Читать книгу Awake and Rehearse - Louis Bromfield - Страница 7

Table of Contents

On Monday, the day I was to entertain Vestiglione and Miss Wannop, at lunch, I opened the Herald to read, “Among those who entertained at the unusually brilliant Sunday night at the Ritz was Miss Savina Wannop, who had as her guests the Duchess de Venterollo, the Marquis de Vestiglione and the Prince Puriatine.”

So there was another “friend” rescued from among the hordes of stray Russians. I imagined Miss Wannop surrounded by three hungry ruins instead of two.

To my astonishment Miss Wannop appeared for lunch accompanied by a maid, the same big Auvergnat known as Amélie. She was a capable servant, no doubt, despite her independent, mocking black eyes. It seemed to me a bit swanky that Miss Wannop should be accompanied thus as if she were a kind of royalty. Amélie was sent to the servants’ hall to lunch.

We ate in the green dining-room where Miss Wannop admired the boiserie, the Coromandel screen, the crystals—all the stuff collected by my father with which I had no desire to part. I saw that Vestiglione’s little green eyes were appraising the value of each piece and thinking how much he might get in commissions on them from some rich American who did not haggle over prices.

I said, “I mean to part with nothing but the porcelaine. My mother left me plenty of money. I am not poor.”

Miss Wannop passed over the vulgar reference to American money, as if she were ashamed of her own wealth derived from sources of which I was at that time ignorant. My dislike for her was growing. It was not the cold contempt I felt for Vestiglione but something harsher than that which arose from a sight of the patrician marble mask, the cold expressionless blue eyes and the delicate blue-veined hands.

With a rather shameful impulse toward malice, I expressed my sympathy over the affair of the cat.

At once she grew agitated. “Let’s not speak of it,” she said. “The thought makes me ill.”

And then I discovered an obscure desire, rather strange in me who is amiable by nature, to torment her, a helpless old lady, old enough to be my grandmother.

She spoke of the Rue Cambon side of the Ritz. “Of course it’s all changed now. I can remember when one saw only ladies and gentlemen. It’s almost as bad everywhere.” For a moment she put down her fork. (She ate greedily, exposing fine, sharp little white teeth.) “You know, Monsieur de S——, I have never cared for my own people; even as a girl I only felt at home with the real French.”

This I thought was a very old-fashioned remark. It was like something out of Henry James; and then it occurred to me that in her youth she must have been very like the wandering Americans who strayed through his pages. I knew what she meant by the real French—the sort that were Royalist and black Roman Catholic, who consider baths and central heating the height of vulgarity, and whose conversation when it was not concerned with the fantastic idea of placing some mental incompetent upon an imaginary throne, was of turnips or their rheumatism.

“I find that my own people—that is, the ones who were my people once—have no sensibilities.”

(This, I thought, was Henry James with a vengeance.)

After lunch we looked at the porcelaine. She admired the pieces with a curious banal enthusiasm though it seemed to me that she knew nothing whatever about them—the dates, the lustre, the marks—nothing that a person with so large a collection and so enthusiastically expressed an interest should have known. And one by one before we reached them she asked Vestiglione to remove any group which might contain a cat. As the subject was extremely rare, there were only two.

“Keep those for yourself,” she said. “I will buy the rest. I have no room for them at the Ritz, but I’ll have a man come and pack them for storage with my other things.”

“But we haven’t discussed price!” I protested.

“I’ll trust you. I dislike discussing money. I’m sure I can trust a deS——.”

What could I do but shrug my shoulders? It all seemed a bit silly.

Amélie was summoned from the servants’ hall and arrived looking doubly robust and high colored. On leaving, Miss Wannop said, “To bind the bargain you must dine with me on Sunday night.”

My first impulse was to refuse, and then I felt a desire to know more of her, to get to the end of the story if there was any end. She fascinated me as cats do. She went downstairs and disappeared into her respectable, high-pitched, old-fashioned motor.

When she had gone Vestiglione proceeded to make it known to me that we might ask her what we liked for the porcelaine.... I told him that I would have in an expert to value the pieces and set a figure, and I saw his greedy eyes darken with disappointment.

“But why,” I asked, “is she indifferent about the price? No one is as rich as that.”

“No,” he replied, “but she is getting old and she—” he hesitated, “and she is trying to get rid of her money. She has no one to leave it to. She is alone in the world.”

“But why should she want to give it to me—a stranger? For that’s what it amounts to.”

Again he hesitated. “Well, she is royalist, you see. She wants to help those of the old régime.”

This made me want to laugh, but I merely said, “But I’m rich already. It can’t help me. And I am not idiot enough to be a sincere royalist.”

“It’s not altogether that, perhaps.” He looked at me slyly. “Perhaps you wouldn’t understand ... but she’d like to have you dine with her at the Ritz.”