Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

But she pulled herself together almost at once and began to talk of the restaurant which, I learned, was marching in a simply marvellous manner. It was only when, in answer to her question, I told her that the Demoiselle Suisse was marching not at all and was about to leave me, that the truth came out. There was no restaurant, there never had been,—except in the country of Tartarin's lions; it was her invention to spare me any self-reproach I might have felt for turning her adrift at the end of her week's engagement. She had found no work since. She and her husband had pawned everything. Tiens, and she emptied before me a pocketful of pawn tickets. They were without a sou. They had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours. That was the change. I began to understand. She was starving, literally starving, in the cold and gloom and damp of the London winter, she who was used to the warmth and sunshine, to the clear blue skies of Provence. If the aliens who drift to England, as to the Promised Land, could but know what awaited them!

Of course I took her back. She might have added rouge to the powder, she might have glittered all over with diamonds, sham or real, and I would not have minded. J. welcomed her with joy. William Penn hung rapturously at her heels. We had a risotto, golden as the sun of the Midi, fragrant as its kitchens, for our dinner.

There was no question of a week now, no question of time at all. It did not seem as if we ever could manage again, as if we ever could have managed, without Louise. And she, on her side, took possession of our chambers, and, for a ridiculously small sum a week, worked her miracles for us. We positively shone with cleanliness; London grime no longer lurked, the skeleton in our cupboards. We never ate dinners and breakfasts more to our liking, never had I been so free from housekeeping, never had my weekly bills been so small. Eventually, she charged herself with the marketing, though she could not, and never could, learn to speak a word of English; but not even the London tradesman was proof against her smile. She kept the weekly accounts, though she could neither read nor write: in her intelligence, an eloquent witness to the folly of general education. She was, in a word, the most capable and intelligent woman I have ever met, so that it was the more astounding that she should also be the most charming.

Most astounding of all was the way, entirely, typically Provençale as she was, she could adapt herself to London and its life and people. Though she wore in the street an ordinary felt hat, and in the house the English apron, you could see that her hair was made for the pretty Provençal ribbon, and her broad shoulders for the Provençal fichu. Té, vé, and au mouins were as constantly in her mouth as in Tartarin's. Provençal proverbs forever hovered on her lips. She sang Provençal songs at her work. She had ready a Provençal story for every occasion. Her very adjectives were Mistral's, her very exaggerations Daudet's. And yet she did everything as if she had been a "general" in London chambers all her life. Nothing came amiss to her. After her first startling appearance as waitress, it was no time before she was serving at table as if she had been born to it, and with such a grace of her own that every dish she offered seemed a personal tribute. People who had never seen her before would smile back involuntarily as they helped themselves. It was the same no matter what she did. She was always gay, however heavy her task. To her even London, with its fogs, was a galéjado, as they say "down there." And she was so appreciative. We would make excuses to give her things for the pleasure of watching the warm glow spread over her face and the light leap to her eyes. We would send her to the theatre for the delight of having her come back and tell us about it. All the world, on and off the stage, was exalted and transfigured as she saw it.

But frank as she was in her admiration of all the world, she remained curiously reticent about herself. "My poor grandmother used to say, you must turn your tongue seven times in your mouth before speaking," she said to me once; and I used to fancy she gave hers a few extra twists when it came to talking of her own affairs. Some few facts I gathered: that she had been at one time an ouvreuse in a Marseilles theatre; at another, a tailoress,—how accomplished, the smart appearance of her husband in J.'s old coats and trousers was to show us; and that, always, off and on, she had made a business of buying at the periodical sales of the Mont de Piété and selling at private sales of her own. I gathered also that they all knew her in Marseilles; it was Louise here, Louise there, as she passed through the market, and everybody must have a word and a laugh with her. No wonder! You couldn't have a word and a laugh once with Louise and not long to repeat the experience. But to her life when the hours of work were over, she offered next to no clue.

Only one or two figures flitted, pale shadows, through her rare reminiscences. One was the old grandmother, whose sayings were full of wisdom, but who seemed to have done little for her save give her, fortunately, no schooling at all, and a religious education that bore the most surprising fruit. Louise had made her first communion, she had walked in procession on feast days. J'adorais ça, she would tell me, as she recalled her long white veil and the taper in her hand. But she adored every bit as much going to the Salvation Army meetings,—the lassies would invite her in, and lend her a hymn-book, and she would sing as hard as ever she could, was her account. Her ideas on the subject of the Scriptures and the relations of the Holy Family left me gasping. But her creed had the merit of simplicity. The Boun Diou was intelligent, she maintained; il aime les gens honnêtes. He would not ask her to hurry off to church and leave all in disorder at home, and waste her time. If she needed to pray, she knelt down where and as she was, and the Boun Diou was as well pleased. He was a man like us, wasn't He? Well then, He understood.

There was also a sister. She occupied a modest apartment in Marseilles when she first dawned upon our horizon, but so rapidly did it expand into a palatial house in town and a palatial villa by the sea, both with cellars of rare and exquisite vintages and stables full of horses and carriages, that we looked confidently to the fast-approaching day when we should find her installed in the Elysée at Paris. Only in one respect did she never vary by a hair's breadth: this was her hatred of Louise's husband.

Here, at all events, was a member of the family about whom we learned more than we cared to know. For if he did not show himself at first, that did not mean his willingness to let us ignore him. He persisted in wanting Louise to meet him at the corner, sometimes just when I most wanted her in the kitchen. He would have her come back to him at night; and to see her, after her day's hard work, start out in the black sodden streets, seldom earlier than ten, often as late as midnight; to realize that she must start back long before the sun would have thought of coming up, if the sun ever did come up on a London winter morning, made us wretchedly uncomfortable. The husband, however, was not to be moved by any messages I might send him. He was too shy to grant the interview I asked. But he gave me to understand through her that he wouldn't do without her, he would rather starve, he couldn't get along without her. We did not blame him: we couldn't, either. That was why, after several weeks of discomfort to all concerned, it occurred to us that we might invite him to make our home his; and we were charmed by his condescension when, at last conquering his shyness, he accepted our invitation. The threatened deadlock was thus settled, and M. Auguste, as he introduced himself, came to us as a guest for as long as he chose to stay. There were friends—there always are—to warn us that what we were doing was sheer madness. What did we know about him, anyway? Precious little, it was a fact: that he was the husband of Louise, neither more nor less. We did not even know that, it was hinted. But if Louise had not asked for our marriage certificate, could we insist upon her producing hers?

It may have been mad, but it worked excellently. M. Auguste as a guest was the pattern of discretion. I had never had so much as a glimpse of him until he came to visit us. Then I found him a good-looking man, evidently a few years younger than Louise, well-built, rather taller than the average Frenchman. Beyond this, it was weeks before I knew anything of him except the astonishing adroitness with which he kept out of our way. He quickly learned our hours and arranged his accordingly. After we had begun work in the morning, he would saunter down to the kitchen and have his coffee, the one person of leisure in the establishment. After that, and again in the afternoon, he would stroll out to attend to what I take were the not too arduous duties of a horse-dealer with neither horses nor capital,—for as a horse-dealer he described himself when he had got so far as to describe himself at all. At noon and at dinner-time, he would return from Tattersall's, or wherever his not too exhausting business had called him, with a small paper parcel supposed to contain his breakfast or his dinner, our agreement being that he was to supply his own food. The evenings he spent with Louise. I could discover no vice in him except the, to us, disturbing excess of his devotion to her. You read of this sort of devotion in French novels and do not believe in it. But M. Auguste, in his exacting dependence on Louise, left the French novel far behind. As for Louise, though she was no longer young and beauty fades early in the South, I have never met, in or out of books, a woman who made me understand so well the reason of the selfishness some men call love.

M. Auguste's manners to us were irreproachable. We could only admire the consideration he showed in so persistently effacing himself. J. never would have seen him, if on feast days—Christmas, New Year's, the 14th of July—M. Auguste had not, with great ceremony, entered the dining-room at the hour of morning coffee to shake hands and wish J. the compliments of the season. With me his relations grew less formal, for he was not slow to discover that we had one pleasant weakness in common. Though the modest proportions of that brown-paper parcel might not suggest it, M. Auguste knew and liked what was good to eat; so did I. Almost before I realized it, he had fallen into the habit of preparing some special dish for me, or of making my coffee, when I chanced to be alone for lunch or for dinner. I can still see the gleam in his eyes as he brought me in my cup, and assured me that he, not Louise, was the artist, and that it was something of extra—but of extra!—as it always was. Nor was it long before he was installed chef in our kitchen on the occasion of any little breakfast or dinner we might be giving. The first time I caught him in shirt-sleeves, with Louise's apron flapping about his legs and the bib drawn over his waistcoat, he was inclined to be apologetic. But he soon gave up apology. It was evident there were few things he enjoyed more than cooking a good dinner,—unless it was eating it,—and his apron was put on early in the day. In the end, I never asked any one to breakfast or dinner without consulting him, and his menus strengthened the friendliness of our relations.