Cassy looked up from it. "Country! He says country. What country? What
does this mean?"
"The Place, mem. Paliser Place. It's not far now."
Cassy had not bargained for that. Stories of girls decoyed, drugged,
spirited away, never heard of again, sprang at her. Quite as quickly she
dismissed them. But, being human, she had to find fault.
"You should have told me before. That will do. Drive on."
She sank back. The car leaped and she smiled. Paliser in the role of
white-slaver! Her momentary alarm was now a mile behind her. But would
they be alone? Though, after all, what did it matter? Yet in Harlem
there was a broken old man who would not like it. And the basilica
investments! If she had known she would have worn the black rag. But
they would do for that tiresome Mrs. Beamish. As yet she had not decided
what she would sing. The _Caro nome_ occurred to her. Under her breath
she began it and abruptly desisted. The _Dear Name_ suggested another.
For it she substituted the _Ombra leggiera_. In its scatter of trills
that mount, as birds mount, there were no evocations, though she did
begin wondering again about Mrs. Beamish's music-room. If it were not
too impossible she might give the _Ernani involame_. But at that and
very unintentionally she thought of Lennox again.
She made a face and looked through the window. As usual she was hungry.
The car now was bellowing through opening gates which, as she looked
back, a man in brown was closing. On either side was a high stone wall,
but beyond, as she looked again, was an avenue bordered with trees and
farther on a white house with projecting wings in which was a court, an
entrance and, above and about the latter, a pillared perron.
From the entrance she could see a man in livery hastening. Behind him, a
man in black appeared. The car stopped. The first man opened the door.
Cassy got out. The other man additionally assisted by looking on and
moving aside. Cassy went into a hall where a young person who did not
resemble the Belle Chocolatiere but whose costume suggested her,
diligently approached.
"Would madame care to go upstairs?"
No, madame would not. But Cassy, instinctively insolent to
pretentiousness, was very simple with the simple. "Thank you. Will you
mind taking my wrap? Thank you again."
She looked about the hall. Before she could inventory it, here was
another man. "A nice trick you played on me," Cassy threw at him. "I was
half-way before I discovered it. The orchids reconciled me. Thank you
for them. Who is here?"
Smiling, deferential, apparently modest, perfectly sent out in perfectly
cut evening clothes, Paliser took her hand. "You are and, incidentally,
I am."
Cassy withdrew her hand. "I suppose you think you are a host in
yourself."
"Merely the most fortunate of mortals," replied Paliser, who could be
eighteenth-century when he liked, but who seldom bothered to keep it up.
Already he had been doing a little inventorying on his own account. The
basilica frock did not say much and what it did say was not to his
taste. The Sunday night fantasy he much preferred. It was rowdy, but it
was artistic. But beauty may be dishonoured, it cannot be vulgarised.
Even in pseudo-Parisianisms Cassy was a gem. A doubt though, one that
had already visited him, returned. Was the game worth the possible
scandal?
But now Cassy was getting back at him. "To stand about with the most
fortunate of mortals ought to be a shape of bliss. As it happens, I
would rather sit."
"Naturally. Only, worse luck, there is no throne."
Cassy gave it to him again: "There is a court fool, though. Where are
your cap and bells?"
"Not on you at any rate."
He motioned and Cassy passed on into a room beyond which other rooms
extended, each different, but all in the same key, a monotone attenuated
by lustres and the atmosphere, infinitely relaxing, which wealth
exhales.
Cassy's thin nostrils quivered. Since childhood, it was her first breath
of anything similar. It appeased and disarmed this anarchist who was
also an autocrat.
"Will you sit here?"
Paliser was drawing a chair. The table before it lacked the adjacent
severity. On it were dishes of Sevres and of gold. Adjacently were three
men. Their faces were white and sensual. They moved as forms move in a
dream.
The stories of girls decoyed, spirited away, never heard of again,
returned to Cassy. She had put the orchids beside her. Her flexible
mouth framed a smile.
"You know, for a moment, I had the rare emotion of feeling and fearing
that I was being eloped with."
A pop interrupted. She turned to a man at her elbow. "Only half a glass,
please, and fill it with water." She returned to Paliser, who was
opposite. "I had been thinking of something. I had not noticed where the
car was going; and all of a sudden, I found myself I did not know where.
Then, houp! It got me."
Paliser helped himself to a clam. "The charm of elopements passed with
the post-chaise. Then they had the dignity of danger and pistol shots
through the windows. Nowadays you go off in a Pullman and return as
prosaic as you started."
"Sometimes even more so," Cassy put in.
Paliser helped himself to another clam. "You speak feelingly and that is
only right. This is a very important matter. It is a shame that romance
should have passed with the post-chaise. Why should it not revisit us in
the motor?"
Cassy sipped and considered it. "There ought to be a law on the
subject."
"There is one. You may be summoned for speeding and get your name in the
papers."
"Then the dignity of danger remains."
"But not in clams. Aren't you going to eat any?"
Cassy laughed. "I had some yesterday with Ma Tamby. They did not seem to
agree with her. She became very noisy about a Mrs. Beamish. Who is she?"
"Mrs. Beamish?" Paliser repeated. He also had forgotten. But, with a
click, memory raised a latch. From behind it the lady emerged. "Oh,
she's a cousin of mine."
"Rather distant, I should fancy," said Cassy, who was conscious of the
delay, though not of the click. The delay she had noticed without,
however, divining the cause. But how could she possibly imagine that
Mrs. Beamish had been evolved for the sole purpose of providing her with
basilica opportunities? Yet the fault, if fault there were, resided in
her education. She had never read Eliphas Levi. She did not know that
genii can be evoked.
"Well, she is more my sister's cousin than mine," Paliser anxious to get
out of it, threw in. "I mean my sister has a more cousinly nature."
"I did not know you had a sister," said Cassy, who not only did not know
but did not care. "Though, come to think of it, a sister with a cousinly
nature must be so gratifying. Another distant relative, isn't she?"
"Very. She is in Petrograd."
That too was evocative. Cassy began talking about the biggest cropper
that history has beheld--a tsar tossed from the saddle to Siberia!
Paliser, glad to be rid of Mrs. Beamish, took it up. The sordid story of
the Russian chief of staff, bought by Hindenburg and shot by the
Grand-Duke Nicholas, whom the tsar then exiled, was told once more.
"What else could you expect of that Hun?" Paliser concluded.
"A Hun!" Cassy exclaimed. "Why he is a Romanov."
"No more than you are," Paliser replied. "The last of the Romanovs
married Catherine the Greater. There the breed ended. Paul, who followed
and who married a German drab, was Catherine's son but not her
husband's. The rest of the litter, down to the father of the recent
incumbent, all married German drabs. The father of the ex-tsar married a
Dane. The fellow is therefore one-eighth Dane and seven-eighths Hun.
Totally apart from which, a grocer who knew his business would not have
had him for clerk. His family knew that and, before he had time to be
tsar, tried to poison him. To the misfortune, not of Russia merely, but
of Christendom, they failed. If they had succeeded the eastern front
would be secure. As for his wife, I saw her once. It was in the Winter
Palace which, before it was sacked, was a palace. Since the palace of
the Caliphs of Cordova crumbled, there has never been a palace like it.
It outshone them all. Well, that woman tarnished it."
Meanwhile dishes were brought and removed by servants, wooden-faced, yet
with ears alert. The subject of elopements had seemed promising, but it
led to nothing. At their own table, talk was gayer.
Cassy enjoyed the food, the diluted wine, Paliser's facile touch. He
appeared to know a lot and she surprised herself by so telling him. "I
wish I did," she added. "I am ignorant as a carp."
"You know how to charm," he replied. But, seeing her stiffen, he
resumed, "With your voice. That is enough. It would be a mistake for you
to be versatile. Versatility is for the amateur. The artist is a flower,
never a bouquet."
It was decently said. In the decency of it, the agreeable insult which a
compliment usually is was so chastened that Cassy flushed and felt that
she had. It annoyed her, and she attributed it to the wine.
It was not the wine. Other influences were at work on this girl, born to
a forsaken purple and whose soul was homesick for it. But purple is
perhaps picturesque. It was not that for which her soul sighed, but the
dream that hides behind it, the dream of going about and giving money
away. To her the dream had been the dream of a dream, realisable only on
the top rungs of the operatic ladder, which, later, she felt she was not
destined to scale. None the less there are dreams that do come true,
though usually, beforehand, there is a desert to cross.
"I wonder if I might have a cavatina?" Paliser asked, rising and moving
to her.
Cassy shrugged. I have to pay for my dinner, she thought, but she too
got up.
Preceding her, he led the way to a room of which the floor, inlaid and
waxed, was rugless. The windows were not curtained, they were shuttered.
In the centre was a grand and a bench. Afar, at the other end, masking a
door, was a portiere, the colour of hyacinth. Near it, were two
unupholstered chairs; one, white; the other, black. Save for these, save
too for a succession of mirrors and of lights, the room was bare. In
addition, it was spacious, a long oblong, ceiled high with light
frescoes, the proper aviary for a song-bird.
Cassy curtsied to it. At table she had not wanted to sing. The mere
sight of this room inspired.
Paliser opened the piano and, seating himself, ran his long thin fingers
over the keys. He was heating them, preluding a score, passing from it
to another. Presently he looked up; she nodded and the _Ah, non giunge_
floated from her.
"Brava!" Paliser muttered as the final trill drifted away. Again he
looked up. "You will be a very great artist."
He did not mean it. He judged her voice colourful but lacking in
carriage.
Cassy, leaning forward, struck the keys, giving him the note and again
she sang, this time the _Libiamo_, which, old as the hills, claptrap,
utterly detestable, none the less served to display the bravura quality
of her voice.
When it passed, Paliser sprang up, faced her. "Open your mouth! There!
Wide!"
Cassy, familiar with the ritual, obeyed. Paliser peered into the
strawberry of her throat. It was deep as a well and he moved back.
"You have the organ but you do not know how to use it. You don't know
how to breathe."
Cassy forgot that he was young, that she was, that in the great room in
the great house they were alone. Through the shutters came the smell of
lilacs, the sorceries of spring. In the sexlessness of art these things
were unnoticed. For the first time she liked him. It was his frankness
that drew her, though if he had been a frank old woman she would have
liked him as well.
"My father says that. He says it is Ma Tamby's fault. He can't bear
her."
For a while they discussed it. Paliser maintaining that were it not for
the war she ought to go to Paris and Cassy asserting, though without
conviction, that the specialty of the Conservatoire consisted in dried
fruit.
Finally she said: "It must be late. I have a wrap somewhere and oh! my
orchids."
The young person was summoned. The wrap was recovered, the orchids
reappeared.
Paliser, helping Cassy with the wrap, said: "Shall I see it here again?"
He knew he would but he thought it civil to ask.
Cassy too had her thoughts. The freedom with which, during the
ham-and-eggs episode, his eyes had investigated her, where was it? On
Sunday he had bored her to tears. That also had gone. During the past
hour or two he had shown himself reasonably intelligent, unpresuming,
without offensiveness of any kind. With a movement of the hand she
lifted the wrap at her neck. "Here?"
It occurred to her that she did not know where the polished and inlaid
floor on which she stood was located. Nor did she particularly care.
Besides if her geography were vague, the floor was pleasant, a bit
slippery perhaps, though just how slippery she was yet to learn.
"Yes. The day after to-morrow. Why not? I would like to run over a score
or two with you."
"Good heavens! You are not composing an opera, are you?"
Paliser laughed. "I want to lead you away from painted mush into the
arms of----"
"Not Strauss?" Cassy interrupted. "Art does not recognise frontiers but
the Huns do not either and I will not recognise a Hun. Is the car at the
door?"
He saw her out and away, and reentering the house went to a room in the
wing. It was lined with bookcases that you did not have to break your
back to examine. They began four feet from the floor and ended two feet
higher. The room contained other objects of interest.
From among the latter, Paliser helped himself to a brandy and soda. It
had been dry work. The drink refreshed him. It stimulated too. Also it
suggested. He put the glass down and lightly swore at it.
"Damn Benny! He has only one thumb."
For a moment he eyed the glass. Then taking from a shelf Gautier's very
spiritual account of the de Maupin, he eyed that. Not for long though.
He put it back. He did not want to read. He did not want to drink. There
were several things that he did not want. In particular he did not want
to be alone.
He rang, ordered out a car and went sailing in town, to a brown-stone
front where you could lose as much money as you liked and not in
solitude either. On the way, the thought of the damned and thumbless
Benny accompanied him.