I remember the first éclat I witnessed between the ladies. For some weeks there had been whisperings among the girls that they were falling out; raised voices, angry words had been heard by people who passed by their door. But the first public scene took place at table. It was typical of all the others and started from a trifle.
Hortense, the maid-servant, dropped a plate behind Mlle Cara's chair, and Mlle Cara gave a start and a scream as if she had been shot.
"The girl did it on purpose. I know she did," she exclaimed.
"Oh, Cara, I'm so sorry she startled you," said Mlle Julie.
"No, you're not," shrieked Mlle Cara. "You're laughing at me. And you encourage her clumsiness. It was you and Mlle Baietto who engaged her. You knew she was totally unsuitable. But of course, you never listen to me."
Mlle Julie tried to turn the attack.
"Well, in the meantime, we'll get her to wait at the other table."
Another time Mlle Cara complained of the food. She pushed away her plate impatiently.
"No one ever pays the faintest attention to my régime," she cried. "And yet I should have thought Mlle Baietto knew by this time that I can't eat beef. I believe you're all trying to poison me."
"But, Cara," said Mlle Julie, "here's your chicken just been put on the table."
"It's too late. I can't eat anything now." She got up to leave the table. Mlle Julie rose too and made a movement to accompany her, but Frau Riesener was beforehand with her. She hurried up to give Mlle Cara a supporting arm, and as they walked slowly from the room, Mlle Julie dropped back into her chair.
My lesson with Signorina that afternoon was an agitated one.
"Oh," she cried. "Heaven knows I do my very best to give her food she'll like. But it's no use. She's determined to find fault with everything."
"Why does she hate you?"
"Oh, it's not me she hates, or only in the second place. What she wants is to torture her. It's bad enough now at table, but upstairs she's getting more and more uncontrolled. She sobs and cries. She says she's dying, that we're all killing her. I listened at the door the other day. It was dreadful. 'You don't love me,' she kept repeating; 'nobody loves me.' And then I heard Mlle Julie answer so tenderly, so sweetly, 'Yes, Cara, indeed I do. I long for you to be well and happy.' And Mlle Cara went on again. I made it out through her sobs: 'No, no. You take everyone's affection away from me. First one and then the other. They begin by liking me and then they change. You steal them from me.' And then, Olivia, I heard your name. 'I thought Olivia would like me, but it's you she likes, always you.'"
"It's not my fault," I cried. "How can I help it?"
It was during my Italian lessons (and it may be believed that I learnt to understand and speak that language with uncommon facility) that I managed to piece together odds and ends of facts over which my imagination first brooded and then built its fantasies. But how far they were really facts, or Signorina's coloured version of them, I never knew. And from first to last of this obscure history, I was nearly always at the outside edge of it, trying to grope my way into its heart, trying with my inexperience of all the fundamental elements of human nature, and my ignorance of most of the actual circumstances, to understand what was going on, to figure to myself the feelings and motives of the actors in it. Of course I never succeeded. And even now . . . no, even now I am still in the same uncertainty. Clouds of suspicion and surmise gather and form round first one and then the other of the characters in the drama, but clouds so unsubstantial and so vague that they dissolve at a breath and shape themselves in other forms and other colours, that they often seem to me to be the unwholesome exhalations of my own disordered heart and mind.
