Генри Джеймс
Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales
THE PENSION BEAUREPAS
I
I was not rich—on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas was cheap. I had further been told that a boarding-house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I was inclined to a literary career and a friend had said to me: “If you mean to write you ought to go and live in a boarding-house: there’s no other such way to pick up material.” I had read something of this kind in a letter addressed by the celebrated Stendhal to his sister: “I have a passionate desire to know human nature, and a great mind to live in a boarding-house, where people can’t conceal their real characters.” I was an admirer of La Chartreuse de Parme, and easily believed one couldn’t do better than follow in the footsteps of its author. I remembered, too, the magnificent boarding-house in Balzac’s Père Goriot—the “pension bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres,” kept by Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans. Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the establishment, as an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, and I hoped for better things from the Pension Beaurepas. This institution was one of the most esteemed in Geneva and, standing in a little garden of its own not far from the lake, had a very homely comfortable sociable aspect. The regular entrance was, as one might say, at the back, which looked upon the street, or rather upon a little place adorned, like every place in Geneva, great or small, with a generous cool fountain. That approach was not prepossessing, for on crossing the threshold you found yourself more or less in the kitchen—amid the “offices” and struck with their assault on your nostril. This, however, was no great matter, for at the Pension Beaurepas things conformed frankly to their nature and the whole mechanism lay bare. It was rather primitive, the mechanism, but it worked in a friendly homely regular way. Madame Beaurepas was an honest little old woman—she was far advanced in life and had been keeping a pension for more than forty years—whose only faults were that she was slightly deaf, that she was fond of a surreptitious pinch of snuff, and that, at the age of seventy-four, she wore stacks of flowers in her cap. There was a legend in the house that she wasn’t so deaf as she pretended and that she feigned this infirmity in order to possess herself of the secrets of her lodgers. I never indeed subscribed to this theory, convinced as I became that Madame Beaurepas had outlived the period of indiscreet curiosity. She dealt with the present and the future in the steady light of a long experience; she had been having lodgers for nearly half a century and all her concern with them was that they should pay their bills, fold their napkins and make use of the doormat. She cared very little for their secrets. “J’en ai vus de toutes les couleurs,” she said to me. She had quite ceased to trouble about individuals; she cared only for types and clear categories. Her large observation had made her acquainted with a number of these and her mind become a complete collection of “heads.” She flattered herself that she knew at a glance where to pigeonhole a new-comer, and if she made mistakes her deportment never betrayed them. I felt that as regards particular persons—once they conformed to the few rules—she had neither likes nor dislikes; but she was capable of expressing esteem or contempt for a species. She had her own ways, I suppose, of manifesting her approval, but her manner of indicating the reverse was simple and unvarying. “Je trouve que c’est déplacé!”—this exhausted her view of the matter. If one of her inmates had put arsenic into the pot-au-feu I believe Madame Beaurepas would have been satisfied to remark that this receptacle was not the place for arsenic. She could have imagined it otherwise and suitably applied. The line of misconduct to which she most objected was an undue assumption of gentility; she had no patience with boarders who gave themselves airs. “When people come chez moi it isn’t to cut a figure in the world; I’ve never so flattered myself,” I remember hearing her say; “and when you pay seven francs a day, tout compris, it comprises everything but the right to look down on the others. Yet there are people who, the less they pay, take themselves the more au sérieux. My most difficult boarders have always been those who’ve fiercely bargained and had the cheapest rooms.”
Madame Beaurepas had a niece, a young woman of some forty odd years; and the two ladies, with the assistance of a couple of thick-waisted red-armed peasant-women, kept the house going. If on your exits and entrances you peeped into the kitchen it made very little difference; as Célestine the cook shrouded herself in no mystery and announced the day’s fare, amid her fumes, quite with the resonance of the priestess of the tripod foretelling the future. She was always at your service with a grateful grin: she blacked your boots; she trudged off to fetch a cab; she would have carried your baggage, if you had allowed her, on her broad little back. She was always tramping in and out between her kitchen and the fountain in the place, where it often seemed to me that a large part of the preparation for our meals went forward—the wringing-out of towels and table-cloths, the washing of potatoes and cabbages, the scouring of saucepans and cleansing of water-bottles. You enjoyed from the door-step a perpetual back-view of Célestine and of her large loose woollen ankles as she craned, from the waist, over into the fountain and dabbled in her various utensils. This sounds as if life proceeded but in a makeshift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas—as if we suffered from a sordid tone. But such was not at all the case. We were simply very bourgeois; we practised the good old Genevese principle of not sacrificing to appearances. Nothing can be better than that principle when the rich real underlies it. We had the rich real at the Pension Beaurepas: we had it in the shape of soft short beds equipped with fluffy duvets; of admirable coffee, served to us in the morning by Célestine in person as we lay recumbent on these downy couches; of copious wholesome succulent dinners, conformable to the best provincial traditions. For myself, I thought the Pension Beaurepas local colour, and this, with me, at that time, was a grand term. I was young and ingenuous and had just come from America. I wished to perfect myself in the French tongue and innocently believed it to flourish by Lake Leman. I used to go to lectures at the Academy, the nursing mother of the present University, and come home with a violent appetite. I always enjoyed my morning walk across the long bridge—there was only one just there in those days—which spans the deep blue out-gush of the lake, and up the dark steep streets of the old Calvinistic city. The garden faced this way, toward the lake and the old town, and gave properest access to the house. There was a high wall with a double gate in the middle and flanked by a couple of ancient massive posts; the big rusty grille bristled with old-fashioned iron-work. The garden was rather mouldy and weedy, tangled and untended; but it contained a small thin-flowing fountain, several green benches, a rickety little table of the same complexion, together with three orange-trees in tubs disposed as effectively as possible in front of the windows of the salon.
II
As commonly happens in boarding-houses the rustle of petticoats was at the Pension Beaurepas the most familiar form of the human tread. We enjoyed the usual allowance of economical widows and old maids and, to maintain the balance of the sexes, could boast but of a finished old Frenchman and an obscure young American. It hardly made the matter easier that the old Frenchman came from Lausanne. He was a native of that well-perched place, but had once spent six months in Paris, where he had tasted of the tree of knowledge; he had got beyond Lausanne, whose resources he pronounced inadequate. Lausanne, as he said, “manquait d’agrêments.” When obliged, for reasons he never specified, to bring his residence in Paris to a close, he had fallen back on Geneva; he had broken his fall at the Pension Beaurepas. Geneva was after all more like Paris, and at a Genevese boarding-house there was sure to be plenty of Americans who might be more or less counted on to add to the resemblance. M. Pigeonneau was a little lean man with a vast narrow nose, who sat a great deal in the garden and bent his eyes, with the aid of a large magnifying glass, on a volume from the cabinet de lecture.
One day a fortnight after my adoption of the retreat I describe I came back rather earlier than usual from my academic session; it wanted half an hour of the midday breakfast. I entered the salon with the design of possessing myself of the day’s Galignani before one of the little English old maids should have removed it to her virginal bower—a privilege to which Madame Beaurepas frequently alluded as one of the attractions of the establishment. In the salon I found a new-comer, a tall gentleman in a high black hat, whom I immediately recognised as a compatriot. I had often seen him, or his equivalent, in the hotel-parlours of my native land. He apparently supposed himself to be at the present moment in an hotel-parlour; his hat was on his head or rather half off it—pushed back from his forehead and more suspended than poised. He stood before a table on which old newspapers were scattered; one of these he had taken up and, with his eye-glass on his nose, was holding out at arm’s length. It was that honourable but extremely diminutive sheet the Journal de Genève, a newspaper then of about the size of a pocket-handkerchief. As I drew near, looking for my Galignani, the tall gentleman gave me, over the top of his eyeglass, a sad and solemn stare. Presently, however, before I had time to lay my hand on the object of my search, he silently offered me the Journal de Genève.
“It appears,” he said, “to be the paper of the country.”
“Yes,” I answered, “I believe it’s the best.”
He gazed at it again, still holding it at arm’s-length as if it had been a looking-glass. “Well,” he concluded, “I suppose it’s natural a small country should have small papers. You could wrap this one up, mountains and all, in one of our dailies!”
I found my Galignani and went off with it into the garden, where I seated myself on a bench in the shade. Presently I saw the tall gentleman in the hat appear at one of the open windows of the salon and stand there with his hands in his pockets and his legs a little apart. He looked infinitely bored, and—I don’t know why—I immediately felt sorry for him. He hadn’t at all—as M. Pigeonneau, for instance, in his way, had it—the romantic note; he looked just a jaded, faded, absolutely voided man of business. But after a little he came into the garden and began to stroll about; and then his restless helpless carriage and the vague unacquainted manner in which his eyes wandered over the place seemed to make it proper that, as an older resident, I should offer him a certain hospitality. I addressed him some remark founded on our passage of a moment before, and he came and sat down beside me on my bench, clasping one of his long knees in his hands.
“When is it this big breakfast of theirs comes off?” he inquired. “That’s what I call it—the little breakfast and the big breakfast. I never thought I should live to see the time when I’d want to eat two breakfasts. But a man’s glad to do anything over here.”
“For myself,” I dropped, “I find plenty to do.”
He turned his head and glanced at me with an effect of bottomless wonder and dry despair. “You’re getting used to the life, are you?”
“I like the life very much,” I laughed.
“How long have you tried it?”
“Do you mean this place?”
“Well, I mean anywhere. It seems to me pretty much the same all over.”
“I’ve been in this house only a fortnight,” I said.
“Well, what should you say, from what you’ve seen?” my companion asked.
“Oh you can see all there is at once. It’s very simple.”
“Sweet simplicity, eh? Well then I guess my two ladies will know right off what’s the matter with it.”
“Oh everything’s very good,” I hastened to explain. “And Madame Beaurepas is a charming old woman. And then it’s very cheap.”
“Cheap, is it?” my friend languidly echoed.
“Doesn’t it strike you so?” I thought it possible he hadn’t inquired the terms. But he appeared not to have heard me; he sat there, clasping his knee and absently blinking at the sunshine.
“Are you from the United States, sir?” he presently demanded, turning his head again.
“Well, I guess I am, sir,” I felt it indicated to reply; and I mentioned the place of my nativity.
“I presumed you were American or English. I’m from the United States myself—from New York City. Many of our people here?” he went on.
“Not so many as I believe there have sometimes been. There are two or three ladies.”
“Well,” my interlocutor observed, “I’m very fond of ladies’ society. I think when it’s really nice there’s nothing comes up to it. I’ve got two ladies here myself. I must make you acquainted with them.” And then after I had rejoined that I should be delighted and had inquired of him if he had been long in Europe: “Well, it seems precious long, but my time’s not up yet. We’ve been here nineteen weeks and a half.”
“Are you travelling for pleasure?” I hazarded.
Once more he inclined his face to me—his face that was practically so odd a comment on my question, and I so felt his unspoken irony that I soon also turned and met his eyes. “No, sir. Not much, sir,” he added after a considerable interval.
“Pardon me,” I said; for his desolation had a little the effect of a rebuke.
He took no notice of my appeal; he simply continued to look at me. “I’m travelling,” he said at last, “to please the doctors. They seemed to think they’d enjoy it.”
“Ah, they sent you abroad for your health?”
“They sent me abroad because they were so plaguey muddled they didn’t know what else to do.”
“That’s often the best thing,” I ventured to remark.
“It was a confession of medical bankruptcy; they wanted to stop my run on them. They didn’t know enough to cure me, as they had originally pretended they did, and that’s the way they thought they’d get round it. I wanted to be cured—I didn’t want to be transported. I hadn’t done any harm.” I could but assent to the general proposition of the inefficiency of doctors, and put to my companion that I hoped he hadn’t been seriously ill. He only shook his foot at first, for some time, by way of answer; but at last, “I didn’t get natural rest,” he wearily observed.
“Ah, that’s very annoying. I suppose you were overworked.”
“I didn’t have a natural appetite—nor even an unnatural, when they fixed up things for me. I took no interest in my food.”
“Well, I guess you’ll both eat and sleep here,” I felt justified in remarking.
“I couldn’t hold a pen,” my neighbour went on. “I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t walk from my house to the cars—and it’s only a little way. I lost my interest in business.”
“You needed a good holiday,” I concluded.
“That’s what the doctors said. It wasn’t so very smart of them. I had been paying strict attention to business for twenty-three years.”
“And in all that time you had never let up?” I cried in horror.
My companion waited a little. “I kind o’ let up Sundays.”
“Oh that’s nothing—because our Sundays themselves never let up.”
“I guess they do over here,” said my friend.
“Yes, but you weren’t over here.”
“No, I wasn’t over here. I shouldn’t have been where I was three years ago if I had spent my time travelling round Europe. I was in a very advantageous position. I did a very large business. I was considerably interested in lumber.” He paused, bending, though a little hopelessly, about to me again. “Have you any business interests yourself?” I answered that I had none, and he proceeded slowly, mildly and deliberately. “Well, sir, perhaps you’re not aware that business in the United States is not what it was a short time since. Business interests are very insecure. There seems to be a general falling-off. Different parties offer different explanations of the fact, but so far as I’m aware none of their fine talk has set things going again.” I ingeniously intimated that if business was dull the time was good for coming away; whereupon my compatriot threw back his head and stretched his legs a while. “Well, sir, that’s one view of the matter certainly. There’s something to be said for that. These things should be looked at all round. That’s the ground my wife took. That’s the ground,” he added in a moment, “that a lady would naturally take.” To which he added a laugh as ghostly as a dried flower.
“You think there’s a flaw in the reasoning?” I asked.
“Well, sir, the ground I took was that the worse a man’s business is the more it requires looking after. I shouldn’t want to go out to recreation—not even to go to church—if my house was on fire. My firm’s not doing the business it was; it’s like a sick child—it requires nursing. What I wanted the doctors to do was to fix me up so that I could go on at home. I’d have taken anything they’d have given me, and as many times a day. I wanted to be right there; I had my reasons; I have them still. But I came off all the same,” said my friend with a melancholy smile.
I was a great deal younger than he, but there was something so simple and communicative in his tone, so expressive of a desire to fraternise and so exempt from any theory of human differences, that I quite forgot his seniority and found myself offering him paternal advice. “Don’t think about all that. Simply enjoy yourself, amuse yourself, get well. Travel about and see Europe. At the end of a year, by the time you’re ready to go home, things will have improved over there, and you’ll be quite well and happy.”
He laid his hand on my knee; his wan kind eyes considered me, and I thought he was going to say “You’re very young!” But he only brought out: “You’ve got used to Europe anyway!”
III
At breakfast I encountered his ladies—his wife and daughter. They were placed, however, at a distance from me, and it was not until the pensionnaires had dispersed and some of them, according to custom, had come out into the garden, that he had an opportunity of carrying out his offer.
“Will you allow me to introduce you to my daughter?” he said, moved apparently by a paternal inclination to provide this young lady with social diversion. She was standing with her mother in one of the paths, where she looked about with no great complacency, I inferred, at the homely characteristics of the place. Old M. Pigeonneau meanwhile hovered near, hesitating apparently between the desire to be urbane and the absence of a pretext. “Mrs. Ruck, Miss Sophy Ruck”—my friend led me up.
Mrs. Ruck was a ponderous light-coloured person with a smooth fair face, a somnolent eye and an arrangement of hair, with forehead-tendrils, water-waves and other complications, that reminded me of those framed “capillary” tributes to the dead which used long ago to hang over artless mantel-shelves between the pair of glass domes protecting wax flowers. Miss Sophy was a girl of one-and-twenty, tiny and pretty and lively, with no more maiden shyness than a feminine terrier in a tinkling collar. Both of these ladies were arrayed in black silk dresses, much ruffled and flounced, and if elegance were all a matter of trimming they would have been elegant.
“Do you think highly of this pension?” asked Mrs. Ruck after a few preliminaries.
“It’s a little rough,” I made answer, “but it seems to me comfortable.”
“Does it take a high rank in Geneva?”
“I imagine it enjoys a very fair fame.”
“I should never dream of comparing it to a New York boarding-house,” Mrs. Ruck pursued.
“It’s quite in a different style,” her daughter observed. Miss Ruck had folded her arms; she held her elbows with a pair of small white hands and tapped the ground with a pretty little foot.
“We hardly expected to come to a pension,” said Mrs. Ruck, who looked considerably over my head and seemed to confide the truth in question, as with an odd austerity or chastity, a marked remoteness, to the general air. “But we thought we’d try; we had heard so much about Swiss pensions. I was saying to Mr. Ruck that I wondered if this is a favourable specimen. I was afraid we might have made a mistake.”
“Well, we know some people who have been here; they think everything of Madame Beaurepas,” said Miss Sophy. “They say she’s a real friend.”
Mrs. Ruck, at this, drew down a little. “Mr. and Mrs. Parker—perhaps you’ve heard her speak of them.”
“Madame Beaurepas has had a great many Americans; she’s very fond of Americans,” I replied.
“Well, I must say I should think she would be if she compares them with some others.”
“Mother’s death on comparing,” remarked Miss Ruck.
“Of course I like to study things and to see for myself,” the elder lady returned. “I never had a chance till now; I never knew my privileges. Give me an American!” And, recovering her distance again, she seemed to impose this tax on the universe.
“Well, I must say there are some things I like over here,” said Miss Sophy with courage. And indeed I could see that she was a young woman of sharp affirmations.
Her father gave one of his ghostly grunts. “You like the stores—that’s what you like most, I guess.”
The young lady addressed herself to me without heeding this charge. “I suppose you feel quite at home here.”
“Oh he likes it—he has got used to the life. He says you can!” Mr. Ruck proclaimed.
“I wish you’d teach Mr. Ruck then,” said his wife. “It seems as if he couldn’t get used to anything.”
“I’m used to you, my dear,” he retorted, but with his melancholy eyes on me.
“He’s intensely restless,” continued Mrs. Ruck. “That’s what made me want to come to a pension. I thought he’d settle down more.”
“Well, lovey,” he sighed, “I’ve had hitherto mainly to settle up!”
In view of a possible clash between her parents I took refuge in conversation with Miss Ruck, who struck me as well out in the open—as leaning, subject to any swing, so to speak, on the easy gate of the house of life. I learned from her that with her companions, after a visit to the British islands, she had been spending a month in Paris and that she thought she should have died on quitting that city. “I hung out of the carriage, when we left the hotel—I assure you I did. And I guess mother did, too.”
“Out of the other window, I hope,” said I.
“Yes, one out of each window”—her promptitude was perfect. “Father had hard work, I can tell you. We hadn’t half-finished—there were ever so many other places we wanted to go to.”
“Your father insisted on coming away?”
“Yes—after we had been there about a month he claimed he had had enough. He’s fearfully restless; he’s very much out of health. Mother and I took the ground that if he was restless in Paris he needn’t hope for peace anywhere. We don’t mean to let up on him till he takes us back.” There was an air of keen resolution in Miss Ruck’s pretty face, of the lucid apprehension of desirable ends, which made me, as she pronounced these words, direct a glance of covert compassion toward her poor recalcitrant sire. He had walked away a little with his wife, and I saw only his back and his stooping patient-looking shoulders, whose air of acute resignation was thrown into relief by the cold serenity of his companion. “He’ll have to take us back in September anyway,” the girl pursued; “he’ll have to take us back to get some things we’ve ordered.”
I had an idea it was my duty to draw her out. “Have you ordered a great many things?”
“Well, I guess we’ve ordered some. Of course we wanted to take advantage of being in Paris—ladies always do. We’ve left the most important ones till we go back. Of course that’s the principal interest for ladies. Mother said she’d feel so shabby if she just passed through. We’ve promised all the people to be right there in September, and I never broke a promise yet. So Mr. Ruck has got to make his plans accordingly.”
“And what are his plans?” I continued, true to my high conception.
“I don’t know; he doesn’t seem able to make any. His great idea was to get to Geneva, but now that he has got here he doesn’t seem to see the point. It’s the effect of bad health. He used to be so bright and natural, but now he’s quite subdued. It’s about time he should improve, anyway. We went out last night to look at the jewellers’ windows—in that street behind the hotel. I had always heard of those jewellers’ windows. We saw some lovely things, but it didn’t seem to rouse father. He’ll get tired of Geneva sooner than he did of Paris.”
“Ah,” said I, “there are finer things here than the jewellers’ windows. We’re very near some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe.”
“I suppose you mean the mountains. Well, I guess we’ve seen plenty of mountains at home. We used to go to the mountains every summer. We’re familiar enough with the mountains. Aren’t we, mother?” my young woman demanded, appealing to Mrs. Ruck, who, with her husband, had drawn near again.
“Aren’t we what?” inquired the elder lady.
“Aren’t we familiar with the mountains?”
“Well, I hope so,” said Mrs. Ruck.
Mr. Ruck, with his hands in his pockets, gave me a sociable wink. “There’s nothing much you can tell them!”
The two ladies stood face to face a few moments, surveying each other’s garments. Then the girl put her mother a question. “Don’t you want to go out?”
“Well, I think we’d better. We’ve got to go up to that place.”
“To what place?” asked Mr. Ruck.
“To that jeweller’s—to that big one.”
“They all seemed big enough—they were too big!” And he gave me another dry wink.
“That one where we saw the blue cross,” said his daughter.
“Oh come, what do you want of that blue cross?” poor Mr. Ruck demanded.
“She wants to hang it on a black velvet ribbon and tie it round her neck,” said his wife.
“A black velvet ribbon? Not much!” cried the young lady. “Do you suppose I’d wear that cross on a black velvet ribbon? On a nice little gold chain, if you please—a little narrow gold chain like an old-fashioned watch-chain. That’s the proper thing for that blue cross. I know the sort of chain I mean; I’m going to look for one. When I want a thing,” said Miss Ruck with decision, “I can generally find it.”
“Look here, Sophy,” her father urged, “you don’t want that blue cross.”
“I do want it—I happen to want it.” And her light laugh, with which she glanced at me, was like the flutter of some gage of battle.
The grace of this demonstration, in itself marked, suggested that there were various relations in which one might stand to Miss Ruck; but I felt that the sharpest of the strain would come on the paternal. “Don’t worry the poor child,” said her mother.
She took it sharply up. “Come on, mother.”
“We’re going to look round a little,” the elder lady explained to me by way of taking leave.
“I know what that means,” their companion dropped as they moved away. He stood looking at them while he raised his hand to his head, behind, and rubbed it with a movement that displaced his hat. (I may remark in parenthesis that I never saw a hat more easily displaced than Mr. Ruck’s.) I supposed him about to exhale some plaint, but I was mistaken. Mr. Ruck was unhappy, but he was a touching fatalist. “Well, they want to pick up something,” he contented himself with recognising. “That’s the principal interest for ladies.”
