The second time that I saw Laura di san Marzano was nearly four years
afterwards, in the hall of the Majestic Hotel, at Lucerne.
I had thought of her, at intervals, and had no difficulty in
recognising her, in spite of the difference between eight years old and
twelve.
She was tall and very slim, and the set of her dark head on her
straight shoulders was just the same. Her black hair now fell in a long
plait to her waist, but she still wore the straight, short fringe that
suited her du Maurier profile.
It was late afternoon--tea-time, and the hall was full of people, and
noisy.
Laura sat motionless, but somehow, one felt, very attentive, beside a
beautifully-gowned and jewelled and painted woman, who was talking to
half a dozen men.
Mama?
She looked very young to have a child of Laura’s age.
Then I saw that Laura’s green silk frock was absurdly short, and made
in a babyish style, that matched the huge bow of green satin ribbon
unnecessarily fastened over one ear.
My pupil, a nearly grown-up one, was late, and as I waited for her, I
watched Laura.
Presently our eyes met. At once recognition leapt into hers, and she
smiled at me, and bowed.
I returned the salutation--with infinitely less grace, as I knew in my
middle-class British self-consciousness--and wondered whether she would
come and speak to me.
Later on she did so, when the group round mama was at its noisiest.
“How do you do, Miss Arbell?” There was not the faintest hesitation
over my name. “I used to see you often in the Borghese Gardens, in
Rome, and once we talked together. I hope you remember?”
“I remember very well,” said I, “but I am surprised at your doing so.
You were so very young then, and you must have met so many people
since.”
“I never forget people,” said Laura simply.
“You left Rome suddenly, didn’t you?” I continued. “I was there for
nearly a month after our meeting, but I never saw you in the gardens
again.”
Laura shook her head slightly.
“I can’t remember,” she admitted. “Very likely we left suddenly. One
does that so often. The management of the hotel becomes intolerable, or
tiresome acquaintances appear--and then the simplest thing is to pack
up and go elsewhere.”
She spoke so evidently from experience that one could but accept her
strange, rootless, attitude as part of her natural equipment.
We talked for a little while, and she told me, or I deduced, that since
the Roman days she had been a great deal in Paris--(“I adore the Opera
there, but the theatres not much”)--and then in New York, with mama.
She was to spend the next few years with mama.
Where?
Laura’s shoulders indicated the faintest of shrugs. Anywhere. Mama
liked New York as well as most places, but personally Laura thought
that the rooms in the hotels there were always too hot. They went to
London a good deal. Delightful--she smiled at me politely--but one
missed the sunshine. Her point of view, inevitably, was one of great
sophistication. It did not, to my mind, detract from her charm, which
had never been of a direct, childlike kind, but rather of a description
so subtle that amongst the many it might easily pass for mere oddity.
“I hope we shall meet again,” she said to me, when a certain nervous
movement in the group of mama’s admirers had culminated in the
detachment of a tall, fair youth, who was coming now towards Laura
herself.
“I am afraid that I leave here to-morrow. My pupil and I are on our way
to rejoin her parents in Italy.”
“We may be gone ourselves to-morrow. I meant for later on--any time,
anywhere.” She smiled charmingly, but her unchildlike eyes remained
serious and rather weary.
I heard the fair youth say something to her, with a burst of
meaningless laughter. She did not laugh in return, but her clear,
well-bred little voice was raised to a sympathetic tone of interest.
“Mama likes an olive in hers, always, but for me I prefer a sweet
Martini--with _two_ cherries, if you please.”
* * * * *
I saw Laura twice again before leaving Lucerne, but we did not speak to
one another.
The first time, at seven o’clock the evening of that same day, was in
one of the gigantic hotel corridors, on the first floor, where I was
waiting for the lift that was to take me to the fifth.
The hotel hairdresser, in a white coat, with an immense head of curled
and discoloured yellow hair, stood before a shut bedroom door. It flew
open suddenly, and then closed sharply behind Laura di san Marzano.
“Vous voila donc! Eh bien, il est trop tard.”
Her voice was ice, her face scornful and unbelieving as she listened to
the man’s torrent of excuses for his tardiness.
“Assez,” said Laura. “Madame est fort mécontente. Elle ne veut plus de
vous.”
“Mademoiselle----”
“C’est inutile. Madame se passera de vous.”
And as the hairdresser turned away, grumbling and disconcerted, she
added superbly:
“J’arrangerai la chose. Soyez exacte demain. Mais pour ce soir, c’est
moi qui coifferai madame.”
Much later in the evening, when I had long ago despatched my pupil to
the bedroom opening out of mine, I returned for a moment to the hot and
strident lounge in order to make certain enquiries at the office.
Mama was in a white wicker armchair, with crimson and orange cushions
overflowing upon either side of it, and showing up the elaborate waves
of her hair, as black as Laura’s own. The paint that I had seen on her
face earlier in the day was now concentrated into one scarlet curve
upon her mouth, her white lace dress was held up by narrow black velvet
straps cutting across the opulent creaminess of her shoulders, and the
electric light above her head had fastened upon the diamond butterfly
bows of her satin shoes, so that they winked and flashed right across
the hall.
One hardly saw--certainly did not distinguish--the figures that
composed her numerous entourage, but the prevailing black and
whiteness, the glitter of continually raised small glasses, gave a
general impression of unrelieved masculinity.
Laura sat beside her mother, on an upright chair. She was dressed in
rose colour, a frock even shorter than the green one that I had seen
before. Her straight hair had been somehow persuaded into a semblance
of long curls; the green silk bow over her left ear had been replaced
by a pink one with fringed ends.
She did not see me. Her eyes, indeed, were glazed with fatigue, and
every now and then her head fell forwards and was jerked upwards again.
The hall was unendurably hot with a breathless, artificial heat, and
the orchestra was playing an American rag-time that every now and then
succeeded in out-sounding the medley of raised voices and high-pitched
laughter and clinking glasses.
It was long after eleven o’clock.
As I looked at Laura, I saw that her slim, silk-clad legs were swinging
gently to and fro between the bars of the high-backed chair. Her feet,
in bronze-coloured dancing slippers, could not quite reach the floor.
For the first time, I saw her as the child she really was--the
efficient, helpless, cosmopolitan, traditionless, hotel child.