On the terrible subject of lack of children in that house Jeanne could not trust herself to speak. It was too sore a spot that with all Jeanne's five grown sons, she had not a grandchild to hold in her arms. The two, Americans now, who were in the Argentine making their fortunes, were married and had families, but what were grandchildren on the other side of the globe to Jeanne? The two younger ones, who were sailors, were not married, and Michel, who had promised to be the mainstay of her life and had stayed at home to run the farm, here he had been caught by that impudent little French girl, one of the chambermaids in a Biarritz hotel, a girl who did not know how to spin, who laughed at the decent Basque ways, and who had no shame for her sterility, refusing to go to Lourdes to pray for children.
Jeanne had never had any romantic feeling for her shiftless, hard-drinking husband, whose irregular earnings as a fisher she had been forced to piece out with much domestic service in the houses of others; and now he was dead, she never thought of him. She had never been to a theater in her life, nor read a novel, for she could not read at all. None of her native capacity for emotion had been used in her youth, nor frittered away later in the second-hand make-believes of modern life. It had all been poured out upon children; on her five sons, and on the one little dark-eyed, black-haired daughter, the little Marie—who had died at eleven, so many years ago, just after her first communion—the blessed saint Marise had looked, slim and straight in her white dress! The Blessed Virgin had found her namesake too sweet to wait for, and had taken her at once.
And now those strong, yearning old arms were empty of young life, and Jeanne's heart was bitter. She might scold her loudest over the waste of butter and eggs at the farm, she might gossip her head off about the faults of the neighbors, and shriek out maledictions on the stingy bourgeoise who wanted to buy her vegetables for nothing, she could not drown out the forlorn echo of emptiness and loneliness within.
She turned up the Rue Thiers, glanced frowningly at the Paris-like department store on the other side of the street with its gaudy plate-glass show-windows, the pride of the younger generation in Bayonne, and looked up with approval at the huge, thick, battlemented walls of the Old Castle, substantial enough that, and plain enough and old enough to please even a Basque.
As she turned in at the door of Anna's apartment house, her mouth was open to begin her litany of grievances; but when she entered Anna's one-room, brick-paved lodging, she found her niece with a budget of exciting news of her own, "Oh, Tante Jeanne, what do you think...." she burst out as the old woman swung lightly in; but before she would go on, she went to close the door, bearing herself so secretly, with such self-importance that Jeanne was between exasperation and greediness to hear. Like all illiterates who cannot glut on the newspapers their appetite for gossip, she was insatiable for it in talk. She sat down on the front of her chair, her ear cocked eagerly. Anna drew her own chair up close and began to speak in Basque very rapidly. "I'm so glad you've come, Tante Jeanne, you've had so much experience in working out in families, you know about things. You know about those American farm machines, that they're beginning to use on the big farms, painted red, you know. Well, the American agent for that company, he has come here to live, here in this house, the grand second-floor apartments, the ones old Père Lapagorry rents furnished, on both sides of the landing, yes, the two of them, because his wife, a very chic madame, didn't think one was big enough, and what can one family do with two kitchens, tell me that, and they with only one child to their name, a little girl, who doesn't take up any more room than a flea, so to speak, and the lady has asked me to find her a cook and a maid, and listen, Tante, she says she will pay sixty francs a month each, and fed and lodged!"
She paused to underline this and looked triumphantly at her aunt, who for years had worked as cook in families for forty francs a month and lodged herself. Jeanne looked back at her hard, a new possibility lifting a corner of its veil in her mind.
"What are they like, these Americans?" she asked, "Spanish-Basque or French-Basque?" (To a Basque, the term "American" means one of his own race who has emigrated to South America, made his pile, and returned to his own country to spend it.)
"They're not Basques at all," said Anna.
"What, French?" said Jeanne instantly incredulous of Anna's story. There was no use trying to tell her that any French family was willing to pay twice the usual wage for servants.
"No, they don't even understand French, but the madame can read it a little."