The Bohemian Girl

by Frances Vernon

  I make this offer in affection and pity, but if you reject it, and above all if you cease to live as discreetly as I must be grateful that you have done till now, I think we cannot even meet.

  This letter had made Diana hysterically angry. She had received another letter today, from Kitty, who had written only because last week Edward had come to visit her examine her minutely in the course of a acid, fascinating little talk. Diana had showed herself to him as a bitter, passionate, elegant feminist, a believer in the right of both sexes to love as they pleased or at least to be equally censured.

  But as you seem to have discovered, Kitty wrote, it is useless to rebel against the way of the world. As a believer in Women’s Rights, could you not have chosen a less old-fashioned profession? I don’t, of course, mean to mock you or cause you more pain than you must be suffering already! What an odd girl you always were – to think that a girl so well bred as you should have ended up no better, than many a pretty girl from the East End. And all through your own deliberate choice! That is what old Lady Blentham and Edward and I find so hard to forgive.

  So, thought Diana, throwing this into the fire, dear Mamma and Kitty are very friendly now. How her style of writing has improved! Quite the lady she is! The corner of Diana’s mouth was twitching uncontrollably though she had never suffered from a tic before.

  She heard Julian’s voice in the hall and closed her eyes.

  ‘D-diana! I say.’

  Of course, she thought, he doesn’t give one warning, he doesn’t ring the bell, he lets himself in as though this were his own house. She remembered then that Trefusis was coming.

  ‘I’m not yet dressed,’ she called over the banisters, running up from the drawing-room to the second floor. ‘I’m still changing!’

  In her bedroom Diana quickly unbuttoned her skirt, and called for Bridget to help her put on an amber silk evening dress trimmed with a little Valenciennes. It had no sleeves, and a modest decolletage. Diana was determined never to put her bosom on open display.

  At dinner they were waited on by Molly, the young housemaid, whose skirt brushed the shedding Christmas tree and made it jangle each time she came into the room. The food was good, and conversation not difficult, for Julian and Trefusis talked politely about the war. Then they all discussed the past Christmas, and moved on to the wonderful fact of its now being nineteen-hundred. Diana and Trefusis had a mathematical argument about whether the twentieth century proper had begun, or whether it would start on 1 January 1901.

  ‘Don’t leave us, don’t leave us, Diana!’ said Trefusis as Diana prepared to go upstairs after the fruit. ‘Julian tells me you can drink a glass of port and smoke a cigar with the best.’

  ‘Perfectly true,’ said Diana, and sat down again. Julian and Trefusis both offered her a cigar. Life’s going to change, she thought, it will change, it will.

  Julian considered proposing that they all visit the theatre, then thoughtlessly suggested instead that they have a game of baccarat, or whist.

  ‘But we’ve no fourth!’ exclaimed Trefusis. ‘I suggest a show. I believe Eleanora Duse is playing in something, somewhere. Oh, she’s a great beauty, but not to compare with you, Diana! You agree, Julian?’

  ‘Bridget can make a fourth,’ said Diana.

  ‘No,’ said Julian.

  ‘Yes, she plays quite well. Only whist, nothing else.’

  ‘Diana …’

  Holding her cigar, Diana ran upstairs to warn Bridget, who protested but agreed when Diana said she wanted and needed her, did not want to be alone with the men.

  The men looked rather glum when she returned to them and suggested they all move up to the drawing-room. Bridget was there, setting out the card table, and so was Alice in her dressing-gown. Two of the electric lights had failed, and the room looked dim in the light of the remaining bulb and four candles.

  ‘N-nursery games?’ said Julian, seeing Alice and setting his glass down.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ said Alice, with an Irish accent nearly as pronounced as Bridget’s. ‘Dethided to come dow’stairs.’

  ‘Dethoided t’com’ dowsteers, did ye!’ said Trefusis, and laughed. The child stuck out her tongue at him, and he was silent.

  ‘Alice can stay,’ said Diana, as the men waited for her to send her daughter out of the room. ‘You’ll be quiet and just listen, won’t you Alice?’ Alice nodded.

  ‘My good Alicky,’ said Bridget, who had removed her cap and apron in order to play whist, and had also pushed up her sleeves as though for physical labour.

  They sat down in silence, and Julian dealt the cards.

  ‘We’ll play for – shilling points,’ said Diana.

  ‘I’ll not,’ said Bridget.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Diana, meaning that she would pay her debts.

  ‘Pound points? Five-pound points? said Trefusis.

  ‘No, no,’ said Diana, watching Alice climb over the sofa.

  ‘We’ll p-play for love,’ said Julian. ‘I w-won’t p-pay D-diana’s card d-debts, my own are b-bad enough!’

  ‘Penny points,’ said Diana, ‘we can all of us afford that.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Julian.

  The game began. Bridget, whose face was ill-tempered tonight, studied the sleek, deliberately composed faces of the other three.

  ‘What an oddity you are, Diana,’ said Trefusis five minutes later.

  ‘Why, Trefusis?’ she replied, glancing at Bridget.

  Bridget spoke. ‘He means, mam, that you will have your servants in to make up the numbers for a game, and your little girl watching a scene of vice, too!’

  ‘This is not a scene of vice,’ said Diana.

  ‘My good young woman,’ smiled Trefusis, ‘I meant nothing of the kind.

  Bridget yawned, imitating a favourite gesture of Diana’s.

  ‘Then what did you mean?’ said Julian, taking no notice of Diana, or of her disgraceful maid.

  Alice was on the floor now, sitting still and slowly fingering the curtains in the window as she watched the group. Hearing Bridget speak had made her listen. Diana thought about Michael, how she had sold her soul to him and put all her eggs in one basket, and how she loved his child.

  ‘Oh,’ said Trefusis, taking a trick, ‘I meant that she could so easily be a rich woman, and doesn’t choose to be.’

  ‘An unoriginal remark of yours, you’ve made it before,’ said Julian. His face was flushed because he was so thankful that tonight, at this moment, the stammer which had shamed him all his life was under his control. It always came back after a while, but each time he would imagine being free of it forever. ‘All your life you’ve been an oddity, haven’t you Diana?’ he said, simply in order to practise his voice.

  ‘Very true,’ said Diana, so impressed by the absence of his stammer that she could not look at him. ‘I’m very much an oddity.’ She thought of Kitty the actress.

  ‘But you won’t come with me to Paris, will you?’ said Trefusis.

  ‘Are you inviting me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How much do you offer me?’

  ‘As much as you care to have. My only demand on you is that you shall outshine them all.’

  Diana glanced up and noticed suddenly that Trefusis’s face was sweating. She looked away, and her heart thumped with embarrassment.

  ‘Oh, be quiet, Trefusis,’ Julian laughed. He was not in the least uneasy now, for this was too ridiculous.

  ‘I’ll go to Paris,’ said Diana then. ‘Yes, I think I will.’ She put her cigar down on the felt of the card table and Bridget took it before it rolled off the edge. Diana looked at her cards, put them down, and was frank. ‘After all, Julian, I may as well end our little affair before you do. You are planning to end it, seriously planning, aren’t you? And you see –’ she looked at Alice, who was staring at her, and then looked away. ‘It’s the second time I’ve run away from you, I know. I’m sorry.’ If she became a full-blown tart in Paris, Diana felt, she would escape beco
ming a shady gentlewoman in Pau. But of course, she thought then, some grand tarts must end up as precisely that. Some lived with their mothers, too. I’m not going to cry, she thought, I can’t cry any more. She looked remarkably calm.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ said Trefusis in confusion, stroking his temples.

  Diana said: ‘Yes, it should be rather pleasant.’ She would learn to drive a motor-car through the Bois de Boulogne. Trefusis of course was repulsive.

  Julian bit through his port glass, just like Lady Caroline Lamb. He had been holding it steady at his lips for nearly a minute. There was no blood.

  Diana started to laugh, quite gently. Her daughter, wide-eyed, stirred the adults’ dropped cards round and round the table.

  CHAPTER 16

  A GRAND HORIZONTAL, PARIS 1900

  Trefusis was impotent, and had been so for thirty years. He had developed a positive distaste for lovemaking, which added to the dizzy strangeness of Diana’s time as his creature.

  She soon learned that it was his life’s ambition not to have a pretty mistress, but to launch a queen of courtesans upon her career, to be her discoverer and her beginning. Though he knew that Diana was not ideally suited to being the greatest of grandes cocottes, Trefusis did not regret or resent her for her beauty moved him too deeply. It was only her seeming inability to take other lovers which seriously displeased him. Diana found this hard to understand, until she realised that his worship of harlots was as simple as it was pure. His ambition had come upon him because his secret wish was not to be the protector of a great whore, but to be a great whore himself; and a courtesan must have many lovers.

  Diana was far more beautiful at twenty-six than she had been at eighteen. Then, she had been a large handsome girl, but now her whole appearance was finer; though she was still, Trefusis told her, Juno and Minerva combined, rather than mere Venus. Her perfect nose was much admired, and a sketch of her appeared in the Paris Herald only a month after her arrival. Trefusis was in transports over it.

  He made her order fabulous clothes, and liked her to change her dress three times a day. He loved to see her undress down to nudity, and very occasionally he would pat her thighs and bottom when he saw her thus. He never did more. To comb her magnificent hair and dress it when she was half-clothed was Trefusis’s most exquisite indulgence. (He was like the old gentleman Diana remembered from reading Fanny Hill, of which she no longer had a copy: the book was too much bound up with memories of Dunstanton and Violet.) He would spend hours at this, telling her meanwhile how both the Parisian haute-monde and the demi-monde were not what they had been in his youth under the Empire.

  The harlots of the sixties were every one of them superior to those of today. Liane de Pougy could not compare with Cora Pearl or Giulia Barucci. A part of the miracle of those days had been the fact that nearly all the courtesans (save Countess Castiglione) had come from backgrounds so humble they could hardly be imagined.

  ‘And now we have officers’ daughters – and English peers’ daughters – instead of bottle-washers and little grisettes.’

  ‘Like Nana?’ said Diana, but he did not understand.

  She remembered Nana’s dying to the words ‘To Berlin! To Berlin! To Berlin!’, and her bosom swelled. She thought that on the whole it would be better for Trefusis not to read the book. He would never do so now, of course, he was too keen an anti-Dreyfusard, and had in any case always considered Zola’s novels immoral and badly written, which amused her.

  Diana watched the ribbon-like veins pulsing in his old temples as, for the sixth time, Trefusis combed out her one particular, thick lock of hair, and laid it on her bosom whilst drawing back the rest, so that she looked like a painting after Lely.

  Trefusis began to tell her another story – they were all very similar – of how a courtesan had ruined a young man of family in the most unkind and dishonest, but laughable way. He grew increasingly excited, and before he had finished it he suddenly said: ‘Touch me. Touch me, Diana.’

  She put a hand on his head: it took her a moment to grasp quite what he meant.

  Bridget came in. ‘Viscount Daymien is here, mam, playing with Alice, and shall I tell him you’re engaged? Sure he’s a very handsome gentleman!’ she said crossly.

  Diana did not laugh. ‘Tell Monsieur d’Amiens I will come down shortly.’

  Trefusis struggled with himself. ‘I wish you would get rid of that – that Irish girl! You don’t understand how much harm she can do.’

  ‘If Bridget goes, I go, Trefusis.’ She was behaving according to form, making outrageous demands. Bridget, she had told him, must have the right to come and go where and when she pleased.

  ‘D’Amiens!’ said Trefusis, getting to his feet. He frowned. ‘Monsieur d’Amiens is a noted personage, Diana. And a man who actually tired of Caroline Otéro after a month.’ He paused, and become dignified. ‘You should try to attach him, my dear.’

  ‘I have attached him. Here he is, after all.’ She got up, and lifted her eyebrows. ‘Really, Trefusis!’

  ‘No, no, you can’t say that, merely because he approached you at Maxim’s! That girl said your daughter was with him, and you know, Diana –’ He stopped.

  Diana adjusted the shoulders of her dress, and looked into one of the great self-reflecting mirrors which hung on the walls. She was like a child when it came to contemplating with fascination an infinity of receding Dianas and Trefusises.

  ‘Nobody seems to have objected to Alice so far. They think she’s an amusing little monkey.’ She turned.

  ‘It’s her clothes, Diana my dear, and the questions she will ask.’

  ‘Nonsense! It’s amusing. Don’t be such an Englishman, Trefusis.’

  Presently, Diana went down to her salon. All the rooms in her house in the rue St Lazare were furnished alike, with photographs of herself, Aubusson carpets, real and imitation Louis Quinze furniture, real and copied Bouchers and Fragonards, bowls of hothouse flowers, screens, portières and nude figurines. There was a little courtyard with an atelier at the back, and there she kept some old clothes, two of Michael’s paintings, and a typewriter.

  M. d’Amiens got to his feet and kissed Diana’s hand when she came in. She saw a box on the table, and told Alice, who was very dirty, to find Bridget for a moment. ‘Un petit cadeau, Monsieur?’ she said. Diana’s French was imperfect, but easy, and she spoke with a good accent, having had a French governess when she was seventeen.

  ‘Chère madame! On m’a dit que c’est votre anniversaire aujourd’hui. Mes félicitations!’

  ‘Ce n’est pas vrai,’ smiled Diana, and opened her present. ‘Mais, merci!’ Inside the box, there was a coach-and-four in gold, jewels and enamel, obviously made by Fabergé. Diana sighed, and decided to sleep with the man who had brought it. She had been in Paris five months now, it was the middle of May, and she had as yet made no move in spite of Trefusis’s encouragement.

  ‘Ce n’est pas mal, n’est-ce pas?’ said M. d’Amiens.

  ‘Pas mal du tout,’ said Diana. The thought of taking more lovers unnerved her, though Trefusis sometimes managed to inflame desires which neither he nor she could satisfy alone. No one, she thought, would ever be able to. From her protector’s conversation, she had learnt that even the most powerful whores were expected not only to make love in the common way, but to do all manner of other things. She felt her lack of experience and excess of delicacy, and was afraid she would blush, stammer, make excuses and look a fool.

  Julian had been excessively straightforward, and so had Michael. He had merely awoken her passionate taste for a very little violence with laughter and tears, because ordinary love had never seemed to release quite enough of their energy, back in Camden Town.

  Diana raised her eyes from the monstrous jewel to the man’s full well-cut face. ‘Alors, Monsieur,’ she said, tapping her foot on the carpet, ‘je suis enchantée de vous voir! C’est dommage que Monsieur Trefusis est encore chez moi. Mais vous avez envie de moi?’ She paused throatily, moved her eye
lashes, and wondered what on earth he would expect her to do. M. d’Amiens shrugged and smiled.

  Talking French, Diana felt herself to be almost unreal, an amusing monkey like Alice. ‘J’espère qu’il prendra son congé, monsieur, quand cela nous sera convenable. Mais asseyez-vous, attendez un petit moment. Il ne nous dérangera pas aujourd’hui.’

  The man took out a cigarette. ‘Madame, vous êtes si gentille.’

  She thought she would tease with a little polite conversation. ‘Dîtes-moi, est-ce que vous êtes un bon Dreyfusard, monsieur? Et que pensez-vous de la victoire de Mafeking, et de la guerre en l’Afrique du Sud?’

  *

  Diana had no friends in Paris, and Trefusis told her that if she meant female friends, no grande coquette had any. Diana, who had three men to sleep with by the beginning of July, and sometimes forgot to charge them, tried not to be disgusted with his stories of their ostentatious rivalry. She could observe the signs of it for herself, in the Bois, at the Opéra and Comédie Française, at races at Longchamps and fashionable restaurants. They were no different from any other men.

  She wanted a woman to write to and describe her life, but she corresponded only with Arthur Cornwallis, who seemed to enjoy writing to her about himself more than reading her letters. His only comment on them was that he had always followed her most extraordinary career with devout and absorbing interest. Cornwallis was Diana’s only contact with England; and she had never been able to be fond of him. He was simply the person who, by accident, had been the most steadily present in her life since she was eighteen.

  Occasionally, Diana thought of making friends with Maud, who was slightly scandalous herself in her dowdy way, and had expressed only mild disgust at her younger sister’s conduct. But far more often, she thought of a woman who had recognised her in the London Library two days before she came over to France. The woman’s name was Clementina Wood, and she was an old acquaintance, who had met Diana in Camden Town in 1896. Soon afterwards, she and her husband Augustus had gone to live in Italy, but they had returned to London a fortnight before Diana quitted it.