Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  He gestured toward the silken couch. Herma sat down on it, and Tea-boy appeared almost instantly with tea and tiny fragrant cakes. For some reason Mr. Ming remained standing.

  “I am very honored,” he said, sipping his tea, and examining her as though he was not yet quite sure why she had come.

  “No, the pleasure is all mine. Just to look at your beautiful things …”

  “And it is for this that you have come?”

  “That, and something else.”

  “And what is the something else?”

  “I’ll tell you, if you’ll sit down and not go on standing there in that exaggeratedly respectful manner.”

  She laid her hand on the couch beside her. Setting his teacup on the table, he sat down, not where she had indicated with her hand but a foot or more from her, very correctly, with his back rigidly upright. She grasped that, with his infinite courtesy, he did not wish to presume on anything that had happened on the occasion of their previous meeting.

  “You told me once,” she began, “that you had certain influences in the world. I believe that’s the way you put it. It was apropos of your proposal of marriage to me,” she added, coloring lightly.

  “That is true. But they are influences of a rather obscure sort. In general, they are not influences that can be made to operate in … your world. Yet, as a wealthy man and a member of an important Tong, I am in contact with”—he seemed to hesitate—“certain powers of a secret sort, whose services are available to me.”

  “You mean your friends are magicians?”

  “Not exactly. Something akin to it, perhaps.” He gazed at her speculatively. “Am I right that you wish to avail yourself of my influence in some way connected with your career?”

  It seemed all very crass. But she said, “Yes.”

  “Then please explain, and I will do the utmost. I cannot promise the impossible.”

  “The Metropolitan Opera Company,” said Herma, “which is on a tour of the West, is about to present La Traviata at the Grand Opera House.”

  “Ah. Traviata. A touching story.”

  “So you go to the opera?”

  “No, I have never been to the opera. It’s not the custom for us,” he explained with a restrained sarcasm. “But there are books in which one can read about such things. The Traviata of Verdi is adapted from La Dame au camélias, a novel by Dumas fils.”

  He got up quickly from the couch, disappeared into the library, and came back with a book. “This is a first edition, signed by the author and bound in genuine morocco.” He opened it to the title page, which was spotted and yellowed with age, and passed it to her. “There are novels on similar themes in Chinese. The figure of the noble courtesan is a familiar one in classic literature.”

  Herma closed the book and set it down impatiently. She didn’t care two figs for Dumas fils. “The point is that, in this production, the part of Violetta is being sung by an antiquity called Albertina Moellendorf. The public must be protected from this incompetent person. She can’t sing the low notes in the ‘Flora, amici’ and has to have it transposed a third higher. She is a dreadful old nuisance and everyone in the company is trying to think how to get rid of her.”

  Carried away by jealousy, her occupational disease, she became quite heated. Mr. Ming evidently saw the point.

  “H’mm,” he murmured. He touched his mustache thoughtfully. “And I gather that you …”

  “It so happens that I can sing the part, by coincidence.”

  “Well, my dear child.” Mr. Ming seemed very dubious.

  Herma added, “She is staying at the Palace Hotel.”

  Mr. Ming was silent for a moment. Then he said, “And takes all her meals there?”

  “Presumably.”

  Another thoughtful silence.

  “Well, let us think what to do,” he said after a while. He hesitated for some time, seeming to choose his words with care. “There is a member of our Tong who is by profession an herbalist and homeopathic pharmacist. And, by coincidence, he has a nephew who is a culinary worker at this same Palace Hotel. But it is not really a coincidence, because everyone in Chinatown has a relative who works in the Palace Hotel. Among the Chinese it is known as the Nine-Storied House.”

  “An herbalist?”

  “A very skillful man. One might almost say a necromancer in his knowledge of the countless strange, rare, and powerful substances to be found in the vegetable world.”

  “But I don’t want to poison the lady.”

  “My dear child, who is speaking of poison? The tea you are drinking is an herb. It produces certain changes in the human body, in this case a feeling of energy and alertness. There are many other such herbs and potions, each with its different effect. It is in this, and a thousand other such things, that my friend is skilled.”

  They had finished their tea. Herma glanced at the companion on the couch beside her, with a speculative little smile. The tea had produced in her, just as he said, a feeling of energy and alertness.

  “Mr. Ming.”

  He waited for her to go on.

  “What will you do with the rest of your afternoon?”

  “Why, I don’t know,” he said as though alarmed. He touched his mustache. “Read a book perhaps.”

  “Suppose I stay for a little while,” suggested Herma, “and we could read another chapter from the Book of the Bridegroom.”

  Herma lay in the large wicker bed, content and thoughtful. Mr. Ming had fallen asleep afterward, as he seemed to do on such occasions. He breathed evenly, turned on his side away from her, and she looked upward onto the ceiling of the little wicker room which was covered, she now noticed, with an elaborately embroidered tapestry depicting a pastoral scene. The strangeness of the situation impressed her. How was it that she—once a little girl hunkered down with her rear in the air, looking at two beetles coupling in the grass in Santa Ana—had arrived at this enjoyable but very odd juxtaposition? It would not seem plausible, even in a story, for Herma, the little girl so carefully nurtured by Papa and Mama, to be lying in a Chinese gentleman’s bed in a house off Dupont Street, watched by a Ch’ing-pai vase in a shrine. And further—she pondered while the recollection of her pleasure still trickled warmly through her limbs and clung in a little honeyed place in the center of her body—was it wrong to do this with someone you didn’t love? Violetta did, until she met Alfredo. It seemed to do her no harm, and it gave pleasure to a great many people, as well as to herself. It was only when she encountered her great love in Alfredo that she began coughing and then died. If this were so, then perhaps love was really a sickness, as a Viennese doctor contended in a book she had heard about.

  Herma, gazing at the oriental shepherds and shepherdesses dallying on the tapestry over her head, concluded that, while perhaps for her as for everyone else there was a single fated love waiting in the wings, she felt no need for it at the moment. For love, of the fated or Liebestod sort, was something that carried you away, something over which you were helpless. And she didn’t care to be swept away or made helpless.

  As matters went now, it was she who chose and she who gave—even though this wasn’t the role of well-brought-up young ladies as her age understood. It was possible that she was headstrong, and even that she was wicked. She was ready to accept that. Still, it gave her satisfaction to be the one who chose.

  And who could ask for a warmer or more satisfying experience than that of giving pleasure to Mr. Ming? That kind, intelligent, sensitive, learned, unassuming, shy, passionate, and beautiful person, who, incidentally, seemed to have acquired a certain expertise in the matter in question since their last meeting—either he had been reading the chapter on “The Means for the Coming Together at the Same Instant of the Pleasures of the Bridegroom and the Bride” or he had been doing some thinking of his own on the matter. She turned to look at him, affectionately, with a little smile. He was still sound asleep.

  Herma, with care not to disturb him, opened the wicker door of the bed and slippe
d out of it. She stole across the room to the Ch’ing-pai vase in its niche. The only light in the room came from a small lamp burning at the foot of this alcove, so that the vase itself, with its alabaster clarity and translucence, seemed to shed its own effulgence into the shadowy air of the chamber. Taking the vase carefully in her two hands, she returned to the bed. Then she lay down again beside Mr. Ming, who remained just as she had left him, lying on his side with his legs slightly apart and an arm over his face.

  Gently, gently, with care not to awaken him, she brought the vase into juxtaposition with Mr. Ming’s body. It was as she had thought. The colors of both were the same, except that the Secret Color of the one was mauve, the other celadon. She ran her fingers over the one and the other. Both were silky and cool, slightly unctuous to the touch, hard as jade and yet delicate and fine in substance. It was this, finally, that woke him up.

  He turned and gazed at her, his eyes still heavy with sleep. In some way that he could not quite fathom, he found himself in bed with the two most precious objects of his universe, his beloved and his most valuable vase.

  “You are a strange child,” he sighed. “Sometimes I think I have only dreamed you.”

  “If so,” she said, “Chinese gentlemen have odd dreams.”

  15.

  The cab with Fred and Ernestine in it jogged along Mission, turned left on Second Street, and came out into Market with its busy traffic of motorcars, cabs, and wagons piled with goods. The double row of cable cars rattled along in both directions down the center of the pavement.

  “It’s only for a few days,” he explained awkwardly. “You see, by then Herma …”

  “I don’t care to hear about Herma. It’s not for Herma that I do it, dear boy, but for you.”

  She seemed quite cheerful, as always. There was perhaps a certain pallor to her complexion, and she seemed a little thinner. It would be a shame, Fred thought, if her figure were damaged by an inadequate diet.

  “It’s very kind of you, you know, Ernestine. I never expected such a—generous sacrifice.” Although of course he had expected it; that was why he had come to the rooming house to see her—on foot, since he hadn’t a coin in his pocket—and delivered his little speech in the parlor under the stern eye of Mrs. Morbihan. He had no choice. They were going to be evicted from the Larkin that afternoon.

  “Everything I have is yours, brave Fred. My hero!” This with her usual trace of irony. Crashing the Curtiss pusher really wasn’t much of a feat. Perhaps she was referring to his sliding down the drainpipe; or sliding halfway down and then falling the rest of the way with the drainpipe in his arms.

  “Where is this—place you know about?”

  “Oh, I know it well. It’s on Jackson, just off Montgomery.”

  He gave the order to the cabman. The cab went up the hill through the financial district, past the great banks and the busy and animated Montgomery Block. A few blocks farther on it drew up on Jackson in front of a dusty-looking shop with the traditional three balls displayed over the door. Fred looked about warily. It was not one of the more elegant parts of the city. It was on the edge of the Barbary Coast with its three solid blocks of dance halls, saloons, and honky-tonk joints, and the usual street loafers were standing around with one foot on the wall behind them, spitting on the sidewalk.

  Ernestine got jauntily out. Fred came around the cab and took her arm. “Wait,” he told the cabman.

  Inside they were confronted by a skeptical-looking Jewish gentleman with his arms spread and both hands flat on the counter. He wore a black vest, a yarmulke, and a pair of gold-rimmed Franklin glasses over which he peered at the world with suspicion. On the finger on the hand spread on the counter was a large and plain gold ring.

  Ernestine unpinned the brooch from her dress and set it on the counter without a word.

  He turned it over in his hands. Nothing changed in his expression. Taking off the Franklin glasses, he donned a loupe and examined the ruby through it. Then he put his glasses back on and weighed the whole brooch in an old-fashioned brass balance.

  He set it back on the counter.

  “Two hundred.”

  “There are the little diamonds around it too,” Fred pointed out.

  “Grainss of sand.”

  “But the ruby itself—”

  “The ruby hass a flaw.”

  Fred took the loupe and inspected it himself. There was a tiny pinpoint inside it with spreading rays, as though it were about to crack.

  “That’s a star. It makes it more valuable.”

  “Star sapphiress I haff heard of. Not star rubiess.”

  “Two hundred and twenty at least.”

  “A hundred and eighty, now that I think of the flaw.”

  “All right, two hundred.”

  Unlocking the cash drawer, he set the coins out onto the glass counter one after the other: ten Double Eagles.

  Fred looked dubiously at the coins on the counter. Then he turned to Ernestine. “What about the ring?” he asked, with a significant glance at the diamond on her finger.

  “Paste,” she told him, giving him a brilliant smile.

  Well, he had to take her word for it. Rather awkwardly he began picking up the coins one by one, then swept them off the counter into his hand and put them in his pocket, along with the pawn ticket. He started toward the door with Ernestine. Then he turned and came back.

  “Some change for the cab, please.”

  The pawnbroker took back one of the Double Eagles and counted out twenty silver dollars. All this weight of metal made a considerable lump in Fred’s pocket, and he distributed some of it to the other side. The pawnbroker watched him disposing of it.

  “If I had known you did not haff money for the cab,” he said with what was perhaps a touch of dry humor, “I would haff said one eighty absolutely.”

  “Good day,” said Fred.

  Back in the cab, he ordered, “To the Larkin.”

  “Larkin Hotel.”

  “No, the Larkin Theater.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ goin’ on there this time o’ day.”

  “You’re very knowledgeable about the world of the theater. Just take us to the Larkin. The stage entrance on Turk.”

  “Well, don’t get heated.” He snapped the whip and the cab clopped off rapidly down Kearney. “How do you like Frisco?”

  “We live here.”

  “Finest climate in the world. That’s Nob Hill over there on your right. The Flood Mansion. The Huntington Mansion.”

  “Fred dear, where are we going?”

  “Don’t worry, Ernestine. Everything is all right.”

  “I’m sure everything is all right, but where are we going?”

  “Just for a little outing in the cab. It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”

  “Union Square,” said the cabman without turning his head. “New Saint Francis Hotel. City o’ Paris Department Store.”

  She said, “We’re going to the Larkin, which is presided over by that reptile Khatchanigherian. This bodes no good, dear Fred, for either of us. I thought you said you were being evicted from the Larkin.”

  “What’s that over there?” asked Fred, falling in with the game.

  “That’s the Call Building. Tallest building west of Chicago. Made entirely out of poured concrete. Ain’t a brick in it.”

  “I’ll bet it’s as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.”

  “You’d win your bet, Mister. U.S. Mint on your left.”

  “What’s your horse’s name?”

  “Dolores. Say, didn’t I pick you up a month or so ago down at the Ferry Building?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You was with a young lady had two great big suitcases with her. Just up from L.A.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, mebbe not. That there’s the Larkin, and where’d you say you wanted to go?”

  “The stage entrance around on Turk.”

  “Like I say, there ain’t nothin’ goin’ on there this time o’ day
.”

  “This is Miss Lily Langtry. I am Mr. David Belasco. We are going to discuss her contract in my private office.”

  “Oh well then.”

  He drew up before the grimy doorway on Turk. The fare was eighty-five cents. Fred gave him a silver dollar and told him to keep the change. He watched while Fred handed Ernestine out of the cab.

  “See you later, Mr. Belasco.”

  With a snap of his whip he wheeled around briskly, and the cab clop-clopped its way back toward Market.

  “Insolent rascal,” breathed Ernestine.

  “Harmless,” said Fred. “An entertaining fellow, really.”

  They went in, past the watchman who knew Fred and hardly looked up from his chair propped in the doorway. He led Ernestine through the labyrinth under the stage, up a flight of stairs, and along a dark corridor. Nothing much was stirring. The dimly lit stage was visible at the other end of the corridor. Fred knocked on a door. After a moment, when there was no answer, he opened it and went in.

  A slender but muscular man in his fifties was sitting with his feet on the dressing table, reading a tattered French novel. He had a complexion like fine parchment, dark glossy hair, a mustache with twisted points, and a neat Van Dyke. He was dressed entirely in black: tight-fitting trousers, a black shirt, and a black tunic decorated with silver embroidery. On the dressing table in front of him was a bottle and a glass with a half-inch of wine in it.

  “Count?”

  Without putting down the novel he looked up and nodded.

  “I don’t believe for a minute that your name is Proxissimo.”

  “Bergonzi, at your service.”

  “Or that you’re a count.”

  “What did you wish to see me about?”

  “I believe you have need of an assistant.”

  For the first time the Count seemed to notice Ernestine. The four legs of the chair came down to the floor. He put away the novel.

  “Might. Who’d you have in mind?”

  “This is Madame Ernestine Lalange, the well-known actress and celebrity of the international theater. She’s temporarily between roles.”