All in the Day's Work — Chapter 6: I Fall in Love, Part 2

But we had what was for us an exciting evening, and when we left and they all begged “Come again” we promised that we would.

It was the beginning of a weekly party.

Madame Bonnet gave the Egyptians their dinners.

We agreed to take dinners once a week with her.

We couldn’t afford more, and besides we wanted to be on the safe side in our relations.

There must be no question in their minds about our entire respectability—respectability as we understood it.

What interested me particularly was that at once they wanted to understand our conventions, social and religious and political.

Nothing disturbed them more, I found, than a feeling that perhaps they had not quite understood, that unintentionally they had infringed on our customs.

Once convinced of this, we could go with entire freedom to our weekly Egyptian evenings.

As I recall them they were happy evenings much like children’s parties at home, for the Egyptians loved games, tricks, charades, play of any sort.

They laughed and shouted and, if something went wrong, flew into a rage like children.

The meat of the connection was the talk which sometimes ran far into the night.

All of these young men were in training for some kind of professional or official position.

Two or three of them had taken from three to four years at German gymnasia or English universities.

All of them spoke three or four languages.

The Prince’s English was perfect, and no one of us could ever hope to approach the French of the group, learned for the most part in Switzerland as children.

They had much more curiosity and real information about the social customs of other countries than we had.

They were eager to know all about our ways, particularly the life of women, their relation to men before and after marriage.

There were would-be reformers of Egyptian marriage customs among them;

especially did they resent the convention which prevented them looking at the face of the bride before the marriage ceremony.

One of the group had made a vow never to marry as long as that custom existed and was urging his compatriots to join him.

Nearly all of them insisted that they would never marry more than one woman.

They asked with a frankness startling to our ears about the way monogamy worked in the United States.

They were curious to know the position of the mistress, and when we were shocked and insisted that a good man never had a mistress they were frankly incredulous.

It would never work out, they insisted.

One wife they understood; but one wife and no mistress seemed entirely impractical.

Politics interested them profoundly.

Particularly did they hate England—how deeply and bitterly I did not realize until in January of ’92 news of the death of the Khedive, Tewfik Pasha son of Ismail Pasha, great-grandson of Mehemet Ali, came to the Rue du Sommerard.

Madame Bonnet came in at once to tell us how sorrowful our friends were and to ask that we dine with them that night.

We found them very grave.

“He was a good man,” they insisted, “our friend.

” What was going to happen now?

I took it they feared changes in government which might make their own futures uncertain.

They were uneasy, frightened and wanted us to understand the reason behind their anxiety.

After dinner a large number of their compatriots filed into the room.

We were begged to stay.

They evidently wanted us to understand better their suspicion of what England might do in this crisis.

The longer the talk, the more bitter they grew.

“Down with England!

” they began to cry.

Indignation and enthusiasm are qualities as contagious as disease.

Before I realized it, I shared their anger and was drinking repeatedly in _l’eau sucrée_—good Mohammedans that our Egyptians were, they never touched wine—drinking repeatedly to loud and angry roars of “A bas l’Angleterre!

” The Egyptians were not only a picturesque and enlivening feature in our life: they had a social value which they never suspected.

We used them rather shamelessly to impress wandering Americans who looked with badly concealed scorn on the Latin Quarter and particularly on our narrow and stuffy rooms.

“A Prince was our neighbor,” we said loftily, and to prove it we could show an autographed photograph which the Prince on his own notion had given me.

I kept it on the mantel in the little salon.

When we felt particular need of asserting ourselves we told of our weekly dinners and they lost nothing of their gaiety and interest in our telling.

There was so much more flavor in them, we always assured those who tried to high-hat us, than ordinary sightseeing offered!

I have always felt rather proud of the way we handled ourselves in that year, keeping the entire respect of our Egyptians.

It was not always so easy.

It fell into my awkward hands to handle one rather violent love affair.

A pretty and vivacious young girl had joined our party at the request of her brother: “Will you look after her?

” The Egyptians were delighted with her, and she treated them as she might a group of American boys, could see no reason why she should not go out with them.

Only our combined disapproval, our insistence that if she did she soon would be classed in the Quarter as little better than the gay little girls who swarmed about, and with whom we occasionally out of the corner of our eyes saw our Egyptians: she must not run that risk.

But while that was managed the inevitable stir of youth could not be managed, and it was not long before I had one of the nicest of the boys begging me on his knees to let him pay his addresses to my little friend, insisting that he would marry her, never take another wife.

He wept and pleaded, but I held my ground until finally the young girl who loved his suit but not the boy was safely on the ocean.

A long time afterwards I had proof that we did look after ourselves.

When a couple of our party were going to Italy one of these young men gave them a letter of introduction to an Egyptian friend in Milan.

The letter was not presented, and not opened until two or three years later, when my friend showed me the postscript.

It read: “Surtout soyez convenable avec ces dames.

” After the Egyptians came our French professor, a woman of forty, buxom, competent, gay-hearted, an able teacher.

I have never known man or woman more shrewd in gauging character or more expert in turning the qualities she found to her own advantage.

If she respected or admired them she took no more than she gave—frequently, as in my case, much less.

But if she found a pupil lazy or dishonest or stingy or rich and irresponsible, she took mercilessly.

“Such people deserve nothing—nothing,” she declared once when I protested.

She respected me because I worked, but she always told me frankly that although I read French easily and wrote it _pas mal_ I should always speak it with the “detestable” English accent.

“No ear—too old.

” However, I could be made more fluent, my vocabulary enlarged, my grammar perfected.

And to that end she bent all her efforts, establishing several useful exchange relations.

The chief of these was her most intimate friend, Monsieur X, a man who I suppose had been for many years her lover.

Monsieur X had no superior intelligence; but he was industrious and _bon enfant_, and partly at least through the help of Madame A had come to hold an excellent official position.

She kept him busy improving his chances.

At the moment she took me on she had him translating a big volume on the English system of handling the unemployed and the helplessly poor, an acute problem for France in the early nineties.

As she already had pried out of me full information of all I was trying to do, she saw at once the possibility of a trade.

If I would help him in translating, he would secure reports and information on subjects in which I was interested.

It seemed a good thing for me at any rate, and the arrangement was made.

I continued to help with the book until it was published.

It was well received, even _couronné_ by the Academy of Science.

To my astonishment I found then that Madame A’s interest in this book and its success was that it would help her in making a more profitable marriage for Monsieur X.

They had settled on a wife—that, I knew—but, as she told me, his position was so much improved by the success of his book that he was worth a much larger dot.

Therefore, she set out with his help, I suppose, to find another wife.

They succeeded, and the affair was arranged.

I was deeply disturbed by the matter.

I believed, as I still do, that the only safe basis for a happy marriage is a compound of physical harmony, capacity for companionship combined with understanding and acceptance of each other’s ideals.

I could see little chance where it was a matter chiefly of balanced income.

But Madame A had no sympathy with my idealistic attitude towards marriage.

Of course it left her high and dry.

The little dinners which the three of us had shared almost every week became dinners _à deux_.

The first night I was torn with sympathy.

“Will you never see him again?

” I asked.

“Of course, not now, later perhaps.

These things arrange themselves, mademoiselle.

” But I noticed she ordered a double cognac that night.

Madame A rendered one very great service to our group, one which we could never repay.

We had been but a short time in Paris before we realized that one of our duties was to be helping out American girls and women who had come to Europe to study a little, sight-see a little, travel a little, expecting easily to form congenial relations with the people of the country, and who for one reason or another had never been able to do this.

They were disappointed and unhappy.

The four of us standing together made a nucleus they envied.

We made it a rule to do our best to help them out; but at least in one case it involved us in serious trouble.

Among those who had attached themselves to us was a woman of some forty or more years with a curiously repellent personality.

I have never known a person to produce a more melancholy effect on strangers.

I have seen our little salon empty itself if she dropped in on our evening at home.

Even Madame Bonnet’s little black dog Riquet, who had adopted us, would slink around the edge of the room and beg to be let out if she came in.

What was the matter?

We could not imagine.

More than once she threw herself into my arms and sobbed that she was unhappy, in great trouble, of which she could not speak.

Miss C had been some three months in the house when we came home from a week-end trip to be met by an outraged Madame Bonnet.

Miss C, she told us, had been arrested, arrested for stealing at the Bon Marché and the Louvre.

She was in Saint-Lazaire.

There was a note for me.

I must do something.

Think of the disgrace to her establishment!

The note told me only where she was, that she had engaged a lawyer, asked me to see him.

I did, and found him of the type which I suppose hangs around all prisons into which great cities dump women of the street and petty criminals.

His only interest was in a possible retainer.

How much would I pay him for taking the case?

Nothing, I assured him, until I had talked to the American authorities.

I went to the consulate, where an irate and worried official swore loudly at the faculty of American women for getting into trouble in France.

“Here I am,” he said, “saddled with a girl who is going to have a baby and who swears she’ll kill herself if I don’t arrange for her to have it so her family will never know.

“I was afraid she would do it too, and then there would be another nasty scandal to hush up, so I got the man here and told him he must put up the money to see her through.

“He laughed at me; but I pulled this revolver out of the drawer” (suiting the action to the word) “and told him I thought I ought to shoot him, but that if I didn’t I’d send for the girl’s brother and see that he did.

Well, he settled for ten thousand francs.

But that does not let me off.

What am I going to do with the baby?

And now here you are with one of the nastiest kind of cases for a French court.

They can’t stand foreigners stealing from them.

” “But what am I to do?

” I wailed.

“She’ll have to stand a public trial.

You must impress the judges.

Find out if she’s got friends.

Get cablegrams.

Show she has relatives willing to help her.

Read her letters.

See if they don’t show what is behind this, and when the trial comes have all the pretty girls and prosperous-looking men you know present.

They’ll look at you, and they’ll think twice.

Put on a campaign, woman.

” And so I started out to put on a campaign.

I began by reading her letters.

I did not go far before I had the story—a tragic one.

Miss C was well born, her family prosperous and important in her state, she a graduate of a great university.

She had been a successful teacher, was to have been married to a man whom she had loved for years with passion and depth.

For reasons I never knew the engagement was broken.

In an attempt to forget, patch up her shattered hopes, she had come to Europe for study and travel; but she couldn’t forget, and every week for months she had written the man long letters and every week they had come back to her unopened.

Her despair became so black that, as she told me later, “I had to do something.

” And so, as when one bites on a sore tooth, she had begun to steal.

The proofs of it were all there in her room: a pathetic collection of articles, not worth stealing, slipped mainly from bargain counters.

Among them there were at least seventy pairs of gloves of every size and color—none of them any one of us would have worn.

There were some fifty pen knives; there were a pile of half-bolts of ribbon and lace, innumerable spools of silk and cotton, packages of pins and needles.

All taken not because she wanted them, only to hurt herself in another spot, take her mind from the original wound.

Understanding her wretchedness, I could sympathize with her folly.

I

began my campaign by telling Madame of our trouble.

She detested Miss C, thought her crazy, though she admitted she was a better pupil than any one of us, but here was excitement, also an opportunity to serve us.

What the consul had not suggested, she did.

There was a long wait.

Our prisoner was transferred to the Conciergerie, where I went to see her.

A gruesome trip under the very windows from which I knew Madame Roland had looked in the days before she mounted the cart and took her last ride along the quay to the guillotine.

When the trial came the sympathizing claque was a grand success.

At Madame A’s suggestion we dressed for it in the best we had, bought new flowers for our hats and fresh gloves, brought over two or three handsome young women from the Champs Elysées Quarter.

As for Madame A herself, she made a toilette which even a judge would see and hear.

I had suggested that Monsieur X, being an important person, might impress the judge.

She was horrified.

“Drag a member of the Government into such a stupid affair!

No, you Americans must do it.

I’ll bring the rich American.

” And she did.

The rich American was a wealthy idler who for several winters had taken lessons from her, largely, I think, because he found her so pungent and amusing.

He treated her royally as to fees and kept her in flowers and candy.

He looked his part of important man of affairs.

No one could have added more to our display, for one could see even the judges eyeing enviously the elegance of his clothes.

Petty larceny cases were at that time, and I suppose still are, taken into a courtroom perhaps forty by twenty, with seats for friends and the public.

On a mounted platform at the end sat three judges in their robes.

A dossier of each case lay before them; they had for our friend a rather impressive collection of documents, cablegrams from her family, proofs that her father was or had been a man of importance in public affairs, her college diploma, her check book and a letter of credit showing her to have ample funds.

When all was ready seven prisoners were brought in, six men half degenerate petty thieves and our poor pale tired friend between them.

Nothing more incongruous could have been seen than this well dressed woman of evident breeding flanked by these hopeless derelicts.

After looking over the papers in her dossier the judges looked at her and then at us, now paler than she and praying for mercy with eyes and clasped hands.

They were perplexed and annoyed.

Was there an international angle to the case?

“What are you doing in Paris?

” asked one of them harshly.

“Studying,” Miss C answered.

“You take a queer way to do it,” he said tartly.

“Why did you do this?

” he asked more gently.

With a weary shake of her head she said, “Je ne sais pas.

” It was Madame A who won the case, for it was to her the judges turned as one who, they knew at a glimpse, talked their language.

She sailed down the aisle to take her stand before them, and I never have seen any one, man or woman, to whom one could so aptly apply the old figure, “like a full-rigged ship.

” They let her talk.

She told how _comme il faut_ we all were—as they could see.

We were important, serious, rich.

Yes, rich.

Then she said candidly: “This woman is crazy.

Send her home to her friends.

” She had solved their problem, told them their duty, and they followed her advice, adding a fine of five hundred francs and an order that she leave France in a week after her dismissal, and never return.

Madame A had saved Miss C, but she wanted no thanks from her, wouldn’t see her; nor would Madame Bonnet let her come into the house save to gather up her things.

She had been a fool and got caught.

To steal the _riens_ as she had!

It was a disgrace and respectable people like them could not afford to have her cross their doorways.

Luckily for us, our association with American women was not confined to problem cases.

There was a disturbing number of them compelling me to ask myself again and again if this break for freedom, this revolt against security in which I myself was taking part was not a fatal adventure bound to injure the family, the one institution in which I believed more than any other, bound to produce a terrible crop of wretchedness and abnormality.

Had not even the few successes I saw about me been paid for by a hardening of heart, a suppression of natural human joyousness that was uglier even than the case of my poor Miss C?

But I was saved from too much perplexity over what freedom might be doing to my compatriots by a gradual drifting into rather close companionship with a number of Americans like ourselves taking lectures at the Sorbonne, and the Collège de France.

It was a great piece of luck for us since these Americans were all students of more experience and attainment than any one of us.

There was Dr. John Vincent of the History Department of Johns Hopkins University, and along with him his wife who spent hours of every day making beautiful copies of canvases in the Luxembourg.

There were Fred Parker Emery of the English Department of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his wife.

There was a younger man, Charles D. Hazen, a Hopkins graduate—a man who was to make a distinguished career for himself in French history, and now Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia, the author of many valuable books.

Serious work did not dull our new friends’ curiosity about French life in general nor prevent a humorous detached view of things.

We soon were dining together every week in restaurants of the Quarter into which we had never ventured before.

Here for one franc, fifty (thirty cents) we got a decent dinner—_vin compris_, as well as a gay company of students and their girls.

They were so merry, so natural in their gaiety that none of us were anything but amused over their little ways.

It was in one of these restaurants that for the first time in my life I saw a girl take out a compact, straighten her hat—her head had been on her cavalier’s shoulder and it was out of plumb—straighten her hat and powder her nose.

That the day would come when the manners and customs of the Latin Quarter of the nineties would be the manners and customs of American girls in practically every rank of life would have been unthinkable to me then.

Our new friends added greatly to the pleasure of the weekly sightseeing excursions which had been one of the features of The Plan.

“Every week end, go somewhere”—I had laid down.

So every Saturday we were taking a _bateau mouche_ or train or tram journey costing only a few of our precious sous—to Saint-Denis, the September fête at Saint-Cloud, Versailles.

If the weather was bad we went to the museums, the churches, the monuments.

Our new friends liked the idea.

When spring came our promenades took on a wider range.

There were week-end trips to Fontainebleau and to one after another of the great cathedral and château towns—Chartres, Beauvais, Rheims, Pierrefonds, Compiègne.

Week ends in company as genial, unaffected and intelligent as that of our new friends proved were a rare experience.

When the time came for a final break-up of the crowd in August of 1892—my first companions had already gone back to America—those left of us decided to take a farewell vacation together.

The difficulty was to settle on a place.

Here was something not on my schedule.

We considered Etaples, Beuzeval-Houlgate, Belle-Île and finally at the last moment took tickets to Mont-Saint-Michel—a glorious spot; but after watching the tide come in for two successive days, after climbing to the top and descending to the bottom of the château, sitting out sunsets on the wall and eating omelettes at Madame Poulard’s until we were fed to the full we pushed on to Saint-Malo and exhausted it as quickly as we had Mont-Saint-Michel.

As we listened bored to the orchestra in the square a poster on a wall suddenly caught our collective eyes.

It told us to go to the Island of Jersey.

With one accord we said “Let’s,” packed our bags and caught the steamer all within an hour.

At Jersey we walked into lodgings: rooms, plenty of them; a salon looking on the sea; such sea fish and vegetables and fruit as only that island offers.

We thought it was costing a fortune, but when the bill came—house, housekeeper, maid, and food such as we had not had for a year—it totaled just eighty cents apiece for a day.

That vacation put a gay finish on my first year in Paris.

I began the second in deep depression, for several good reasons.

First, I had exhausted my reserve.

I think I came back from my vacation with twenty francs in my pocket.

All my American associates were gone or going soon.

I had a new address, for Madame Bonnet had moved from the neighborhood of the Musée Cluny to the more somber neighborhood of the Panthéon and, hardest of all, I knew now that instead of one year more I must have at least two to finish my undertaking.

The homesickness and hunger for my family had never been appeased.

I had lived on their letters.

If they did not come regularly I scolded and wailed; I begged for details of their daily life.

My mother was an intimate letter writer, delightfully frank about her neighbors and about the family.

She told who was at church, fretted because father spent so much time with his precious Sunday school class of girls, described every new frock, told what they had for Sunday dinner, announced the first green corn in the garden, the blossoming of her pet flowers—snowdrops and primulas and iris in the spring, roses in the summer, anemones in the fall, cactus in the winter.

Occasionally she would apologize for her homely details, particularly after I had written a long guidebookish epistle home describing some ancient monument I had been visiting.

How I must have bored them sometimes!

But home details—“I live off them,” I told her.

“You can’t tell me too much about your daily doings.

” This feeling about my family made me a sensitive receiving plate and accounts, I suppose, for the only proof I personally have ever had of the possibilities in telepathy.

This came the first Sunday of June, 1892. I had hardly taken my coffee when I fell prey to a most unaccountable alarm.

What it was about, I did not know.

I could not work and finally went to the street.

For hours I walked, not able to throw off the black thing that enveloped me.

It was late in the afternoon when I returned to find a compatriot with a letter of introduction waiting.

As he was leaving the apartment after his call I picked up my daily copy of _Le Temps_ and as I always did turned first to the news from _les Etats Unis_.

It was to read that the city of Titusville and its neighbor Oil City had been utterly destroyed by flood and fire.

The only buildings left in my home town were said to be the railroad station and a foundry.

A hundred and fifty persons had been drowned or burned to death—the inhabitants had taken to the hills.

At that moment my caller came back for his umbrella.

I seized him roughly: “Read, read.

What shall I do?

” He was a sensible man.

“Steady, steady,” he said.

“Put on your hat, and we’ll go out and get other papers.

” We were soon back with the last editions of all the English and French journals.

They all gave space to the disaster, each more distressing and unsatisfactory than the one before.

This explains my black day, I told myself.

The family is dead—our home gone.

It was useless to cable, for the newspapers all spoke of broken communications.

But the next morning as I was dressing, Madame Bonnet came in with a cablegram.

Hardly daring to open it I backed into the corner of the room to feel the support behind me of the walls while my friend Mrs. Vincent, still with me, watched with white face.

The telegram was from my brother, and it had just one word.

“Safe.

” When finally a letter came, I found I had justification for my day of horror.

For many hours there had been but little doubt in the minds of my father and brother that the family would have to take to the hills.

But they were safe, our home was standing.

The experience left me more nervous than ever about them, and now that my friends were gone it took all the resolution I could summon to keep my foolish alarms under control.

Although I was beginning my second year with no money in the bank I had friendly relations with two publishing firms that seemed to see a possible something in my work.

There was _Scribner’s Magazine_, a relation of which I was justly proud; not only had they encouraged me about my book, but they had asked me to let them consider magazine subjects that interested me and that I was doing.

But, while it was the relation on which I hoped to build serious work in the future, at the moment I must share it with something of quicker return; and that seemed to be the McClure Syndicate.

I felt surer of this after my first meeting with its founder, S. S.

McClure.

That meeting had been just before my vacation in the summer of 1892; Mr. McClure had dropped into Paris in the meteoric fashion I found was usual with him, and came by appointment to see me at my new address in the Rue Malebranche.

This crooked and steep passage off the Rue Saint-Jacques was unknown to half the _cochers_ of Paris, but Mr. McClure found it and arrived bareheaded, watch in hand, breathless from running up my four flights—eighty steps.

“I’ve just ten minutes,” he announced; “must leave for Switzerland tonight to see Tyndall.

” A slender figure, S. S.

McClure, a shock of tumbled sandy hair, blue eyes which glowed and sparkled.

He was close to my own age, a vibrant, eager, indomitable personality that electrified even the experienced and the cynical.

His utter simplicity, outrightness, his enthusiasm and confidence captivated me.

He was so new and unexpected that practical questions such as, “Would you be interested in articles on ...

” and “How much will you pay?

” dropped out of mind.

Before I knew it I was listening to the story of his struggle up.

How as a peddler he had earned money for college—who could have let him go without buying?

—his vast schemes of learning undertaken when a freshman at Knox College, one of which was to study every word in the English dictionary, its start, its development, its present stage, its possible future, his beautiful romance with Hattie, his wife, the story of the Syndicate and of John—always John this, John that, and last a magazine to be—soon.

And here I was to come in.

While he talked I was managing somehow to tell him the story of my life and hopes and to fit things together.

What was to have been ten minutes stretched to two hours or more.

“I must go,” he suddenly cried.

“Could you lend me forty dollars?

It is too late to get money over town, and I must catch the train for Geneva.

” “Certainly,” I said.

I had forty dollars there in my desk, the sum set aside for my farewell vacation.