I
The murder of Monty Paliser, headlined that morning in the papers, shook
the metropolis at breakfast, buttered the toast, improved the taste of
the coffee.
Murdered! It seemed too bad to be false. Moreover, there was his
picture, the portrait of a young man obviously high-bred and insolently
good-looking. In addition to war news and the financial page, what more
could you decently ask for a penny? Nothing, perhaps, except the address
of the murderer. But that detail, which the morning papers omitted,
extras shortly supplied. Meanwhile in the minds of imaginative New
Yorkers, visions of the infernal feminine surged. The murdered man's
name was evocative.
His father, Montagu Paliser, generally known as M. P., had lived in that
extensive manner in which New York formerly took an indignant delight.
Behind him, extending back to the remotest past when Bowling Green was
the centre of fashion, always there had been a Paliser, precisely as
there has always been a Livingston. These people and a dozen others
formed the landed gentry--a gentry otherwise landed since. But not the
Paliser clan. The original Paliser was very wealthy. All told he had a
thousand dollars. Montagu Paliser, the murdered man's father, had stated
casually, as though offering unimportant information, that, by Gad, sir,
you can't live like a gentleman on less than a thousand dollars a day.
That was years and years ago. Afterward he doubled his estimate.
Subsequently, he quadrupled it. It made no hole in him either. In spite
of his yacht, his racing stable, his town house, his country residences
and formerly in the great days, or rather in the great nights, his
ladies of the ballet, in spite of these incidentals his wealth
increased. No end to it, is about the way in which he was currently
quoted.
All New Yorkers knew him, at any rate by repute, precisely as the least
among us knows Mr. Carnegie, though perhaps more intimately. The tales
of his orgies, of his ladies, of that divorce case and of the yacht
scandal which burst like a starball, tales Victorian and now legendary,
have, in their mere recital, made many an old reprobate's mouth
champagne. But latterly, during the present generation that is, the
ineffable Paliser--M. P. for short--who, with claret liveries and a yard
of brass behind him had tooled his four-in-hand, or else, in his superb
white yacht, gave you something to talk about, well, from living very
extensively he had renounced the romps and banalities of this life.
Old reprobates could chuckle all they liked over the uproar he had
raised in the small and early family party that social New York used to
be. But in club windows there were no new tales of him to tell. Like a
potentate outwearied with the circumstance of State, he had chucked it,
definitely for himself, and recently in favour of his son, Monty, who,
in the month of March, 1917, arrived from Havana at the family
residence, which in successive migrations had moved, as the heart of
Manhattan has moved, from the neighbourhood of the Battery to that of
the Plaza.
In these migrations the Palisers had not derogated from their high
estate. Originally, one of the first families here, the centuries, few
but plural, had increased what is happily known as their prestige. Monty
Paliser was conscious of that, but not unwholesomely. The enamellings
that his father had added gave him no concern whatever. On the contrary.
He knew that trade would sack the Plaza, as long since it had razed the
former citadels of fashion, and he foresaw the day when the family
residence, ousted from upper Fifth Avenue, would be perched on a peak of
Washington Heights, where the Palisers would still be among the first
people in New York--to those coming in town that way.
That result it was for him to insure. Apart from second cousins, to whom
he had never said a word and never proposed to address, apart from them,
apart too from his father and himself, there was only his sister, Sally
Balaguine, who, one night, had gone to bed in Petersburg and, on the
morrow, had awakened in Petrograd. Though, in addition to this much
surprised lady, before whose eyes Petrograd subsequently dissolved into
Retrograd and afterward into delirium, there was her son, a boy of
three. Mme. Balaguine's prince did not count, or rather had ceased to.
As lieutenant of the guards he had gone to the front where a portion of
him had been buried, the rest having been minutely dispersed.
To perpetuate the clan in its elder branch, there was therefore but this
young man, a circumstance which, on his return from Havana, his father
advanced.
They were then at luncheon. For the father there was biscuit and milk.
For the son there was an egg cooked in a potato. Yet, in the kitchen,
or, if not there, somewhere about, were three chefs. Moreover on the
walls were Beauvais. The ceiling was the spoil of a Venetian palace. The
luncheon however simple was not therefore disagreeable.
With an uplift of the chin, the elder man flicked a crumb and sat back.
The action was a signal. Three servants filed out.
Formerly his manner had been cited and imitated. To many a woman it had
been myrrh and cassia. It had been deadly nightshade as well. After a
fashion of long ago, he wore a cavalry moustache which, once black, now
was white. He was tall, bald, very thin. But that air of his, the air of
one accustomed to immediate obedience, yet which could be very urbane
and equally insolent, that air endured.
In sitting back he looked at his son for whom he had no affection. For
no human being had he ever had any affection, except for himself, and
latterly even that unique love had waned.
The chefs, originally retained on shifts of eight hours each, in order
that this man might breakfast or sup whenever he so desired, that he
might breakfast, as a gentleman may, at four in the afternoon, or sup at
seven in the morning, these chefs were useless. His wife, who had died,
not as one might suppose of a broken heart but of fatty degeneration,
had succumbed to their delicately toxic surprises with groans but also
with thanksgiving.
That is ancient history. At present her widower supped on powdered
charcoal and breakfasted on bismuth. The cooks he still retained, not to
prepare these triumphs, but for the benefit of his heir, for whom he had
no affection but whom he respected as the next incumbent and treated
accordingly, that is to say, as one gentleman treats another.
On this high noon, when the servants had gone, the father sat back and
looked at his son, who, it then occurred to him, astonishingly resembled
his mother. He had the same eyes, too big, too blue; the same lashes,
too long, too dark; the same ears, too small and a trifle too far
forward. In addition he had the same full upper-lip, the same cleft in
the chin, the same features refined almost to the point of degeneracy.
But the ensemble was charming--too charming, as was his voice, which he
had acquired at Oxford where, at the House, he had studied, though what,
except voice culture, one may surmise and never know. Men generally
disliked him and accounted the way he spoke, or the way he looked, the
reason. But what repelled them was probably his aura of which, though
unaware, they were not perhaps unconscious.
His father motioned: "Thank God, you are here. At any moment now we may
be in it and you will have to go. You are not a divinity student and you
cannot be a slacker."
The old man paused and added: "Meanwhile you will have to marry. If
anything should happen to you, there would be but Sally and the
Balaguine brat and I shouldn't like that. God knows why I care, but I
do. There has always been a Paliser here and it is your turn now--which
reminds me. I have made over some property to you. You would have had it
any way, but the transfer will put you on your feet, besides saving the
inheritance tax."
"Thank you. What is it?"
"The Place, the Wall Street and lower Broadway property, that damned
hotel and the opera-box. Jeroloman wrote you about it. Didn't you get
his letter?"
"I may have. I don't know that I read it."
"When you have a moment look in on him. He will tell you where you are."
"And where is that?"
The old man summarised it. Even with the increased cost of matrimony, it
was enough for a Mormon, for a tribe of them. But the young man omitted
to say so. He said nothing.
His father nodded at him. "You think marriage a nuisance. So it is. So
is everything. By Gad, sir, I wish I were well out of it. I go
nowhere--not even to church. I have grown thin through the sheer
nuisance of things. But if nothing happens over there and you don't make
a mess of it, the next twenty years of your life ought not to be
profoundly disagreeable. Now I dislike to be a nuisance myself, but in
view of the war, it is necessary that there should be another Paliser,
if not here, at least en route."
"I will think it over," said this charming young man, who had no
intention of doing anything of the kind.
"The quicker the better then, and while you are at it select a girl with
good health and no brains. They wear best. I did think of Margaret
Austen for you, but she has become engaged. Lennox his name is. Her
mother told me. Told me too she hated it. Said you must come to dinner
and she'd have a girl or two for you to look at. Oblige me by going.
Plenty of others though. Girls here are getting healthier and stupider
and uglier every year. By Gad, sir, I remember----"
The old man rambled on. He was back in the days when social New York
foamed with beauty, when it held more loveliness to the square inch than
any other spot on earth. He was back in the days when Fifth Avenue was
an avenue and not a ghetto.
With an air of interest the young man listened. The air was not feigned.
Yet what interested him was not the outworn tale but the pathological
fact that the reminiscences of the aged are symptomatic of hardening of
the arteries.
Mentally he weighed his father, gave him a year, eighteen months, and
that, not because he was anxious for his shoes, but out of sheer
dilettantism.
The idea that his father would survive him, that it was he who was
doomed, that already behind the curtains of life destiny was staging his
death--and what a death!--he could no more foresee than he foresaw the
Paliser Case, which, to the parties subsequently involved, was then
unimaginable, yet which, at that very hour, a court of last resort was
deciding.
He looked over at his father. "Palmerston asked everybody, particularly
when he didn't know them from Adam, 'How's the old complaint?' How is
yours?"
With that air that had won so many hearts, and broken them too, the old
man smiled.
"When I don't eat anything and sit perfectly still, it is extraordinary
how well I feel."
How he felt otherwise, he omitted to state. A gentleman never talks of
disagreeable matters.