Part 12
Laura and her children were the subject of a good deal of Alice’s idle chatter. They were the most divine children, Alice asserted; she only hoped hers would be as good. She drew a showy picture of the nursery: Laura’s Rollo-like offspring eating at a little table with their Belgian governess, while Laura in a Bendel gown received in the drawing-room below. Laura in most respects was obviously Alice’s model.
At night, it was usually cold enough for a fire and, with the ruddy logs glowing in the great boulder fireplace, the pair sat on a wooden settle banked with cotton print covered cushions, facing the fire, holding hands. It was Alice who did most of the talking. She had so much to say. Harold was comparatively inarticulate; very few thoughts in his mind urgently demanded expression, and he had to search to find words in which to express even these. Half-comprehending, half-dreading life, he seldom asserted himself. He basked in the pleasant warmth of Alice’s conversation, as she basked in the heat of the burning logs, enjoying Alice, talk, and fire, objectively. He, indeed, would have been glad to remain indefinitely at Provincetown, or near it, although they knew nobody and it seemed they never would, for Alice objected that she could not meet people from Greenwich Village, and, of course, she added, one can’t know the natives. The Portuguese themselves, had she but been aware of it, would have taken the first step, had it been necessary, towards preventing any narrowing of this always ample breach. However that may be, although Harold and Alice crossed the dunes nearly every day to go to the post office or the market, they made no acquaintances of any kind.
Their intimacy was so complete and exclusive, indeed, that to the Provincetowners--both natives and visitors--they appeared to be a couple of youngsters revelling in their first illicit love. The married state, certainly, was never ascribed to them. Gossip was endemic among the Portuguese, and, as the rumour grew, biographies were invented to fit the happy pair. Letters passed back and forth as the gossip bubbled, gossip to which Emma added her unwholesome quota. Heartily disliking Alice, Emma permitted herself uncontrolled flights of the imagination once she met her friends in the village.
* * * * *
Emma brought in the soup. They sat down to eat at two adjoining sides of the hexagonal table. Later, there was fish. Almost invariably, indeed, there was fish.
Alice’s glance was directed towards the prongs of her fork.
Harold, she asked, shall we live here much longer?
The boy showed his astonishment. Are you unhappy, dear? he questioned her in return.
Not unhappy, no, but restless. You know it isn’t my kind of place.
But New York in the summer....
We can’t go back just yet, of course ... but in a little while. I suppose, too, that you will want to be getting to work. She observed his expression of amazement, but she hurried on: You are going to work, aren’t you?
Of course.
He felt confused and embarrassed. Here was an aspect of the situation which had never occurred to him. Now that he was a family man he would be expected to make a living for his bride.
You can’t, she went on rather sententiously, always live on your father, Harold dear. My daughters.... Well, dearest, they couldn’t respect you.
What would he do? Harold helplessly interrogated himself. No more was said about the matter that night, but he tossed about restlessly in bed, his heart beating violently, revolving the idea over and over. It seemed that he could never accustom himself to the problems of life. As fast as the old ones were solved, fresh ones rose on every hand. Nothing seemed simple. How, for example, could he expect to get on sufficiently well to enable him to support his wife without his father’s assistance? He could think of no possible opening in the business line except to go in with his father, and his father had expressly said that he did not wish him to do that. What could he do?
Alice, on her part, did not refer to the matter again for several days. She exposed the pleasantest side of her nature, wore her prettiest dresses. She even refrained from complaining about the plates. They took long idyllic walks together on the dunes. They bathed in the sea. The actual clouds drifted out of the sky and the tone of the atmosphere grew more mellow, less grey. Their evenings they passed on the settle. The morose Emma, having washed the dishes and arranged the neat punnets of berries in the ice-chest, left them alone, after fortifying herself for three hours of creative gossip with a nip of perry, a beverage she was skilful in brewing. In spite of the apparent calm, Alice’s words ate deeper and deeper into Harold’s consciousness. He felt that she was right and, finally, one night, he summoned up enough courage to broach the subject again.
Alice dear, I’ve been worrying about what you said....
She frowned, questioningly. What I said? she repeated, with an interrogative inflection.
About my going to work.
Dearest boy, I didn’t mean to worry you.... Only--she was nervously switching her suède shoes with a willow-bough she had cut during her afternoon walk--, only, it has seemed to me at times that perhaps you are taking things too easily, too much as a matter of course; that was all. We can’t stay here for ever, you know.
I understand. His tone was low and serious. I have been thinking about it and I know that you are right.
She brightened, and threw the switch into the fire.
I’m glad you agree with me, Harold. Now, what are you going to do?
That’s just it, he groaned. I haven’t the least idea!
Don’t you think it’s best for you to go in with your father? He would help you so much, and you would get on so fast, and we should all be so proud of you!
But my father doesn’t want me to go into his business. I’ve explained all that to you.
Alice gazed at him intently for a little while, as if weighing him and the consequences of what she was about to divulge. As she began to speak, her glance dropped to the fire.
I think it’s only fair that you should know something, Harold, she said at last.
He searched her face with some alarm.
Nothing serious. She grasped his arm and rubbed her cheek affectionately against his cheek. He has done it for your good, dear. Your father has been deceiving you.
My father! He sprang away from her in amazement and stood, helplessly, a little apart, trying to find some kind of meaning in her words.
It was a sort of plot or plan, she went on in a somewhat pedantic manner, as though she had been rehearsing this speech for a long time. You see your father had the feeling that, as you had been brought up by women, you were innocent and ignorant of life. He was afraid if he took you right into his business that you might break away, be misled--Oh! I don’t know what exactly. Anyway, you said you didn’t want to go in with him, and he hoped you would eventually decide for yourself that you did want to. So--she tried to approach him again but his manner warned her that this would be dangerous, or at least difficult--, he thought that if he threw you into the _wrong_ kind of life in the beginning you would _hate_ it, and come round to him of your own accord. That is why he made life unpleasant for you, as disagreeable for you as possible, hoping that a year of it would tire you. You were tired in a month. He was so pleased. He wants you with him, Harold--she was pleading now--; he is expecting you. Only, you must _ask_ him. He won’t ask _you_. Don’t you understand?
Harold was standing with his back to the fire, his face, in the shadow, almost green in its pallor. His head seemed to be reeling around and around. Suddenly he realized that he was excessively angry.
I’d see him in hell first! he cried.
Harold!
I mean it. Who’s to blame for the way I was brought up? He didn’t do much to prevent it, did he? the boy asked scornfully.
Harold!
And so, he went on, the whole thing was a trick!
Now, completely the prey of alarm, a suspicion of tears crept into Alice’s voice. It was for your good, Harold, to make a man of you. She was whining, whimpering.
And who kept me from being a man? Who? I should like to know.
His voice had grown so incisive and cold that it scarcely seemed to be he that was talking.
Alice was really crying now. I shouldn’t have told you, she sobbed. Only, it seemed to be the right time ... and ... and I thought you loved me, Harold ... I couldn’t help telling you, Harold, because I love you.
He ignored this. How did you find all this out? was his next question.
She was trembling. Your father, she began.
Our meeting ... the stalled car ... arranged? He was sneering.
No, Harold, no! That was an accident. Only....
Only what?
Only, you see, after we met.... Well, your father, of course, knows my father.... It seemed best to keep us apart.
You knew all this?
Why yes, Harold. It seemed all right. I loved you, Harold, and they told me....
Did Campaspe know?
She stopped crying at once and her tone became petulant.
Campaspe? Why do you bring in Campaspe? Campaspe! Campaspe! Campaspe! Why are you questioning me? Why do you look at me like that?
Did Campaspe know? His tone was colder, more acid.
No.
Harold, who until now had stood as stiffly as a birch-tree, began to move about the room. Presently, he laughed.
So, he said, she’s clean. They’re all clean: Paul, and Bunny, and Ronald, compared with my own wife, my own father.
Harold!
You’ve tricked me: Your father, my father, you. At last I understand what Aunt Sadi meant in her letter. It doesn’t matter. Only this--he grasped her shoulders firmly and held her at arm’s length--only this, you can tell my father that I’m going straight back where he sent me!
Harold!
Straight back. They’re clean. They didn’t know what it was all about, but they were natural and real while all you rotters have been playing parts.
Harold, you can’t mean what you’re saying!
I haven’t even begun to say what I mean! He threw her roughly back against the settle, relinquishing his hold on her shoulders. I’m through.
He crossed the room in great strides and rushed out through the door. Her screams rang in his ears as he staggered off across the dunes, black in the night, stumbling, falling even, in the deep sand. There was a distant rumble of thunder, faint flashes of lightning. A storm was arising over the sea.
_Chapter X_
On an afternoon in September, Campaspe woke up feeling a little ill, and decided not to go out. She did not, however, send for a physician. Campaspe cherished a peculiar superstition in regard to ill-health. She considered it as a visitation in the nature of a warning, a warning to take a rest. Any interference with the course of the complaint she held to be artificial and even vicious. The miraculously prolonged youthful appearance of her mother, who had never permitted a doctor to visit her since the days when she bore her children, confirmed Campaspe in this esoteric belief.
If I had a broken leg, she assured herself, I would call in a surgeon to set it, but a headache or a hæmorrhage is natural. Decayed cells are breaking down and need to be replaced, or I am being punished by nature for some misdemeanour. When it is over, and the cells have renewed themselves, I shall be stronger than ever.
She glanced over her mail. A letter from Laura, which she did not open.... A postcard from the Duke, with a lithograph in colours of a cottage smothered in rambler roses, and a Nantucket post-mark. Inside quotation marks the Duke had written the following on the reverse side of the card: “Tu te prives de viandes, de vin, d’étuves, d’esclaves et d’honneurs; mais comme tu laisses ton imagination t’offrir des banquets, des parfums, des femmes nues et des foules applaudissantes! Ta chasteté n’est qu’une corruption plus subtile, et ce mépris du monde l’impuissance de ta haine contre lui!” Ronald was amusing.... And so he had gone away again. She sighed, as she tore open an orange envelope with a Danish stamp. The contents were printed, but in such delightfully large type, in reds and greens and blacks and blues, that she was moved to examine the sheet more particularly. It was a prospectus, the preliminary announcement, of the Danish Colonial Lottery. A whole ticket, five drawings, was available at $37.50. One might win 100,000 francs on each of the first four drawings and as much as 1,000,000 francs on the fifth drawing. The lucky number suggested by the agents was 38653. Mentally, Campaspe rapidly added these digits to see if the result conformed with certain figures on a chart that an adept in Kabbalism had recently made out for her. She was a trifle disappointed to find that it did not.... Pushing aside the remainder of her correspondence, a mass of invitations and bills, her mind wandered to an article she had read in some magazine, picked up in a dentist’s waiting-room, an article concerning the extermination of rats. The plan proposed was to catch the rats alive, kill all the females, and set the males free again. In time, as a consequence, the males would outnumber the females by such a high percentage that their persecution of the latter would eventually end in sterility and death for the whole race. In the same magazine there was a paper on hierba maté, the South American beverage, bitter and unpalatable until a taste for it is acquired, draughted from the leaves of the Ilex Paraguayensis. Genaro Romero, the Paraguayan, had rhapsodized regarding it: When we taste maté our energies are renewed, our nerves are comforted by the effect of the green sap, the juice of hope of the Paraguayan flora; and we experience strange impressions, we are nourished by an infusion of energy, and gilded dreams, possibly of good fortune, caress us. Campaspe wondered, at this juncture, if Esperanto had any irregular verbs.... She made an attempt to define her impression of the work of Gertrude Stein. She uses words, thought Campaspe, for their detonations and their connotations.... In the New York Times she discovered an account of a man who had devoted years to the engraving of the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. Once this task was accomplished, he went first blind and then insane.... Out of the back of her mind she picked another detail: girls working in cordite factories use the explosive for chewing-gum. It acts as a heart stimulant.
Campaspe began to feel restless and energetic. She was not, she now believed, ill enough to keep to her room; nor did she deny herself to callers, although she was expecting no one in particular. Her mood was capricious, volatile, vibratory. She welcomed, therefore, the announcement of the arrival of the expressman with two large crates from Paris, and she ordered them deposited in the drawing-room, sending Frederika for the butler and hammer and screw-driver. The crates were not entirely a surprise. Fannie had written that she was shipping some pictures.
They proved to be unusually interesting pictures by Henri Rousseau and Marc Chagall, artists whose work Campaspe admired vastly. The Chagall was a portrait of a girl with bangs across her forehead, long hair down her back, melancholy eyes (eyes which were uncertain, Campaspe noted), a sensual mouth, and an intellectual nose. She wore a tight-fitting yellow bodice with a frill, clasped by a brooch, around the throat, and deep indigo gloves. The background, too, was a rich blue. Campaspe considered the picture: fantasy, fable, colour. She would think about it a good deal more in the future, she was certain. She realized that Laura’s first question would be, What does it mean? That was, perhaps, its chief charm, that it did not mean anything; it was as meaningless as Mozart’s E flat major symphony or life itself. The Rousseau was a splendid and definite jungle, with curiously exotic trees with long green fronds, plants with startling scarlet blossoms, monkeys, and a royal tiger. She recalled that Rousseau had been a working-man, painting on Sunday, his only free day, how he had never left Paris, creating his jungles after visits to the Jardin d’Acclimatation and the Jardin des Plantes. What a genius! This was not imitation but creation. And yet there were those who asserted that he painted in this sure way through naïveté. Looking at the picture, Campaspe realized that the artist had been entirely aware of what he was doing, that he must have been certain even on his darkest days that eventual recognition would come to him. Work such as this--Campaspe was irresistibly reminded of Lucas Cranach--was assuredly no accident. She pondered over this idea. She was sitting on the floor in the centre of the drawing-room, still regarding the pictures, set up against the wall, when Bunny was announced.
Hello, Bunny, she called out, without rising, when he was shown in.
Hello, ’paspe. His manner was solemn. What have you got here?
Oh! some pictures Fannie sent me. Aren’t they divine? I could eat that tiger of Rousseau’s.
They _are_ good. There’s something about that jungle which suggests to me what I have been trying to do in my rotten music.
Your music is as good as the picture, she retorted.
I can’t compose any longer, ’paspe.
He had been standing, but now she rose to her feet and led him to the divan.
Poor Bunny.
I wish I’d never seen her!
Bunny! Don’t forget the music she made you write!
I don’t give a damn about that! I can’t do it any more. I’m no good at all now. It’s all gone ... with her. If I only had her back!
Campaspe changed the subject abruptly: What’s Paul doing? He hasn’t been near me.
Harold’s father sent him another cheque; so he’s happy. All he needs, for happiness, Bunny added bitterly, is money. Drains received a cheque, too, and he’s gone off with the Duke.
Back to Ronald.
Everybody goes back to Ronald, Bunny remarked with some resentment. He bought a bulldog before he left town, he continued inconsequentially.
Whatever will he do with it?
Campaspe’s mind reverted to the dog-fight in the garden. There was a moment’s silence, during which she gazed intently at the Rousseau. Bunny’s expression was most lugubrious.
A perfectly divine tiger! she repeated at last, as if speaking to herself.
’paspe, I don’t believe you’ve been listening!
... heard every word.
Do you know what Zimbule is doing?
She rose slowly, still scrutinizing the painting which held her fancy.
No. What? Her manner was preoccupied.
Moving pictures. Angel. Apartment. Riverside Drive.
My dear Bunny, I believe you are a detective. Do you know who he is?
Yes, I do. His tone was hard and there was a challenge to interrogation in it. Nevertheless, Campaspe did not ask the question Bunny expected to hear.
Where is she living? she queried, lightly.
The Lombardy.
Campaspe smiled. I think I’ll send her a picture.
She won’t like it. She wouldn’t understand _these_. He swept his arm around in a vague gesture. It was characteristic of Bunny’s movements that they were never definite and forceful.
Oh! I wouldn’t send her one of these. I like them too well myself. I’ll send her the pictures I take down when I hang these.
I’m sure she has plenty of pictures. The boy was actually malicious.
No doubt, but one can always use a few more. Possibly she cares for change as much as I do.
* * * * *
Campaspe did not carry out her threat. Instead, she made a resolution to call on Zimbule in a day or so. She had heard the story of Harold’s disappearance, or as much of it as she needed to hear, from Alice. Her father, too, had been voluble. Where was Harold? She must know; of that these two obtuse members of her family were firmly convinced. As a matter of fact she did not, and she was making no effort to find out. When he was ready he would come to her, and, subsequently, she determined, her family should hear nothing whatever about the visit. Her father and Alice had almost put her through three degrees in their effort to drag the information out of her which they were certain that she possessed. It required very little of this kind of thing to satisfy Campaspe. Her manner assumed a crisp frigidity which her family had encountered on occasion in the past. They knew the meaning of it, and, for the moment, they withdrew their brisk importunities.
She had considered the possibility of taking Paul with her when she called on Zimbule. After a little reflection, she decided to go alone. She dressed very carefully for the adventure, wearing a smart, grey tailored costume which had just arrived from Redfern, and a black hat adorned with white wings. From her wrist dangled a cluster of crystal grapes, an inspiration of Marie El Khoury.
As her motor bore her into the unfamiliar neighbourhood, already she began to smile. She was in her best humour as she stood before the telephone operator in the elaborate hallway, which reminded her, somehow, of a scene in a Theodore Dreiser novel. She had, she was convinced, never before seen so much onyx all at once, such highly polished onyx, too. The electroliers of burnished gold, the tall gothic seats, with their rich, red velvet cushions, the purple uniforms and brass buttons of the black attendants, all played their parts in creating an effect in which she could perceive no single flaw. She recalled a happy Spanish proverb, If you want to go to the devil, at least go in a carriage!
Once she had been admitted to Zimbule’s apartment, she resumed her inquisitive appraisement, with some stupefaction at first, until she remembered that there was a trade called interior decorating. The room was Viennese (or München) in style--an amazingly acute originality for New York in 1922, Campaspe thought. The walls were brown, the furniture heavy but extremely picturesque, in the fascinatingly tortured shapes affected by modern Austrian or Bavarian cabinet-makers. Campaspe cried out with delight when she descried a porcelain stove in one corner. Over a particularly ornately constructed sofa hung a horizontal row of framed samplers, all the Scandinavian goddesses, Freya, Iduna, and the rest, done in red yarn. There were other pictures, bright amazing dancers by Schnackenberg, portraits of Maria Hagen, Peter Pathé, Anne Ehmans, and Lo Hesse, more remote conceits in black and white by Alastair, a poster for a baroque ballet by Mela Koehler, and nude, graceful pretties with cats by Raphael Kirchner. A great green and red and blue box of Baumgarten bonbons stood on a table covered with a square scarf which resembled an Italian futurist painting. Over the mantelpiece, on which two heavy vases of garnet and gold Bohemian glass seemed very much at home, hung a large picture in pure design by Jean Metzinger.
I wonder, Campaspe was thinking, if Zimbule lives up to this incongruous environment.