Mrs. Austen waved at her. "Oh, I don't mean that he has deceived you. He
has done nothing of the kind. It is you who have deceived yourself. That
was to be expected. At your age I deceived myself quite as thoroughly. I
thought your father a conquering hero and he was merely a bore. But he
pointed a moral, though he adorned no tale. He married to settle down.
That is this young man's idea and I must give him credit for the fact
that while he has not deceived you, he did deceive me. I thought him a
tedious person; whereas, not a bit of it. He is exceedingly lively. If
he keeps it up, his wife will be blessed among women. But that is just
it. He won't keep it up. He swore he would not and I believe him. He has
turned over a new leaf. I can't cry over it, but it is really too bad."
Margaret, who had straightened, stiffened. "If I believed a word of what
you tell me, I would forgive him entirely."
Mrs. Austen, unprepared for that, leaned forward. "My dear, I had no
idea you were so sensible."
"I would forgive entirely," Margaret continued. "But I would never see
him again."
How good that tasted! Mrs. Austen swallowed it contentedly. "Of course
you will see him. You are not going blind, I suppose. But when you do
see him, it will be only decent of you to ignore the matter which is not
a fit subject for you to discuss."
Margaret, who had straightened and stiffened, now was rigid. "I
certainly shall ignore it. It is not worth talking about."
Mrs. Austen leaned back. "Ah, my dear, how right you are. He could not
tell you that he had loved wisely, it would not be very flattering. He
could not say he had loved too well, for that would be embarrassing.
What a pretty frock you have on. Did Marguerite make it? Of course he
could not. It would not be nice at all. But to me he made a soiled
breast of it. Don't you think the skirt a bit too long? Stand up a
minute."
Margaret coloured again. She coloured with a flush that put two red
spots on her. She did not believe it. She could not and would not. Yet
credence, like the wind, bloweth where it listeth.
Mrs. Austen, noting the spots, knew that the card had been well played
and leisurely selected another.
"Perhaps it is the way you are sitting. Yes, altogether it is quite
ducky. I really must go to Marguerite on Monday. Don't let me forget
about it or the dentist either. I shall have my hands full and my mouth
also. The proper caper, too, apparently. That little dollymop, whom we
saw this afternoon, had her hands full. Did you notice the roll of bills
that she was counting? Such an enjoyable occupation! But it won't last.
You need not worry on that score. He had been paying her off. He assured
me of that and so unnecessarily. Why, I saw the whole thing at a glance.
Anybody but you would have seen it too. But you are so theosophically
nearsighted. It was for that reason I took you away. Now, though, he is
going to begin on a clean slate. Those were his very words, and you, I
suppose, are the clean slate. He has such original expressions, hasn't
he? But there! I forgot. He did not mean me to tell you. In fact, he
begged me not to."
From Margaret's face the flush retreating left it white with that
whiteness which dismay creates. A bucket of mud had drenched her. It did
more, it dazed her. The idea that the bucket was imaginary, the mud
non-existent, that every word she had heard was a lie, did not occur to
this girl who, if a Psyche, was not psychic. In her heart was the mud;
in her mother's hand was the bucket. But the mire itself, he had put
there. The evidence of her own eyes she might have questioned. But he
had admitted it and the fact that he had induced in her the purely
animal feeling to get away, to be alone and to suffer unseen.
She left the room, went to her own, closed the door and at a prie-Dieu
fell on her knees, not to pray--she knew that the Lords of Karma are not
to be propitiated or coerced--but in humiliation.
In humiliation there may be self-pity and that is always degrading. With
uncertain hands she tried to transform that pity into sorrow, not for
herself, but for him. The burnt offering seared her. In the secret
chambers of her being her young soul tripped and fell. For support she
clutched at her creed. Ordinarily it would have sustained her.
Ordinarily it would have told her that her suffering was the penalty for
suffering which she had caused, a penalty that the gods of the doors
that close behind our birth were measuring to her. Ordinarily she would
have realised that in some anterior, enigmatic and forgotten life, she,
too, had debased herself and that this cross was the punishment for that
debasement. Ordinarily the creed would have sustained her. But as she
clutched at it, it receded. Only the cross remained and that was too
heavy.
In the drawing-room an indifferent nymph pointed a finger at hours, all
of which wound and of which the last one kills.
In that room Mrs. Austen was writing a note. Addressed to Montagu
Paliser, Jr., esqre., it asked him to dinner.
X
In the subway, the following evening, Cassy saw a man eyeing her. She
turned and saw another man who also was eyeing her. On the seat opposite
two women were discussing her clothes.
The clothes, her own manufacture, were not of the fashion, not behind
it, or ahead of it, but above it. A mode, or a mood of her own, they
consisted in a blue silk smock and a yellow cloth skirt. On the sleeves
and about the neck of the smock there was also yellow, touches of it,
with which the skirt married. Therewith she was hatless, rebellious and
handsome.
Accustomed to the inquisitiveness of appraising eyes, she ignored the
women as, already, she had ignored the men. With obliterating unconcern,
she reduced them to the fluidity of the inchoate. Other matters occupied
her, and, primarily, a trick, an extremely shabby one, from which she
had not yet recovered.
The day before, after paying the butcher, the baker, and the punctual
and pertinacious agent, she had scaled the walk-up where she found her
father with the violin, on which, an hour earlier, Lennox had loaned her
the money.
The spectacle flabbergasted her. Then, realising what Lennox had done,
his iniquity struck her as hateful. At once, in an effort to account,
however imaginatively, for the apparent sorcery of it all, she tried to
invent a fairy-tale. But the tale would not come. Nor was it needed. Her
father dispensed with any. Impatient of detail, as the artist usually
is, he required none. The extraordinary perspicacity of the police who
had nailed and returned the violin instanter, this wizardry that would
have thrown any one else into stupors of bewilderment, interested him
not at all. He had the violin. That sufficed. The rest did not matter.
It mattered though and monumentally to Cassy. To owe the butcher, the
baker, the candlestickmaker, and to have them look slantingly at you,
that was disgusting. But to be beholden for a gift, which you had
refused to accept, and which then, behind your back, was dumped in on
you, that was degrading. Consequently, while conjecturing new versions
of Perrault, versions which it relieved her to find were not wanted, she
gnashed her milk-white teeth at Lennox, felt that she hated him, yet
felt, too, and the feeling was maddening, that the hatred was very
tender.
All this was irritating enough and the Tamburini had contrived to add to
the irritation. It had been arranged that the fallen star was to come to
the walk-up and accompany Cassy to the Splendor. Instead of which, at
the last moment, the ex-diva had telephoned that she would join her at
the hotel, and Cassy foresaw a tedious sitting about in the lobby, for
Ma Tamby was always late. But when have misfortunes come singly? Cassy
foresaw, too, that the tedium would not be attenuated by Paliser's
conversation.
It was not for that, or for him, that she was then in the subway, but
for dinner. Young, healthy and consequently carnal, though not otherwise
carnal than hunger can make you, she liked food, on condition that she
had not prepared it, and--in particular, and why not?--she liked the
savorously truffled menus that walk-ups lack. She had another reason for
being in the subway, one that Ma Tamby had lodged, like a flea, in her
ear.
But now, near the heart of Manhattan, the train had stopped. Cassy got
out, looked at her white gloves, wondered if they smelled of benzine,
decided that they did, took them off and went on to the Splendor where
Paliser was waiting.
Other people appeared to be similarly occupied. In the high, wide hall
were groups of careful men and careless women, the latter very
scrumptious in their imported frocks. The sight of these Parisianisms
abashed Cassy no more than her appearance abashed Paliser. Etiquette,
Formality, the Proper Thing, the great inane gods of the ante-bellum
heavens, he had never acknowledged and now, though locally their altars
remained and their worship persisted, he knew they were forever dead,
blown into the dust-bin of the things that were, tossed there in
derision by that atheist, the War.
The careless women looked at Cassy and carefully looked away. The
careful men looked at her and carelessly looked again. In the severity
of the wide, high hall, the girl with her rebellious beauty and
harlequin gown, struck a note which it lacked, struck two of them, the
go-and-be-hanged-to-you and originality.
In evening clothes that said Savile Row, Paliser approached. "You are
punctual as a comet and equally luminous."
Cassy, ignoring the remark, ignoring, too, the hand that accompanied it,
cut him short. "Haven't seen Madame Tamburini, have you?"
Paliser's hair had the effect of a mirror. He smoothed the back of it.
The ex-diva he had certainly seen and not later than just before she
telephoned to Cassy. But it is injudicious, and also tiresome, to tell
everything. With the wave of a cheque, the complicity of the former
first-lady had been assured, and assured moreover without a qualm on her
part. Ma Tamby did not know what it is to have a qualm--which she could
not have spelled if she had known. She was differently and superiorly
educated. In the university that life is, she had acquired encyclopedias
of recondite learning. She knew that ice is not all that it is cracked
up to be: that a finger in the pie is better than two in the fire, and
that angels have been observed elsewhere than at Mons--learning which,
as you may see, is surprising.
Over the ham and eggs of an earlier evening, the syllables of Paliser's
name had awakened echoes of old Academy nights and Mapleson's "grand
revivals" of the Trovatore, echoes thin and quavering, yet still
repeating hymns in glory of the man's angelic papa. On the way from ham
and eggs to Harlem, she had, in consequence, conjured, for Cassy's
benefit, with performing fleas. But when, on this afternoon, M. P. Jr.,
had come and waved cheques at her, she had felt that her worst hopes
were realised, that her finger was really in the pie, and she had agreed
to everything, which, however, for the moment, was nothing at all,
merely to abandon Cassy that evening; merely also to collaborate later
in the evocation of a myth, and meanwhile to keep at it with the fleas.
Now, in the hall of the Splendor, as Paliser patted the back of his
head, he was enjoying Cassy's open-air appearance that needed only a
tennis-racket to be complete.
Cassy glanced about. She had a penny or two more than her carfare and
yet, if she had owned the shop, she could not have appeared more at ease
in this smartest of smart inns, a part of which, destiny, in its
capriciousness, was to offer her.
"No," he answered. "But I have a private room somewhere. She can find
her way there, unless you prefer palms and an orchestra."
"I do," said Cassy, to whom a room with this man said only boredom and
who liked to see what was going on.
Then when, presently, they were seated at a table, to which the
chastened captain of the ham-and-egg night had piloted the way, Cassy
beheld what she had never beheld before, and what few mortals ever do
behold, a cradled bottle of Clos de Vougeot. But to her, the royal cru
was very much like the private room. It said nothing. A neighbouring
table was more eloquent.
Among the people seated there was an imperial woman with an imperial
manner, whom Cassy instantly recognised. She was prima donna, prima
donna assoluta, and though Cassy did not know it--nor would it have
interested her if she had known--dissoluta also.
To be in her shoes!
In that seven-leagued dream, she forgot Paliser, the delinquent
Tamburini, the trick that Lennox had played. In a golden gloom, on a
wide stage, to a house packed to the roof, Cassy was bowing. Her final
roulade had just floated on and beyond, lost now in cyclonic bravas.
"It was the Duc d'Aumale," Paliser was saying.
"Eh?" Abruptly Cassy awoke.
"Or, if not, some other chap who, recognising it, ordered his regiment
to halt and present arms."
"To whom?"
"To the vineyard where the grape in that bottle was grown."
Cassy shook out a napkin. "You talk just like my janitress. I never
understand a word she says."
But now a waiter was bringing delicacies other than those obtainable in
Harlem; in particular, a dish that had the merit of pleasing Cassy.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Muskrat."
"What!"
"Muskrat with terrapin for a pseudonym. The pseudonym shows imagination.
Let us be thankful for that. Gastronomy is bankrupt. Formerly it was
worshipped. Formerly gastronomy was a goddess. To-day the sole tributes
consist in bills-of-fare that are just like the Sahara minus the oases.
It is the oases we want and it is muskrat we get. That is all wrong. The
degree of culture that any nation may claim is shown in its cookery and
if there is anything viler than what we get here it must be served in
Berlin. It must have been Solon who said: 'Tell me what you eat and I
will tell you who you are.' He added, or should have, that animals feed,
man dines and, when permitted, dines devoutly. There are dishes, as
there are wines, to which one should rise and bow. But hereabouts it is
only by special dispensation that one gets them. In a hotel such as this
there is an outward show of reverence, but it is sheer hypocrisy; of
real piety there is none, a sham attempt to observe the sacred rites
without knowing how. I admit I don't know either. From me the divine
afflatus has been withheld. But elsewhere I have been conscious of the
presence. Once or twice I was blessed. Here, though, in default of
shrines there should be chairs. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, should
establish a few. When I was in college I was taught everything that it
is easiest to forget. If the youth of the land were instructed in
gastronomy we would all be wiser and better. Chairs on gastronomy, that
is what we need!"