Madame got up hastily, murmured a "no, oh no," and disappeared down the hall. Isabelle opened the windows, fell on her knees and set to work with energy, suppressing (lest her mistress still be within earshot) the lively dance-air which came to her lips, as she rattled the brush against the furniture and base-boards. She would be nineteen at her next birthday. What a lovely spring day, how sweet the air was, Jeanne had promised to let her walk out beyond the city-walls next Sunday afternoon with Pierre, and she had a new pair of shoes, real leather shoes, to show off there. Perhaps Pierre would take her to a confiserie and buy her some candied chestnuts! Her pulse beat strong and full, the dance-tune jigged merrily inside her head, she reached far under the bed with her brush, and enjoyed so heartily the elastic stretch and recoil of the muscles in her stout shoulders, that she reached again and again, although there was no need for it. "Jig! Jig! Pr-r-rt!" went the dance tune in her head ... new shoes ... sunshine ... candied chestnuts ... Pierre ... kisses.
Her mistress, detesting the sight of Isabelle's broad, vacuous face had walked aimlessly away, anywhere to escape the slatternly flap of her heelless sandals, and the knock of her brush as she went through the never-varying routine of the morning cleaning. Around and around, every slow dawn brought exactly the same sequence of tiresome, insignificant events. Only stolid, vegetable natures like Isabelle's could endure it. Flora's small, thin, white hands fluttered piteously out into the air as though trying physically to lay hold on something else. There must be something else. The tears stood for a moment in her blue eyes, not so blue now as they had been—oh, she knew how they were fading!
She went through the corridor into the salon, and pulling the curtains aside, stepped into the alcove where her writing desk stood. But she had no intention of writing a letter. To whom? If she wrote what she really felt, there was nobody to understand her. She did not now, as had been her habit in the first days, go to the window and amuse an idle hour by looking down on the crowd below, the ox-drivers, the fish-women, the soldiers, the Spanish peddlers, all the bright-colored, foreign throng that had seemed to her like a page out of a book. Not for nothing had she lived four years in Bayonne! That first simple candor of hers was darkly dyed with new knowledge. She knew now that people talked about a woman still young enough to be desirable, who showed herself at an open window. She knew they talked, and she knew what they said. That hearsay knowledge had been sharpened by her gradual perception of the way certain men among the passers-by had looked up at her; and it had been driven deeply home one day, by one of those men. As she leaned out, her fair hair bright in the sun, a passer-by, a well-dressed man with a walking-stick in his hand, had stared hard at her, caught her eye, hesitated and looked again. Flora had not avoided his eye. Why should she? It was early in her life in the half-Spanish town. She did not fear men's eyes. When he saw this he turned and mounted the stairs to ring at the bell. Isabelle had let him in, not knowing him from any other caller. He stepped quietly to the salon, where the lady of the house, not dreaming that any one had entered, still stood before the window. When she turned in answer to a discreet little cough on his part, she had seen him standing there, hat in hand, waiting, with a singular little smile on his lips, a smile she never forgot.
Oh, he had been perfectly polite, indeed quite desolated at having made a mistake, and had speedily bowed himself out of the place, apologizing gracefully to the moment of door-closing. But that very day, Flora Allen had the swathing lace-curtains put back in their original position, covering every inch of the glass; and when dusk fell, she was always the first to think of drawing the heavy damask curtains over them, so that there seemed to be no windows at all in the room.
That seemed to her to express her life—no windows except these opening on what was physically sickening and coarse; no doors save those leading back and forth between the deadly familiarity of the imprisoning rooms.
What was it she had not done which other women did to let them into the center of life, while she was exiled to the outer fringes? How was it that while other women's arms seemed to close about warm, living substances, hers grasped at shadows. Or did other women only pretend to be satisfied, for fear of facing the emptiness which echoed in her ears more and more loudly?
Did they really and honestly find the absorbing joy in their children, which was the sentimental tradition? And if they did, how did they manage it? She loved Marise, nobody had a nicer little girl, nor a prettier. But the plain facts were that a little girl and a grown woman were very different beings, with very different needs and interests. There was nothing she would not do for Marise, she often told herself, if Marise needed it. But Marise apparently did not need a single thing her mother could do for her, any more than any healthy little girl absorbed in her school and play. There was no sense in doing uninteresting things for people when they were just as well off without them. She often looked at Marise across the dinner-table, fresh and well-groomed by Jeanne's competent hands, and wondered with a sincere bewilderment how any one could expect her to make an occupation out of loving a very busy, self-centered, much-occupied little girl, who left the house before her mother was out of bed, was gone all day, spent most of her few free hours with her music teacher, and in the nature of things went to bed just at the beginning of the evening.
From time to time, when they had first come to Bayonne, she had made various attempts to connect her life with Marise's, annoyed by the affection Marise showed to Jeanne and to that singularly unattractive Mlle. Hasparren. Breaking through the tyrannical regularity of the child's hard-working life, she had carried her off, now for a day on the beach at Guéthary, now for a day in the shops at Biarritz, once for a week-end at Saint Sauveur. But she had come home after such attempts, mortally weary and depressed. What was the use of trying to pretend that the things which delighted and amused a child were not inconceivably tiresome to a grown-up? Those endless hours while she sat in the sun on the sand (which got into her Shoes), and watched Marise inanely prance in the surf, or dig for clams which she did not care to keep after she had caught them! How could she see anything but very visible repulsiveness and dirt, and quite probably diseases in the lank stray dogs and cats which always turned up when Marise went along a street, and which Marise always felt an inexplicable and perverse desire to fondle? And those cheap bazaars, where Marise loved to linger, gazing with dazzled eyes at the trumpery, papier-maché gimcracks and playthings...! Of course, as Marise had grown less childish, walks had been free of hoop-rolling with its inevitable encounters with irascible old gentlemen's legs, but she had developed other tastes quite as bothersome. Flora's pretty, slender feet ached with fatigue at the recollection of the long hours she had stood beside Marise, who, sucking hard on a barley-sugar stick, and hooking her elbows over the parapet of the bridge over the Adour, gazed endlessly down on dirty, smelly ships being unloaded by dirty, smelly workmen.
Flora had come to the conviction that the European custom of sending a servant around with children was based on a realistic recognition of facts. It was better for both sides; for she knew that, although she tried to be patient, Marise felt her lack in interest in chatter about whether the stone would hit the tree this time, or how long Marise could walk over flagged sidewalks without once stepping on a crack. Good Heavens! What difference did it make! It was inevitable that a servant's vacant mind should be naturally more nearly on the childish level.
And yet, once in a while, when Marise came into the salon to kiss her mother good-night, Flora's arms caught her fast, wistfully, feeling an aggrieved, helpless resentment at somehow being cheated out of what seemed to mean so much more to other mothers. Marise always felt instantly this special mood in her mother and always flashed up in an ardent return, straining her mother to her in a great silent hug. It was a good moment for them both, but so quickly gone.