Mademoiselle Miss, and Other Stories

by Henry Harland

It chanced to reach him (in a letter from a friend, saying it would be celebrated in a fortnight) on the very day of its occurrence; and that, by a pleasant coincidence, was his birthday. In a fit of cynical despair he asked a lot of his schoolfellows, and a few, ladies of the neighbourhood, to dine with him; and they feasted and made merry till well into the following morning, when, for the first and almost the only time in his life, he had to be helped home, drunk. His drunkenness, though, was perhaps not altogether to be regretted. It kept him from thinking; and for that particular night it was conceivably better, on the whole, that he should not think.

His mood of cynical recklessness lasted for a month or two. He celebrated the wedding—faisait la noce, as the local idiom runs—in a double sense, and with feverish diligence. For a moment it seemed a toss-up what would become of him: whether he would sink into the condition of a chronic noceur, or return to the former decent tenor of his way. It happened, however, that he had no appetite for alcohol, and that bad music, bad air, evil communications, gaslight, and late hours failed to afford him any permanent satisfaction: whilst, as for other women,—who that has savoured nectar can care for milk and water?—who that has lost a rose can be consoled with an artificial flower? This was how he put it to himself All the women he knew on the right bank of the Seine were, to his taste, mortally insipid; those whom he knew on the left were stuffed with sawdust.

And the consequence was that one morning he went to work again; and in spite of the dull pain in his heart, he worked steadily, doggedly, from day to day, from year to year, scarcely noting the progress of time, in the absorbed and methodical nature of his life, till presently he had turned forty, and was what they call a successful man. Of course the dull pain in his heart had softened gradually into something that was not entirely painful; into something whose sadness was mixed with sweetness, like plaintive music; but her image remained enshrined as an idol in his memory, and I doubt if ever a day passed without his spending some portion thereof in worship before it. He never walked abroad, either, through the Paris streets, without thinking, “What if I should meet her!” (It would be almost inevitable that she should some time come to Paris.) And at this prospect his heart would leap and his pulses quicken like a boy’s. For art and love between them had kept him young; it had indeed never struck him to count his lustres, or to reflect that in point of them he was middle-aged. Besides, he lived in a country whose amiable custom it is to call every man a lad until he marries. Regularly once a year, in the autumn, he had sent a picture to be exhibited at New York, in the hope that she might see it.

He gave his brushes to be washed rather earlier than usual this afternoon, and went for a stroll in the garden of the Luxembourg. The air was languorous with the warmth and the scent of spring; in the sunshine the marble queens, smiling their still, stony smile, gleamed with a thousand tints of rose and amethyst, as if they had been carved of some iridescent substance, like mother-of-pearl. The face of the old palace glowed with mellow fire; the sleek, dark-green foliage of the chestnut-trees was tipped here and there with pallid gold; and in the deep shade of the allées underneath innumerable children romped vociferously, and innumerable pairs of lovers sentimentalised in silence. Of course they were only mock lovers, students and their étudiantes; but one could forget that for the moment, and all else that is ugly, in the circumambient charm.

He took a penny chair by and by, and sat down at the edge of the terrace, and watched the dance of light and shadow on the waters of the fountain, and thanked Heaven for the keen, untranslatable delight he was able to feel in the beauty of the world. He drank it in with every sense, as if it were an ethereal form of wine; but no wine was so delicious, no wine could have penetrated and thrilled and stimulated him as it did. It was a part of his philosophy,—I might almost say an article of his religion,—to count his faculty for deriving exquisite pleasure from every phase of the beautiful as in some sort a compensation for many of the good things of life that he had missed; and yet, in one way at least, so far from serving as a compensation, it only added to his loss. In the presence of whatever was beautiful, under the spell of it, he always longed with intensified pain for her. And now presently, as he had done in like circumstances countless times before, he sighed for her, inwardly: “Ah, if she were here! If we could enjoy it all together!”—I dare say, poor man, it was a little ridiculous at his age; but he did not see the humour.

He pictured her to himself, her slender figure, her white, eager face, with its penumbra of brown hair, soft as smoke, and its dark eyes, deep and luminous, as if pale fires were burning infinitely far within them. He heard her voice, low and melodious, and her crisp, girlish laughter. And she smiled upon him, a faint, sad smile, that was full of tenderness and yearning and regret. He took her hands, her warm little rosy hands, and marvelled over them, as he caressed them. They were like images in miniature of herself, so sensitive, so fragile, so helpless-seeming, yet possessed of such amazing talents: for when he watched them leaping above the ivory keys of her piano, invariably striking the right note with the right degree of stress and the right interval of time (although to an uninitiated witness their movement must have appeared quite wanton), he wondered at them as a pair of witches.

If he had not reckoned his own years, or marked their action upon himself, it is certain that he had treated her with no less forbearance. She came back to him always the same; always the girl of nineteen whom he had left behind him nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Ah, if she were only with him now, here in the quaint old garden of the Luxembourg! How complete and unutterable his joy would be! He would lead her beside the great basin of the fountain, where the goldfishes flashed like flames; and they would stop before the statues of the queens, and tell over for each other the romantic histories of those dead royal ladies; and how much warmer the sunshine would be, how much greener the earth, how much sweeter the fragrance of the air! By and by they would enter the museum, where he would show her that picture of his which the State had honoured him by buying, and which, he had received a whispered promise, should some day find its way into the Louvre. Afterwards they would saunter down the Boulevard, past the Castle of Cluny, across the bridge, into the open space before Notre Dame. And all the while they would talk, talk, talk, making up for the time that they had lost; and their wounds would be healed, and their hearts would be at rest. It was strange, he thought, that she had never come abroad. All Americans come sooner or later, and one is perpetually running across those one happens to know.

He had never run across her, however, though he had never left off expecting to do so. This very afternoon, for instance, how entirely natural it would seem to meet her. The annual irruption of his country-people had begun; thousands of them were in Paris at this moment: why not she among them? And she would certainly not come to Paris without visiting the Luxembourg; and to-day was a perfect day for such a visit; and—if he should look up now....

He looked up, holding his breath for a second, almost thinking to see her advancing towards him. Surely enough, somebody was advancing towards him, standing before him there in the path, making signals to him. But, as the mists of his day-dream cleared away, he perceived that it was only the old woman come to take his penny for the chair.