Chapter VIII

I had half-expected a person of so much decision, and above all of so much consistency, would make me feel the weight of her disapproval of my own share in that little act of revelry by the most raffish part of the lakeside. But she maintained her claim to being a highly reasonable woman—I couldn’t but admire the justice of this pretension—by recognising my practical detachment. I had taken her daughter as I found her, which was, according to Mrs. Church’s view, in a very equivocal position. The natural instinct of a young man in such a situation is not to protest but to profit; and it was clear to Mrs. Church that I had had nothing to do with Miss Aurora’s appearing in public under the compromising countenance, as she regarded the matter, of Miss Ruck. Besides, she liked to converse, and she apparently did me the honour to consider that of all the inmates of the Pension Beaurepas I was the best prepared for that exercise. I found her in the salon a couple of evenings after the incident I have just narrated, and I approached her with a view to making my peace with her if this should prove necessary. But Mrs. Church was as gracious as I could have desired; she put her marker into her inveterate volume and folded her plump little hands on the cover. She made no specific allusion to the English Garden; she embarked rather on those general considerations in which her cultivated mind was so much at home.

“Always at your deep studies, Mrs. Church,” I didn’t hesitate freely to observe.

“Que voulez-vous, monsieur? To say studies is to say too much; one doesn’t study in the parlour of a boarding-house of this character. But I do what I can; I’ve always done what I can. That’s all I’ve ever claimed.”

“No one can do more, and you appear to have done a great deal.”

“Do you know my secret?” she asked with an air of brightening confidence. And this treasure hung there a little temptingly before she revealed it. “To care only for the _best_! To do the best, to know the best—to have, to desire, to recognise, only the best. That’s what I’ve always done in my little quiet persistent way. I’ve gone through Europe on my devoted little errand, seeking, seeing, heeding, only the best. And it hasn’t been for myself alone—it has been for my daughter. My daughter has had the best. We’re not rich, but I can say that.”

“She has had _you_, madam,” I pronounced finely.

“Certainly, such as I am, I’ve been devoted. We’ve got something everywhere; a little here, a little there. That’s the real secret—to get something everywhere; you always can if you _are_ devoted. Sometimes it has been a little music, sometimes a little deeper insight into the history of art; sometimes into that of literature, politics, economics: every little counts, you know. Sometimes it has been just a glimpse, a view, a lovely landscape, a mere impression. We’ve always been on the look-out. Sometimes it has been a valued friendship, a delightful social tie.”

“Here comes the ‘European society,’ the poor daughter’s bugbear,” I said to myself. “Certainly,” I remarked aloud—I admit rather hypocritically—“if you’ve lived a great deal in pensions you must have got acquainted with lots of people.”

Mrs. Church dropped her eyes an instant; taking it up, however, as one for whom discrimination was always at hand. “I think the European pension system in many respects remarkable and in some satisfactory. But of the friendships that we’ve formed few have been contracted in establishments of this stamp.”

“I’m sorry to hear that!” I ruefully laughed.

“I don’t say it for you, though I might say it for some others. We’ve been interested in European _homes_.”

“Ah there you’re beyond me!”

“Naturally”—she quietly assented. “We have the entrée of the old Genevese society. I like its tone. I prefer it to that of Mr. Ruck,” added Mrs. Church calmly; “to that of Mrs. Ruck and Miss Ruck. To that of Miss Ruck in particular.”

“Ah the poor Rucks _have_ no tone,” I pleaded. “That’s just the point of them. Don’t take them more seriously than they take themselves.”

Well, she would see what she could do. But she bent grave eyes on me. “Are they really fair examples?”

“Examples of what?”

“Of our American tendencies.”

“‘Tendencies’ is a big word, dear lady; tendencies are difficult to calculate.” I used even a greater freedom. “And you shouldn’t abuse those good Rucks, who have been so kind to your daughter. They’ve invited her to come and stay with them in Thirty-Seventh Street near Fourth Avenue.”

“Aurora has told me. It might be very serious.”

“It might be very droll,” I said.

“To me,” she declared, “it’s all too terrible. I think we shall have to leave the Pension Beaurepas. I shall go back to Madame Chamousset.”

“On account of the Rucks?” I asked.

“Pray why don’t they go themselves? I’ve given them some excellent addresses—written down the very hours of the trains. They were going to Appenzell; I thought it was arranged.”

“They talk of Chamouni now,” I said; “but they’re very helpless and undecided.”

“I’ll give them some Chamouni addresses. Mrs. Ruck will send for a _chaise à porteurs_; I’ll give her the name of a man who lets them lower than you get them at the hotels. After that they _must_ go.”

She had thoroughly fixed it, as we said; but her large assumptions ruffled me. “I nevertheless doubt,” I returned, “if Mr. Ruck will ever really be seen on the Mer de Glace—great as might be the effect there of that high hat. He’s not like you; he doesn’t value his European privileges. He takes no interest. He misses Wall Street all the time. As his wife says, he’s deplorably restless, but I guess Chamouni won’t quiet him. So you mustn’t depend too much on the effect of your addresses.”

“Is it, in its strange mixture of the barbaric and the effete, a frequent type?” asked Mrs. Church with all the force of her noble appetite for knowledge.

“I’m afraid so. Mr. Ruck’s a broken-down man of business. He’s broken-down in health and I think he must be broken-down in fortune. He has spent his whole life in buying and selling and watching prices, so that he knows how to do nothing else. His wife and daughter have spent their lives, not in selling, but in buying—with a considerable indifference to prices—and they on their side know how to do nothing else. To get something in a ‘store’ that they can put on their backs—that’s their one idea; they haven’t another in their heads. Of course they spend no end of money, and they do it with an implacable persistence, with a mixture of audacity and of cunning. They do it in his teeth and they do it behind his back; the mother protects the daughter, while the daughter eggs on the mother. Between them they’re bleeding him to death.”

“Ah what a picture!” my friend calmly sighed. “I’m afraid they’re grossly illiterate.”

“I share your fears. We make a great talk at home about education, but see how little that ideal has ever breathed on them. The vision of fine clothes rides them like a fury. They haven’t an idea of any sort—not even a worse one—to compete with it. Poor Mr. Ruck, who’s a mush of personal and private concession—I don’t know what he may have been in the business world—strikes me as a really tragic figure. He’s getting bad news every day from home; his affairs may be going to the dogs. He’s unable, with his lost nerve, to apply himself; so he has to stand and watch his fortunes ebb. He has been used to doing things in a big way and he feels ‘mean’ if he makes a fuss about bills. So the ladies keep sending them in.”

“But haven’t they common sense? Don’t they know they’re marching to ruin?”

“They don’t believe it. The duty of an American husband and father is to keep them going. If he asks them how, that’s his own affair. So by way of not being mean, of being a good American husband and father, poor Ruck stands staring at bankruptcy.”

Mrs. Church, with her cold competence, picked my story over. “Why, if Aurora were to go to stay with them she mightn’t even have a good _nourriture_.”

“I don’t on the whole recommend,” I smiled, “that your daughter should pay a visit to Thirty-Seventh Street.”

She took it in—with its various bearings—and had after all, I think, to renounce the shrewd view of a contingency. “Why should I be subjected to such trials—so sadly éprouveé?” From the moment nothing at all was to be got from the Rucks—not even eventual gratuitous board—she washed her hands of them altogether. “Why should a daughter of mine like that dreadful girl?”

“_Does_ she like her?”

She challenged me nobly. “Pray do you mean that Aurora’s such a hypocrite?”

I saw no reason to hesitate. “A little, since you inquire. I think you’ve forced her to be.”

“I?”—she was shocked. “I _never_ force my daughter!”

“She’s nevertheless in a false position,” I returned. “She hungers and thirsts for her own great country; she wants to ‘come out’ in New York, which is certainly, socially speaking, the El Dorado of young ladies. She likes any one, for the moment, who will talk to her of that and serve as a connecting-link with the paradise she imagines there. Miss Ruck performs this agreeable office.”

“Your idea is, then, that if she were to go with such a person to America she could drop her afterwards?”

I complimented Mrs. Church on her quickly-working mind, but I explained that I prescribed no such course. “I can’t imagine her—when it should come to the point—embarking with the famille Roque. But I wish she might go nevertheless.”

Mrs. Church shook her head lucidly—she found amusement in my inappropriate zeal. “I trust my poor child may never be guilty of so fatal a mistake. She’s completely in error; she’s wholly unadapted to the peculiar conditions of American life. It wouldn’t please her. She wouldn’t sympathise. My daughter’s ideal’s not the ideal of the class of young women to which Miss Ruck belongs. I fear they’re very numerous; they pervade the place, they give the tone.”

“It’s you who are mistaken,” I said. “There are plenty of Miss Rucks, and she has a terrible significance—though largely as the product of her weak-kneed sire and his ‘absorption in business.’ But there are other forms. Go home for six months and see.”

“I’ve not, unfortunately, the means to make costly experiments. My daughter,” Mrs. Church pursued, “has had great advantages—rare advantages—and I should be very sorry to believe that _au fond_ she doesn’t appreciate them. One thing’s certain: I must remove her from this pernicious influence. We must part company with this deplorable family. If Mr. Ruck and his ladies can’t be induced to proceed to Chamouni—a journey from which no traveller with the smallest self-respect can dispense himself—my daughter and I shall be obliged to retire from the field. _We_ shall go to Dresden.”

“To Dresden?” I submissively echoed.

“The capital of Saxony. I had arranged to go there for the autumn, but it will be simpler to go immediately. There are several works in the gallery with which Aurora has not, I think, sufficiently familiarised herself. It’s especially strong in the seventeenth-century schools.”

As my companion offered me this information I caught sight of Mr. Ruck, who lounged in with his hands in his pockets and his elbows making acute angles. He had his usual anomalous appearance of both seeking and avoiding society, and he wandered obliquely toward Mrs. Church, whose last words he had overheard. “The seventeenth-century schools,” he said as if he were slowly weighing some very small object in a very large pair of scales. “Now do you suppose they _had_ schools at that period?”

Mrs. Church rose with a good deal of majesty, making no answer to this incongruous jest. She clasped her large volume to her neat little bosom and looked at our luckless friend more in pity than in anger, though more in edification than in either. “I had a letter this morning from Chamouni.”

“Well,” he made answer, “I suppose you’ve got friends all round.”

“I’ve friends at Chamouni, but they’re called away. To their great regret.” I had got up too; I listened to this statement and wondered. I’m almost ashamed to mention my wanton thought. I asked myself whether this mightn’t be a mere extemporised and unestablished truth—a truth begotten of a deep desire; but the point has never been cleared. “They’re giving up some charming rooms; perhaps you’d like them. I would suggest your telegraphing. The weather’s glorious,” continued Mrs. Church, “and the highest peaks are now perceived with extraordinary distinctness.”

Mr. Ruck listened, as he always listened, respectfully. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know as I want to go up Mount Blank. That’s the principal attraction, ain’t it?”

“There are many others. I thought I would offer you an exceptional opportunity.”

“Well,” he returned, “I guess you know, and if I could _let_ you fix me we’d probably have some big times. But I seem to strike opportunities—well, in excess of my powers. I don’t seem able to respond.”

“It only needs a little decision,” remarked Mrs. Church with an air that was a perfect example of this virtue. “I wish you good-night, sir.” And she moved noiselessly away.

Mr. Ruck, with his long legs apart, stood staring after her; then he transferred his perfectly quiet eyes to me. “Does she own a hotel over there? Has she got any stock in Mount Blank?” Indeed in view of the way he had answered her I thought the dear man—to whom I found myself becoming hourly more attached—had beautiful manners.