Chapter IV: Part 4

After a few passes her hands, which were slightly tremulous, regained some of their wonted steadiness and brilliancy of movement, and the cards dropped rapidly on the table. Mr. Horace, as he had got into the habit of doing, watched her mechanically, rather absent-mindedly retailing what he imagined would interest her, from his week's observation and hearsay. And madame's little world revolved, complete for her, in time, place, and personality.

It was an old-fashioned square room with long ceiling, and broad, low windows heavily curtained with stiff silk brocade, faded by time into mellowness. The tall white-painted mantel carried its obligation of ornaments well: a gilt clock which under a glass case related some brilliant poetical idyl, and told the hours only in an insignificant aside, according to the delicate politeness of bygone French taste; flanked by duplicate continuations of the same idyl in companion candelabra, also under glass; Sèvres, or imitation Sèvres vases, and a crowd of smaller objects to which age and rarity were slowly contributing an artistic value. An oval mirror behind threw replicas of them into another mirror, receiving in exchange the reflected portrait of madame in her youth, and in the partial nudity in which innocence was limned in madame's youth. There were besides mirrors on the other three walls of the room, all hung with such careful intent for the exercise of their vocation that the apartment, in spots, extended indefinitely; the brilliant chandelier was thereby quadrupled, and the furniture and ornaments multiplied everywhere and most unexpectedly into twins and triplets, producing such sociabilities among them, and forcing such correspondences between inanimate objects with such hospitable insistence, that the effect was full of gaiety and life, although the interchange in reality was the mere repetition of one original, a kind of phonographic echo.

The portrait of monsieur, madame's handsome young husband, hung out of the circle of radiance, in the isolation that, wherever they hang, always seems to surround the portraits of the dead.

Old as the parlors appeared, madame antedated them by the sixteen years she had lived before her marriage, which had been the occasion of their furnishment. She had traveled a considerable distance over the sands of time since the epoch commemorated by the portrait. Indeed, it would require almost documentary evidence to prove that she, who now was arriving at eighty, was the same Atalanta that had started out so buoyantly at sixteen.

Instead of a cap, she wore black lace over her head, pinned with gold brooches. Her white hair curled naturally over a low forehead. Her complexion showed care--and powder. Her eyes were still bright, not with the effete intelligence of old age, but with actual potency. She wore a loose black sack flowered in purple, and over that a black lace mantle, fastened with more gold brooches.

She played her game of solitaire rapidly, impatiently, and always won; for she never hesitated to cheat to get out of a tight place, or into a favorable one, cheating with the quickness of a flash, and forgetting it the moment afterward.

Mr. Horace was as old as she, but he looked much younger, although his dress and appearance betrayed no evidence of an effort in that direction. Whenever his friend cheated, he would invariably call her attention to it; and as usual she would shrug her shoulders, and say, "Bah! lose a game for a card!" and pursue the conversation.

He happened to mention mushrooms--fresh mushrooms. She threw down her cards before the words were out of his mouth, and began to call, "Jules! Jules!" Mr. Horace pulled the bell-cord, but madame was too excitable for that means of communication. She ran into the antechamber, and put her head over the banisters, calling, "Jules! Jules!" louder and louder. She might have heard Jules's slippered feet running from the street into the corridor and up-stairs, had she not been so deaf. He appeared at the door.

"But where have you been? Here I have been raising the house a half-hour, calling you. You have been in the street. I am sure you have been in the street."

"Madame is very much mistaken," answered Jules, with resentful dignity. He had taken off his white apron of waiter, and was disreputable in all the shabbiness of his attire as cook. "When madame forbids me to go into the street, I do not go into the street. I was in the kitchen; I had fallen asleep. What does madame desire?" smiling benevolently.

"What is this I hear? Fresh mushrooms in the market!"

"Eh, madame?"

"Fresh mushrooms in the market, and you have not brought me any!"

"Madame, there are fresh mushrooms everywhere in the market," waving his hand to show their universality.

"Everybody is eating them--"

"Old Pomponnette," Jules continued, "only this morning offered me a plate, piled up high, for ten cents."

"Idiot! Why did you not buy them?"

"If madame had said so; but madame did not say so. Madame said, 'Soup, Jules; carrots, rice,'" counting on his fingers.

"And the gumbo?"

"I have explained that that was an accident. Madame said 'Soup,'" enumerating his menu again; "madame never once said mushrooms."

"But how could I know there were mushrooms in the market? Do I go to market?"

"That is it!" and Jules smiled at the question thus settled.

"If you had told me there were mushrooms in the market--" pursued madame, persisting in treating Jules as a reasonable being.

"Why did not madame ask me? If madame had asked me, surely I would have told madame. Yesterday Caesar brought them to the door--a whole bucketful for twenty-five cents. I had to shut the door in his face to get rid of him," triumphantly.

"And you brought me yesterday those detestable peas!"

"Ah," shrugging his shoulders, "madame told me to buy what I saw. I saw peas. I bought them."

"Well, understand now, once for all: whenever you see mushrooms, no matter what I ordered, you buy them. Do you hear?"

"No, madame. Surely I cannot buy mushrooms unless madame orders them. Madame's disposition is too quick."

"But I do order them. Stupid! I do order them. I tell you to buy them every day."

"And if there are none in the market every day?"

"Go away! Get out of my sight! I do not want to see you. Ah, it is unendurable! I must--I must get rid of him!" This last was not a threat, as Jules knew only too well. It was merely a habitual exclamation.

During the colloquy Mr. Horace, leaning back in his arm-chair, raised his eyes, and caught the reflected portrait of madame in the mirror before him--the reflection so much softer and prettier, so much more ethereal, than the original painting. Indeed, seen in the mirror, that way, the portrait was as refreshing as the most charming memory. He pointed to it when madame, with considerable loss of temper, regained her seat.

"It is as beautiful as the past," he explained most unnaturally, for he and his friend had a horror of looking at the long, long past, which could not fail to remind them of--what no one cares to contemplate out of church. Making an effort toward some determination which a subtle observer might have noticed weighing upon him all the evening, he added: "And, apropos of the past--"

"_Hein_?" interrogated the old lady, impatiently, still under the influence of her irascibility about the mushrooms.

He moved his chair closer, and bent forward, as if his communication were to be confidential.

"Ah, bah! Speak louder!" she cried. "One would suppose you had some secret to tell. What secrets can there be at our age?" She took up her cards and began to play. There could be no one who bothered herself less about the forms of politeness.

"Yes, yes," answered Mr. Horace, throwing himself back into his chair; "what secrets can there be at our age?"

The remark seemed a pregnant one to him; he gave himself up to it. One must evidently be the age of one's thoughts. Mr. Horace's thoughts revealed him the old man he was. The lines in his face deepened into wrinkles; his white mustache could not pretend to conceal his mouth, worsened by the loss of a tooth or two; and the long, thin hand that propped his head was crossed with blue, distended veins. "At the last judgment"--it was a favorite quotation with him--"the book of our conscience will be read aloud before the whole company."

But the old lady, deep in her game, paid no more heed to his quotation than to him. He made a gesture toward her portrait.

"When that was painted, Josephine--"

Madame threw a glance after the gesture. The time was so long ago, the mythology of Greece hardly more distant! At eighty the golden age of youth must indeed appear an evanescent myth. Madame's ideas seemed to take that direction.

"Ah, at that time we were all nymphs, and you all demigods."

"Demigods and nymphs, yes; but there was one among us who was a god with you all."

The allusion--a frequent one with Mr. Horace--was to madame's husband, who in his day, it is said, had indeed played the god in the little Arcadia of society. She shrugged her shoulders. The truth is so little of a compliment The old gentleman sighed in an abstracted way, and madame, although apparently absorbed in her game, lent her ear. It is safe to say that a woman is never too old to hear a sigh wafted in her direction.

"Josephine, do you remember--in your memory--"

She pretended not to hear. Remember? Who ever heard of her forgetting? But she was not the woman to say, at a moment's notice, what she remembered or what she forgot.

"A woman's memory! When I think of a woman's memory--in fact, I do not like to think of a woman's memory. One can intrude in imagination into many places; but a woman's memory--"

Mr. Horace seemed to lose his thread. It had been said of him in his youth that he wrote poetry--and it was said against him. It was evidently such lapses as these that had given rise to the accusation. And as there was no one less impatient under sentiment or poetry than madame, her feet began to agitate themselves as if Jules were perorating some of his culinary inanities before her.

"And a man's memory!" totally misunderstanding him. "It is not there that I either would penetrate, my friend. A man--"

When madame began to talk about men she was prompted by imagination just as much as was Mr. Horace when he talked about women. But what a difference in their sentiments! And yet he had received so little, and she so much, from the subjects of their inspiration. But that seems to be the way in life--or in imagination.

"That you should"--he paused with the curious shyness of the old before the word "love"--"that you two should--marry--seemed natural, inevitable, at the time."

Tradition records exactly the same comment by society at the time on the marriage in question. Society is ever fatalistic in its comments.

"But the natural--the inevitable--do we not sometimes, I wonder, perform them as Jules does his accidents?"

"Ah, do not talk about that idiot! An idiot born and bred! I won't have him about me! He is a monstrosity! I tell his grandmother that every day when she comes to comb me. What a farce--what a ridiculous farce comfortable existence has become with us! Fresh mushrooms in market, and bring me carrots!"

The old gentleman, partly from long knowledge of her habit, or from an equally persistent bend of his own, quietly held on to his idea.

"One cannot tell. It seems so at the time. We like to think it so; it makes it easier. And yet, looking back on our future as we once looked forward to it--"

"Eh! but who wants to look back on it, my friend? Who in the world wants to look back on it?" One could not doubt madame's energy of opinion on that question to hear her voice. "We have done our future, we have performed it, if you will. Our future! It is like the dinners we have eaten; of course we cannot remember the good without becoming exasperated over the bad: but"--shrugging her shoulders--"since we cannot beat the cooks, we must submit to fate," forcing a queen that she needed at the critical point of her game.

"At sixteen and twenty-one it is hard to realize that one is arranging one's life to last until sixty, seventy, forever," correcting himself as he thought of his friend, the dead husband. If madame had ever possessed the art of self-control, it was many a long day since she had exercised it; now she frankly began to show ennui.

"When I look back to that time,"--Mr. Horace leaned back in his chair and half closed his eyes, perhaps to avoid the expression of her face,--"I see nothing but lights and flowers, I hear nothing but music and laughter; and all--lights and flowers and music and laughter--seem to meet in this room, where we met so often to arrange our--inevitabilities." The word appeared to attract him. "Josephine,"--with a sudden change of voice and manner,--"Josephine, how beautiful you were!"

The old lady nodded her head without looking from her cards.

"They used to say," with sad conviction of the truth of his testimony--"the men used to say that your beauty was irresistible. None ever withstood you. None ever could."

That, after all, was Mr. Horace's great charm with madame; he was so faithful to the illusions of his youth. As he looked now at her, one could almost feel the irresistibility of which he spoke.

"It was only their excuse, perhaps; we could not tell at the time; we cannot tell even now when we think about it. They said then, talking as men talk over such things, that you were the only one who could remain yourself under the circumstances; you were the only one who could know, who could will, under the circumstances. It was their theory; men can have only theories about such things." His voice dropped, and he seemed to drop too, into some abysm of thought.

Madame looked into the mirror, where she could see the face of the one who alone could retain her presence of mind under the circumstances suggested by Mr. Horace. She could also have seen, had she wished it, among the reflected bric-a-brac of the mantel, the corner of the frame that held the picture of her husband, but peradventure, classing it with the past which held so many unavenged bad dinners, she never thought to link it even by a look with her emotions of the present. Indeed, it had been said of her that in past, present, and future there had ever been but the one picture to interest her eyes--the one she was looking at now. This, however, was the remark of the uninitiated, for the true passion of a beautiful woman is never so much for her beauty as for its booty; as the passion of a gamester is for his game, not for his luck.

"How beautiful _she_ was!"

It was apparently down in the depths of his abysm that he found the connection between this phrase and his last, and it was evidently to himself he said it. Madame, however, heard and understood too; in fact, traced back to a certain period, her thoughts and Mr. Horace's must have been fed by pretty much the same subjects. But she had so carefully barricaded certain issues in her memory as almost to obstruct their flow into her life; if she were a cook, one would say that it was her bad dinners which she was trying to keep out of remembrance.

"You there, he there, she there, I there." He pointed to the places on the carpet, under the chandelier; he could have touched them with a walking-stick, and the recollection seemed just as close.

"She was, in truth, what we men called her then; it was her eyes that first suggested it--Myosotis, the little blue flower, the for-get-me-not. It suited her better than her own name. We always called her that among ourselves. How beautiful she was!" He leaned his head on his hand and looked where he had seen her last--so long, such an eternity, ago.

It must be explained for the benefit of those who do not live in the little world where an allusion is all that is necessary to put one in full possession of any drama, domestic or social, that Mr. Horace was speaking of the wedding-night of madame, when the bridal party stood as he described under the chandelier; the bride and groom, with each one's best friend. It may be said that it was the last night or time that madame had a best friend of her own sex. Social gossip, with characteristic kindness, had furnished reasons to suit all tastes, why madame had ceased that night to have a best friend of her own sex. If gossip had not done so, society would still be left to its imagination for information, for madame never tolerated the smallest appeal to her for enlightenment. What the general taste seemed most to relish as a version was that madame in her marriage had triumphed, not conquered; and that the night of her wedding she had realized the fact, and, to be frank, had realized it ever since. In short, madame had played then to gain at love, as she played now to gain at solitaire; and hearts were no more than cards to her--and, "Bah! Lose a game for a card!" must have been always her motto. It is hard to explain it delicately enough, for these are the most delicate affairs in life; but the image of Myosotis had passed through monsieur's heart, and Myosotis does mean "forget me not." And madame well knew that to love monsieur once was to love him always, in spite of jealousy, doubt, distrust, nay, unhappiness (for to love him meant all this and more). He was that kind of man, they said, whom women could love even against conscience. Madame never forgave that moment. Her friend, at least, she could put aside out of her intercourse; unfortunately, we cannot put people out of our lives. God alone can do that, and so far he had interfered in the matter only by removing monsieur. It was known to notoriety that since her wedding madame had abandoned, destroyed, all knowledge of her friend. And the friend? She had disappeared as much as is possible for one in her position and with her duties.

"What there is in blue eyes, light hair, and a fragile form to impress one, I cannot tell; but for us men it seems to me it is blue-eyed, light-haired, and fragile-formed women that are the hardest to forget."

"The less easy to forget," corrected madam. He paid no attention to the remark.

"They are the women that attach themselves in one's memory. If necessary to keep from being forgotten, they come back into one's dreams. And as life rolls on, one wonders about them,--'Is she happy? Is she miserable? Goes life well or ill with her?'"

Madame played her cards slowly, one would say, for her, prosaically.

"And there is always a pang when, as one is so wondering, the response comes,--that is, the certainty in one's heart responds,--'She is miserable, and life goes ill with her.' Then, if ever, men envy the power of God."

Madame threw over the game she was in, and began a new one.

"Such women should not be unhappy; they are too fragile, too sensitive, too trusting. I could never understand the infliction of misery upon them. I could send death to them, but not--not misfortune."

Madame, forgetting again to cheat in time, and losing her game, began impatiently to shuffle her cards for a new deal.

"And yet, do you know, Josephine, those women are the unhappy ones of life. They seem predestined to it, as others"--looking at madame's full-charmed portrait--"are predestined to triumph and victory. They"--unconscious, in his abstraction, of the personal nature of his simile--"never know how to handle their cards, and they always play a losing game."

"Ha!" came from madame, startled into an irate ejaculation.

"It is their love always that is sacrificed, their hearts always that are bruised. One might say that God himself favors the black-haired ones!"

As his voice sank lower and lower, the room seemed to become stiller and stiller. A passing vehicle in the street, however, now and then drew a shiver of sound from the pendent prisms of the chandelier.

"She was so slight, so fragile, and always in white, with blue in her hair to match her eyes--and--God knows what in her heart, all the time. And yet they stand it, they bear it, they do not die, they live along with the strongest, the happiest, the most fortunate of us," bitterly; "and"--raising his eyes to his old friend, who thereupon immediately began to fumble her cards--"whenever in the street I see a poor, bent, broken woman's figure, I know, without verifying it any more by a glance, that it is the wreck of a fair woman's figure; whenever I hear of a bent, broken existence, I know, without asking any more, that it is the wreck of a fair woman's life."

Poor Mr. Horace spoke with the unreason of a superstitious bigot.

"I have often thought, since, in large assemblies, particularly in weddings, Josephine, of what was going on in the women's hearts there, and I have felt sorry for them; and when I think of God's knowing what is in their hearts, I have felt sorry for the men. And I often think now, Josephine,--think oftener and oftener of it,--that if the resurrection trumpet of our childhood should sound some day, no matter when, out there, over the old St. Louis cemetery, and we should all have to rise from our long rest of oblivion, what would be the first thing we should do? And though there were a God and a heaven awaiting us,--by that same God, Josephine, I believe that our first thought in awakening would be the last in dying,--confession,--and that our first rush would be to the feet of one another for forgiveness. For there are some offenses that must outlast the longest oblivion, and a forgiveness that will be more necessary than God's own. Then our hearts will be bared to one another; for if, as you say, there are no secrets at our age, there can still be less cause for them after death."

His voice ended in the faintest whisper. The table crashed over, and the cards flew wide-spread on the floor. Before we could recover, madame was in the antechamber, screaming for Jules.

One would have said that, from her face, the old lady had witnessed the resurrection described by Mr. Horace, the rush of the spirits with their burdens of remorse, the one to the feet of the other; and she must have seen herself and her husband, with a unanimity of purpose never apparent in their short married life, rising from their common tomb and hastening to that other tomb at the end of the alley, and falling at the feet of the one to whom in life he had been recreant in love, she in friendship.

Of course Jules answered through the wrong door, rushing in with his gas-stick, and turning off the gas. In a moment we were involved in darkness and dispute.

"But what does he mean? What does the idiot mean? He--" It was impossible for her to find a word to do justice to him and to her exasperation at the same time.

"Pardon, madame; it is not I. It is the cathedral bell; it is ringing nine o'clock."

"But--"

"Madame can hear it herself. Listen!" We could not see it, but we were conscious of the benign, toothless smile spreading over his face as the bell-tones fell in the room.

"But it is not the gas. I--"

"Pardon, madame; but it is the gas. Madame said, 'Jules, put out the gas every night when the bell rings.' Madame told me that only last night. The bell rings: I put out the gas."

"Will you be silent? Will you listen?"

"If madame wishes; just as madame says."

But the old lady had turned to Mr. Horace. "Horace, you have seen--you know--" and it was a question now of overcoming emotion. "I--I--I--a carriage, my friend, a carriage."

"Madame--" Jules interrupted his smile to interrupt her.

She was walking around the room, picking up a shawl here, a lace there; for she was always prepared against draughts.

"Madame--" continued Jules, pursuing her.

"A carriage."

"If madame would only listen, I was going to say--but madame is too quick in her disposition--the carriage has been waiting since a long hour ago. Mr. Horace said to have it there in a half hour."

It was then she saw for the first time that it had all been prepared by Mr. Horace. The rest was easy enough: getting into the carriage, and finding the place of which Mr. Horace had heard, as he said, only that afternoon. In it, on her bed of illness, poverty, and suffering, lay the patient, wasted form of the beautiful fair one whom men had called in her youth Myosotis.

But she did not call her Myosotis.

"_Mon Amour!_" The old pet name, although it had to be fetched across more than half a century of disuse, flashed like lightning from madame's heart into the dim chamber.

"_Ma Divine!_" came in counter-flash from the curtained bed.

In the old days women, or at least young girls, could hazard such pet names one upon the other. These--think of it!--dated from the first communion class, the dating period of so much of friendship.

"My poor Amour!"

"My poor, poor Divine!"

The voices were together, close beside the pillow.

"I--I--" began Divine.

"It could not have happened if God had not wished it," interrupted poor Amour, with the resignation that comes, alas! only with the last drop of the bitter cup.

And that was about all. If Mr. Horace had not slipped away, he might have noticed the curious absence of monsieur's name, and of his own name, in the murmuring that followed. It would have given him some more ideas on the subject of woman.

At any rate, the good God must thank him for having one affair the less to arrange when the trumpet sounds out there over the old St. Louis cemetery. And he was none too premature; for the old St. Louis cemetery, as was shortly enough proved, was a near reach for all three of the old friends.

PUPASSE

Every day, every day, it was the same overture in Madame Joubert's room in the Institute St. Denis; the strident:

"Mesdemoiselles; à vos places! Notre Père qui est dans le ciel--Qui a fait ce bruit?"

"It's Pupasse, madame! It's Pupasse!" The answer invariably was unanimous.

"But, Madame Joubert,--I assure you, Madame Joubert,--I could not help it! They know I could not help it!"

By this time the fresh new fool's cap made from yesterday's "Bee" would have been pinned on her head.

"Quelle injustice! Quelle injustice!"

This last apostrophe in a high, whining nasal voice, always procured Pupasse's elevation on the tall three-legged stool in the corner.

It was a theory of the little girls in the primary class that Madame Joubert would be much more lenient to their own little inevitabilities of bad conduct and lessons if Pupasse did not invariably comb her the wrong way every morning after prayers, by dropping something, or sniffling, or sneezing. Therefore, while they distractedly got together books, slates, and copy-books, their infantile eyes found time to dart deadly reproaches toward the corner of penitence, and their little lips, still shaped from their first nourishment, pouted anything but sympathy for the occupant of it.

Indeed, it would have been a most startling unreality to have ever entered Madame Joubert's room and not seen Pupasse in that corner, on that stool, her tall figure shooting up like a post, until her tall, pointed _bonnet d' âne_ came within an inch or two of the ceiling. It was her hoop-skirt that best testified to her height. It was the period of those funnel-shaped hoop-skirts that spread out with such nice mathematical proportions, from the waist down, that it seemed they must have emanated from the brains of astronomers, like the orbits, and diameters, and other things belonging to the heavenly bodies. Pupasse could not have come within three feet of the wall with her hoop-skirt distended. To have forced matters was not to be thought of an instant. So even in her greatest grief and indignation, she had to pause before the three-legged black stool, and gather up steel after steel of her circumference in her hands behind, until her calico skirt careened and flattened; and so she could manage to accommodate herself to the limited space of her punishment, the circles drooping far over her feet as she stood there, looking like the costumed stick of a baby's rattle.

Her thinness continued into her face, which, unfortunately, had nothing in the way of toilet to assist it. Two little black eyes fixed in the sides of a mere fence of a nose, and a mouth with the shape and expression of all mouths made to go over sharp-pointed teeth planted very far apart; the smallest amount possible of fine, dry, black hair--a perfect rat-tail when it was plaited in one, as almost all wore their hair. But sometimes Pupasse took it into her head to plait it in two braids, as none but the thick-haired ventured to wear it. As the little girls said, it was a petition to Heaven for "eau Quinquina." When Marcelite, the hair-dresser, came at her regular periods to visit the hair of the boarders, she would make an effort with Pupasse, plaiting her hundred hairs in a ten-strand braid. The effect was a half yard of black worsted galloon; nothing more, or better. Had Pupasse possessed as many heads as the hydra, she could have "coiffe'd" them all with fools' caps during one morning's recitations. She entirely monopolized the "Daily Bee." Madame Joubert was forced to borrow from "madame" the stale weekly "Courrier des Etats-Unis" for the rest of the room. From grammar, through sacred history, arithmetic, geography, mythology, down to dictation, Pupasse could pile up an accumulation of penitences that would have tasked the limits of the current day had not recreation been wisely set as a term which disbarred, by proscription, previous offenses. But even after recreation, with that day's lessons safely out, punished and expiated, Pupasse's doom seemed scarcely lightened; there was still a whole criminal code of conduct to infract. The only difference was that instead of books, slates, or copy-books, leathern medals, bearing various legends and mottos, were hung around her neck--a travestied decoration worse than the books for humiliation.

The "abécédaires," their torment for the day over, thankful for any distraction from the next day's lessons, and eager for any relief from the intolerable ennui of goodness, were thankful enough now for Pupasse. They naturally watched her in preference to Madame Joubert, holding their books and slates quite cunningly to hide their faces. Pupasse had not only the genius, but that which sometimes fails genius, the means for grimacing: little eyes, long nose, foolish mouth, and pointed tongue. And she was so amusing, when Madame Joubert's head was turned, that the little girls, being young and innocent, would forget themselves and all burst out laughing. It sounded like a flight of singing birds through the hot, close, stupid little room; but not so to Madame Joubert.

"Young ladies! But what does this mean?"

And, terror-stricken, the innocents would call out with one voice, "It's Pupasse, madame! It's Pupasse who made us laugh!" There was nothing but fools' caps to be gained by prevaricating, and there was frequently nothing less gained by confession. And oh, the wails and the sobs as the innocents would be stood up, one by one, in their places! Even the pigtails at the backs of their little heads were convulsed with grief. Oh, how they hated Pupasse then! When their _bonnes_ came for them at three o'clock,--washing their tear-stained faces at the cistern before daring to take them through the streets,--how passionately they would cry out, the tears breaking afresh into the wet handkerchiefs:

"It's that Pupasse! It's that _vilaine_ Pupasse!"

To Pupasse herself would be meted out that "peine forte et dure," that acme of humiliation and disgrace, so intensely horrible that many a little girl in that room solemnly averred and believed she would kill herself before submitting to it. Pupasse's voluminous calico skirt would be gathered up by the hem and tied up over her head! Oh, the horrible monstrosity on the stool in the corner then! There were no eyes in that room that had any desire to look upon it. And the cries and the "Quelle injustice!" that fell on the ears then from the hidden feelings had all the weirdness of the unseen, but heard. And all the other girls in the room, in fear and trembling, would begin to move their lips in a perfect whirlwind of study, or write violently on their slates, or begin at that very instant to rule off their copy-books for the next day's verb.

Pupasse--her name was Marie Pupasse but no one thought of calling her anything but Pupasse, with emphasis on the first syllable and sibilance on the last--had no parents only a grandmother, to describe whom, all that is necessary to say is that she was as short as Pupasse was tall, and that her face resembled nothing so much as a little yellow apple shriveling from decay. The old lady came but once a week, to fetch Pupasse fresh clothes, and a great brown paper bag of nice things to eat. There was no boarder in the school who received handsomer bags of cake and fruit than Pupasse. And although, not two hours before, a girl might have been foremost in the shrill cry, "It is Pupasse who made the noise! It is Pupasse who made me laugh!" there was nothing in that paper bag reserved even from such a one. When the girl herself with native delicacy would, under the circumstances, judge it discreet to refuse, Pupasse would plead, "Oh, but take it to give me pleasure!" And if still the refusal continued, Pupasse would take her bag and go into the summer-house in the corner of the garden, and cry until the unforgiving one would relent. But the first offering of the bag was invariably to the stern dispenser of fools' caps and the unnamed humiliation of the reversed skirt: Madame Joubert.

Pupasse was in the fifth class. The sixth--the abécédaires--was the lowest in the school. Green was the color of the fifth; white--innocence--of the abécédaires. Exhibition after exhibition, the same green sash and green ribbons appeared on Pupasse's white muslin, the white muslin getting longer and longer every year, trying to keep up with her phenomenal growth; and always, from all over the room, buzzed the audience's suppressed merriment at Pupasse's appearance in the ranks of the little ones of nine and ten. It was that very merriment that brought about the greatest change in the Institute St. Denis. The sitting order of the classes was reversed. The first class--the graduates--went up to the top step of the _estrade_; and the little ones put on the lowest, behind the pianos. The graduates grumbled that it was not _comme il faut_ to have young ladies of their position stepping like camels up and down those great steps; and the little girls said it was a shame to hide them behind the pianos after their mamas had taken so much pains to make them look pretty. But madame said--going also to natural history for her comparison--that one must be a rhinoceros to continue the former routine.

Religion cannot be kept waiting forever on the intelligence. It was always in the fourth class that the first communion was made; that is, when the girls stayed one year in each class. But Pupasse had spent three years in the sixth class, and had already been four in the fifth, and Madame Joubert felt that longer delay would be disrespectful to the good Lord. It was true that Pupasse could not yet distinguish the ten commandments from the seven capital sins, and still would answer that Jeanne d'Arc was the foundress of the "Little Sisters of the Poor." But, as Madame Joubert always said in the little address she made to the catechism class every year before handing it over to Father Dolomier, God judged from the heart, and not from the mind.

Father Dolomier--from his face he would have been an able contestant of _bonnets d'âne_ with Pupasse, if subjected to Madame Joubert's discipline--evidently had the same method of judging as God, although the catechism class said they could dance a waltz on the end of his long nose without his perceiving it.

There is always a little air of mystery about the first communion: not that there is any in reality, but the little ones assume it to render themselves important. The going to early mass, the holding their dog-eared catechisms as if they were relics, the instruction from the priest, even if he were only old Father Dolomier--it all put such a little air of devotion into their faces that it imposed (as it did every year) upon their companions, which was a vastly gratifying effect. No matter how young and innocent she may be, a woman's devotion always seems to have two aims--God and her own sex.

The week of retreat came. Oh, the week of retreat! That was the _bonne bouche_ of it all, for themselves and for the others. It was the same every year. By the time the week of retreat arrived, interest and mystery had been frothed to the point of indiscretion; so that the little girls would stand on tiptoe to peep through the shutters at the postulants inside, and even the larger girls, to whom first communion was a thing of an infantile past, would condescend to listen to their reports with ill-feigned indifference.

As the day of the first communion neared, the day of the general confession naturally neared too, leading it. And then the little girls, peeping through the shutters, and holding their breath to see better, saw what they beheld every year; but it was always new and awesome--mysterious scribbling in corners with lead-pencils on scraps of paper; consultations; rewritings; copyings; the list of their sins, of all the sins of their lives.

"_Ma chère!_"--pigtails and sunbonnets hiving outside would shudder. "Oh, _Mon Dieu!_ To have to confess all--but _all_ your sins! As for me, it would kill me, sure!"

And the frightful recoils of their consciences would make all instantly blanch and cross themselves.

"And look at Pupasse's sins! Oh, but they are long! _Ma chère_, but look! But look, I ask you, at them!"

The longest record was of course the most complimentary and honorable to the possessor, as each girl naturally worked not only for absolution but for fame.

Between catechisms and instructions Madame Joubert would have "La Vie des Saints" read aloud, to stimulate their piety and to engage their thoughts; for the thoughts of first communicants are worse than flies for buzzing around the forbidden. The lecture must have been a great quickener of conscience; for they would dare punishment and cheat Madame Joubert, under her own eyes, in order surreptitiously to add a new sin to their list. Of course the one hour's recreation could not afford time enough for observation now, and the little girls were driven to all sorts of excuses to get out of the classroom for one moment's peep through the shutters; at which whole swarms of them would sometimes be caught and sent into punishment.

Only two days more. Madame Joubert put them through the rehearsal, a most important part of the preparation, almost as important as catechism--how to enter the church, how to hold the candle, how to advance, how to kneel, retire--everything, in fact.

Only one day more, the quietest, most devotional day of all. Pupasse lost her sins!

Of course every year the same accident happened to some one. But it was a new accident to Pupasse. And such a long list!

The commotion inside that retreat! Pupasse's nasal whine, carrying her lament without any mystery to the outside garden. Such searching of pockets, rummaging of corners, microscopic examination of the floor! Such crimination and recrimination, protestation, asseveration, assurances, backed by divine and saintly invocations! Pupasse accused companion after companion of filching her sins, which each after each would violently deny, producing each her own list from her own pocket,--proof to conviction of innocence, and, we may say, of guilt also.

Pupasse declared they had niched it to copy, because her list was the longest and most complete. She could not go to confession without her sins; she could not go to communion without confession. The tears rolled down her long thin nose unchecked, for she never could remember to use her handkerchief until reminded by Madame Joubert.

She had committed it to memory, as all the others had done theirs; but how was she to know without the list if she had not forgotten something? And to forget one thing in a general confession they knew was a mortal sin.

"I shall tell Madame Joubert! I shall tell Madame Joubert!"

"_Ma chère_!'" whispered the little ones outside. "Oh, but look at them! _Elles font les quatre cents coups_!" which is equivalent to "cutting up like the mischief."

And with reason. As if such an influx of the world upon them at this moment were not sufficient of itself to damn them. But to tell Madame Joubert! With all their dresses made and ready, wreaths, veils, candles, prayer-books, picture-cards, mother-of-pearl prayer-beads, and festival breakfasts with admiring family and friends prepared. Tell Madame Joubert! She would simply cancel it all. In a body they chorused:

"But, Pupasse!"

"_Chère_ Pupasse!"

"_Voyons_, Pupasse!"

"I assure you, Pupasse!"

"On the cross, Pupasse!"

"Ah, Pupasse!"

"We implore you, Pupasse!"

The only response--tears, and "I shall tell Madame Joubert."

Consultations, caucuses, individual appeals, general outbursts. Pupasse stood in the corner. Curiously, she always sought refuge in the very sanctum of punishment, her face hidden in her bended arms, her hoops standing out behind, vouchsafing nothing but tears, and the promise to tell Madame Joubert. And three o'clock approaching! And Madame Joubert imminent! But Pupasse really could not go to confession without her sins. They all recognized that; they were reasonable, as they assured her.

A crisis quickens the wits. They heard the cathedral clock strike the quarter to three. They whispered, suggested, argued--bunched in the farthest corner from Pupasse.

"Console yourself, Pupasse! We will help you, Pupasse! Say no more about it! We will help you!"

A delegate was sent to say that. She was only four feet and a half high, and had to stand on tiptoe to pluck the six-foot Pupasse's dress to gain her attention.

And they did help her generously. A new sheet of fool's-cap was procured, and torn in two, lengthwise, and pinned in a long strip. One by one, each little girl took it, and, retiring as far as possible, would put her hand into her pocket, and, extracting her list, would copy it in full on the new paper. Then she would fold it down, and give it to the next one, until all had written.

"Here, Pupasse; here are all our sins. We give them to you; you can have them."

Pupasse was radiant; she was more than delighted, and the more she read the better pleased she was. Such a handsome long list, and so many sins she had never thought of--never dreamed of! She set herself with zeal to commit them to memory. But a hand on the door--Madame Joubert! You never could have told that those little girls had not been sitting during the whole time, with their hands clasped and eyes cast up to the ceiling, or moving their lips as the prayer-beads glided through their fingers. Their versatility was really marvelous.

Poor Pupasse! God solved the dilemma of her education, and madame's increasing sensitiveness about her appearance in the fifth class, by the death of the old grandmother. She went home to the funeral, and never returned--or at least she returned, but only for madame. There was a little scene in the parlor: Pupasse, all dressed in black, with her bag of primary books in her hand, ready and eager to get back to her classes and fools' caps; madame, hesitating between her interests and her fear of ridicule; Madame Joubert, between her loyalty to school and her conscience. Pupasse the only one free and untrammeled, simple and direct.

That little school parlor had been the stage for so many scenes! Madame Joubert detested acting--the comedy, as she called it. There was nothing she punished with more pleasure up in her room. And yet--

"Pupasse, _ma fille_, give me your grammar."

The old battered, primitive book was gotten out of the bag, the string still tied between the leaves for convenience in hanging around the neck.

"Your last punishment: the rule for irregular verbs. Commence!"

"I know it, Madame Joubert; I know it perfectly, I assure you."

"Commence!"

"Irregular verbs--but I assure you I know it--I know it by heart--"

"Commence, _ma fille!_"

"Irregular verbs--irregular verbs--I know it, Madame Joubert--one moment--" and she shook her right hand, as girls do to get inspiration, they say. "Irregular verbs--give me one word, Madame Joubert; only one word!"

"That--"

"Irregular verbs, that--irregular verbs, that--"

"See here, Pupasse; you do not know that lesson any more than a cat does"--Madame Joubert's favorite comparison.

"Yes, I do, Madame Joubert! Yes, I do!"

"Silence!"

"But, Madame Joubert--"

"Will you be silent!"

"Yes, Madame Joubert; only--"

"Pupasse, one more word--and--" Madame Joubert was forgetting her comedy--"Listen, Pupasse, and obey! You go home and learn that lesson. When you know it, you can reënter your class. That is the punishment I have thought of to correct your 'want of attention.'"

That was the way Madame Joubert put it--"want of attention."

Pupasse looked at her--at madame, a silent but potent spectator. To be sent from home because she did not know the rule of the irregular verbs! To be sent from home, family, friends!--for that was the way Pupasse put it. She had been in that school--it may only be whispered--fifteen years. Madame Joubert knew it; so did madame, although they accounted for only four or five years in each class. That school was her home; Madame Joubert--God help her!--her mother; madame, her divinity; fools' caps and turned-up skirts, her life. The old grandmother--she it was who had done everything for her (a _ci-devant_ rag-picker, they say); she it was who was nothing to her.

Madame must have felt something of it besides the loss of the handsome salary for years from the little old withered woman. But conventionality is inexorable; and the St. Denis's great recommendation was its conventionality. Madame Joubert must have felt something of it,--she must have felt something of it,--for why should she volunteer? Certainly madame could not have imposed _that_ upon _her. It must_ have been an inspiration of the moment, or a movement, a _tressaillement_, of the heart.

"Listen, Pupasse, my child. Go home, study your lesson well. I shall come every evening myself and hear it; and as soon as you know it, I shall fetch you back myself. You know I always keep my word."

Keep her word! That she did. Could the inanimate past testify, what a fluttering of fools' caps in that parlor--"Daily Bees," and "Weekly Couriers," by the year-full!

What could Pupasse say or do? It settled the question, as Madame Joubert assured madame, when the tall, thin black figure with the bag of books disappeared through the gate.

Madame Joubert was never known to break her word; that is all one knows about her part of the bargain.

One day, not three years ago, ringing a bell to inquire for a servant, a familiar murmuring fell upon the ear, and an old abécédaire's eyes could not resist the temptation to look through the shutters. There sat Pupasse; there was her old grammar; there were both fingers stopping her ears--as all studious girls do, or used to do; and there sounded the old words composing the rule for irregular verbs.

And you all remember how long it is since we wore funnel-shaped hoop-skirts!