Читать книгу Her Mother's Daughter - Nalbro Bartley - Страница 4

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WHEN Min was eighteen she married Jules Beaumont. He was a remote and worldly cousin, a small, dark, reddish-eyed person, pockmarked yet dapper and fifteen years Min’s senior. The Beaumonts at the pension did not think overly well of Jules but they were glad when Min was off their hands. Even Aunt Marguerite had failed in training her to her ways. Secretly, Aunt Marguerite believed that her mistake had been in not punishing Min the night she had thrown away the bell clapper and found the American’s ring. To have broken her word to the American and explained it to God afterwards would have been a wiser procedure. She dated Min’s rise in spirit from that day.

At eighteen Min was a broad-hipped, red-haired girl with sharp, small eyes and a flexible mouth that could sulk or curl up at the corners in a happy grin. Her fat hands with their short nails and turned-back thumbs were the hands of a curious, capable person. They were as hopelessly red as her neck and face. Since Min was fourteen she had worked on the farm. The stables held no terrors for her. Barefoot or in sabots she tramped from cattle pen to pig sty to wash or feed or milk or doctor. She did not shrink from the frankness of farmyard life. She assisted as willingly at the mating of a mare as she mothered day old chicks. Anything as long as she escaped the pension with its rooms of stiff elderly guests and her smiling, thin-lipped aunt.

The Beaumont boys regarded Min as one of themselves. Olga was the belle. She wore the peasant costume as effectively as if it were her native land, waiting table and slyly pocketing tips under Madame Beaumont’s nose. Two English students came up for afternoon tea for no other reason than Olga’s shy whispers and flaxen curls.

Jules Beaumont, thirty-three and worldly wise, regarded Min as a rarity. She was so strong, so simple that neither her flesh nor her crudeness prejudiced him. After years in hotels, Jules was surfeited with flirtatious underlings. But no man desires lonely old age. Without warning Jules had found himself longing to come home for a visit, to be with his own people. Yet a week at the pension found him ready to quarrel with everyone, to shock them with his stories, his gambling, his wine, the theory that America was the one land where a man might come into his own.

There was no doubt but what Jules would have fled to Paris but for Min. He admired her spirit, her childish capacity for enjoyment. Moreover, she spoke English. Jules was not a bad sort but he was conceited and stubborn. It pleased him to ignore the smirking Olga Bialias who made eyes at him for all of the English students. It pleased him to buy Min Beaumont a fan which her red fingers handled awkwardly, to take her to casino concerts, to praise her because her English blood was obvious, to make love to, in short, to propose to—all within a month.

Min’s father having died, there was no one to consult as to marriage. Min was a little past eighteen. She had saved fifty francs. She had a wooden chest filled with fragments of a wardrobe. She knew nothing of marriage nor the world—nor of Jules. America was a magic name. England roused sad memories of her unhappy mother and the apple-cheeked grammer. But she must escape from the pension. To her mind Switzerland seemed a stupid, painted landscape filled with toy houses and toy tourists. Jules had promised that they go to America. In New York his friends would help him to a position. Soon money would flow their way. They could buy clothes and jewelry, their children could attend splendid schools. Everything would be infinitely better than if they stayed abroad. She must be a sensible girl and marry him without waiting. They would go by way of Paris where he would buy her a silk dress and a necklace—well, what did she say? Come, he was not such a bad fellow and she would not have many such chances. How they overworked her at the pension; how he liked the way her red hair grew back from her forehead in tiny waves, the heavy lashes of her small eyes! At eighteen Min was tempting to a man like Jules. He could train her to his ways ... he wanted to kiss that red, happy mouth (he had not seen it sulk as yet) and to feel her eager arms about his neck ... she knew nothing of the world—absolutely nothing ... Jules’ reddish eyes glistened.

At the time he proposed, they had been walking in the private cemetery of Château Blonay. Imposing tombs of the once mighty counts of Savoy and their good ladies filled the forsaken little yard. Min was sitting on no less than the Countess of Zeppelin’s monument. She gazed down at the lake, gray and soft due to a coming rain. Above were the grape terraces and rose arbors set in a background of trees.

Jules thought, that Min was listening intently to his plans. She only halfway listened. She was looking up at the road, searching for a squarish boulder that marked where she had found the bell clapper and the ruby ring ... well, fair or unfair, her aunt had never beaten her since that day.

“Yes, Jules, we may as well be married now,” she heard herself saying. “America is where I want to go.”

“I shall open a shop. You shall see, ma petit. I shall have them flocking from all sides for my Basle honey cakes, my peach kuchen, my London Bridge puddings. Oh, I can take a cabbage and make it taste like a pomegranate. I can cook anything,” and he kissed his fingers to the air. “I have a little book—tiny, very old—but it contains the recipes for our success and wealth. My own recipes, please understand. I shall show the Yankees what baking ought to be.”

“I shall have a silk dress and a necklace and our children shall have everything—everything,” she repeated. “Let us be married without anyone’s knowing. They might object and I should lose my temper. Let us run away—you are old enough to take care of me now—now,” her warm, strong body suddenly leaned against his with childish assurance.

Jules’ lips met her red, happy mouth, the thick lashes closed over her eyes.

“Now,” he agreed.

It was August, 1890, when Min and Jules Beaumont reached New York. One of those dreary midsummer storms that send people scurrying home from resorts to rummage for wraps and blankets. A sharp wind swept the city like the wail of a starving gutter cat. Min’s first impression of America was of a crowded, cold city with many horse-cars and abusive drivers and friendly policemen, high-voiced citizens and tall buildings, rows and rows of brownstone and red-brick dwellings, shops aglitter with prohibited articles.

She was still nauseated from the sea voyage. They had come second-class on a cheap line, the weather proving rough from the moment they boarded the Cherbourg tender. Marriage with Jules had not been as Min had expected. So far it had been quite as Jules had wished it.

They had hurried to Paris after their wedding in a notary’s office. Min had left a rather boasting, now-what-have-you-to-say-about-it note for the Beaumonts. The nine-hour ride from Basle in the second-class compartment had brought an irritable Min into an indifferent Paris. Jules had taken her to the lodgings of his friends. They welcomed her in their way but dropped hints about her lack of style, the difference in their ages. The next day Jules bought her two dresses but neither was of silk. When she reminded him of the promised necklace, he pinched her cheek and called her a “greedy little one.”

“You are married now,” he added in a tone of finality. “The journey to America is expensive and we must live until something turns up.”

So Min looked at necklaces in the store windows. By contrast her reddish, plump neck seemed barer than ever. Jules cut short his stay in Paris and took Min to Cherbourg, that bleak seaport where she felt the world must be coming to an end whenever she looked at its grim fortifications and the pool of dull water beyond. That was the English channel which she had crossed as a child. Perhaps she had been wrong to encourage Jules to go to America, perhaps it would be wiser to try England. But it was too late to change. Jules was impatient to be off. He was beginning to be impatient if Min did not have things just as he wished, if she did not understand the first time he spoke. Despite her youth he was a trifle ashamed of her gawkishness. His Parisian friends had made him realize what a country product she was.

She had been glad to leave Cherbourg even for the ill-smelling inside ship’s cabin. For almost two weeks she lay with her face toward the wall, refusing food and biting her lips to keep her homesick sobs from Jules’ unsympathetic ear. He left her alone a great deal for he was an excellent sailor. Once or twice she had struggled up on deck—a dismal clod, she dimly felt, with her unbecoming clothes and tear-stained face. Even mal de mer did not relieve her of her florid color. She watched Jules, well-groomed and jaunty, playing deck games or talking with the sailors. He seemed unaware of her presence, so she groped her way back to the cabin.

Then New York and icy rain and sharp winds and forlorn rooms high up in a lodging house near Second Avenue. Jules’ friends, of whom he had been so confident, did not materialize. That was the way with this new, unstable country, he complained. Promise anything and do nothing. He must strike out for himself. Would she please stop her complaints? She was off the ship, was she not? Well, then, what was there to wail about?

They must go to work at once or their stock of money would be gone. They must do anything they could find. Later they would be in a position to choose.

Jules drove a team for a wholesale grocery house and Min found herself as chambermaid in a Seventh Avenue hotel. They saw little of each other for the next six months. They met at night, tired, disgruntled, rather bewildered. Jules was no longer trim and dapper and Min’s red mouth became permanently sulky. But it was Min who learned of America—not Jules. At first hand Min saw the life in the cheap hotel, the waste and extravagance, the possibilities of living! She listened to everything that was said about America and by Americans. She saved her wages and her tips and made herself invaluable to the housekeeper. Despite Jules’ sneers about the “rawness and dishonesty and arrogance of America” Min defended this new country.

“It is a fine land,” she would insist. Since she earned her share of expenses Jules could no longer make her be still.

“You are a fool,” she dared tell him at the end of ten months. “Still driving that team, you, a cordon bleu—why don’t you cook? Go from restaurant to restaurant, bakeshop to bakeshop until you find something to do, anything that is in your line. For me, it does not matter. I can make beds in a hundred years from now and still remember how to weed a garden or harness a team. But you—where are our fortunes coming from?”

Jules was uncomfortable under such a harangue. He did not like New York; he was afraid of it. He had been too conceited to go from restaurant to restaurant, bakeshop to bakeshop. He refused to join the union. He complained about the dampness from the Sound, the noise, the crowds, the lack of opportunity. He wanted to try a smaller city. There he would go into business for himself. Everyone advised his doing this; America was said to favor independence.

Min was tired of her work at the hotel. She, too, disliked the noise of crowds. She longed for green spaces and neighbors. She hated listening to Jules rail night after night—and do nothing to remedy his plight. Min had saved a hundred dollars. Jules had three hundred.

They left New York almost a year from the day they had landed and went upstate to Rutledge. It was a substantial American city of seventy-five thousand—with room for seventy-five thousand more. Someone told Min it was certain to become of industrial importance. Its situation in a fertile valley could not fail to attract industry. Rutledge prices would prove more reasonable than New York prices and there the people would be different. They were the “real Americans.” Min was eager to know what “real Americans” would be like.

They rented comfortable rooms in a downtown, “foreign” section, according to Rutledge natives. The city proved an old-fashioned, conservative spot with broad hills nestling about it protectively and wide, tree-bordered streets which formed a dignified background for its numerous mansions. Business was conducted in a leisurely, we-don’t-care-what-the-rest-of-the-world-is-doing fashion. These “real” Americans apparently enjoyed what the New Yorker termed “quiet” wealth. Rutledge had no slums at this time and few poor families. The mills and the manufactories furnished employment to anyone who wanted work.

At first Jules was for their trying the mills but Min held him to his original promise.

“Start a bakery,” she commanded. “These rich people like to eat and there is no bakery here like we can run. We have enough to rent rooms and buy a stove and some flour. When our things are in the windows, they’ll come buy. Oh, yes, they will. Everyone has a stomach.”

Grumbling, Jules obeyed. He had not expected this turn of affairs. Romance having exhausted itself, he found Min’s large strong self something of a tyrant. More and more he was inclined to sit back and let her engineer their fortunes. She was not lazy but the months in the New York hotel had ruined her. She had acquired strange ideas and silly ambitions, all of which would cost a pretty penny to gratify. What was this chatter about owning a fur coat and a diamond ring, drawing books from the library? Better save her money and allow them to go home for their old age ... well, age made everything different and one’s people were one’s people. Jules was losing his bravado and cosmopolitanism. He longed for the quiet of his native canton, the aimless chatter of old inhabitants, the security which a small annuity would bring.

But Min was for spending “pretty pennies,” acquiring the fur coat and diamond ring, the American novels, for going to church suppers and lectures with lantern slides, for Jules becoming naturalized and member of a fraternal order. She wanted to rent a cottage with a parlor and a veranda, to buy furniture on the installment plan. This was America, she kept reminding him, the greatest country in the world.