Читать книгу The Little Vanities of Mrs. Whittaker - John Strange Winter - Страница 15

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A Parisian finishing school is for English girls like putting French polish on British oak.

Nothing of any importance happened in the household at Ye Dene for two years after this. Then it became time for Maudie to be introduced into society. With most girls this epoch in life is one eagerly looked forward to, tremulously entered upon, and very frequently looked back to with a certain amount of disappointment. Regina herself, I am bound to confess, thought with no small misgiving of the time when she should have to be a wallflower for her daughter’s sake.

“The child must have her chance like other girls,” she remarked to Alfred one night when they were sitting together in the drawing-room at Ye Dene. “She is very beautiful. She will not go empty-handed to her husband. She ought to make a brilliant marriage.”

“Yes, she is a nice-looking girl,” said Alfred Whittaker.

“My daughters,” said Regina, with an air of dignity which was very pardonable in a mother, “are both beautiful in different styles. Maudie is purely Greek in type; Julia is purely Irish—or I might say French. I noticed when we were in Brittany, two years ago, how thoroughly Irish one type of the peasantry was.”

“Yes, she’s a good-looking girl. They’re both all right,” said Alfred Whittaker, with the easy indifference of an ordinary father. “I daresay you’ll have your hands full a little bit further on, old lady, when we get shoals of young men about Ye Dene, and you have to think out little dances and suppers and theatre parties, and other things of that kind, instead of giving up all your time to making other people happy.”

“Well, whatever I have to do, I hope I shall do it with all my might,” said Regina.

“I am sure you will,” said Alfred, tenderly; “I am sure you will, Queenie.”

For his peace of mind’s sake, it was just as well that Alfred Whittaker was at business during the greater part of each day, for he might have been upset, not to say scandalized, by the extremely independent, not to say free-and-easy, life which was led by his two daughters.

Regina herself was very strong on this point. “I like to hear everything that my girls tell me,” she said, in discussing the question about this time with the doctor’s wife, “but I don’t demand it as a right. Nobody would demand of a boy of nearly eighteen that he should tell his mother everything that he has said, done and thought during the twenty-four hours of the day. Why shouldn’t a girl be brought up on the same system?”

“It is not the custom, that’s all. I was amenable to my mother,” Mrs. M’Quade replied, “and I expect my daughter to be amenable to me. It is not a question of want of independence; the child is independent enough—but a girl’s mind and a boy’s mind are not the same, they’re different.”

“Only because men and foolish mothers have made them so,” persisted Regina.

“Ah, well, you and I agree to differ on those points—don’t we, Mrs. Whittaker? Heaven forbid that I should make my girl less independent than I would wish to be myself, but to shut the mother out of her life is no particular sign of a girl’s independence—at least, that is the way in which I look at it. Then I suppose,” went on the doctor’s wife, “that you will, a little later on, allow your girls to have a latchkey?”

“Certainly, if they wish to have a latchkey. Why not?” Mrs. Whittaker demanded. “I should not expect them to come in at three o’clock in the morning because I gave them the privilege of a latchkey. If they misused the privilege, I should take it away from them.”

“You are beyond me,” the doctor’s wife cried. “With regard to my Georgie, all I can say is, that until she is married she will have to live just as I lived until I was married; that is to say, she will do what I tell her, she will wear what I advise her to wear, or what I give her to wear; she will have a very good time, but she will not have a separate existence from mine until she goes into a home of her own, or until I am carried out to my last long resting-place.”

“We are good friends,” said Regina, with an air of superb tolerance, “we are good friends, Mrs. M’Quade, and I hope we shall always continue so; but in some of our ideas we are diametrically opposed to each other, and we must agree to differ.”

But to go back to the question of the entrance of Maud Whittaker into society, not a little to her parents’ surprise, Maud absolutely declined to do anything of the kind.

“Come out—go into society!” she echoed. “Oh, there will be time enough for that when Ju is ready.”

“Julia? Why, she is two years younger than you,” Mrs. Whittaker exclaimed.

“Yes, dearest, I know it; but I am young for my age and Julia is old for hers. If she comes out in another year, I can wait until she is ready.”

“But why? I never heard of such a thing!”

“I am not very great on society,” said Maud. “I would rather wait until Ju is fully fledged.”

“And you will stay at school?”

“Yes, I’d just as soon, only when one comes to think of it, I’ve learnt all they can teach me, as far as I know. We are both of us much too big to be at that school—it’s a perfect farce. Why don’t you take us away and give us a course of lessons? That is the proper thing to do—like they do in Paris. Or why don’t you send us to Paris for a year? Then we may contrive to speak French that is French, and not Park polyglot.”

“Maudie!” cried Regina.

“Yes, I know, dearest. You may say ‘Maudie!’ but facts are facts. The other day, being, or being supposed to be, the best French speaker in the school, I was put up to talk to a French lady who was staying at the Vicarage. You know Mrs. Charlton speaks French like a native—indeed, I think she has French relations, and I think this was an old schoolfellow. Anyway, I was put up to talk to her as being the show girl at French conversation.”

“Well?” Regina’s tone was as the sniff of a war-horse who scents the battle from afar.

“I couldn’t make head or tail of her,” said Maudie. “Ju did—at least, in a kind of way she did. All the same she had to repeat everything she said three times over, and then whatever-her-name-was had to make shots at her meaning.”

“But, my dear children,” exclaimed Regina, aghast. “I hear you talking French to each other every day!”

“Yes, I know,” said Ju; “but you hear us talking something that isn’t French.”

“My education,” said Regina, “did not include many modern subjects. That was one reason why I was so very anxious that you two should learn French and German.”

“Then you had better send us to Paris—because French is just what we cannot speak. When we want to talk without the servants knowing, we speak what we call the Park polyglot, but it doesn’t go down with French people. I could see that that friend of Mrs. Charlton’s caught a word here and there, and her native wit supplied the rest.”

“Perhaps she was not a person of position, and did not speak good French,” said Regina, who was loath to admit that a child of hers could do anything badly.

“Oh, not a bit of it! Mrs. Charlton kept calling her Comtesse. She was all right.”

“And how did Miss Drummond come off?”

“Oh, well, Miss Drummond speaks a little honest English-French, which has no pretense of being the real thing.”

It is not surprising that after this, Regina’s two girls were withdrawn from the school at Northampton Park, and were, as she particularly told everybody, by their own request sent to a school kept by a French lady on the outskirts of Paris, to be particular in that off-shoot of Paris which Regina called “Nully.”

During the year that followed, Regina worked harder than ever; indeed, even her complacent husband now and again uttered a mild protest that his wife should be absolutely absorbed by work which brought him neither comfort nor emolument.

“I had a wife, once,” he said in joke to the doctor, one night when the M’Quades were dining at Ye Dene; “but now I often think I’ve only got a Chairman of Committee.”

Nevertheless, he said it with an air of pride, and later, when Regina asked him seriously whether he would prefer that she should give up her public duties and once more merge her identity into his, he exclaimed, “God forbid! What makes you happy, my dear, makes me happy, as long as you still regard me as the linch-pin of your existence.”

“I do, my dear Alfie, I do,” she cried. “Indeed I’m the same Queenie that you married all those years ago. My heart has never altered or changed in the very least. No other man has ever crossed its threshold since you first took possession of it.”

“As long as you feel that, my dear girl,” he returned, putting his arm about her ample waist and looking at her with fond eyes of loving, if somewhat sleepy, devotion, “as long as you feel like that, you can do what work you like and have what interests you like. And good luck go with you, for I am sure you must be a great comfort to a good many people.”

And Regina did work, like the traditional negro slave. Still, she never neglected her home duties. Regularly every week she wrote to her girls, and sometimes when she was dog-tired and found her eyes closing over the sheet on which she was writing, she shook herself quite fiercely, and reminded herself of her duty; then blamed herself passionately that her letters to her girls, her own girls, who thought of her, loved her, trusted her, made her the recipient of their hopes, doubts and fears, joys and pleasures, and even such simple sorrows as had as yet entered into their lives, should ever have come to be a duty—a mere duty.

Poor Regina! I will not pretend that the two girls never wished to hear from their mother, or that they would not have been bitterly disappointed had she wholly and totally neglected them; but they were happy in their school life, and they did not spend their time watching for the arrival of the facteur de poste, as Regina fondly believed of them. No, they quietly accepted their mother’s letters when they received them, read them, discussed them, and then put them on one side to think about them no more.

So time went on until the Christmas holidays arrived. The two girls did not come home to the Park for their vacation, but their father and mother made a little break in their respective callings and went to Paris, where the girls joined them at a modest but comfortable boarding-house.

Now the boarding-house had been recommended by the lady of the school at which the sisters were being educated. It was one kept by a French lady, to which but few English people were in the habit of going. Of the charming language of our neighbors across the Channel, Alfred Whittaker did not know one word beyond a form of salutation which he called bong jour! and an equally useful word which he was pleased to call messy. These two old people were therefore absolutely at the mercy of their young daughters; and the young daughters themselves thanked Heaven many times, during the three weeks which they passed together in Paris, that French had not been included in the curriculum of either their father’s or mother’s education. Oh, they meant no harm, don’t think it for a moment. There was no harm in either the one or the other. They were modern, human girls, into whom a life of independence had been instilled as a religion. Independent their mother wished them to be, and independent they were to an abnormal and an aggressive degree. They were as sharp as needles, exactly as their old schoolfellow had said years before; they had acquired a knowledge of Paris which was simply extraordinary considering that they had been immured in a pensionnat for demoiselles. They knew all the great emporiums quite intimately, and having extracted some money from their father on the score that it was no use their mother coming to Paris without buying clothes, and also that their own wardrobes required renewing, they whisked their mother from the Louvre, to the Bon Marché, from the Bon Marché to the Mimosa, and even got wind of that wonderful old market down in the Temple, where the Jews hold high revel between the hours of nine o’clock in the morning and noon.

What a time it was. “My girls,” said Regina to an elderly English lady with whom she foregathered in one of the pretty little white crêmeries in the Rue de la Paix, “speak French like natives. I was educated in all sorts of ways—I have taken degrees and done all sorts of things that most women don’t do—but when you put me down in Paris, I am utterly undone. I never realized before what a terrible thing want of education is.”

“And yet you have taken degrees,” said the lady, admiringly.

“Yes, but they are not much good when you come to Paris. But my daughters,” she added, with pride, “speak French like Parisians.”

It was a little wide of the mark. The girls did speak French with considerable fluency, and they had the advantage of not being shy, and of never allowing want of knowledge to keep them back from communicating with their fellow-beings. And as they gabbled on, as Alfred Whittaker frequently declared, nineteen to the dozen, Regina stood by and admired.