A woman's man

Chapter I

<f Weigh me the weight of the fire, or measure me the blast of the wind, or call me again the day that is past.”

Esdras II.

The first thing I remember in the penumbra of childhood is waking in the morning and listening to the footsteps that passed through our street. A secret and quite reasonless joy would possess me as I heard the pit-pat of the world outside my window.

says the old nursery rhyme. Yes, who was it who was passing to the echo of the street? Someone I might know perhaps when I grew to be a man when I went out and took my place in life — in life that was to make me bappy, rich, famous and very dear to my mother — life that I feared and fearfully loved, whose rumours filled me with a delicious trepidation and made me thankful for the long cloistered years of childhood.

I do not know if many children are bom with the preoccupation of greatness, the sense that they must set a seal on their time, but as for me with the first gropings of my mind came the obsession of responsibility, the feeling that I owed the world some debt, that above all I owed it to my mother to make a name for us both.

Mother — there is the word that tuned all my young boyhood, there was the influence that moulded me.

This woman, ambitious and austere, who saw in me not only her son but the last of her house, she was the maker of me. Had my mother been of this generation, she would have acquired fame of some kind, for there was in her the rigorous stuff of which celebrity is made, but she belonged to the age that still spoke of the “weaker sex” ; she was old-fashioned enough to feel she had conquered her world if she had inspired her men to conquer it for her.

I know now it was she who built up my father. She made of him, who had been a provincial doctor, one of the biggest surgeons of his day. She drew her breath for him and when he died there was in her tears, I believe, as much gall as sorrow. It was not only her husband she had lost but her life’s work. When he died she left Paris where he had settled after his rise into fame ; she came back to Tours to the home of her girlhood, to the house she had left to be married. She paced from kitchen to pantry, from cupboard to cupboard, to the jingling of the keys she wore at her chatelaine, and her genius of organisation weighed on her — a wasting talent.

I was so little then that it hardly seemed to her that I could ever be of use as a pawn. I believe it was the day she cut my hair short that she began to love me really. I was the man-child to her then and just as Hannah dedicated Samuel in the Temple so I think my mother vowed in her heart to form me to redeem all the efforts, all the striving that my father’s death had wasted.

Now when a woman determines to exert her influence over child, husband, father, she sets to work as a mesmerist might, she filters herself somehow into the innermost nature of the being she would subjugate. It was not so much filial love I felt for this woman as veneration, as a cult — she had taken a profound root in me. The thought “is this right or is this wrong” never occurred to me ; it was always “will this please my mother,” or “will this displease my mother.” I felt she had vowed me to some vocation and that when I grew up, all would he made plain.

My mother never said to me in so many words, “I am an ambitious and disappointed woman, I slaved for your father ; proud as I am, fiercely proud, I went in spirit down on my knees, I fawned before people who were not worthy to brush his coat. I suffered and I lost ultimately. His name is nothing to what it might have been. My son, I still have you, make it worth while my having lived, make me feel I have made a man.”

If my mother had spoken so to me, I was too young, I would not have understood her, but woman has a language infinitely more soul-reaching. It was in my mother’s eyes I read the presage of my future, it was in tlie caress of her cool soft hand that I felt — how shall I say — the call of life.

She came into my room in the morning, — tall, tall — as only the child sees the grown being. She advanced noiseless as a shadow, her black fichu crossed on her breast. She bent over me and her earrings drooped forward, she kissed me on the forehead — no, it was not with tenderness that my heart bounded, it was with awe rather, with a sense — I could not have defined it then, I know now what it was, — the sense of the sacred debt we owe to the woman who has made us out of her flesh, who has carried us in the world for nine months deep down under her heart. “Good morning, my son,” my mother would say, and I felt that life had re-begun after the reposeful hours of the night.

I would get out of bed and together we would say our prayers. My mother was religious, but without the beauty, the aestheticism of religion. She regarded the world as a moral gymnasium ground, or rather as a laboratory where the soul suffered under the lens. From what she said, I gathered that God tried experiments with his creatures and exerted his ingenuity in tempting and trying them, and that to keep good was in a way getting a little bit the better of God.

Before she left the room, my mother would never fail to draw me against her. After all these years I can recall the acrid perfume of verbena that emanated from the fichu against my cheek. “Bemember, Armand,” my mother would say, “that every day is an opportunity, an opportunity to he better, to be stronger than yesterday.” She would underscore the word “strong” and the weight of life would seem to settle on my breast.

Yes, she was dearest to me on earth, but it was a relief to me when the door closed behind her. A lightness of heart would possess me and I would dress whistling under my breath for fear she should hear me. All the while an invigorating aroma of coffee breathed through the house, and in the stillness of the provincial manor I could hear our old servant creeping about cautiously.

When I was dressed, I would throw wide the shutters. We rose at six in my mother’s house but Tours is a matutinal town and by seven there would be plenty of folk about and mostly a blue sky. Opposite was a little tavern, La Croix d’Or , lately sprung up and a great eye-sore to my mother, indeed it looked grossly out of place in this old-world street edged between two grandiose facades, two noble houses where the aristocracy of Tours was dozing behind the shutters. The carters would stand on the pavement, their Percheron horses stolidly waiting. The men would drink and laugh and a thrill would go through me as I thought how they had driven at night through the still country, how they had come from away off through the hush of dawn. . . .

Or else it would be winter, with snow perhaps padding the ground, then shovels would be scraping in a grating soothing rhythm, or else it might be spring with all Tours smelling like a basket of fresh flowers. The aroma, the wonder of the world when one is young! What is it that youth senses in life and that life loses when youth goes ? But indeed I shall be old when the change of the seasons, when all the earth offers of sound and odour will not cause me to dream, to hope and to forget.

CHAPTER II “She is appointed unto thee from the beginning.”

Tobit .

It was my mother who taught me to read and write, who told to me the stories of the Bible, all of which excel in beauty and simplicity what I have since read. It was Monsieur Godot, however, the town archivist and a man of letters, who instructed me in mathematics, in Latin and in Greek. He was a little old gentleman of a shrivelled hut cheerful ap* pearance who bore an insistent resemblance to a grasshopper, but a grasshopper, mind you, with a vocation and a great deal of manner. To see him draw off his cotton gloves and press this limp and ancient hand-gear against his breast, to see him turn out his toes, loop his legs and how to my mother, was to see the very effigy of politeness. Monsieur Godot’s coat was cut beyond the ken and remembrance of man. His preternaturally pointed chin was encased in a choker with custardcoloured discs. Nevertheless it was from him that I learnt to love the poets. Monsieur Godot would say — “Now we will take up the dead languages,” and my heart would stand still as though he had said, “I will evoke some ghosts to entertain you.” He would read to me in his high voice in the notes of a fife a translation of how Ulysses crossed the waste of waters, and the hair of my head would rise as though the breath of the vast outer world had blown through our little room.

I do not know why, but when I was a child everything that was, to me, beautiful hurt me as much as it enchanted me — yes, Monsieur Godot read to me, and every quarter of an hour the chimes of St. Erangois, our parish church, interrupted him. A pot of geraniums stood on the window-sill, a square of sky showed between the opposite houses, ajnong the gables the swallows darted, and I who am now a man and have lost all the finer joys and perceptions, I listened, a child then, and my soul expanded to the voices of the oldest poets.

My childhood was one long lullaby that nothing interrupted, not even the bitter days of 1870, the rancour and anguish of 1871.

Monsieur Godot was a disciple of Michelet; he had all the great master’s veneration for women. He always spoke of the sex with the most becoming gravity. Women were, according to Monsieur Godot, semi-invalids, martyrs, creatures of candour and tenderness, but born to persecution and to be the prey of men. It was my tutor, I make no doubt, who implanted in my mind the semi-mystic adoration I had for women, for my mother, especially when I was a boy. Even in childhood I felt my responsibility towards what Monsieur Godot called the “weaker sex.” He had so impressed upon me that a man’s first duty is a chivalrous devotion to women as to set me thinking how when I was grown I could best defend these defenceless and delicate creatures. Poor Monsieur Godot, I do not know what may have been Sis experience of the “weaker sex,” the only point of this book is to confide mine.

Monsieur le Cure, who dined with my mother Thursdays and Saturdays, had quite another notion of women. He made no bones about saying that they were much more easily damned than men. They attracted hell fire, and this fatal combustibility of theirs made them pathetic in my eyes. Monsieur le Cure saw woman as the early Catholic Church saw her, as a creature naturally impure, but saved sometimes through the renunciation of the flesh or the pangs of motherhood. If, however, or so Monsieur le Cure would admit, looking at my mother, a woman had put her heel like St. Theresa on the vanities of the world, she was doubly a saint; then my mother would how, and in the silence that ensued our clock ticked on in its decent, muffled voice.

One of the acutest pleasures of my childhood was to hear my mother and Monsieur le Cure talk of my father. I cannot analyse the sensation. I did not remember my father and I did not love him, but the lowered tones that were used to speak his name, the consequential faces that were assumed, thrilled me with excitement. I felt somehow that my father’s death was the crime of the world, and that his body must be close to us — perhaps behind the arm-chair over there. Monsieur le Cure had been the confessor of my father while my father lived in Tours. The priest’s condolatory manner was sincere. Sentiments are slow to wear out in the provinces.

We had other visitors too, the aristocracy of Tours came to see us — in those days we were very grand. In the morning our gardener entered in felt shoes and rubhed our parlour floor with his feet till it shone ; my mother got out the Dresden set, no one was allowed to carry it from the cupboard to the mantel-piece but herself. When she had gone from the room, I would climb on a chair. All the dainty ladies and pretty gentlemen smiled at me as though to say: “Is it not foolish to keep us in the dark so long?” With my finger I would smooth their little blonde heads. They were quite cold from being hidden away in the cheerless cupboard.

Oh, the excitement that throbbed through our house on a visiting day. Yvonne, my mother’s prized servant, an old Bretonne, stood before her stove as tense as though she were driving in a chariot race, and when she spoke to me it was in a deep, stern voice. I had done nothing wrong, but instantly I felt guilty and something fluttered in my throat.

“Maman, they are coming,” I would announce, slipping into the parlour in the dusk. I had seen through the bars of the vestibule window a family carriage drive up to our door. “They are coming, Maman.” Then my mother would rise and light the four candles. As the door opened, she would fix me with her eyes as though to say — “With each visit let your manners show an improvement” — and my heart began to heat wildly for fear these people for whom I cared nothing should think me impolite. Such paradoxical sensations make up the mystery of childhood.

There was a long stretch of shiny floor between the teatable and the door. My mother and I would come half the way and the visitors the rest. We settled in a circle — there was much bowing, kissing of hands, sipping of tea, hut little conversation. These folk have nothing to do with my story, I will not describe them. They were the average grown beings that make children think so poorly of us.

As for friends of my own, I had none — not at this time. There, was the void of my childhood. At least I had no hoy friends, I had a girl friend but I did not like her because my mother was forever telling me that this child was such a good child. When she came to see me it was with her father and mother who were exceedingly rich, Monsieur and Madame Anselme, the only manufacturers my mother received. Bernardette — that was the name of this little girl — was portioned off to my care. She was exceedingly plump and round as I remember her and dressed in balloony white. When she and I sat on the sofa together and her parents and my mother clucked indulgently over us, I noticed the little girl’s feet did not reach the ground. Thus we stayed, side by side, mute and miserable. My mother would signal me with her eyebrows to talk to this child, hut when I tried to question her, Bernardette would hide her face against the hack of the sofa. “Take Bernardette to see the flowers, Armand,” my mother would say, and I would lug the child off the sofa. “Don’t go near the fountain,” my mother would call after us in her even, chill voice.

So it was only gradually after circling round the flowerbeds that Bernardette and I came to the fountain. The spray was light like an ostrich feather and deep down under the water the sad-faced carps were mouthing. I was proud that Bernardette should see I had a pool, a slimy green pool of my own. I told her one could drown in it as well as not. She was standing a little in front of me all fluffy and white like a tiresome angel, and I remember a sudden beastly impulse to push her into the water. Fortunately just then she turned about, she cocked up her cherub face to harken to a bird in a tree and I recalled what Monsieur Godot had said about women — how they roused what was worst in men — how pitiful they were, so I took Bernardette by the hand ; I led her home, and as I was pulling her up our steps on to the verandah I remember thinking I was rather a fine fellow.

Chapter III

“For I was the son of my father, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother.”

Proverbs.

Our old servant Yvonne used to say that since we every one of us were born into the world naked, we’d best be grateful if only for a shirt. My mother did not share this sentiment, she was not rich and the fact embittered her. She was born to have had the charge of a fortune, yet only once during her husband’s meteoric career had she had the handling of any considerable sums; this money, made by my father at his profession, had gone to insure him a position in Paris. He, by dying, had put an end to this income and left my mother as poor as when he married her.

I sometimes think that life is sweetened by the very difficulty of living, but my mother took economy to heart. I do not mean by this that she was not innately frugal and thrifty — I believe she would have remained so had I made a million — but her pride, stiff as Lucifer’s, rebelled against the petty household thrifts. She wanted money, not from avarice but because money could give her what she coveted — consideration, power.

I remember one morning watching my mother adding up the day-book. We were in the store-room, a bright, sunny place redolent of spices. On a shelf along the wall were ranged blue paper cones of sugar, jars of cinnamon-sticks, bottles of olives and sucre d’orge, while in the place of honour was throned the tea-caddy, a tin box gay with mandarins and almond-eyed ladies of whom I dreamt at nights. My mother was counting and heaving sepulchral sighs — I felt sorry for her. My eyes roamed over the room, over the bright-coloured comestibles, and my inability to help her hurt me. Once I grew a man things should be different, she need hever count again nor save — I told her so. “I only ask of my son to be honourable and upright,” said my mother and began on another column, but I had seen her eyes flash and I knew it was to drag us out of mediocrity that she was training me.

I was grown a long thin boy by now and it was time to think of taking me out of the tuition of Monsieur Godot and of sending me to school. The morning of my first class day when my mother kissed me good-bye, how my heart beat ! In my mind’s eye, I see us both — the parlour is cold and fragrant, on the mantel-piece tapers a Sevres jar crammed with pot-pourri, beneath it stands my mother, erect, very pale; one feels she is a widow, and I, the delicate woman-bred child in my black alpaca apron, pressing my new school-books against my breast, bend my head under my mother’s kiss, my head cropped close as a convict’s. I was on the threshold of life, my mother told me. I went off to school, my heart beating to suffocation.

In this story I seem forced to tell that I am often afraid, and it is true I have been afraid more or less my life long, yet I would not have you think I am a coward. Once in a fight, I never yet disgraced myself — no, it is a sort of moral terror that haunts me, a trembling of the spirit. I am afraid of life, of what it will bring me, of what it has made me feel, of the violence of my sensations. Before facts, before daily incidents, the artist — and I am one — I use the word not in self praise, but to discriminate between the imaginative and the practical man — feels his weakness, his incompetence, the aspen-like qualities of his soul. I think this morbid sensibility was encouraged in me by my mother. Like many women, she saw life out of drawing, out of proportion. A waistcoat button fell and she was sure God knew of it. In every occurrence she divined the thickening plot of life. She taught me to live constantly tense, on the strain. No incident seemed to her unimportant and I made out of every hourly event a sort of trial of my soul. My heart was constantly thumping, like a student’s on the eve of an examination.

How I have suffered through my life and how uselessly. What an agony were those first days of school for me. I held up the lid of my desk and behind it I cried scalding tears, while in the stifling study hours I heard the drip-drop of a cistern in the yard — that damp, reeking yard where I dragged through my recreations.

At first I had no friends — I who had so wanted to play with other boys. I stood way off in a corner, mute and stiff. The others brushed past me, kicking buoyant, striped balls. Sadly I chewed the bread and chocolate I had brought from home and I thought “Never shall I like them nor they me.” I was not one of them. I understood that my mother’s gentle, cold hand had led me away from my kind and made of me another creature.

In all my school years, I had only one friend, and a genial scallywag he was — his name was Ernest Bonnet, his father kept the circulating library of Tours and let me browse in its musty precincts. In this dark and smelly room, the world of books opened for me. What imagination and what sight I brought to those humid, flimsy pages. I brought the heart and the eyes of youth. Meanwhile Ernest, who never read, perched on a high stool and recounted entirely fictitious stories of the cruelty of his father. I had best be careful, he would say, his father might at any moment spring out from behind the counter and choke me, one never knew where the old man might be lurking. Eor a while I believed Ernest and I used to flinch whenever I caught sight of the bald pate of kind old Monsieur Bonnet. Indeed Ernest was the most convincing liar I have ever known. It was impossible to doubt him if he but looked at you with his round, innocent eyes, pale as skimmed milk and set exaggeratedly far apart in a face as falsely ingenuous as that of a gnome.

Ernest was my friend, I say, and yet, looking back, it seems to me that he meant very little in my childhood. Owing perhaps to my mother’s stern ascendency, I never knew the sweetness of an entire intimacy with some one of my years. Always wherever I was, my mother’s will dominated me. In spirit she stood at my shoulder warning, “Armand, do not confide, for every confidence will weaken you ; do not lean on any one, Armand, for what little strength you have will go,” and indeed her own life was unsweetened by any confidante or interest outside myself.

Sometimes as I bent of nights over my studies, I caught her interchanging glances with my father’s portrait — I say interchanging glances, for to my imagination the copy of my father’s eyes appeared to answer her gaze. The canvas and she seemed to understand each other. They were foreseeing, planning my life. The effect on me of this ghostly dialogue was to redouble my sense of responsibility, my nervousness of events, my fear of the future. I felt too small, too weak to satisfy my mother’s ravenous ambition. I wanted to stay the age I was for ever, but in the hush of our old house, in the lull of the provincial town, my childhood ebbed away too rapidly.

The day of my first Communion came and found me a gentle-faced hobbledehoy immaculately dressed in black like an immature bridegroom. I was at this age deeply religious — mystic, rather — for what I experienced at church and at the confessional was poignant and ecstatic as are the vague longings, the premonitions of love, to an ignorant child. My confirmation passed for me to the pumping of my heart. After the ceremony, as I passed out under the Cathedral arch the sight of the sky dizzily blue made me catch my breath, for an instant I had the conviction that I was looking — not into space, into ether, but at the underside of the pavement of the house of God.

That same evening, to celebrate my first Communion my mother gave a little fete ; our habitual guests came, Monsieur le Cure, Monsieur Godot, Monsieur and Madame Anselme and their daughter, Bernardette. Since my earliest remembrance, these folk always dined with us on holidays, such as All Saints, the Anniversary of the Saint after whom I was named, and New Year’s Eve — a sober party we were that broke up soon after Yvonne had brought in the camomile tea at the decent hour of ten.

Now on the night of my first Communion, to my mother, Monsieur Anselme, the manufacturer, said :

“Here is your son, Madame, grown a fine fellow, what’s to be done with him, eh ?”

My mother did not immediately answer. Over her cup her eyes sought my father’s picture, and all our guests following her gaze assumed, with the exception of little Bernardette, expressions of official mourning.

“Well, what do you yourself say, young man ?” Monsieur Anselme boomed out at me in his sonorous snoring voice.

I was standing near the table very straight in my new clothes. I looked at my mother.

“Armand,” said she speaking for me, “has no vocation for his father’s work. I regret it, a surgeon may do much good. Armand’s interest is in writing, I cannot judge of the merit of his prose, he is a child now and his mind is a child’s, but Monsieur Godot assures me there is promise in some verses of his, a fluent style. His father, you will remember, Monsieur le Cure, expressed himself well.”

Monsieur le Cure bowed to my mother and then to my father’s portrait, while Monsieur Godot, who was the most impressionable of men, sighed fit to blow the table over, and in the silence that ensued we all laid down our cups gingerly.

We sat very still, all except Monsieur Anselme who fussed with his fob and scowled.

“You appear preoccupied, Monsieur,” said my mother to the manufacturer.

“Mon Dieu, Madame,” quoth he, “I have nothing to say against any trade so long as it be honest and will feed its man. But look you, this literature is an uncertain business ; why only the other day I read in the newspaper that Monsieur de Balzac died poor, yet if ever a man blackened reams of paper, it was he. No, no, Madame, let your son look about him before he decides on his career. Are you not of my mind, Henriette ?” he added as he shot a glance across at his wife.

Over her billowy bosom, she nodded, while significantly with her plump hand she smoothed the head of her little daughter who sat beside her on a footstool, hands clasped, eyes cast down like the print of a good girl in a child’s primer.

“Monsieur,” stated my mother, “though I regret to say it of a man of our town, the works of Monsieur de Balzac were immoral, and God would not permit him to thrive on them. If my son puts pen to paper, it will be to help the world, I trust.”

Whenever my mother spoke in this voice, every word she said weighed on my shoulders like a burden, and the fanciful thoughts of childhood fled away and hid themselves.

Chapter IV

“The wind bloweth whence it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.” . . .

St. John.

My mother was jealous of every hour I spent out of our house, jealous of my school life, jealous above all of my friendship for Ernest. She always spoke of him with an acrid writhing of the lips, pretended to forget his name, referred to him as “your young friend — you know — the one who has such provincial manners.” It was disloyal but I did not mind hearing him criticised by my mother. I had breathed too often the atmosphere of Feminine Leagues and Charitable Committees not to revel in false commiseration and spiteful gossip. All this sighing, wagging of the head over poor Ernest tickled my vanity, made me feel I was his better.