The Little French Girl/Part 1/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
It was evident to Alix, thinking and thinking of it in the day and night that followed her talk with Giles, that the best way of helping him was not to be there at all. The greater the distance between her and Maman's life and Toppie's life, the safer would Toppie be. She should never, oh, never, have come at all, and Maman would never have let her could she have known that Captain Owen had kept that inculpating silence. But she could not tell Maman of that now. If Toppie must not be hurt, neither must Maman. It would hurt her, terribly, even if she, like Giles, saw at once the reason for it. But she wrote to Maman the next morning, sitting there behind Giles, and begged that she might come home.
She had been long enough in England, she said. It was not that she was unhappy; they were all too kind for that. But it was not her life. She was a sea-fish—Alix found the simile, feeling that it would be helpful with Maman—and they were river-fishes, and she was not comfortable in their water. Je vous supplie, Maman chérie, laissez-moi revenir.
Eight days passed before Maman's answer arrived. It was decisive. She could not think of having Alix back till Spring. It was everything to her to know that her darling was benefiting by all the advantages of Heathside. Even had there not been the wretched question of money, she would have chosen to have her there and Alix must not fret; how far less trying it was for her to be at Heathside with such good friends than if, like so many jeunes filles de son âge, she had been in a convent. As for herself, she was starting in a few days with friends for a little trip to Italy and would not be back in Paris till April or May. Maman was evidently preoccupied, yet determined. There was nothing for it but to submit.
A few days after this, Alix and Giles and Mrs. Bradley motored to Oxford. She did not enjoy the drive. It was sad to be losing Giles. She did not know how she would find Heathside without him. The cold, grey day matched her mood, and as they entered the mean, modern streets of Oxford, at dusk, she thought that she had never seen so triste a town and wondered that it could harbour beauty and antiquity.
Giles's rooms, however, were amusing. They belonged to another world. One went through old courtyards where the stone was peeling in great flakes from the walls, up narrow stone staircases, winding and winding, with names on the doors one passed, and found oneself at last, high up, overlooking a quadrangle of green, in a solid, pleasant room which might have been waiting for Giles during the years of his absence, so expressive of his personality were the blazing fire, the deep chairs, even the blue-and-white tea-cups that waited on the central table.
The books and pictures were to go up next day; but even so the room was cheerful, and a wise, middle-aged man, whom Alix at first, in some bewilderment, took to be a professor lending himself to friendly offices, perhaps in some English ritual of self-effacement, brought in an excellent tea.
“He's what we call a scout,” Giles, smiling, explained to her.
“Not a Boy Scout!” Alix exclaimed. It was very confusing, and Giles had to explain it further.
She and Mrs. Bradley slept that night at lodgings in the town and Alix made her first acquaintance with the English lodging-house bed. There was no sommier and the mattress seemed to be filled with potatoes. One wound oneself among the lumps and contrived at last to sleep.
They helped Giles with his books and pictures next morning, and in the afternoon he said he must show her Oxford while his mother shopped. It was raining. Giles had on a raincoat turned up about his ears, and so had she. She had never seen so many bicycles, and from under a dripping umbrella, after one had dodged them, she found the Gothic quadrangles and deep emerald gardens, the meditative swans gliding, at Worcester, on the water, and the mist-washed vistas of the High, all triste. She was depressed at the thought of leaving Giles behind in such a damp, crumbling place where it was, indeed, natural to think of philosophers drinking hemlock, and where only in the refuge of one's own room with the wise scout to take care of one, might one find a sense of warmth and cheerfulness.
“You can't very well imagine how jolly all this is on a fine day,” said Giles: “when the sun comes out, you know, and the distances are blue, and the stone golden, and the gardens full of flowers.”
He was sad, too, Alix felt, though he tried to speak cheerfully and the day was unbecoming to him as to everything else. He looked a gaunt, uncouth student, his nose projecting under his cap and his eyes making Alix think, in their meditative melancholy, of the swans. He would, of course, be missing Toppie.
“All the women wear velour hats of the same shape,” she observed as they made their way along the High. “All turn up behind and down in front. Now I would turn mine down behind and up in front—with a very slight curve to the side; the line is better. And for costumes tailleurs it is so needful that the skirt should hang evenly.”
“Is it?” said Giles with a gloomy grin. “I'm showing you the architecture, not the clothes of Oxford.”
“Are they all the wives of philosophers?” Alix inquired, and the question indubitably interested her more than the architecture.
“A good many of them are, no doubt,” laughed Giles. “Do you wonder if my wife will look like that?”
Alix had a sudden vision of Toppie in the rainy High Street. Yes, even dear Toppie would sink, she felt, into the fatal sameness, embody the type. She could see her, slender, in her wet grey tweed, speeding on a bicycle in just such a velour hat. They, too, were perhaps Toppies if one could have a careful look at them.
“Do you intend to live in Oxford, Giles?” she inquired.
“I'd like to.—Here is Magdalen and the tower. Let's cross the bridge so that you can see the tower.—It's where I want to live.”
They crossed the bridge and he told her about the tower and the May morning ceremony.
“It must be very charming, very gay,” said Alix. “And would you care to marry soon?” The question, she knew, was academic, merely. There could be no hope of marriage for Giles as long as Toppie thought only of Captain Owen. But they could both pretend.
“I couldn't marry soon.” Giles was still laughing, though evidently a little disconcerted by her lack of appreciation. “I've no money.” He led her off to Christ Church meadows.
“None at all, Giles?”
“Well, only enough to have a very dowdy wife. To buy her a better hat and a smarter costume tailleur I'd need a great deal more.”
“But Captain Owen was to marry.” Alix ventured it. It was all so remote.
Giles felt it so. He elucidated the financial differences of the family. “We've all got a little. He went into the city, into stock-broking, and was making a very good thing of it. He could very well afford to marry.”
“And do you not care for stock-broking?”
“No; I care for philosophy. Unlucky for my wife, isn't it, Alix?”
“I do not know. Perhaps not if she had taste. One can do so much with very little money if one has taste. But would they know—the others—if she had to live in Oxford, that her hats and dresses were different?”
“Oh—I expect women always know that—even the wives of philosophers!” laughed Giles.
In spite of her æsthetic deficiencies, she felt that she kept up his spirits.
For tea they went to a professor friend—a real professor this time—who had known Mrs. Bradley's father. Everybody seemed to have known Mrs. Bradley's father. He lived in the Banbury Road with two unmarried daughters, and was old but robust and bearded and jovial, and he kept a hand on Giles's shoulder for a long time and promised Mrs. Bradley good things of him.
Giles stood and smiled and promised nothing. She had an impression of his strength and self-knowledge.
Monsieur le professeur's daughters were middle-aged ladies with lean red faces and grey hair strained tightly back above their ears and clothes of which all that could be said was that they were warm and clean. So tall, so spare they were, the pair of them, so rigid and with such ingenuous eyes, that they made Alix think of the elongated figures on the western portals of Chartres; only the Misses Cockburn were not beautiful in their strangeness and had none of the exquisite chinoiserie of aspect upon which Maman and monsieur Villanelle had discoursed on that summer afternoon when they had visited the great cathedral. How it all rushed over her as she sat at the little table Miss Jennifer had placed for her near the window! She saw them all three, Maman in white under her white sunshade, in the hot French sunlight before the sublime object. Up into the blue it went, august, almost terrifying, so beautiful that it made one want to cry. And as they had wandered in and out, into the vast, illuminated darkness where the rose windows hung like apparitions, out into the fretted portals with the sunlight washing up their steps, Maman had told her of a Queen Alix who had borne a part in its history. Her heart contracted as she remembered it all. Maman might have been one of those queens. She so belonged to Chartres. When Chartres was in one's blood, what could one feel for Oxford?
She had time for these comparisons. The Misses Cockburn were kind, but they paid no attention to her beyond carefully feeding her; as if, she reflected, she had been a pet dog led in by Mrs. Bradley. People in England, she had already surmised, did not feel an obligation to entertain, further than by feeding, other people's friends.
She sat and ate her scone and drank her tea and looked out at a laburnum-tree and a hawthorn-tree, all leafless and dripping on the background of ornamental red brick opposite. All the houses were of red brick and all so singularly alike in spite of their adventurous excrescences. “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” thought Alix, as she watched the tea-time lights come out in the bow-windows with Gothic points over them, and felt that they held learned, innocent people who would not be disconcerted by anything that happened in the universe. She had never seen a place that seemed to her quite so safe as the Banbury Road. And yet such safety made part of the tristesse. Dieu! how triste it was! How dreadful it would be to be caught and imprisoned there.
Miss Grace came to draw the curtain and asked Alix if she were warm and Alix said she was. Giles seemed quite at home, seemed, indeed, part of it, lifting the scones from the little brass stand before the fire, talking about municipal elections to Miss Jennifer and about the Bach Choir to Miss Grace. With Giles as the link of identity between them, she saw that Heathside was part of the Banbury Road, too. Even Giles seemed far away as the sense of alienation grew within her.
Then as she sat there, alone, apart, the throb of a big motor came up to the gate, and a moment afterwards a lady was among them who, by her presence, dispelled the sense of loneliness. It might have been into Maman's salon that she came, so vivid was Alix's sense of knowing what she would do and say and of liking both beforehand. All furs and pearls and softness, and such sweet smiles, she was one of the people who could see and blow and catch the soap-bubbles, the beautiful, impalpable things of human intercourse, and while she talked to monsieur le professeur, she cast mild, bright glances at Giles, at Mrs. Bradley, at herself. Alix saw that it was at herself that she looked most, and presently, when the lady and Mrs. Bradley talked, Mrs. Bradley called her to them, and holding her hand, scanning her face, the lady said she knew her name. “It's there behind me; where I don't quite know;—in an old letter; a volume of mémoires; an ancestor of mine, I feel it must have been, who knew a Mouveray in Paris before the Revolution. Yes, that was it. It comes back to me. A comte Henri de Mouveray.”
Alix remembered, too. “He was guillotined at Lyon. He was a great-uncle of Grand-père's.”
“And where is Grand-père?” asked Lady Mary Hamble, for such was her name. “Do you live with him?”
Alix told her that she had lived with him; but that he was dead. “I live with my mother in Paris,” she said.
When Lady Mary was gone, Alix felt herself scanned by Miss Grace and Miss Jennifer as if from a spaniel she had altered to a monkey; not more interesting, but more curious. Monsieur le professeur still didn't see her at all. He brushed aside Lady Mary and went on talking about Relativity to Giles.
“Yes; was it not strange?” said Alix, as, in Giles's rooms again, Mrs. Bradley commented on the romantic encounter. “There was his portrait at Montarel, that Henri de Mouveray. So grave yet so gay a face, blue-eyed, and with dark hair.”
“Like you, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, and Alix remembered that he was like her; very.
“And to think that someone so near you was guillotined at Lyon,” Mrs. Bradley mused. “He could have known your grandfather.”
“Yes. If he had not been guillotined, if he had lived long enough, he could have.”
“Don't you think Lady Mary very lovely, Giles?” said Mrs. Bradley. “She must be as old as I am, I suppose; yet how lovely.”
“She's not nearly as lovely as you are,” said Giles, poking the fire.
Mrs. Bradley laughed at the absurdity. “That's loyal—but not accurate, my dear.”
“She's very pretty, and she's never had a doubt. She's always felt that she was lovely and that everyone thought her lovely, and I suppose that preserves the complexion,” said Giles.
“But if everyone thinks one so, is it not likely that one is lovely?” Alix inquired. “And if one is so, why should one not think so oneself?” She considered that Giles was captious.
“No one is as right in every way as she thinks herself,” said Giles. “No one can be so smooth without being artificial. She's awfully nice, I'm sure; but for beauty, give me Mummy.”
It would not be polite to contradict him, but Alix, too, thought Giles absurd.