Читать книгу Awake and Rehearse - Louis Bromfield - Страница 6

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The old man, clad in a shabby cutaway and soiled yellow gloves, met me just inside the revolving-doors. He was all bows, smiles and servility, for he was a toady who existed only in relation to people whom he considered important. Alone in his own room I cannot think of him as existing at all. In this case I fancy he was impressed by the name and family of my French father and the wealth of my American mother. And he was nervous about the bargain over the porcelaine.

He rubbed together dry and wrinkled old hands slightly dirty about the nails, and commented upon the January cold. “Miss Wannop is waiting for us,” he added. “I am sure you will find her a charming person.”

It was midwinter and most of the tables were filled. They were all there—American millionaires, demi-mondaines, decayed grand dukes and cousins of dethroned royalty, German buyers speaking bad English in the hope that they would be mistaken for Americans, English titles, Argentine cattle kings, Italian “princes” who were blackmailers, American college girls seeing life, actresses, Spanish dukes, decayed and once famous beauties. Following my shabby Marquis through the mob, I picked out an old lady sitting alone by a pillar who I was certain must be Miss Wannop. She was large and heavy, with a red wig, huge diamond earrings, and a large, badly painted mouth.

“This,” I told myself, “must be Miss Wannop. This is what American women of her generation turn into when they have, as my friend says, lived among us for so long.”

I made ready to bow and seat myself, but we passed the diamonds and the red wig without a sign of recognition. A second later Vestiglione halted abruptly before an old lady whom I should never have noticed. Bowing, he said, “This is Mees Wannop. May I present the Prince de S——.”

He said it in English, but she replied at once in the most exquisite and flawless French. “There is no need to speak English. I know French well. I am almost French myself. I have lived among you so long.”

She wasn’t at all the Miss Wannop I had expected. She wasn’t at all like most American women of my mother’s generation who, married to Frenchmen and Italians, have withered away and turned bitter, or dyed their hair and taken lovers, or formed a despairing interest in art or music or charity. And she wasn’t, of course, like the young American women of our day, glittering, handsome and self-assured. She was a little old lady of the greatest gentility, not in the rakish, enlightened sense of the eighteenth century, but ... well ... rather Louis Philippe, dowdy and a little manqué. That ever-recurrent expression, “I have lived among you so long,” was the key. Here, I thought, was an American who had accomplished what so many Americans of Miss Wannop’s day had attempted without success. She had fled an America which she found hard and vulgar for a France that she saw through a sentimental haze, overlooking all its footless aristocracy and the heavy coarseness of its bourgeois Third Republic. And she had actually transformed herself into a Frenchwoman. All her friends, I divined, must be French. Vestiglione was simply a chance acquaintance picked up in a business arrangement. In appearance she seemed exactly like my French grandmother.

She was small and thin and dressed in purple and black, and wore on her fingers amethysts and diamonds in heavy old-fashioned gold settings. As I approached she had let fall the piece of petit point on which she had been working with the air of a duchess who must recover her old chairs with her own hands because it was the tradition in her family.

I said to her, “Of course, I speak English well enough. My mother was an American.”

Her gentle smile said, “Need you tell that to one who has lived among you so long?” And her lean, small, aristocratic voice said, “Yes, I know all about that. I once served on the same charity board as your grandmother. The French one, I mean, of course. The old Princesse. I have not lived in America for forty years.”

Again it occurred to me that it was strange I had never heard of her save in the newspapers and then only in a world which neither my mother nor myself could believe really existed.

“I suppose you would find it greatly changed if you went back now.”

“Oh, I shall never go now. I’ve been away too long. Why, I’ve even lost all trace of my own relations, all except a cousin who turns up now and then. She married a Frenchman ...” Her voice fell almost to a whisper, as if she were about to mention a disgrace. “It was of course only a Bonapartist title ... the Prince de Bézancourt.”

I murmured that I had the honor of knowing the Princesse, her cousin. A delightful and amusing woman.

“But it is not the same,” she said in a voice which with my eyes shut I could have sworn was my grandmother’s. But my grandmother was, of course, a Frenchwoman, whose father had died on a scaffold in the eighteenth century, and she was much nearer to Napoleon. You could understand why my grandmother childishly looked upon him as an upstart. “My cousin Emma,” she continued, “never adapted herself to the ways of her new country. She made no effort.” And the thin small mouth closed in an unpleasant line of disapproval.

“But she was happy,” I said. “It was one of the few happy marriages of that sort. Her husband adored her, to the very end. It is a kind of legend that he was one faithful French husband in history. She kept him amused and all his friends too.”

I kept seeing her, Cousin Emma, the Princesse de Bézancourt, as different as day and night from this quiet, exquisite old lady. Even as an old woman Emma de Bézancourt in a red wig had the fire and the wit to draw young men about her.

But the cold, pleasant, refined voice was saying, “But it is not the same. Bézancourt himself was the grandson of a blacksmith. And my Cousin Emma owed a duty to her new country.”

They were the very words I had heard my grandmother use about Emma de Bézancourt—how long ago? Thirty years perhaps. Only because Emma de Bézancourt had been alive and human and colorful.

“But she made her husband and her children very happy.”

She did not appear to think this argument worth an answer, and Vestiglione, who had been waiting a chance to talk of the days when France was still a country fit for a gentleman to live in, launched himself upon a long-winded account of a visit made to the Château de Bézancourt in the days when he had been the cuckold husband of the Beauty. Miss Wannop appeared not to listen, as if such a world could hold no interest to one who had the Royalist cause at heart. Once, in the middle of the account, he winked at me and murmured, “Miss Wannop doesn’t care for that set.” It was an insolent and vulgar wink. I was aware that he wasn’t toadying now to Miss Wannop, but to me. The old lady, I think, was a little childish and failed to notice.

When he had finished, Miss Wannop picked up the thread of conversation as if the unfortunate Bonapartist interlude had never occurred. Finally we came round to the delicate business of the porcelaine de Saxe. She had, she said, long known of my father’s famous collection. She was a collector herself. She had had a house in the Rue de l’Universite, but she had given it up during the war because it was so difficult to keep servants. Since then she had lived at the Ritz and all her things had been kept in storage. She failed to speak of money, or of price, or to suggest that I would take less than the asking price. It was the first time she seemed different from my grandmother. My grandmother would have haggled over every sou.

The Marquis, devouring cakes and sandwiches with the air of a man who had not lunched, talked a great deal of the beauty and value of the collection, all of course with his commission in view. I asked her to lunch on the following Monday to inspect the collection and she accepted at once, almost with an air of eagerness.

And at the same moment I saw the immense woman with the red wig and the diamond earrings moving toward us.

“Ah,” said Miss Wannop, smiling faintly. “It is Olivia. You must know her already, Monsieur de S——. She is a charming woman, don’t you think? And one of the most ardent of Blacks.”

I had to admit that I did not know the Duchess, but in the next moment I was presented. At the mention of my name the evil old face of the Duchess lighted up as if someone had turned on a light behind the badly painted mask. “Ah, of course,” she said, seating herself heavily on one of the gilt chairs. “I knew your grandmother in Italy ... the old Princesse. We were on the same committee to aid the orphans of people who died there of the plague.”

The notorious charitable activities of my devout grandmother had, I thought suddenly, brought her some strange acquaintances. The most noticeable fact about the Duchess was, I think, her need of a thorough bath. The rouge and powder on her massive face had been put on, layer after layer, until it had caked. The great shelf of a bosom bore evidence that she was an untidy eater.

Then I noticed that she had not spoken to Vestiglione and that he had turned his chair a little away from her. Something about the strange trio made me suddenly uneasy. It was a feeling difficult to put into words, but I felt that I must escape the depression that was settling over me and that I could only escape it by escaping these people. I rose and kissed the hands of both ladies, the white, immaculate, beautifully kept hand of Miss Wannop, covered with diamonds and amethysts in old-fashioned gold settings, and the fat greasy one of the Duchess with greedy eyes.

Vestiglione rose quickly too, but he only kissed the hand of Miss Wannop. And then an odd thing happened. I saw a look of horror come into the china-blue eyes of Miss Wannop. I heard her scream, “That horrid beast!” and I saw her faint dead away. At the sound of her scream, others turned from the tables all about us and out from under the table itself ran a great white cat. It scurried through the crowd and disappeared into the corridor that led toward the Rue Cambon.

In a wild confusion we got her upstairs amid cries from the Duchess of “Ma chère Savine! C’est inouï! C’est incroyable! A laisser vivre cette sale bête.”

Miss Wannop had a bedroom and a salon overlooking the garden and both were filled with porcelaine de Saxe arranged coldly in horrible cabinets and vitrines in the style of Louis Philippe. What she could possibly want with more of the stuff, I did not know. Among it moved her maid, a big, florid woman called Amélie. It was she who succeeded in restoring Miss Wannop to consciousness. I left the old lady to the tender care of the Duchess, but Vestiglione remained glued to my side. I soon discovered the reason. He wanted a lift in my motor to the door of the shabby hotel where he lived. I suspect, too, that it gave him pleasure and a sense of self-respect to have the world see him walking through the corridors of the Ritz by the side of a man who was rich, respectable and possessed of a position.

In the motor he kept on revealing his horrid little character. It began when I asked who on earth was the Duchess de Venterollo. The name haunted me in the same fashion as Miss Wannop’s had done.

“She is,” he said, “a nobody, one of those countless cheap Italian titles. She’s a vulgar old woman who lives off Miss Wannop.”

“But,” I said, “she seems to be covered with diamonds.”

“They are all paste. She even got those out of Miss Wannop.” He sighed. “She is too good-hearted, too trusting and too generous.”

It occurred to me that if it had been the Duchess to whom I had given a lift, she would have been saying the same things of little Vestiglione. These two ruins, these harpies, were living off the naive old lady. And yet she wasn’t naive, because she was much too hard. She must have been a little stupid. She could have done better than these two.

Hoping to draw him into deeper water, I said, “Miss Wannop does not seem the sort to be imposed upon.”

He slipped away by repeating, “She is much too kind, much too kind.” This, I knew, was nonsense. Whatever virtues Miss Wannop may have had, kindness was not among them. Talking to her was like talking to a marble pillar. There was no warmth or resiliency. She was flat, cold, metallic.

I mentioned the incident of the cat.

“She has a horror of cats,” he said. “She can feel it when one is in the room with her. That white cat has lived at the Ritz for years ... on the Rue Cambon side, in the grill.”

I told him that I knew the cat well and was even fond of it. “But it must annoy her continually,” I observed.

“Oh, she never goes to the Rue Cambon side. It’s partly on account of the cat, but more, I think, on account of the people one sees there. You see, they offend her.”

“It is much more lively and amusing than that den of decayed wrecks where we had tea today.”

He did not wince. “Yes, but you see, she belongs to another day and another world. And then the bar is always filled with Americans, and she has lived among us so long ...”

I could not endure the remark again. “She ought to know,” I said, “that young France is trying to be as American as possible.”

“But it’s not the same thing. Your mother didn’t belong to the noisy vulgar mob. She was like ... like Miss Wannop.”

The remark made me angry and gave me my first clue to my real feeling about the old lady. She suddenly seemed to me, in spite of all her airs and refinements, the most vulgar woman I had ever known.

“My mother was certainly not like Miss Wannop.”

“Perhaps not ...” he said smoothly.

“But the cat. If she feels like that about cats, I can’t see why she stays on at the Ritz.”

“She threatens to leave, but they know she never will.”

“But why ... she’s rich and free.”

“She couldn’t bear living alone. At the Ritz she sees her friends.” After a moment he said, “It’s an odd thing about the cat. It never crosses over to the Place Vendôme side unless she is there. It seems to be fascinated by her.”

As the chauffeur opened the door for the battered Marquis to step down, the old man said, “Don’t be afraid to ask a good price for the porcelaine. Money is nothing to her when she’s impressed, and you have impressed her.”

With this cryptic remark he vanished through the garish yellow door of his hotel.

All the way home the name Venterollo haunted me, and then all at once I knew. It was one of the names in the mysterious world of the Paris Herald. At home I took up the paper again. Yes, she too had been at the dinner for the Crimean orphans along with Miss Wannop and Vestiglione.