Rough-Hewn Part 44

M. Vaudoyer sat down abruptly, and reaching for a large red-and-white checked handkerchief, mopped his bald head and perspiring face with it.

He was evidently containing himself with difficulty and waiting till he could be sure of speaking with moderation before he opened his lips.

Eugenia explained to Marise with dignity, glad of the opportunity to state her case, "I come to M. Vaudoyer for lessons in diction. I don't come to study singing or seventeenth-century history. I hate history and all those dull studies. I don't see why everybody should always be trying to force me into them. M. Vaudoyer gets very angry because I will not practise singing lessons and because I cannot find the time to spend hours in the Bibliotheque Nationale reading all about everything that happened in Moliere's time. What do I care what happened in Moliere's time? What I want, what I am paying for, is a very simple thing.

Instruction in French diction. I don't see that I am getting it."

Her accent showed that she considered her case una.s.sailably good and reasonable.

M. Vaudoyer listened with attention, looking at her very hard, and when she had finished he nodded, "You are right, Miss Mills. I am not the teacher for you. I am a poor, old, impractical Frenchman, incapable of satisfying a practical American girl, who knows what she wants and has the money to buy it. You are the race of the future, you Americans, I of the past. There is no common ground between us." He spoke mildly.

Eugenia stared. Marise winced.

"What do you mean, M. Vaudoyer?" asked Eugenia. "Are you sending me away?"

He said with a little smile, "You have sent me away, Miss Mills, far away. And as to what I mean, if you like, I will try to tell you. But you will not understand. I cannot talk the American language. I can only speak the French language." He paused, wiping his perspiring forehead again with his checked handkerchief. "There are two parts to every art.

One is the thorough command of your medium; the other is the personality you express through your medium. Neither has the slightest value without the other. Neither is to be had without paying the price of all you have ... _all_, all!

"You must have perfect command of your medium, just in itself, as a tool. Listen," he stood up, his heavily jowled face grim and stern, drew a long breath, as if he were about to speak, and then as at a sudden thought, paused, the expression of his face changing with comical suddenness to a broad smile, and began to laugh. The girls stared at him in amazement, wondering if he had taken leave of his senses. Apparently something very funny had popped into his mind, just as he was about to go on with his statement to them. It must have been really _very_ funny indeed, for he could not stop his laughter, try as he might. It was too much for him. Both hands on his hips, throwing back his head, he pealed out an irresistible, "Ha! Ha!" as though he would burst if he did not laugh. Seeing their astonished faces, he tried to stop to tell them the joke, choked himself down to rich chuckles, opened his mouth to speak, and, the joke striking him afresh, went off again in a huge roar of mirth that made them both smile and then laugh outright in sympathy.

At this, his face instantly resumed its sad, stern expression, and he was looking at them severely as before, breathing quickly, it is true, as though he had been running, but without a trace of any feeling.

"There you see," he said drily. "That is an example of what I mean by command of a medium. To be master of _my_ tool I must not only be able to laugh, when I feel like it, but whenever I need to laugh, whether I feel like it or not. And I a.s.sure you, young ladies, I do not feel in the least like laughing now, having had this glimpse of the future as it will be, shaped to the American mold, by the people of the future."

The girls were stricken silent by all this, their lips, frozen in astonishment, still curving in the set smile that was all that was left of their foolish, induced mirth. Marise was nettled and angry. He had no business playing tricks like that on them. She had been made to appear foolish, horribly foolish, and she resented it.

"Well, Miss Mills," he went on, addressing Eugenia, "you cannot get such a control of your medium, you cannot learn to speak any language beautifully, without long, long dull hours of the oh! oh! ah! ah!

practice that you scorn. You cannot buy such a command of your medium, not for millions of your great round dollars. No, not the wealthiest, sharpest American who ever lived can possess European culture, by buying little pieces of it here and there, and hanging it up on his wall. By changing the very fibre of your being, that is the only way to become anything that is worth becoming. And you cannot change the fibre of your being without dying a thousand deaths and knowing a thousand births."

He puffed out a scornful breath and went on, "And for the other half, Miss Mills. You want to learn diction by reading to me. But what you read has sense. It is not just consonants and vowels. And to read it well, you must understand it. And to understand it, you must know something--do you understand me? You must _know_ something. I soon found that you could not understand Moliere, because you know no history, no literature, nor anything else you should have been learning. You cannot read with any over-tones in your voice, unless you understand the over-tones of what you are reading. You cannot read Moliere, or anybody else, as if you were reading,

"'_Barbara; celarent; darii; ferio; baralipton._'

"Or at least--" His carefully repressed indignation burst for a moment from his control; he said in a roar, "At least you cannot in _my_ loge--not, not even an American, not even a representative of the people of the future!"

He had risen to his feet, trembling with his anger, a high-priest rebuking a blasphemy. The girls shrank back, startled.

At once he extinguished the flame, went for a moment to the window, and when he turned back, said quietly, "You must excuse an old man's bad temper, Miss Mills, and you must look for a politer, more practical teacher. I can give you the address of one who will suit you. I can, in fact," he said smoothly, "give you the addresses of several hundred who will suit you perfectly. I will send the addresses of several to you.

Good-day, Miss Mills. Good-by, Miss...." He was vague as to Marise's name, but murmured something with an absent courtesy. He stepped to the door, opened it with an urbane inclination of the head.

Eugenia held in her hand the sealed envelope which contained the usual fee for a lesson, and now looked down at it, uncertain whether she dared offer it. He saw her glance at it, and relieved her of her uncertainty, "No, no fee to-day, Miss Mills. I have given you no lesson." As they pa.s.sed before him, he added under his breath, "No lesson, that is, that will be of any value to you."

Marise glancing over her shoulder, saw him turn at once to the easel and reach for his palette and brushes. He had dropped them from his mind. It was the airy, finis.h.i.+ng touch to their humiliation. She burned with anger and shame.

They groped their way down the darkened stairs in silence, neither trusting herself to speak, lest she burst into tears.

At the bottom Marise said neutrally, "I have a music lesson now. Would you like to come along?"

Eugenia said in a loud, quavering voice, "I should think not! I have had enough of their hatefulness for _one_ day!" She went on, her voice shaken by suppressed sobs which did not at all fit what she was saying, "And I h-have an appointment w-with the hairdresser anyhow." She fumbled with a desperate haste in her little gold-beaded hand-bag, jerked out a lacy handkerchief and wiped her eyes angrily. But more tears came, a flood of nervous, excited tears, which ran down in big drops. She flung her arms around Marise's neck and hiding her face on her shoulder, cried out pitifully, "Oh, Marise, don't you ever just want to go back _home_?"

Marise's heart was very full of compa.s.sion, very barren of consolation.

"I haven't any home to go back to, any more than you," she said in a whisper.

Eugenia reached up, pulled her head down and kissed her, still sobbing.

Marise kept her cheek pressed against the other's tear-wet face, aching with her helplessness, burning to find some word of comfort, finding nothing but loving silence to express her tenderness and pity.

A door opened upstairs, laughing voices sounded on the landing above.

The two girls drew apart and moved towards the door hand in hand.

II

Mme. de la Cueva had been crying and Marise guessed that she was getting ready to have a new husband. She seemed to have had bad luck in husbands. The one who had just been put to the door was the second Marise had known in the four years of her study with the pianist, and there had been at least two before that. It was a terrible grief to her always to find out that she no longer cared for the one she had; but she faced the facts with courage, allowing herself no dissembling, no bourgeoise timidity. The old one disappeared, and in a few months a new one was there.

"Good-day, my child," said the pianist affectionately, pulling Marise down to kiss her on both cheeks. "No lesson to-day nor to-morrow," she spoke solemnly, the tears in her eyes.

She began to cry openly.

Marise sat down by her, startled out of her own mood of resentment.

"Why, dear Madame de la Cueva, why?" she asked, "What has happened?"

"I am going to America," said the older woman. "Georges Noel and I are booked for a concert tour of the world. We will be married in Australia."

The inevitable first thought of the magnificent egotism of youth was for itself, "Why, what shall _I_ do?" cried Marise aggrieved.

Mme. de la Cueva did not resent this. She never resented anything which she recognized as natural. And this seemed to her pre-eminently natural and proper. She took Marise's hand in hers tenderly, maternally.

"It is for your good, my dear child, the change, though I know how you will miss me. You need some one else. A year with the old Visconti will be the making of you."

"The old Visconti!" cried Marise, "but he lives in Rome!"

"But it is perfectly possible for other people to live in Rome too! My dear child, a year in Rome at your age ... it will be the making of you!

You will always bless your poor old de la Cueva who secured it for you.

Youth, talent, beauty, Rome!" she drew the picture with envious admiration of its possibilities.

There was no use trying to reason with her, as one would with any one else, Marise knew that from experience--no use trying to show the material, practical obstacles in the way. What would her father say? How could she go alone to Rome to live? Not that Mme. de la Cueva would have hesitated at any age to go anywhere alone to live--but she would not long have remained alone! How like Mme. de la Cueva to dispose of her so calmly! Even as Marise said all this to herself she was aware by a sudden warm gush of pleasure and excitement in her heart that she was delighted beyond measure with the plan, that she had been longing for some change in her life, that she had been growing deathly stale in the same old round, the absurdly life-and-death consultations with Biron in the kitchen, the same old professors at the Sorbonne with the same old gla.s.s of sugar-and-water and the same high-keyed nasal delivery of the same old lectures, even Mme. de la Cueva with her same old cliches about ma.s.s and bulk in the ba.s.s. She felt no guilt about this last, for if there were one person in the world who understood entirely the fatigue at the recurrence of the same old things, it was Mme. de la Cueva! The pianist looking at her young disciple with discerning and experienced eyes, saw something of this and smiled sympathetically.

"You have been working, working, working, and now it is time to run a little free, my Marisette," she said, patting her hand, "you are ... how old?"

"Twenty-one to-day," said Marise.

"Exactly! As though Fate had timed it. Very likely Fate did." She had a great faith in Fate provided one did not hang back before the doors Fate set open before one. Personally she had never hesitated to step through every one that had been even ajar.

"A year in Rome with the old Visconti, who has the most wonderful sense of rhythm of any man alive--the real, the living rhythm--the life, the personality of music! Make yourself a docile little pair of ears and nothing else when he talks to you of rhythm! And pay _no_ attention, none, do you hear, to his fingering! It is _infecte_, _ign.o.ble_! Then after a year, I shall be here again to see what else you need before I launch you--good old Maman de la Cueva will be thinking of you all the time...."

"But I am not in the least sure I can manage a year in Rome," protested Marise, breaking in with a hurried protest against this taking-for-granted of everything, "I never dreamed of going to Rome! My father...."

"Oh, you can manage it," Madame de la Cueva a.s.sured her carelessly, "one can always manage whatever one really wants to do. Especially if it depends on a man."

She crossed the room now to pull at a bell-cord and to order tea of the stout, elderly maid who came. Such a cosmopolitan as Madame de la Cueva would of course have tea.