by Fannie Hurst
True, it was not for the likes of Ray, the birds of nondescript plumage, that these notes actually were intended. But a hand reaching in quickly could flip one. Grabber, keeper!
Then, horrible and inevitable to these tables, was the outer fringe of the outer fringe, elderly women, with bands of black velvet worn ornamentally to cover the cables in their necks, their talons covered with gold rings and clutching onto evening purses of beads and sequins. Their weaving, witchlike hands and dry-as-powder fingers were what made it a little horrible to clutch for spoils, even if you never consciously did so unless these spoils were waved almost literally in your direction. The necky reaching from the last rows gave one a sick feeling.
Once she found herself caught in an embroil of shrill angry French which came hurtling at her from a superbly gowned manikin, who, in a carrot-colored wig, had been leaning over the chair of a special friend, whose reach over his shoulder with a five-hundred-franc note had seemed so willy-nilly to Ray, eager to play, that she had let her hand close upon it. Upon the swift avalanche of high and furious French she had surrendered immediately, of course, and slipped from the group, ashamed.
But in general, if one stood about patiently of an evening, something in the gay carnival of the gambling spirit usually found its way to you.
A small fifty-franc stake, perhaps. Sufficient to enable her to lean in for a bet or two.
One evening, on a hundred-franc stake, she had gone home with a thousand. But usually her luck was more evasive. Small risks, small winnings, if any, but a general average profit, because she was conservative and would dare to quit with a narrow surplus.
This year that Walter and Corinne had come over without the children, leaving Arnold at one of the summer camps just then coming into vogue, Richard to his new rôle in the banking house, and Irma visiting the Mordecai Pooles, said to be the wealthiest family of Spanish Jews in America, an amusing and daring thing happened two or three times, between Walter, at play at the baccarat table, and Ray on the fringe.
Without ever the slightest note of recognition between them, he had tossed her of his chips and, leaning over his very shoulder so that they had touched, she had placed them. On the occasions that Corinne did not join him at the Casino—always of course with an impeccable discretion—this was amusingly possible. On the evenings that Corinne, only mildly interested, did join the hotel contingent of wives, she usually merely ambled aimlessly about the various rooms while Walter played, ending by interrupting his game long enough to have him tuck her into the hotel omnibus, which plied between the Bernasçon and the Casino, and take her home. Usually he caught the same bus back to the Casino, resuming his rather moderate game, or watching, with a remote kind of disapproval, the speculations of men like the Mohammedan prince out of India, whose winnings or losings ran nightly into tens of thousands, and who tipped his croupiers sums that were legendary the resort and the Riviera over. Behind the shoulders of this notoriously naughty potentate, who resembled Othello in an uneven walnut-juice makeup, there hung and glittered, like the beautiful and exotic small birds of an aviary, the pick of the manikins, the cocottes, the birds of Paris and paradise, many of whom wore his jewels in diamond, emerald, and ruby service stripes up their arms.
An American woman, reputed to be worth forty millions, had sat opposite Walter one of the nights Ray had so daringly hovered at his shoulder and, without a flicker of her stiff and blackened lashes, or her startling lips, which were painted the color and almost the shape of a large strawberry, had lost to the bank the equivalent of eighteen thousand dollars. And this at one of the more conservative tables.
In such a group, the figure of Walter, the rather short, only slightly stout, graying, and by no means undistinguished figure of the American banker—who, notoriously able to afford a spectacular place at the gaming table, played within a modest budget—was not remarkable. The pearls on his wife were. Even here. And that year, when Irma arrived, wearing the six-carat engagement ring of Mordecai Poole, II, the Mohammedan prince, famed for his emeralds, appraised hers along with the best of his own.
Yes, the pearls of Corinne were remarkable, even here, and so, in a war-stripped Europe, were the size of Walter’s alleged fortune and his vast indulgence to his womenfolk and the assiduity with which his aim in life seemed to be to place himself at their beck and call. One of the average American big-business men, with not much grace, but whose families, as their men trailed them so tirelessly across the high spots of Europe, seemed so sure of their place in the sun. Spoiled, pampered, overindulged, none-too-reverent families of men who, with fear of hardening of the arteries in their hearts, traveled in high-power cars over Europe in search of lowered blood pressure, while their women acquired Paris wardrobes, impoverished noblemen, and imitated accents, which in turn were imitated on the stages of the music halls of Great Britain and the Continent.
Sometimes, watching Walter’s face, from the vantage of a remote corner of the room, the miracle of the consistency of her love for this man, which had so long ago passed her understanding, smote her again and again. A face which, graying, became a Jewish face, sharpening, in the years she had known it, from the unbattered roundness of youth to plane surfaces and angles. Triangles for cheeks by now, as if the flesh had run downhill off them into little sacs at the base of the jowls. The nose stronger, and more prominent and more aquiline, because the face was leaner. A man unremarkable in a crowd, certainly in that crowd of the world’s cosmopolites, yet continuing to be remarkable to her, in a way that, even gazing at him, as he sat, jaws locked, over gaming stakes that were mere pennies to him, was to feel the something that was akin to, and even transcended what had washed over her that day at the curb of the C. H. and D.
It was as if, with her very breathing, as it rose and fell, she could say over and over to herself, as she sometimes did when she sat thinking of him as she waited, or sewed, “Darling, darling, darling.” The clock on the mantel, the wheels on the railroad track, could say that for her. All the little rhythms, the humming of a sewing machine, the beating of an omelet. Darling. Darling.
It was one of the easy summers. It was a summer that in many ways measured up to and even surpassed the old ones at Cape May, when there had been time for walks along the beach. Come to think about it, this was infinitely better than any other summer. The Meyer Friedlanders from Mannheim and Frankfurt-am-Main, an impressive group of handsome, opulent, and overweight Frauen and Herren, with contingents of daughters, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, maids, nurses, and Fräuleins, had joined their American cousins at the Bernasçon that year. There was scarcely an hour of the day or evening, that Corinne, in her glory, was not occupied with these vigorous and extraordinarily modish German women, who loved to scour the local shops in search of embroidered linen, drive motor-loads to neighboring resorts, and evenings, while the men gathered at the Casino, assemble in the hotel lobbies or gardens for bridge or incessant and animated talk of incessant and animated family nature.
It left Walter more than ordinarily free to lunch in the tiny suite in the infinitesimal hotel buried beneath the hill that shouldered the Bernasçon. A chromo of a pair of rooms that smelled of its carpet, and tasted of its staleness.
But what luncheons could be served there, on a table drawn up beside a window that looked out upon a small garden where guests could sit under tin umbrellas and sip coffee or liqueur! The hors-d’oeuvres variés, omelette fines herbes, poulette en casserole with all the fresh green vegetables prescribed by Walter’s diet. Chianti in its wicker cradle, the long, crisp French bread (forbidden in Walter’s diet). Assorted cheeses, served on a board, and from which you could sliver your choice. Fruits, so much smaller and less juicy than at home, but which somehow tasted so much better, especially if you peeled and cut and ate them with your knife and fork, in the killing fashion of these Europeans. It was like a picnic. It threw you into a gay, irresponsible mood. And away from the banking house, away from the affairs that pressed in upon him, away from
the more formal routine of the Bernasçon, something let down in Walter. He became younger than she had ever known him in his youth. They became mimes together, aping the Mohammedan prince; aping the ex-mistress of a king, who played her baccarat without ever seeming to open her eyes; aping Mrs. August Friedlander, who wore a stomacher of real pearls and whose stomach was large; aping M. Damlier Printemps, whose monocle was set in a rim of tiny emeralds, and his son-in-law Prince Laski of Poland, who notoriously purchased diamond and emerald bracelets for his mistresses at his father-in-law’s world-famous jewelry emporium. One day Ray dressed up the Babe in a spangled shawl, with an aigret of broomstraws on his head, to impersonate a famous dowager, Lady Innescourt, who had a system, and played her boule at the cheap tables to constant cabalistic calculations on a paper pad.
And when, so absurd were the antics of the Babe in his scarf, her hilarity became a little hysterical, Walter caught her to him and, in a way that had not occurred for years, kissed her with a flash of youth and an old vitality in his embrace that left her with an old sweet limpness. It was as if the reincarnations of their youth had leaned into these bright fleeting days of this summer at Aix. There was so little talk of the world that lay too heavily upon him. Even the children were scarcely discussed. No public addresses to be worried over and memorized. No typing or scouting about for catalogues or art-dealers’ quotations. None of the racking, momentous, and highly special crises of finance that had harassed him throughout the period of the war. Not even the usually daily sheaves of cables from the banking house were permitted to come through to him this summer. As Walter himself put it, this was a case of taking a complete rest or having one for which he was not ready forced upon him.
Ray suspected that part of his docility to this complete business detachment, which was not characteristic of him, was due to an element of scare thrown into him by an attack of acute indigestion that had laid him low during several days of the sojourn at Paris. As a matter of fact, the cause of the sharp gastric attack was easily traceable to his inability to resist the compensations of the table. Before rich foods that were palatable to him, he became the small boy, throwing discretion to the winds and forgetting past after-dinner adversities in the gratifications of the moment.
“I’ll have a little of this, even if it kills me,” was his almost invariable comment upon surrender.
To demur, or withhold from the table certain of his favorite dishes, such as richly potted roasts, cheese Torten, pickled delicacies, which were sure to incur from him later expressions of regret, was to arouse his immediate irritation, even anger.
“Don’t treat me like a child. I know what is good for me and what isn’t. My, how I dislike all this interfering.” But in any event, the attack in Paris had not been without its effect. “I know what ails me better than those French doctors. The attack had nothing at all to do with the number of those little escargots I ate at Prunier’s. It’s complete rest I need, and I’m getting it.”
Just the same, he was a little chastened that summer at Aix, went through a double term of the cure with a sort of shamefaced regard for his diet that, because it was so boyish, hurt her.
“None of that hors-d’oeuvre for me tonight, Ray. Not hungry for it.” The face of the matter, of course, was that he wanted nothing more than the assorted array of salads, tinned fish, cunningly piled artichoke hearts, pickled mushrooms, pâté de foie gras, coiled anchovies with hearts made of their own paste, caviar in beds of ice, endive stuffed with Roquefort; and the pathetic little evasion hurt her. It was not the evasion in itself that hurt, or the self-denial, so much as the idea of the default of the flesh. Why need it be? Especially for him, who felt humiliation. If he had only known it, his debilities, at least where she was concerned, were dear. All the remainder of that summer, as she felt him consciously slowing his pace, observing his diet, leaving the Casino shortly after midnight, attending meticulously to the period set aside for his walks, massages, and rest, her tenderness flowed out to him as it would to a child in a dilemma.
Sometimes, in the evenings, when the women were attending a concert or grand opera at the fine opera house adjoining the Casino, they ventured, by way of one of the little horse-drawn barouches, for a drive along a tranquil old road in the direction of the next town, Chambéry, where trees met to form a leafy tunnel practically all of the way. The trotting horse, the rounded back of the driver, the lazily flecking whip, the lumbering of distant hills against the skyline, Walter’s fingers laced into hers, fireflies, tinkle of the semi-occasional horse that passed theirs or the still more infrequent whizz of an automobile, were part of the remote reality seen through eyelashes that had been recently kissed by Walter.
“Walter”—fingers interlaced—“I love you.”
“I love you, Ray.”
Clip. Clop.
The driver had a little song which he sang under his breath.…
“I love you, Walter.”
“I love you, Ray.”
Clip. Clop. Neither driver nor his pasteboard-looking horse troubling to ponder at the wintry-looking romance they were drawing gently through the powdery night.
“Walter,” she asked him suddenly, during one of these drives, that, as it took place, was being embalmed as precious memory to her, “have you any regrets?”
He had been lying back, his head against her shoulder, his fingers interlaced with hers. “About what?” he asked her, without moving.
“Us.”
Clip. Clop.
“When you ask me that, Ray,” he said quietly, after a long pause, “you might as well continue and ask if I have any regrets because I have hands, or because my children are healthy, or because there is a sun.”
It was she who was silent then, so long that he spoke again.
“You have held my life together, Ray. What force I have would never have been disciplined without you. I don’t always admit it, even to myself, but practically everything I am, or everything I have accomplished, has been you. The schooling of my children, the history of my business, the very pictures on my walls have been you. I know that, Ray, and when I am sane like I am now—tonight, I admit it. Me, have regrets!”
The blood began to whir in her ears of the suffusing sweetness of what he said, and yet what she had hoped for was that he would turn the question: “Have you any regrets, Ray?”
It was not only that the assurance to the contrary was bubbling at her heart to be spoken, but the question, even though prompted by her own, would have reflected a similar solicitude for herself that somehow she wanted terribly.
What, after all, had she given up in an entire lifetime that could compare with even the stolen sweetness of such an evening as this? “The only ill that can ever befall the perfection of what we have,” she told him over and over again, “is that anyone else be hurt by what we are doing, and that we must never let happen.” He knew what she meant, and invariably lifted her fingers and kissed them for this. But just the same, if only now he had leaned to her with the question, “Ray, have you any regrets?”
“No, I have no regrets, Ray, except for the lie. There would never have been a way to make her see how this aspect of my life has never encroached upon hers. It has been hard. I have suffered. But I have no regrets, Ray.”
(I. I. I. I. I. I.)
“Nor I.”
“I have needed you, Ray, every inch of the way.”
(I. I. I. I. I. I.)
“And I you.”
“I have been happier with you than I deserve.”
(I. I. I. I. I. I.)
What if, suddenly, she should throw this hand from her lap, leap from the slowly moving vehicle, and run laughing down the road, thumbing her nose back at him, screaming her derision? That would be madness; the escape of the sense of madness that sometimes pressed against the wall of her being when she felt herself, as now, beating vainly against the walls of his being, as if he were so much mortar and stone.…
He lifted her hand suddenly and pressed it again
st his brow. “I’ve a headache. I like to feel your hand. I’m so tired, Ray. It rests me to be with you.”
For an hour longer they rode at snail’s pace along the quiet, tree-laced road, and presently he fell asleep with his head against her numb shoulder, and her palm against his brow.
42
The engagement of Irma to Mordecai II, eldest son of Mordecai Poole, founder and president of the North American Coffee and Mocha Company, brought to an abrupt ending a midsummer that was filled with the little perfections of occasions such as these.
Happening, as she had beheld it happen, through the eyes of Walter, the affair of this betrothal, nevertheless, when it actually precipitated itself, came as a shock to him.
“Why, Walter, you act as if something dreadful had occurred, instead of something which you had not only been expecting, but hoped for.”
They had been seated in her little sitting room, reading aloud from the Paris Herald the considerable announcement of the engagement party that had been held a few evenings previous in the gardens of the Hotel Bernasçon.
At this remark, one of the familiar gusts of anger, similar to the one inspired by her remark about the back streets of his life, swept him.
“You talk as if I’d been trying to marry her off.”
“Nonsense, Walter! But you know yourself, when Irma decided to stay back this summer and visit the Pooles and then come over later with Richard, you suspected what was going to happen. You told me as much.”
“You women have a set of mental processes that are beyond me. You and her mother had this thing arranged in your minds before the two ever met. If I had my way she wouldn’t be thinking of marriage for another five years.”
She sat very still at that, flushing with a suddenly tapped flood of bitterness and strange pleasure.… “You and her mother.”
