Читать книгу To Tell You the Truth - Merrick Leonard - Страница 6

In the Bois, one day, I met madame Aribaud. By madame "Aribaud" I mean the wife of a very popular dramatist, and I call them Aribaud because it wouldn't do to mention their real name. I like meeting madame Aribaud when I am in Paris. It refreshes me, not only because she isn't preceded by a gust of scent, and doesn't daub her mouth clown red, like so many Parisiennes, but because she is so cheerful. She diffuses cheerfulness. She sat beaming at her little son, while he scattered crumbs for the birds, and she informed me—it was in 1912—that he was in the latest fashion, having a nurse from England to give him the real English pronunciation, though as yet he was hardly a linguist. And the nurse said, "I tell madam we must be pietient with 'im; we can't expect 'im to talk like I do hall at once."

Also the lady informed me that they had finished arranging their new house, and that on the morrow I must go there to déjeuner. Very readily I went, and they showed me the "English nursery," and an American contrivance that she had presented to her husband for his dressing-room—"Comme ils sont pratiques, les américains!"—and an antique or two that she had picked up for his study; and, not least, she showed us both some croquettes de pommes that looked ethereal and—I have never tasted croquettes de pommes like madame Aribaud's! I always say she is the most domesticated of pretty women, and her husband the most pampered of good fellows. Playgoers who know him merely by his comedies, in which married people get on together so badly up to the fourth act, might be surprised to see inside his villa.

Only when he and I were lounging in the study afterwards—my hostess was in the little garden, pretending to be a horse—I said to him, as the boy's shouts came up to us through the open window, "Doesn't the child disturb you out there when you're busy?"

My friend nodded. "Sometimes," he acknowledged, "he disturbs me. What would you have? He must play, and the 'garden' is too diminutive for him to go far away in it. It makes me think of what Dumas père said when he paid a visit to his son's chalet in the suburbs—'Open your dining-room window and give your garden some air!' Once or twice I have wondered whether I should work in a front room, instead, but to tell you the truth, I always come to the conclusion that I like the noise. Believe me, a dramatist may suffer from worse drawbacks than a child's laughter." He blew smoke thoughtfully, and added, "I had a wife who was childless."

Now, though I knew Maurice Aribaud very well indeed, I had never heard that this was his second marriage, and I suppose I stared.

"Yes," he said again, "I had a wife who was childless." And then, with many pauses, he told me a lot that I had not suspected about his life, and though I can't pretend to remember his precise words, or the exact order in which details were forthcoming, I am going to quote him as well as I can.

"I had not two louis to knock together when I met her—and I wasn't so very young. I had been writing for the theatre for years, and had begun to despair of ever seeing anything produced. To complete my misery, I had no companionship, if one excepts books—no friend who wrote, or aspired to write, no acquaintance who did not draw his screw from a billet as humdrum as my own. I was a clerk in the Magasins du Louvre, and though of course the other men in the office talked about plays—in France everybody is interested in plays; in England, I hear, you are interested only in the players—none of them was so congenial that I was tempted to announce my ambitions to him. I used to think how exciting it must be to know authors and artists, even though they were obscure and out-at-elbows. Every night, as I walked home and passed the windows of a bohemian café I used to look at it wistfully. I envied the fiercest disappointments of the habitues inside, for they were at least professionals of sorts; they moved on a different planet from myself. Once in a blue moon I found the resolution to enter, pushing the door open timidly, like a provincial venturing into Paillard's. I suppose I had a vague hope that something might happen, something that would yield confidences, perhaps a comrade for life. But I sat in the place embarrassed, with the air of an intruder, and came out feeling even lonelier than when I went in.

"One windy, wet day I was at the mont-de-piété to redeem my watch. I had pawned it two or three weeks before, because I had seen a second-hand copy of a book that I wanted very much and couldn't afford at the moment. I will not inquire whether you have ever pawned anything in Paris, yourself, but if you haven't, you may not know the formalities of the dégagement. Ah, you have pawned things only in London.

"Well, after you have paid the principal and the interest, you are given a numbered ticket, and then you go into a large room and take your choice among uncomfortable benches, and wait your turn. It is something like cashing a cheque at the head office of the Crédit Lyonnais, only at the mont-de-piété the people on the benches sit waiting for the most disparate articles. On one side of you, there may be a fashionably dressed woman who rises to receive a jewel-case—and on the other, some piteous creature who clutches at a bundle. The goods and chattels descend in consignments, and when one consignment has been distributed, the interval before the next comes down threatens to be endless. The officials behind the counter converse in undertones, and you meanwhile have nothing livelier to do than listen to the rain and wonder how hard-up your neighbour may be.

"That day, however, I did not chafe at the delay. There was a young girl there whose face caught and held my attention almost immediately. Not only was her prettiness remarkable—her expression was astonishing. She looked happy. Yes, in the gaunt room, among the damp, dismal crowd, relieving the tedium by a heavy sigh or an occasional shuffling of their shoes, this fair-haired, neat, innocent little girl looked happy. Smiles hovered about her lips, and her eyes sparkled with contentment. I tried to conjecture the reason for her delight, what treasured possession she was about to regain. A trinket? No, something indefinable in her bearing forbade me to think it was a trinket. My imagination ranged over a dozen possible pledges, without finding one to harmonise with her. Ridiculous as it sounds, I could picture nothing so appropriate for her to recover as a canary, which should fly, singing, to her finger. Every time a number was called, curiosity made me hope that her turn had come. The latest load that had been delivered was almost exhausted. Only three packages remained. Another call, and she got up at last! The package was a bulky one. I craned my neck. It was a typewriter.

"Quite five minutes more lagged by before I got my watch, and when I crossed the courtyard I had no expectation of seeing her again; but no sooner had I passed through the gate than I discovered her in trouble. She had been trying to carry the typewriter and an open umbrella, and now the umbrella had blown inside out, and she had put the typewriter on the pavement.

"In such a situation it was not difficult for me to speak.

"I picked the thing up for her. She thanked me, and made another ineffectual attempt to depart. I offered my help. She demurred. I insisted. We made for her tram together—and tram after tram was full. It had been raining for several hours and Paris was a lake of mud. In the end I trudged beside her through the swimming streets, carrying her typewriter all the way to the step of her lodging. So began my courtship.

"She was as solitary as I; her father's death had left her quite alone. He had been old, and very poor. Blind, too. But his work had been done up to the last, my little sweetheart guiding him to the houses—he had earned a living as a piano-tuner. In Sèvres she had an aunt, his sister-in-law; but though the woman boasted a respectable business and was fairly well-to-do, she had come foward with nothing more substantial than advice, and the orphan had had only her typewriter to keep the wolf from the door. Her struggles in Paris with a typewriter! She had been forced to pawn it every time she lost a situation. But every time she saved enough to recapture it she felt prosperous again. Her own machine meant 'luxuries.' With her own machine she could afford a plant to put in her attic window, and a rosebud for her breast.

"She loved flowers, and she often wore them, tucked in her bodice, after the Magasins du Louvre closed—the lonely clerk used to hurry to meet the little typist on her way home. Yet she told me once that her love for them had come very late; for years the sight of all flowers had saddened her. She had been born on that melancholy boulevard that leads to the cemetery of Père La Chaise, that quarter of it where one sees, exposed for sale, nothing but floral tokens for the mourners—nothing to right and left but mountains of artificial wreaths, and drear chrysanthemums in stiff white paper cones. As a child she had thought that flowers were grown only for graves.

"I recall the courtship in all seasons, and always in the streets—when the trees were brown and the light faded while we walked; and when the trees had whitened and the lamps were gleaming; and when the trees grew green and we walked in sunshine. It was in the streets that we fell in love—in the streets that I asked her if she would marry me.

"We were on the quai des Orfèvres one Sunday afternoon in summer. I had meant to wait till we were in the Garden of the Tuileries, but we had stopped to look at the river, and I can see it all now, the barge folk's washing hanging out to bleach, and a woman knitting among the geraniums on a deck. There was a little fishing-tackle shop, I remember, called 'Au Bon Pêcheur,' and a poodle and a Persian cat were basking together on the doorstep. Our hands just touched, because of the people passing; and then we went on to the Tuileries, and talked. And before we seemed to have talked much, it was moonlight; a concert had begun, and away in the distance a violinist was playing La Précieuse. 'Why,' I exclaimed,' I've given you no dinner!' She laughed; she hadn't been hungry, either. No millionaires have ever dined at Armenonville more merrily than we, for a hundred sous, at a little table on a sidewalk.

"She said, 'When I am your wife, I shall type-write all your plays for you, Maurice—perhaps that will bring you luck.' And by and by, when we came to the Magasins du Louvre, she pointed to the Comédie-Française: 'You haven't far to travel to reach it, dearest!' she smiled—'we'll cross the road together.'

"How sweet she looked in the wedding frock that she had stitched! How proud I was of her! Our ménage was two rooms on the left bank; and in the evening, in our tiny salon on the sixth floor, her devoted hands clattered away on her machine, transcribing my manuscript, till I kissed and held them prisoners. Didn't she work hard enough all day for strangers, poor child?—my salary was too small to liberate her. 'You are jealous,' she would say gaily, 'because I write your dialogue so much faster than you.' And often I wished that I could create a scene as rapidly as she typewrote it. But we had our unpractical evenings, also, when we built castles-in-the-air, and chose the furniture for them. I had brought home, from the Magasins, one of the diaries that they issue annually. It contained plans of the theatres—it always does—and, perched on my knee, she pictured a play of mine at each of them in turn, and the house rocking with applause. And then we pencilled the private box we'd have; and drove, in fancy and our auto-mobile, to sit there grandly on the three-hundredth night.

"We spent many hours in selecting presents that I would have made to her if I could. One of the things she wanted was, of course, a theatre bag: 'the prettiest that you can pretend!' and I pretended a beauty for her in rose brocade—and inside I put the daintiest enamelled opera-glasses that the rue de la Paix could show, and a fan of Brussels point, and a Brussels-point handkerchief, and a quaint gold bonbonniere with sugared violets in it. I remember she threw her arms round my neck as ecstatically as if the things were really there. We were, at the time, supping on stale bread, with a stick of chocolate apiece."

The dramatist sat silent, his eyes grown wide. I think that for a moment he had forgotten his new, desirable home and the antiques on the mantelpiece—that he was back in a girl's arms in a room on a sixth floor. Under the window, his wife had ceased to play at horses, and was swinging their son, instead. The child's delight was boisterous.

She called up to us now: "Are we a nuisance, messieurs? Shall we go to the nursery?"

"No, no," cried Aribaud, starting, "not at all; we are doing nothing. Continue, mon ange, continue!"

"What a heaven opened," he went on, turning to me, "when I had a piece taken at last! As long as I live I shall think of the morning that letter came, of our reading it together, half dressed, and crying with joy. She was making the coffee for breakfast. And yet, even when the contract was signed, it sometimes seemed incredible. I used to dream that it had happened, and dream that I was dreaming—that I was to wake and find it wasn't true. And the eternity of delay, the postponements, one after another! And then, when we felt worn out with waiting, the night that we jolted to the show in an omnibus, and sat breathless in the fauteuils de balcon! I remember the first laugh of approval that the audience gave, her clutching my hand; and how she clung to me, sobbing and comforting, when we got home and knew that the piece had failed.

"I had a short run the next autumn with Successeur de Son Père, but my first hit, of course, was Les Huit Jours de Léonie. When that was produced, the fees came tumbling in.

"Weren't we dazed at the beginning! And how important we felt to be taking a flat and going to a bureau de placement to engage a servant! We were like children playing with a doll's-house. The change was marvellous. And when I received an invitation from somebody or other who had been unapproachable only a year before—her exultance to see me go! The invitations to the author, you understand, did not always include his wife; and, unfortunately, those that ignored her were often those that it would have been unwise for me to decline. I found that rather pathetic; we had hoped together for so long, and now that success had come she wasn't getting her fair half of the fun. An elaborate evening gown that we had hurried expectantly to order for her was not needed, after all—it was out of fashion before she wore it. Still, as I say, she exulted to see me go—at first. And later Well, when I insisted on a refusal because she had not been asked, it grieved her that I neglected opportunities for her sake; and when I consented to go without her she was, not unnaturally, dull.

"It was not very lively for her in the daytime, either. When my duties as a clerk had taken me from her, she, too, had had employment, but now, of course, her berth had been resigned, and while I wrote all day upstairs, she was alone. She was not used to leisure—all her life she had worked. We had no child to claim her time, to occupy her thoughts and yield the interests of maternity. Though she endeavoured to create distractions for herself, the flat that we had been so proud of was rather dreary for her, after its novelty faded. She sighed in it oftener than she laughed.

"The very few women that she met were actresses, who talked of nothing but their careers—their genius, their wrongs, and their Press notices. What companion could she find among them, even had I wished her to seek their companionship? And the men who came to us also talked shop continuously, and directed themselves chiefly to me. No doubt they would have had enough, and too much, to say to her had I been absent, but, as it was, they often appeared to forget that she was there. As time went on, too, the theatre made more and more demands upon me—a comedy in rehearsal while another was being written; the telephone bell always ringing to call me away just when I had arranged to take a half-holiday with her. And when I left the theatre I could not dismiss the anxieties of a production from my mind as I had dismissed the affairs of the Magasins when I left my office stool—they were mine, and I brought them home with me. She grew bored, restless. She was nervy with solitude, and chagrined at feeling herself insignificant. She told me one day that she wanted me to put her on the stage.

"Mon Dieu! To begin with, she had no gift for the stage—and if she had been ever so clever, did I want to see her there? I was aghast.

"'But, mignonne,' I said, 'what makes you think, all of a sudden, you could act? Leaving everything else aside, what reason is there to suppose you would succeed? You have had no experience, you have never even shown the slightest tendency towards it.'

"'I want something to do,' she said.

"'But,' I said,' that isn't enough. And besides, you would not like it at all—you would find it odious. You sit in a box and you see a celebrated woman bringing the house down, and to be an actress looks to you very fine. But she has been half a lifetime arriving at celebrity—there is nothing fine about the journey to it. You would feel that you had given up a good deal, I assure you—a dramatist's wife in the box is a much more dignified figure than a dramatist's wife rehearsing a trivial part and being corrected by the stage-manager.'

"'I did not mean trivial parts,' she said disconsolately—and I realised for the first time that she had been dreaming of a début in the principal rôle. But she let the discussion drop, and I half thought I had convinced her.

"I was very much mistaken. A few weeks later she referred to it again, and more urgently. She seemed to imagine that her project was a perfectly simple matter for me to arrange, that the only obstacle in the way was my personal objection to it. 'What you say about trivial parts is quite true,' she acknowledged, with an air of being extremely reasonable, 'but in one of your own pieces you could easily get me lead. Everybody wants plays from you now; you would only have to say that you wished me to be engaged. Of course, I should study; I should go to a professor of diction and take lessons.'

"Well, I tried to explain the commercial aspect of the case to her. I told her that, for one thing, the managers would see my plays in Jericho before they agreed to entrust the leading part to a novice. And I told her that, supposing for an instant I did find a manager reckless enough to consent, I should be ruining my own property.

"'Ah,' she said, 'you make up your mind in advance that I have no dramatic instinct?'

"I said: 'It is not even a question whether you have any dramatic instinct; it is enough that you haven't any renown. You have heard too much of the business by this time not to know that everybody tries to secure the most popular artists that he can. For me to put up a play with an absolutely unknown name, instead of a star's, would be asking for a failure.'

"'If I were billed as "madame Aribaud" the name would not be unknown,'" she argued.