Villette
reflex from the window again lit his face: he smiled, but his eye was
melancholy. How I wished that he could feel heart’s-ease! How I grieved
that he brooded over pain, and pain from such a cause! He, with his
great advantages, _he_ to love in vain! I did not then know that the
pensiveness of reverse is the best phase for some minds; nor did I
reflect that some herbs, “though scentless when entire, yield fragrance
when they’re bruised.”
“Do not be sorrowful, do not grieve,” I broke out. “If there is in
Ginevra one spark of worthiness of your affection, she will—she _must_
feel devotion in return. Be cheerful, be hopeful, Dr. John. Who should
hope, if not you?”
In return for this speech I got—what, it must be supposed, I deserved—a
look of surprise: I thought also of some disapprobation. We parted, and
I went into the house very chill. The clocks struck and the bells
tolled midnight; people were leaving fast: the fête was over; the lamps
were fading. In another hour all the dwelling-house, and all the
pensionnat, were dark and hushed. I too was in bed, but not asleep. To
me it was not easy to sleep after a day of such excitement.
CHAPTER XV.
THE LONG VACATION.
Following Madame Beck’s fête, with its three preceding weeks of
relaxation, its brief twelve hours’ burst of hilarity and dissipation,
and its one subsequent day of utter languor, came a period of reaction;
two months of real application, of close, hard study. These two months,
being the last of the “année scolaire,” were indeed the only genuine
working months in the year. To them was procrastinated—into them
concentrated, alike by professors, mistresses, and pupils—the main
burden of preparation for the examinations preceding the distribution
of prizes. Candidates for rewards had then to work in good earnest;
masters and teachers had to set their shoulders to the wheel, to urge
on the backward, and diligently aid and train the more promising. A
showy demonstration—a telling exhibition—must be got up for public
view, and all means were fair to this end.
I scarcely noted how the other teachers went to work; I had my own
business to mind; and _my_ task was not the least onerous, being to
imbue some ninety sets of brains with a due tincture of what they
considered a most complicated and difficult science, that of the
English language; and to drill ninety tongues in what, for them, was an
almost impossible pronunciation—the lisping and hissing dentals of the
Isles.
The examination-day arrived. Awful day! Prepared for with anxious care,
dressed for with silent despatch—nothing vaporous or fluttering now—no
white gauze or azure streamers; the grave, close, compact was the order
of the toilette. It seemed to me that I was this day, especially
doomed—the main burden and trial falling on me alone of all the female
teachers. The others were not expected to examine in the studies they
taught; the professor of literature, M. Paul, taking upon himself this
duty. He, this school autocrat, gathered all and sundry reins into the
hollow of his one hand; he irefully rejected any colleague; he would
not have help. Madame herself, who evidently rather wished to undertake
the examination in geography—her favourite study, which she taught
well—was forced to succumb, and be subordinate to her despotic
kinsman’s direction. The whole staff of instructors, male and female,
he set aside, and stood on the examiner’s estrade alone. It irked him
that he was forced to make one exception to this rule. He could not
manage English: he was obliged to leave that branch of education in the
English teacher’s hands; which he did, not without a flash of naïve
jealousy.
A constant crusade against the “amour-propre” of every human being but
himself, was the crotchet of this able, but fiery and grasping little
man. He had a strong relish for public representation in his own
person, but an extreme abhorrence of the like display in any other. He
quelled, he kept down when he could; and when he could not, he fumed
like a bottled storm.
On the evening preceding the examination-day, I was walking in the
garden, as were the other teachers and all the boarders. M. Emanuel
joined me in the “allée défendue;” his cigar was at his lips; his
paletôt—a most characteristic garment of no particular shape—hung dark
and menacing; the tassel of his bonnet grec sternly shadowed his left
temple; his black whiskers curled like those of a wrathful cat; his
blue eye had a cloud in its glitter.
“Ainsi,” he began, abruptly fronting and arresting me, “vous allez
trôner comme une reine; demain—trôner à mes côtés? Sans doute vous
savourez d’avance les délices de l’autorité. Je crois voir en je ne
sais quoi de rayonnante, petite ambitieuse!”
Now the fact was, he happened to be entirely mistaken. I did not—could
not—estimate the admiration or the good opinion of tomorrow’s audience
at the same rate he did. Had that audience numbered as many personal
friends and acquaintance for me as for him, I know not how it might
have been: I speak of the case as it stood. On me school-triumphs shed
but a cold lustre. I had wondered—and I wondered now—how it was that
for him they seemed to shine as with hearth-warmth and hearth-glow.
_He_ cared for them perhaps too much; _I_, probably, too little.
However, I had my own fancies as well as he. I liked, for instance, to
see M. Emanuel jealous; it lit up his nature, and woke his spirit; it
threw all sorts of queer lights and shadows over his dun face, and into
his violet-azure eyes (he used to say that his black hair and blue eyes
were “une de ses beautés”). There was a relish in his anger; it was
artless, earnest, quite unreasonable, but never hypocritical. I uttered
no disclaimer then of the complacency he attributed to me; I merely
asked where the English examination came in—whether at the commencement
or close of the day?
“I hesitate,” said he, “whether at the very beginning, before many
persons are come, and when your aspiring nature will not be gratified
by a large audience, or quite at the close, when everybody is tired,
and only a jaded and worn-out attention will be at your service.”
“Que vous êtes dur, Monsieur!” I said, affecting dejection.
“One ought to be ‘dur’ with you. You are one of those beings who must
be _kept down_. I know you! I know you! Other people in this house see
you pass, and think that a colourless shadow has gone by. As for me, I
scrutinized your face once, and it sufficed.”
“You are satisfied that you understand me?”
Without answering directly, he went on, “Were you not gratified when
you succeeded in that vaudeville? I watched you and saw a passionate
ardour for triumph in your physiognomy. What fire shot into the glance!
Not mere light, but flame: je me tiens pour averti.”
“What feeling I had on that occasion, Monsieur—and pardon me, if I say,
you immensely exaggerate both its quality and quantity—was quite
abstract. I did not care for the vaudeville. I hated the part you
assigned me. I had not the slightest sympathy with the audience below
the stage. They are good people, doubtless, but do I know them? Are
they anything to me? Can I care for being brought before their view
again to-morrow? Will the examination be anything but a task to me—a
task I wish well over?”
“Shall I take it out of your hands?”
“With all my heart; if you do not fear failure.”
“But I should fail. I only know three phrases of English, and a few
words: par exemple, de sonn, de mone, de stare—est-ce bien dit? My
opinion is that it would be better to give up the thing altogether: to
have no English examination, eh?”
“If Madame consents, I consent.”
“Heartily?”
“Very heartily.”
He smoked his cigar in silence. He turned suddenly.
“Donnez-moi la main,” said he, and the spite and jealousy melted out of
his face, and a generous kindliness shone there instead.
“Come, we will not be rivals, we will be friends,” he pursued. “The
examination shall take place, and I will choose a good moment; and
instead of vexing and hindering, as I felt half-inclined ten minutes
ago—for I have my malevolent moods: I always had from childhood—I will
aid you sincerely. After all, you are solitary and a stranger, and have
your way to make and your bread to earn; it may be well that you should
become known. We will be friends: do you agree?”
“Out of my heart, Monsieur. I am glad of a friend. I like that better
than a triumph.”
“Pauvrette!” said he, and turned away and left the alley.
The examination passed over well; M. Paul was as good as his word, and
did his best to make my part easy. The next day came the distribution
of prizes; that also passed; the school broke up; the pupils went home,
and now began the long vacation.
That vacation! Shall I ever forget it? I think not. Madame Beck went,
the first day of the holidays, to join her children at the sea-side;
all the three teachers had parents or friends with whom they took
refuge; every professor quitted the city; some went to Paris, some to
Boue-Marine; M. Paul set forth on a pilgrimage to Rome; the house was
left quite empty, but for me, a servant, and a poor deformed and
imbecile pupil, a sort of crétin, whom her stepmother in a distant
province would not allow to return home.
My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its chords.
How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless! How vast
and void seemed the desolate premises! How gloomy the forsaken
garden—grey now with the dust of a town summer departed. Looking
forward at the commencement of those eight weeks, I hardly knew how I
was to live to the end. My spirits had long been gradually sinking; now
that the prop of employment was withdrawn, they went down fast. Even to
look forward was not to hope: the dumb future spoke no comfort, offered
no promise, gave no inducement to bear present evil in reliance on
future good. A sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed on
me—a despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things
earthly. Alas! When I had full leisure to look on life as life must be
looked on by such as me, I found it but a hopeless desert: tawny sands,
with no green fields, no palm-tree, no well in view. The hopes which
are dear to youth, which bear it up and lead it on, I knew not and
dared not know. If they knocked at my heart sometimes, an inhospitable
bar to admission must be inwardly drawn. When they turned away thus
rejected, tears sad enough sometimes flowed: but it could not be
helped: I dared not give such guests lodging. So mortally did I fear
the sin and weakness of presumption.
Religious reader, you will preach to me a long sermon about what I have
just written, and so will you, moralist: and you, stern sage: you,
stoic, will frown; you, cynic, sneer; you, epicure, laugh. Well, each
and all, take it your own way. I accept the sermon, frown, sneer, and
laugh; perhaps you are all right: and perhaps, circumstanced like me,
you would have been, like me, wrong. The first month was, indeed, a
long, black, heavy month to me.
The crétin did not seem unhappy. I did my best to feed her well and
keep her warm, and she only asked food and sunshine, or when that
lacked, fire. Her weak faculties approved of inertion: her brain, her
eyes, her ears, her heart slept content; they could not wake to work,
so lethargy was their Paradise.
Three weeks of that vacation were hot, fair, and dry, but the fourth
and fifth were tempestuous and wet. I do not know why that change in
the atmosphere made a cruel impression on me, why the raging storm and
beating rain crushed me with a deadlier paralysis than I had
experienced while the air had remained serene; but so it was; and my
nervous system could hardly support what it had for many days and