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MARIE-LOUISE

LESLIE GORDON BARNARD

T WAS on a Saturday afternoon that I ran into Lawrence Ashcroft on the street. He was hurrying along with that slightly bookish stoop to his shoulders that would be more pronounced if we, who were his intimates, had left him still more to his reading and writing, instead of insisting on occasional periods of recreation away from the city and his customary circles. For the holiday before last I had been responsible, a glorious two months in northern Quebec; now I remembered, with a slight inward uneasiness but an outward smile, that he must have been back some time from his European honeymoon.

"The art gallery!" he replied, rather crisply I thought, in answer to my question as to his immediate destination.

"Does Marie-Louise take kindly to the artistic life?" I asked him. I could have bitten my tongue out after it was said.

His eyes shot to mine. He replied, quickly enough, parrying it with a smile: "One cannot expect everything! I take her to all the exhibitions!"

A great desire came upon me to see again the little rose-cheeked Marie-Louise of our glorious Laurentian days. I hinted something of the kind. Perhaps he thought his noncommittal silence would put me off,

but it only increased my obstinacy, and I fell into step beside him, wittingly blind to any decencies involved. His slight stoop seemed to increase, as if I had, by my company, put an added burden on his shoulders. As we approached the broad steps of the gallery, he swung upon me. "Look here," he said, "you think I'm meeting Marie-Louise. I'm not! It's just a friend. I'm sorry, old chap, but-"

He smiled again in dismissal. In a moment I should have left him, but suddenly the smile on his face died and suffered a curious resurrection. This latter was not for me. I turned instinctively. A slim autumn creature came gaily up; there was a little stirring of breeze behind her that seemed to carry her lightly to us; I thought of a scarlet leaf dancing in autumn wind and sunshine.

"Both of you!" she cried, offering a hand to each of us, but letting mine drop first.

"Mrs. Holling!" I cried, with due deference to the bridal state of one who was Patricia Ward.

"Pat to my friends, please!" she chided. "Come along, Lorry; I'm just famished to see some pictures with you!"

Ashcroft hesitated, his eyes on me with an evasion natural, perhaps, in a newly married man about to escort through the gallery a newly

married woman, and embarrassed by the unexpected presence of a mutual friend who knew how, having been as good as engaged, they had gone their respective ways and married elsewhere....

"You'll come with us, of course?" suggested Ashcroft briefly, explaining to Patricia that I had thought of accompanying him.

"Of course!" she agreed, readily enough, but her eyes shot fire that her pretty lids were not quick enough to cover. With an impulsive movement she put a hand on Ashcroft's arm; it was a possessive gesture. Remembering Marie-Louise, I felt suddenly chill. The high interior of the gallery was like a mausoleum after the brilliant sunshine of the street.

23

It was not my purpose to force my society upon them, even if my obstinacy had brought me this far. To do so I felt would be a disservice to our little Marie-Louise. I became ostensibly interested in a group of paintings, and left them to their own devices. The real fact was that my mental chaos cast a blur over the pictures, and only gradually did they come into focus. And there again I must amend my statement, for it was one small thing in oils that had, almost subconsciously, attracted me, and that now held me to the exclusion of all others. "Spring in the Laurentians" it was called, though I did not need the catalogue to tell me that. A simple enough composition: a French-Canadian house of the better sort, a thing of honest stone and broad mortar, of casements below and dormer-windows above, un

spoiled by any of the modern gewgaws that a more flimsy and ornate and superficial taste has introduced. Set on a slight rise, the land sloped away from it in curious convolutions of brown earth, with snow in white patches still, and, working through it all, a faint ethereal green, so elusive yet so pervasive one caught one's breath. This spring patchwork melted into soft haze at the foot of the low encircling hills that formed the background. In the foreground, the April sun had stirred the little farmyard into activity: some hardy fowls scratched in the uncovered mud and straw; a few ducks waddled toward a muddy-colored stream that ran in a depression to the right, a tiny stream but so grown big with spring that it flooded the roots and lower trunks of a thin growth of trees on its banks-young poplars and one or two sugar-maples, to catch whose sap cans were hung. As yet the branches were bare, but some cloudy promise hung over and about them, and, as one looked, faint life seemed to stir, and one felt again that sense of an all-pervasive green. . .

I knew at once it was Brynner's; nobody but Brynner could have done the subtle thing, and I remembered he was to have gone up the week-end after we left. For this was the house of Paul Choquette, and one required little imagination to fancy that the figure, barely suggested in the doorway, was that of Marie-Louise herself. It induced in me a curious sensation, not wholly painful; I cared to see no other painting than this; I sat down on the leather-covered couch opposite and remained drinking it in . . . living

again those holidays at St. Lemaire in the hills-those winter days with long woodsy tramps while the surface remained unbroken save by our snow-shoes, and then the sudden break-up of spring, the real ecstasy of seeing the first brown earth where a wheel of old Paul's wagon rutted through; of hearing the gurgle of running water under the thinning ice of the stream, the cawing promise of a crow high up in the April sky; of watching the comradeship of my

friend Ashcroft and little MarieLouise, caught in the toils of spring themselves, their love-affair as delicate and subtle as that pervasive green of Brynner's picture. Mixed with it was a fear, on my part, of heartbreak for Marie-Louise, if this should pass and come to nothing, forgetting that a man, in a case like Lorry's, may be caught on the rebound, and held . . . at least as long as spring is in the air. Perhaps I was a fool not to think further, not to consider the greater heartbreak that might follow any more permanent attachment.

His poetry was mixed up in it too. You may have read "Spring Hillsides," by Lawrence Ashcroft. It was there he wrote the greater part of it-to me the finest thing he has done, for it smells of the soil, and touches the humanities, though he regards it more lightly. He used to read the stuff to Marie-Louise, whose English, for she was convent-bred for several formative years, is good.

Sitting there, I could picture the interior: the little "front parlor" especially opened for us; the window wide to admit the sweet spring air; Ashcroft sunk back in a deep horsehair-upholstered chair; Marie-Louise

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Of Winter's onslaughts, now rejoices in

The slow soft pulse of Spring that beats itself

Against the panes in cloudy tints of green-"

when she would cry, her voice breaking a little, and her eyes eager almost to tears: "Oh, m'sieu! Oh, m'sieu!"

I thought then: "She will do! She understands!"-forgetting, of course, how Ashcroft had always said: "When I want real criticism I have to go to Pat for it. She's not just gush and emotion; there's a lot of solid intellect and judgment to anchor it!"

But it was spring then at the home of Marie-Louise, at St. Lemaire in the hills. And he seemed well satisfied that she should cry in that eager, broken way of hers:

“Oh, m’sieu! Oh, m’sieu!”

22

Often during the winter that followed my autumn meeting with Lawrence Ashcroft and Patricia Holling at the art gallery, I thought of how they came upon me as I still sat there engrossed in Brynner's picture.

"There's a good thing!" cried Pat, with her quick little way of forming assured opinions.

"Yes," agreed Lorry gravely. gravely. "It's good!" His eyes, as if they could not help themselves, flashed to mine. How can I express the thing I saw in them? The most precious things of life are often the most elusive; to put finger on them is to let them slip. What was it? I do not know. Something as haunting as that cloudy spring of which he wrote; more elusive, for Brynner managed to catch that with his brush. It was gone like a shimmering bubble touched by the eager finger of a child, for I tried almost with anguish to seize it, as if indeed I might hand it to Marie-Louise—a shred of happiness perhaps—but as I_reached, it disappeared.

"Better come along with us to tea!" Lorry said, and like a fool I went. Marie-Louise, tremblingly happy over putting her wedding tea-service and china of undreamt-of daintiness to use, and childishly clumsy at her task, poured for us and served us. She was so glad, so glad to have Madame Holling. Also to have me, "comrade of happy, happy days,' she whispered in my ear, proud of the felicity of her English phrase! Patricia sat there, deep in a corner of the Chesterfield, where the lamp-glow could burnish her red-gold hair to advantage, accepting the girl's ministrations with sweet and dainty graciousness, her fingers like delicately painted ivory against the honest red still showing on those of Marie-Louise from her days of labor on the farm. Occasionally, at some trifling gaucherie of the girl's, she would smile quickly at Lorry, her

head a little on one side, as if to say, "But how quaint, my dear!" Ashcroft would fidget, and I found myself hating the crinkles about Pat's keenly observant eyes.

Afterward, while the two were busy over the reviews of a new book, I got Marie-Louise aside, asking how she liked married life.

Her eyes were like stars; tears welled up. "You will think me so silly," she said, "but that is how it is with me and him! He is so wonderful to me. One cannot speak of it." And then she shook the tears brightly from her. "Oh, I can see how greatly he must have cared when there were-others-such as she. Others who are not " She laughed gently. "But there, he will not have me say that I am, after all-just ordinary!"

No, I could understand that he would not. There are thoughts that will not bear expression in words.

"Besides," agreed Marie-Louise, her big eyes gravely upon me, "it would be very terrible-would it not?—to be—just ordinary-to one's beloved!"

22

Not once during that first winter of her married life did Marie-Louise express in words any uneasiness or mistrust of her man. And I doubt if any was in her simple heart. She had exalted him to a pinnacle; and what he did up there, being right in his eyes, was right in hers. In some ways this was the very worst attitude she could have taken. Especially did her mention of his work irritate him, I could see. She had a way, when guests were in for instance, of speaking with a certain awed breathlessness about it. Anything he

wrote was wonderful to her. And Ashcroft, more than at her incompetence of judgment, her lack of the finer discrimination in literary matters, was annoyed at such candor in circles accustomed to pose a little about the things they created.

When I say guests, I mean the occasional enlargements of his literary circle; ordinarily it was to Patricia Holling that he turned. You would think, sometimes, that it was her house, not Marie-Louise's, the cool way she had of making herself at home. Holling himself had turned out no good at all. We heard of him in Europe-ostensibly on a business trip, but word drifted back of some entanglement in Paris. In justice to Ashcroft, it was I who, long before he had any inkling, I believe, became aware of the subtle desperate game Pat was playing for happiness. She was intensely modern, of course, and superior to oldfashioned ideas of marriage. Old Lorry and she both had made a ghastly mess of the business, and the sensible thing was to recognize it and retrieve the future. I wasn't supposed to hear that. She chose an unfortunate time to be confidential with a woman friend; she caught my eye as I passed, saw I had heard, and flashed a quick defiance at me.

We met at tea the next Saturday, at Ashcroft's. He had just received advance copies from his publisher of a new edition of his "Collected Poems," and demanded the communion of a fellow-artist in celebration.

I can imagine the tiger gleam in Pat's eyes when I was announced that afternoon!

I left them, however, to their rapt consideration of the new volume.

Marie-Louise was coming from the kitchen, after some instructions to the maid—always an embarrassment to her who had been accustomed to all menial work-and I intercepted her in the hall. She drew me over to a corner where, through leaded panes, the sunshine of late afternoon was touching a plain black vase, from whose dark mouth a bundle of pussy-willows lifted themselves.

"This morning," she informed me, "the baker's boy brought them! He and I have such great talks! He also is from the country!" She was wearing a simple black dress; the sleeve fell back, displaying a white arm as she reached up to stroke the gray silky things. I thought, "She too is Spring in a black vase!" She said: "You will hardly believe it, but I cried over them. Yes, like a great big baby, I cried!" Her eyes were brimming now, but with ecstasy. "Such a secret to tell you!" she confided. "Oh, my dear friend, how could I do without springtime in the country? But my dearest promised me, all winter he has promised me we should go as soon as spring breaks, and the sap is running, and the stream is waking, and the silly fowls are cackling their heads off! It is to be our second honeymoon!" She broke off. "Oh dear! The tea has gone in, and I am not there! Come along!"

We entered the living-room, where a cheerful fire burned, and soft lights were agleam against the orange glow of the window. Patricia Holling, regal and composed, in a rather audacious gown of jade green, was calmly pouring tea from MarieLouise's wedding silver tea-pot into Marie-Louise's best wedding china!

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