Part 7
He gave the letter to Drains to post, but immediately after Drains had departed on this mission, he felt the need of going out himself. A novel restlessness had besieged him. Drawing on his rain-coat, he left the house. Without being particularly conscious of where he was walking, without any desire to walk to any definite place, he directed his steps towards Gramercy Park. The rain-drops pelted his face with a welcome freshness. He did not want to go to Paul’s but he craved the opportunity of talking to somebody, and to whom else could he talk? Ki, at the door, informed him that Paul had gone out. Would he come in and wait? He declined. Too nervous to sit still, he preferred to walk around the iron-grating enclosing the park. The benches in the enclosure were deserted. The trees, drenched by the windy rain, shook drops of water on the vivid green grass.... Harold walked round and round the iron fence. A policeman in a rubber-coat stood on the corner of Lexington Avenue. On the other side of the park, Harold passed a sailor under an umbrella.... What would Alice say? Would she answer his letter at all? He felt completely miserable. Why couldn’t his father give him a position in his own home where he could meet people? He was, he assured himself, to all intents and purposes an outcast. He returned to Paul’s. Paul had not yet come in. Ki smiled. Would the gentleman wait? Harold again declined. Round and round the grating. The rain continued to fall. It was twilight.
Drains, too, was smiling, as he opened the door for Harold. How could everybody smile? And they all smiled cynically, as if they knew some secret of which he was not aware. Did they all understand why life was so cruel? Did they all comprehend the jest of the cruelty? The evening was almost a replica of his first evening in his own apartment. Drains asked what he would have for dinner ... and gave him chops, etc. Again he went early to bed with books and magazines which he did not read. He could not tolerate this waiting. He, who had been patient all his life, was becoming impatient. He lifted the receiver from the hook ... and put it back again. She had asked him, he forced himself to remember, not to telephone. Drains departed for the night. The driving rain was still beating against the window-panes. The lightning flashed occasionally and there were heavy crashes of thunder. Harold shuddered. How lonely he was! He who had been alone so much formerly, now could not suffer being alone. His circumstances had been so different then. Now he felt that the world was against him, had separated him from the one person he wanted to see. His heart almost stopped beating when the telephone bell tinkled. It was Paul. Harold’s voice registered his disappointment. Yes, he had called. No, nothing in particular. Yes, he would drop in tomorrow.
What are we going to do? Harold asked desperately.
Anything you like. We’ll decide when you arrive.
Then, quite suddenly, after the naïve manner of youth, Harold cried out for sympathy: Can I come over tonight?
Sorry, old man, Paul answered; it’s quite impossible. I have a rendezvous in a doss-house with my aged grandmother.
Realizing that he had made a mistake, Harold mumbled a good-bye. Tears streamed out of the corners of his eyes. He felt more alone, more miserable than ever. At this moment, he would have been glad to see even Drains. He tried to read, but nothing held his interest. At last, he got up and walked about, his restlessness increasing as he fed it. Suddenly his eye fell on a carafe, half-full of brandy, standing on the side-board. Grasping it, he poured out enough to fill a wine-glass, and, with much gulping, he contrived to swallow the burning fluid. Then and then only was he able to fall asleep.
* * * * *
The answer to his letter was delivered by messenger in the afternoon. The envelope, he noted, was addressed in a different hand from that which had penned the envelope containing the hundred dollar bill. Still it must be.... He tore it open. His own note, the top of the envelope neatly slit, tumbled out first. Then a letter:
Sir:--
My daughter has informed me of the manner in which you have become implicated in her affairs. I take this occasion to thank you for your assistance, if you have given assistance, but I must ask you not to pursue my daughter further. If you seek more than gratitude for what you have done, I shall be glad to send you a check. Under no circumstances, however, are you to address another letter to my daughter. Any such I shall be obliged to open and, if you persist in making her the butt of your unwelcome attentions, I shall be obliged to pay a visit to the police court myself.
very truly yours, +BECKFORD BLAKE+.
What an insult! The hideous mortification of receiving such a letter burned Harold’s cheeks with shame. And poor Alice. How must she feel? What had her father done to her? Then he suddenly remembered that he had been on the verge of telling the whole story to Paul. If he had seen Paul last evening he certainly would have told him, and Paul would have laughed. Paul surely would laugh at this story; so would Drains. With a sort of furtive intuition he began to believe that no women were innocent in the eyes of Paul and Drains. Harold felt more than ever a martyr. His life, which, it seemed, began with a mistake on the day he was born, would, he was convinced, never shape itself. All his existence, apparently, would continue to be one long mistake. Again, quite spontaneously, the idea recurred to him that he hated his father for, however unconsciously, shaping it for him. It wasn’t, he began to realize, his college years which had proved his present undoing, but his early bringing up, the inadequate and unworldly supervision of Aunt Sadi and Persia Blaine. And this was his father’s doing! To be sure, his aunt and Persia had meant well; they had loved him ... but they had not been capable of preparing him for the perils he had to face.
* * * * *
Paul, that day, and for several days following, was rather inclined to be distrait, and Harold, silent concerning the only matter which really interested him, on his part found comparatively little to say. He encountered Campaspe on several occasions, and once or twice, he fancied, he saw her looking at him with sympathy, but they were never alone, and mainly she was preoccupied with gossip about the Duke of Middlebottom, who had arrived, unaccountably, in New York _in June_.
June, he had remarked to Campaspe, is the London season; why not make it the New York season as well? I told him, Campaspe repeated in her narrative to Paul, that all he would need was an impresario to produce an opera or two, three or four ladies of society, and a climate. His answer was direct. He said, and it is perfectly true, that New York is cooler than London in the summer, that wherever I was there was sure to be society, and that he would give the opera himself. He is committed to some such plan.
Bunny and Zimbule, also, offered matter for discussion. They were much talked about and, when one wasn’t talking about them, they ran in to talk about themselves. They were settled in Bunny’s small apartment in Greenwich Village and were living a life in which love and ambition played equal parts. Bunny was composing his two bar songs and piano pieces, and he had succeeded, without much difficulty, in securing Zimbule a situation on the stage for, after a day’s reflection, she had decided that she would rather go on the stage than do anything else.
She spent days in Campaspe’s motor, and out of it in smart shops, outfitting herself at Campaspe’s expense. She was aware of her beauty and not without taste, it was discovered, when it came to adorning it, withal this taste was somewhat bizarre. She had begun by assuming such ready-made dresses as could be easily summoned from the backs of models at Bendel’s, Tappé’s and Gilbert Clark’s, but very soon, under the spell of the compliments which her really exquisite loveliness won from the lips of the attendants in these shops, she was encouraged by Campaspe, whose desire in life was to amuse herself, and whose purse was sufficiently heavy to make the carrying out of this desire facile, to go a little further along the route of self-expression. Campaspe’s philosophy was as sure at this point as at another. It was only, she frequently said, those who expected to find amusement in themselves who wandered about disconsolate and bored. Amusement was to be derived from watching others, when one permitted them to be entirely themselves. One was born with oneself and, if one were intelligent, one got to know oneself thoroughly at the age of four. Thereafter, a life of boredom intervened until the grave yawned, unless one surrounded oneself with people who were individual enough to comport themselves with some eccentricity, not to say perversity. Zimbule was not cut to any conventional pattern. She filled Campaspe’s bill.
Soon the child began to notice the difference between stuffs, the difference between patterns and colours. Warm as it was, she affected an interest in kinkob and camel’s-hair shawls, and she became aware of the sacred names of Reboux, Premet, Chéruit, and Maria Guy.
I adore her! Campaspe ejaculated one day. I can never cease to thank God that we captured her from those embracing snakes. She is the most amusing person we’ve ever discovered. She’s wholly natural, wholly an animal. I’ve never met a woman like her. When she’s hungry she eats; when she’s sleepy, she sleeps; and when she’s amorous, she loves. She’s imitative like an animal too. Having observed that I wear geraniums, she’s clever enough to realize that geraniums are not her flower. When I called for her the other day she was sporting a great bouquet of orchids. Bunny, of course, can never pay for them and so I have taken to sending her orchids every morning, developing an expensive taste. Her next lover may be rich enough to afford them. But you can never tell with Zimbule. Animals are not interested in money. If she falls in love with a rich man it will be an accident.
Bunny, it was certain, was deeply in love with Zimbule. He had no eyes for her eccentricities, but he was delighted that Campaspe had dressed her up. The practical side of these attentions dawned on him more fully when she was engaged, solely on her looks, for a good part in support of a female star. Zimbule took this engagement entirely as a matter of course. Everything with Zimbule was a matter of course. She ate, slept, lived, loved as a matter of course. And, quite naturally, like the little animal she was, she never thought at all.
* * * * *
One afternoon, the Duke of Middlebottom appeared at Paul’s apartment, and Harold was astonished by the grace and charm of Drains’s former master. The Duke immediately manifested an interest in Harold which appeared to be sincere. As for Harold, the Duke appealed to him from the beginning, without giving him the sense, which the others made him feel so constantly, that he was being made game of. The Duke was younger than Harold had expected to find him. Somehow, Harold had thought of all Dukes as middle-aged men, and this particular Duke was but scantily past thirty. He was a tall, blond English-man; his hair, of course, was curly; his cheeks were rosy, and his eyes were blue. He was always dressed to perfection, wore a monocle, and had the habit of flaunting three cornflowers as a boutonnière. His trousers flared at the bottom and his small feet were encased in round-toed French boots with cloth tops. He had very ugly hands, thick across, with short, stubby fingers with spatulate terminations, and nails which seemed never to have permitted the attentions of a manicure. Not only were they unevenly clipped; often, they were actually dirty. Another peculiarity of the Duke was that he stammered, but this apparent defect actually added to his attractiveness. His name was eponymous for a certain group that frequented the Café Royal in London and with his crest on his stationery was the motto: A thing of beauty is a boy for ever. The Duke made it a point to live by the Julian Calendar, thirteen days behind the Gregorian. In this wise he contrived to evade all unsatisfactory engagements, especially if they were complicated in any way by daylight-saving time, an American refinement of which he was utterly ignorant.
Harold found him very delightful and wondered if Drains’s strictures were part of that valet’s demoniacal cynicism. He judges everybody, thought Harold, in terms of himself and his own rotten life. It was plainly to be seen that the Duke of Middlebottom never entertained an evil thought.
Campaspe and the Duke were old friends, and they talked of Capri, from whence the Duke had recently emerged, the new English plays, the best of which, the Duke appeared to believe, were by Beaumont and Fletcher, Poiret’s inventions for the grues at Auteuil, Cocteau’s café, Le Bœuf sur le Toit, and kindred subjects. He was a charming and engaging conversationalist, and the most winning quality of his manner was its utter frankness and apparent absence of guile. Harold had been fully prepared, by advance reports, to meet an ironic epigrammatist, who perhaps removed his coat in public to inject a shot of morphia into his arm. The Duke seemed free from a mania for exhibitionism. Not only was he delightful to Harold, he was equally at his ease with Paul, and he had bestowed upon Zimbule, whom he playfully described as a sciurine oread, the accolade of his particular interest. He had made her his friend at once by promising to present her with a long string of coral beads of the valuable and rare colour of the berries of wintergreen.
At their first meeting, she had challenged his monocle.
What’d you do if it dropped and broke? she asked.
For answer, the Duke relaxed the muscles around his eye, and the glass fell to the floor, shivering into fragments. Immediately, he took another glass from his waistcoat pocket, and adjusted it.
The Duke questioned Harold regarding his tastes, and told him long stories of harmless adventures among the Italian peasantry, in which shepherd boys and bersaglieri figured in sympathetic guises. Sheep were saved, and ladies escorted through perilous mountain-passes, while banditi rained down shot from convenient posts above. There was also a harrowing, but amusing, account of the birth of a child in the compartment of a railway carriage during the prolonged passage through the Simplon Tunnel. Only once did Harold betray what he thought was a trace of affectation in the Duke when that one, being questioned, declared that he had never seen the Blue Grotto.
But you have just come from Capri!
The boy does not believe you, Campaspe interposed. Ronald never lies, Harold. Think a moment. How long have you been in New York?
Nearly three weeks.
Have you seen the Statue of Liberty?
No.
Or Grant’s Tomb?
No.
Or the Metropolitan Museum of Art?
No-o.
Or Poe’s house?
No.
Or the Bronx Zoo?
No.
Or Fraunces’ Tavern?
No.
Or the Aquarium?
No.
And you have been here three weeks. The Duke spent two or three weeks in Capri and yet you expect him to have seen the Blue Grotto!
During the progress of this dialogue there was a crescendo in Harold’s abashment, but the Duke only smiled and did not seem to be at all put out.
Youth, he remarked, is always incredulous. The Firebird, however, hasn’t t-t-t-told you the whole truth. I pass t-t-two or three weeks in Capri every year, and yet I have never seen the B-B-B-Blue Grotto.
I believe you, said Harold fervently.
I would never see Mount Ætna at T-T-Taormina, or Vesuvius at Naples if it were possible to escape them. But they see me first and then they insist that I look.
Why, asked Harold, quite ready to let this subject drop, do you call Campaspe the Firebird?
It seems natural, even inevitable, to do so. Her p-p-plumage is so brilliant. It glistens and d-d-dazzles.
Oh!
Wait. There is more. I am not thinking of the Zhar-Ptitsa of Russian legend. Rather I am making an impious in-t-t-terpretation of certain passages in the Comte de Gabalis. Probably you have not yet read that fascinating seventeenth century satirical romance in which the author, the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars, was undoubtedly poking fun at the occultists. Ironically enough, the modern Rosicrucians have taken the b-b-b-book seriously and use it as their B-B-Bible. In this delicious capolavoro, the Comte discourses with the author, somewhat after the fashion of .... Well, certainly such works as W. H. Mallock’s New Republic and Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow stem from this book.
The Comte recommends marriage with one of the immortal beings who people the elements rather than with a human; he advises cohabitation with the nymphs who swim in the water, the gnomes who inhabit the earth, the sylphs who fly in the air, or the salamanders who thrive in the fire. Campaspe, I am convinced, has married a salamander and has embraced his element. She b-b-b-burns like a clear white flame, using our emotions for fuel. Wherever there is passion, Campaspe’s incandescence increases, but she remains faithful, under all circumstances, to her salamander. Occasionally, in one of her soaring flights, she drops a fiery feather, and some poor mortal mistakes it for the living bird.
But I have married a mortal, Campaspe objected.
Your children are salamanders, was the Duke’s final word.
Harold was uncertain whether to tell Drains that he had met the Duke, but Drains saved him the trouble. As he brought in Harold’s coffee one morning, the man remarked:
I saw my old master yesterday, sir.
The Duke .... Yes, I know. I’ve met him. He isn’t a bit the sort you described.
Drains raised his eyebrows.
I described the Duke! he exclaimed. I told you that I had been in his employ, sir, but I scarcely permitted myself to go further.
You told me why you had left him, dared Harold.
Drains’s face had regained its customary imperturbability.
I cannot, of course, contradict you, sir, but I assure you, sir, that you are labouring under some misapprehension. I could never have discussed the affairs of the Duke. He is a fine gentleman, sir.
Well, for once we agree, said Harold, and he began to wonder if he had misjudged Drains.
_Chapter VII_
Ronald, Duke of Middlebottom, had taken a furnished house on West Twelfth Street for the summer, against the advice of friends who had urged the advantages of Sutton Place. The owner of this property, a woman, had individual taste, somewhat influenced by the Italian of various epochs and styles, and the Duke had added his own touches here and there. The drawing-room, a vast chamber on a level with the street-door, approached by a flight of steps, extended the full depth of the house. The walls of this room were stained a curious olive-green, and the windows were curtained with stiff draped silver-grey taffeta, bound with narrow bands of turquoise-blue. Silver and crystal candelabra were placed at convenient intervals along the walls, but no central chandelier depended from the ceiling. On the marble mantelshelf stood two Venetian glass Ethiopians, clad in white, clasping baskets of multi-coloured crisp glass flowers, from the midst of which emerged white wax candles. On a long, polished walnut table there were more glass figures, capricious examples of the art of the verrier, a Spanish Infanta of rosso Murano and black, a white-spotted black deer, a saucy red-lipped Columbine. The chairs and divans, possibly of Italian renaissance design, were covered for the season with a gay Derryvale linen. A few pictures hung on the walls: a bowl of zinnias by Florine Stettheimer, orchids by Charles Demuth, and magnified, scarlet cannas by Georgia O’Keeffe. The hallway, painted a bright Italian blue, sprinkled with tiny blue stars, ran parallel with the drawing-room from the front to the back of the house, leading down a flight of steps into the garden in the rear, where a shell-walk wandered in and out between tiny beds of azure flowers, planted under symmetrical chestnut-trees and catalpas with their heart-shaped leaves and ridiculously long and slender seed-pods, to a fountain in the middle of the back wall, a fountain inspired by Nijinsky’s interpretation of Mallarmé’s faun. A huge umbrella, striped orange and black, almost like the canopy of a pavilion, protected a black table and chairs from the sunglare. The dining-room was in the basement and it had been the happy fancy of its mistress to hang the walls with an old-fashioned paper, printed in pink and white stripes after the manner of stick candy. On these walls she had fastened by means of pins a few ribald covers torn off Le Rire and La Vie Parisienne. The prim little black marble mantelshelf held half a dozen painted sugar statuettes, ravished from a Houston Street pasticceria, representing Sicilian banditi, not unmenacing, and bland shepherdesses with thick ankles, guarding shapeless sheep. The table, at dinner, was usually a confusion of fragile, opaque Bristol Glass, with decorations of birds and flowers, old Staffordshire china, and ornaments of artificial grapes and crystal, laid on the bare walnut board. Sometimes a great bronze Buddha panted on his back in a bowl of nasturtiums, his hexagonal belly looming high above the posies.
The second floor was divided into two bedrooms, the walls of one of which were hung with an old eighteenth century paper, depicting rather fanciful South Sea Islanders enjoying themselves in the shade of great palm-trees, while other cannibals with formidable spears navigated the sea in extravagant canoes. This was the back chamber, and because it overlooked the garden and was free from the noises of the street, the Duke had chosen it for his own. When the Duke moved into a hotel room, the decorations of which were distasteful to him, he frequently sent for a paper-hanger and ordered the room repapered. He did not go so far in this instance, but he had contrived to conceal a good part of the pseudo-Marquesan landscape with shungwa, a special class of Japanese prints, erotic and often obscene. The room was always in the uttermost disorder, as most of his personal belongings and the books and pictures and knick-knacks which he was constantly picking up were littered within its four walls. A gate-legged table in the corner served as an uneasy resting place for a bronze torso by Dujam Penic, the Serbian sculptor, a pair of yellow-green glass candlesticks in the shape of inverted dolphins, De Berg van Licht by Louis Couperus, boxes of cravats from Charvet, consignments of pleasant odours from Bichara, and a hand-illuminated quotation from Goethe:
Hätte Gott mich anders gewollt, Er hätte mich anders gebaut;