for that idea had not yet come to her--but his Art. And he might follow this mistress whither she beckoned,--to poverty, defeat, or victory,--unmindful of her and her child, forgetting them like idle memories in the pursuit of his blind purpose. It was a force inimical to her and antagonistic to all orderly living, as the Hawaiian had said,--a demonic force which rises in the midst of society to give the lie to all the pretences men make to themselves and call "civilization."

Milly hated it, instinctively. Jack must paint no more such pictures for love or for money, if their life were not to end in disaster. Did he know what he had done with this Russian woman?... Where were they, anyway?

She looked up at the silent _manoir_. The green blinds were drawn to shut out the western sun. Milly knew the long, high room with its timbered ceiling which Madame Saratoff had restored and furnished in English style, and where, for the most part, she lived. The two were there together now--she was sure of it. A new and fiercer emotion swept Milly towards the house: she would discover them in their shame, in their cruel selfishness. But she stopped on the stairs, suffocated by her pa.s.sion. She felt their presence just above her with a physical sense of pain, but she lacked the strength to go forward. A terrible sense of weakness in face of her defeat made her tremble. Her heart was broken, she said; what mattered it now what they did. She had no doubts: all was revealed as if she saw them in each other's arms. No man could have discovered the secret of a woman's inmost being, if she had not voluntarily yielded to him the key....