She did not altogether approve of the hatted, conventionally dressed
women she passed half an hour later in the sunny streets of the little
city on her way to the home of Anna Etchergary. Anna was concierge of
one of the apartment houses on the Rue Thiers, opposite the Old Castle,
and to reach it, Jeanne had to pass through the new quarter of Bayonne,
the big open square where the fine shops are and the Frenchified madames
walking about. Bayonne was a poor enough apology for a Basque city,
thought Jeanne, but its somewhat backsliding and partly Gascon and
Spanish inhabitants were at least not such grimacing monkeys as those
Parisians.
She strode along with the swift, sure, poised gait of sandal-wearing
people, her mind full of the grievances she wanted to pour out to Anna;
the disrespect of her son's wife, and the scandalous extravagances of
her expenditures. "Consider, Anna," she rehearsed her story beforehand.
"She uses the eggs herself, instead of sending them to market. She
serves _omelettes_, as though Michel's house were a hotel! And she will
not spin! She uses Michel's money to _buy yarn_! To think that money
from the Amigorena farm should go to buy yarn, with a distaff hanging on
the wall and ten idle, good-for-nothing fingers at the end of her arms."
On the terrible subject of lack of children in that house Jeanne could
not trust herself to speak. It was too sore a spot that with all
Jeanne's five grown sons, she had not a grandchild to hold in her arms.
The two, Americans now, who were in the Argentine making their fortunes,
were married and had families, but what were grandchildren on the other
side of the globe to Jeanne? The two younger ones, who were sailors,
were not married, and Michel, who had promised to be the mainstay of her
life and had stayed at home to run the farm, here he had been caught by
that impudent little French girl, one of the chambermaids in a Biarritz
hotel, a girl who did not know how to spin, who laughed at the decent
Basque ways, and who had no shame for her sterility, refusing to go to
Lourdes to pray for children.
Jeanne had never had any romantic feeling for her shiftless,
hard-drinking husband, whose irregular earnings as a fisher she had been
forced to piece out with much domestic service in the houses of others;
and now he was dead, she never thought of him. She had never been to a
theater in her life, nor read a novel, for she could not read at all.
None of her native capacity for emotion had been used in her youth, nor
frittered away later in the second-hand make-believes of modern life. It
had all been poured out upon children; on her five sons, and on the one
little dark-eyed, black-haired daughter, the little Marie--who had died
at eleven, so many years ago, just after her first communion--the
blessed saint Marise had looked, slim and straight in her white dress!
The Blessed Virgin had found her namesake too sweet to wait for, and had
taken her at once.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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