Part 18

And she held up a newspaper photograph of the Governor ... now the Senator ... clipped from one of the American newspapers which Ellen brought to Numero Dix. It portrayed him in the act of addressing the Benevolent Order of Camels in Detroit. The pose was in itself flamboyant. Everything about him flowed. His loose black cravat flowed in the breeze. His hair, worn rather long, waved behind him. His alpaca suit ballooned about his heavy figure. His stomach rested upon a flag-draped railing, and his face wore a smile that was old and familiar, the smile of one who patronized his audience. In the background there was a vague suggestion of a square, solid figure in a richly flowered costume, wearing a pince nez and a cloud of flowing veils ... obviously the figure of the Senatoress.

Though Lily sometimes mocked the Governor, she never mentioned him as the source of Jean’s restless vitality and intelligence. But it did not matter, since no one in her world and, least of all Ellen, was interested in the Governor or eager to defend him.

The women who came to her drawing-room were, first of all, “Madame Gigon’s friends.” Toward Lily, for all her good-nature and her submission to their world, their attitude was never more than that of acquaintances. She saw them many times a month but there remained always an insurmountable barrier. It existed perhaps because she was too indolent to make those overtures necessary to friendship, perhaps because deep down in the heart of their bourgeois respectability they detected in the American traces of the wanton. They came to the “salons” of Madame Gigon and Lily went in turn to theirs. But she never entertained in the evening save at small dinners of four and six, and she never went to balls. Her hunger for gaiety she satisfied in the midst of crowds, at the Opéra, in the music halls, at the races. And always she was accompanied by Jean or Ellen or Madame Gigon so that no one was able to say that she was indiscreet. If she went out frequently with the Baron, he was after all the cousin and protector of the old woman who accompanied them. If the Baron came frequently to her house it was to see Madame Gigon who was flattered by his attentions and his gifts of money.

Yet it could not be said that she was more friendly with men than with women. The men admired her. Indeed men from the world of fashion, from the world of the Duchesse de Guermantes’ _soirées_, sometimes mingled with the dowdy Bonapartists of Madame Gigon’s salon, brought there by friends who moved in the circle closest to “the American.” They were pleasantly received and sent on their way, having accomplished nothing. If they became a trifle ardent she called Madame Gigon or the Baron to her side and the incident ended without difficulty. The visits came to nothing, for Lily appeared to have no ambitions. She was bafflingly content. She might have had great success in a score of ways, for her flamboyant beauty was a sort rarely seen among French women and it attracted notice wherever she appeared. But she had no ambitions; she was both wealthy and content. People remarked her at the Opéra but it was seldom that any one was able to identify her, for none knew her. Her circle was small, dowdy and infinitely respectable. She lived quietly with old Madame Gigon, now almost blind, and a charming son. It seemed that she was even content to forego a second marriage. And among those who admired her, because she was so good-natured and lovely to look upon, was the wife of the Baron, a pretty blond woman, rich and stupid, the daughter of a manufacturer from Lyons.

Madame Gigon adored her in two quite distinct fashions. The first because Lily was pleasant, kindly and generous. The second adoration, less commendable perhaps but none the less thorough, was the adoration of a woman pinched all her life by poverty for a fellow creature who secured her declining years with every possible luxury. Madame Gigon could not possibly forget that it was Lily who had set her up in a situation worthy of a woman whose father had been ruined by his loyalty to Napoleon the Little. The widow of the curator of the Cluny Museum had grown very small and dry. Her face resembled a withered pomegranate both in texture and color. Her dog Fifi had long since been laid to rest in the dog’s cemetery on a little island in the Seine where Madame Shane had kindly raised a tombstone with Fifi in marble sitting on a bronze cushion, “tout á fait comme dans la vie.” Fifi had not one successor but two, both provided by Madame Shane to console “her poor old Louise.” One was a black and tan, for all the world like the departed Fifi, and bore the name of Criquette. The other, a perky black Scotty brought back from England as a surprise, bore the name of Michou. They slept in Madame Gigon’s room overlooking the garden and had their own corner in the Louis Seize dining room, where they ate when the rest of the household sat down at an enormous table lighted by tall candles. Like Fifi they had gone the way of gateaux and were stout and short of breath.

LVI

These four ... Lily, Madame Gigon, Criquette and Michou ... were the permanent tenants of Numero Dix. There were two others who came and went, spending now a week’s holiday, now a whole month or more. They even paid visits frequently to the lodge at Germigny l’Evec in the park of the Baron, where Lily spent the spring and the autumn of every year, taking a house during the summer at Houlgate where she lived as a Frenchwoman in the very heart of the small American colony. The transients in the establishment of Madame Shane were her son Jean and her cousin Ellen Tolliver. They flitted in and out like birds of passage, less regular in their arrival and departure, though no less spirited and noisy.

The Ellen Tolliver of the pompadour and starched shirt waists had become the Lilli Barr whom crowds packed concert halls to see and hear, whom music critics found themselves bound to commend--the same Lilli Barr whose photograph seated beside a great composer appeared in the Sunday supplements of American newspapers. This of course, the public never knew. It knew only that she was a fine pianist with a sensational presence and a vitality which reached out and engulfed them through the medium of surging music. It knew nothing of her past. Indeed there were few who knew she was an American. Her name might have been Russian or Austrian, Hungarian or German. It carried with it the glamor sought by the public which will receive the most sublime artist with indifference if her name happened to be Mary Smith and her origin Evanston, Indiana. This she realized. She shrewdly explained to Lily the evolution of her name.

“Barr,” she said, “is the name of my grandfather. I have a perfect right to it. Alone and unadorned it is not thrilling. Therefore I have chosen Lilli. That, my dear, is a tribute to you, because if it had not been for you I should probably be an old maid giving music lessons at fifty cents an hour to the daughters of mill clerks.” She laughed noisily. “Lilli Barr.... A great name, don’t you think? It will suit everybody. It will suit those who believe American musicians should be encouraged and it will suit those who must have a little exotic European sauce with their fowl. Lilli Barr.... It might be anything at all.”

“Lilli Barr” was a name which betrayed nothing of a rather materialistic elopement with a traveling salesman called Clarence Murdock. It betrayed nothing of Clarence’s quiet passing out of this life from a weakened heart too greatly tried by life with a robust and ambitious wife. It had nothing to do with a father, ruined by honesty, who wore away his middle age as clerk in an industrial bank. It gave no hint of a mother who, in an effort to follow her ambitious, migratory offspring, had kept a Manhattan rooming house for five years past. Decidedly, emphatically, it was an exotic name. There were even people who believed that she was the protegee of a German Baron named Unschaff (they had his name and the history of his amours) whom she repaid in the usual way. And this story Ellen would have been the last to deny, for she knew its value. She understood that the people who paid money for concerts must have something beside music. And she understood the value of money in a fashion never imagined by Lily. The critics might call her playing sensational, bordering even upon charlatanism, she would not deny it. The public liked an artist who understood the value of a gesture, who came upon the concert stage with air of a queen, who played with gusto and the sweep of a hurricane. She understood all that. It was not that she was insincere. There were those for whom she played exquisitely and with all the distilled beauty of a sensitive artist, with the same curious passion which had engulfed her music on that last night in the drawing-room at Cypress Hill. She was a clever woman, far more intelligent than Lily, and having been nourished in the midst of poverty and failure, her one God was success, a sort of embittered success which played upon the silliness and affectation of the world.

Certainly she had kept the promise made to Lily. She fitted no pattern, least of all the pattern of the Town. She had her own ruthless law, founded upon consideration for friends alone. She had her own thoughts and beliefs. Indeed she hated the pattern bitterly, so bitterly that she made a vow never to play in the Town no matter what the fee offered her. In appearance she resembled curiously her grandaunt, Lily’s mother. About her features there was the same bold carving. Her face was too long and her eyes a shade too green. Her figure held none of the voluptuous curves that softened her cousin’s beauty; on the contrary it was slim and strong. She walked with a fine free swing that carried in it a hint of masculinity. Beside Lily she was not beautiful at all; yet on the concert stage under the glow of the lights her beauty was infinitely more effective than Lily’s would have been.... Her energy was the energy descended directly from Hattie Tolliver. It crackled through her whole being. She was not like Lily, a woman of the world; there was a quality of directness and naivete, a breeziness springing from her background and her ancestry, which all the courts of Europe might never overcome. She was, above all else, herself, incapable of affectation or pretense. And this, she also understood, was a thing of great value because one expected it of the artistic temperament. An artist made no compromises.

LVII

One late afternoon in April, nineteen thirteen, when the trees in the garden were all feathery and soft with the first green of the Gallic springtime, Madame Gigon sat in her chair by the door of the long drawing-room bidding her guests good-by, one by one, as they left her usual Thursday _salon_. The drawing-room, owing to the sharp slope of the ground upon which the house was built, lay below the surface of the Rue Raynouard on the garden side of the house so that the guests leaving were forced to climb a long flight of stairs that led up to the street door. The stairway, opening directly into the drawing-room, provided a long, high vista leading up to a door, itself noticeable by its very insignificance. It was one of the charming features of the house that on the street side it was but one story high with a single door and a row of high windows which betrayed no hint of the beauty and space within its walls. On the garden side, however, the house presented a beautiful façade some three stories high, constructed of Caen stone and designed in the best manner of the eighteenth century. Lenôtre himself was said to have had a hand in the planning of the terraces and the pavilion that stood at a little distance completely embowered by shrubs and covered by a canopy made of the broad green leaves of plane trees. The house, after a fashion, turned its back upon the world, concealing its beauties from the eye of the random passerby, preserving them for the few who were admitted by the humble and unpretentious door that swung open upon the cobble stones of the Rue Raynouard. To the world it showed the face of a _petite bourgeoise_. To its friends it revealed the countenance of an eighteenth century marquise. And this fact had influenced for more than a century and a half the character of its tenants. The prosperous chocolate manufacturer abandoned it for the German palace in the Avenue de Jena for the very reason that Lily Shane seized it the moment it fell vacant. It was no sort of a house for one who desired the world to recognize his success and the character of his life, but it was an excellent house in which to live quietly, even secretly. It stood isolated in the very midst of Paris.

Madame Gigon sat in a high-backed chair, her small, withered body propped among cushions, her feet resting on a footstool. Since her eyes had grown dim she used her ears as a means of watching her guests; and these, after the fashion of such organs, had become sharper and sharper with the failure of her sight.

A fat and dowdy woman dressed all in white and wearing an extravagant white veil moved up to her.

“Good-by, Madame Gigon,” she said. “You come to me on Friday. Don’t forget. The Prince himself will be there.”

Madame Gigon, instead of peering at the white lady, leaned back. “Ah, it’s you, Héloise.... Yes, I will be there on Friday. But you are leaving early.”

“No,” replied the white lady, who was a countess and possessed a fine collection of armor. “No. Others have gone before me. I am dining out in the Boulevard St. Germain.”

Madame Gigon smiled. “With your Jewish friends?”

“Yes. It is a long way.”

“They say her eldest daughter is to marry a rich American ... millions. He is called Blumenthal.”

“Oui ... a very nice gentleman and the Good God alone knows how rich.”

“Well, money is a great thing ... the foundation of everything, Héloise.”

“Yes ... Good-by ... On Friday then. And fetch Madame Shane if she cares to come.”

And the plump white lady made her way with effort up the long polished stairway to the unpretentious doorway.

Madame Gigon, holding Michou on her lap, began fondling the dog’s ears. She leaned back and listened. Most of the guests had gone. Her sharp ears constructed the scene for her. A shrill and peevish voice in the far corner betrayed Madame de Cyon. The old woman saw her, fat, with dyed black hair and a round face well made up to conceal the ravages of time. A Russian woman, married to a French diplomat ... Bonapartist of course. She translated American novels into French to amuse herself and to help keep up the household in Neuilly. Yet she was rich, for her fat pig’s hands were covered with rings and the sable of her cloak was the best.

A man’s voice, ill-tempered and gruff, rose through the shadowy room. Captain Marchand, who did not get on with his wife. Tactless of Madame de Cyon to have led them to the bridge table to play with each other. Bridge-mad ... was Madame de Cyon ... bridge-mad, and she hated like the Devil to lose. To lose five francs was like losing one of her fat legs. Strange game ... this bridge. It put every one into a bad temper. Not at all like piquet.

“Deux pique!” announced Madame de Cyon.

“Passe!” ... “Passe!” ... “Passe!”

From the dining-room issued the sound of two voices in dispute, the one high-pitched, old and somewhat shrill, and the other rather deep and gentle, almost conciliatory. They drifted to Madame Gigon across the murmurous spaces of the drawing-room. Madame Blaise and “Mees Ellen’s” friend, Schneiderman. Madame Blaise was a Gasconne, old, shrill and vituperatory, yet somehow amusing and stimulating ... a little cracked perhaps but still full of spirit, and mysterious in the fashion of those whose existence has its foundations in a world of fanciful, half-mad unreality. She was tall and thin, with a mass of dyed red hair (it must have gone gray ten years earlier) under an old-fashioned purple bonnet trimmed with purple plumes and perched high on her head in the fashion of the eighties. Madame Gigon knew she was by the gateaux ... eating ... eating ... eating ... as if she starved herself at home. Yet she too was rich.

“Ah, you don’t know the Germans as I do!” came the high-pitched voice. “My fine young fellow! I tell you I have lived with them. I have been on business for the government. They are capable of anything. You will see....”

And then the voice of Schneidermann, mild and a little amused by the old lady. “Ah ...,” gently. “Perhaps ... perhaps. But I do not think that war is any longer possible.”

“Nevertheless,” persisted the voice. “One fine day you will go marching away like the rest.”

LVIII

Schneidermann was Alsatian, and Jew on his father’s side, rich, for his family owned steel mills at Toul and Nancy and in the very environs of Paris, as well as coal mines in the neighborhood of St. Quentin and La Bassée. Schneidermann, tall, handsome, swarthy ... was beautiful in an austere, sensual fashion as only Jews can be beautiful. He came sometimes to play the ’cello with “Mees Ellen,” choosing queer music they called “modern” that had none of the beauty and melody of Offenbach and Gounod.

The voice of “Mees Ellen” joining the pair in the dining-room.... “War!... War!... Nonsense! There can’t be any war. I must play in Berlin and Munich next season.” Her voice rang with genuine conviction, as if she really believed that war itself dared not interfere with still more amazing successes. Madame Blaise’ cynical laugh answered her.

“Ah, you young people ... you young people. What do you know of war and politics? I have been through wars, through revolutions, you understand. I know about these things. I am as old as time.”

The old woman was talking in her most fantastic vein. It was her habit to talk thus as if she were wise beyond all people. She was, as Madame Gigon said, a little cracked on this side of her.

“I know ... I know,” she continued to mutter in the most sinister fashion until an unusually large madeleine put an end to her talk.

“How much did you say ... eight francs?” It was the peevish voice of Madame de Cyon settling her bridge debts.

“Eight francs,” came the gruff reply of Captain Marchand. “Eight francs, I tell you.” And then the tinkling of the Russian’s woman’s innumerable gold bangles as she thrust her fat bejeweled hand into a small purse to wrench loose from it the precious eight francs. “I had no luck to-day ... no luck at all,” she observed in the same irritable voice. “No cards at all. What can one do without cards? Now last week I won ...” And she fell to recounting past victories while Captain Marchand’s chair scraped the floor savagely.

And then the voice of Madame Blaise quite close at hand, bidding Madame Gigon good-by.

“On Tuesday, then, Louise. I shall expect you.”

“On Tuesday,” repeated Madame Gigon.

“And bring Madame Shane if she wishes to come. But not ‘Mees Tolliver.’ I can’t bear her and her American ways.” The old harridan bent lower, her reticule shaking with the aged trembling of her thin body. “That Schneidermann!” she observed scornfully. “He is a fool! The men I knew when I was young were interested in revolutions and politics ... not music. Music! Bah!” And to show her disgust she spat on the bare floor.... Then she made a hissing noise and swept up the long dim stairway, her boots squeaking as she walked.

Then the confusion of farewells as the last guests departed, Madame de Cyon passing by, still in bad humor over her losses.

“On Friday, Madame Gigon,” she said. “My husband will be there. He is home from the Balkans and full of news.”

“Of the wars I suppose.... On Friday, Madame.”

“And tell Madame Shane she is expected also.”

Then Captain Marchand and Madame Marchand, also in a bad humor because they got on badly. Madame Marchand’s day fell on Monday and she too asked the old woman to bring Madame Shane. Her invitation was made in the same oblique fashion as the other. “Bring Madame Shane if she cares to come.”

At last there remained no one save those whom Lily, in her vague, lazy fashion called “the family.” These were old Madame Gigon, Ellen Tolliver, Jean, herself and the Baron.

As the blond little Captain Marchand, pompously clanking his spurs as he walked, disappeared up the darkening reaches of the long stairway, Jean, who had been reading in a corner reserved for himself, sprang up with the bound of a young animal and ran across to Ellen and Schneidermann.

“Alors! Viens donc ... la musique!” he cried, seizing her by the hand while she struggled against his youthful strength, and Schneiderman laughed at his exuberance. She resisted, bracing her strong slim body and indulging in a mock struggle.

“Not a sound from me,” she replied. “Unless we talk English. I can make no more effort with this waiter’s chatter.”

It was a price which she exacted frequently, for she spoke French badly, though with great vigor, and with an accent so atrocious that it seemed quite beyond hope of improvement. Her English carried the drawling tang of the middle west. She called “dog” _dawg_ and “water” _watter_.

Jean resembled his mother. His hair, like hers, was red though less soft and more carroty. His nose was short, straight, and conveyed an impression of good humor and high spirits. He was tall for his age and strongly built with a slim figure which gave every promise of one day growing into the bulky strength of the Governor. He possessed a restless, noisy, energy quite incomprehensible to Lily. To-day he wore the uniform of a cadet at the cavalry school at St. Cyr. It was the idea of the Baron, himself a cuirassier, that Jean should be trained for the cavalry. “If he does not like it, he may quit,” he told Lily. As for Jean, he appeared to like it well enough. He was as eager for a war as Madame Blaise had been certain of one.

“Come along, Nell,” he cried. “Be a good cousin, and play that four-handed stuff with me.”

Madame Gigon, with Michou and Criquette waddling amiably after her, stole quietly away to her room to lock her door against the hideous sounds which Ellen, Schneidermann and Jean made when they played what they called modern “music.”