Of course he answered yes, and they waited. Lanny, who had just put his car in storage, hired one, and drove to the Croydon airport. He knew how carefully Beauty had thought out her plans, and he knew how she hated the idea of flying and had never done it; he guessed that this sudden change meant serious trouble. When she stepped out of the plane he saw her face was set grimly. “What is it, dear?” he asked, and she answered: “Kurt is going to be married.”
He was so sorry for her, he caught her in his arms right there; but she said: “I’ve had it out with myself, and it’s all over. Forget it.”
There were passports and customs formalities to be arranged, and he knew she wouldn’t want the officials to see tears in her eyes. “Business as usual,” was the plucky English formula, so he squeezed her hand and went ahead helping her with the practical affairs. After they were in the car, and before he started it, she took a letter from her handbag and gave it to him. He sat and read:
Dear Beauty:
This is the letter which you have so many times told me I would some day write to you. It is hard to do, but your kindness and common sense have made it possible.
I have been told by my father’s physician that he is not likely to live many years longer, and so I have to consider his happiness, if ever. Hitherto he has made little objection to our relationship, but of course it is not what he has hoped for, and now he has put it up to me in a way which I have not felt able to refuse. In short, dear Beauty, I am planning to be married, so it will not be possible for me to return to Bienvenu.
Knowing your goodness, I am sure you will be glad to hear that the young woman whom my parents have chosen is one with whom I can be happy. She is nineteen, and while she has not your beauty, over which the world has raved, she is of the type which I admire; her family are old friends of ours, so my parents know her character and qualifications for wifehood. She is gentle and good, and I have made certain of her feelings toward me before writing you this news. I count upon your friendship, so many times manifested, to appreciate my position and understand that I could not refuse the duty which has been forced upon me here.
As you know, you have saved my life, and you must believe that my gratitude will never cease. I did what I could in my inadequate way to repay you. The happiness which you gave me for eight years I shall never forget, nor the wisdom and loyalty. If I possessed the magic to make you twenty years younger—and if you were not a rich woman—I would take you to my parents and they would love you also. But they feel about me as you feel about Lanny—they want me to have a family, and good sense as well as tradition is on their side. I write this with tears in my eyes and I know you will read it in the same way. Show this letter to Lanny and ask him to forgive me and permit me to think of him always as a dearly loved brother. Explain matters as you think best to little Marceline, and let her remain my adopted daughter as well as pupil. I hope that in the years to come we need not always be strangers, and I hope that you may find the happiness for which you were made and which you have deserved.
Adieu, dear Beauty. From now on, your half-brother and half-son,
Kurt.
“Don’t say anything about it to the others,” Beauty commanded, with hands clenched tightly. “I don’t want to be a wet blanket. I came because I felt I must have a change of scene.”
“Of course!” he exclaimed. “I am glad, and the others will be, too.”
“This thing has been hanging over me, and I suppose it’s better to have it over with.” She only half meant it, but it was good propaganda.
He started talking about the people he had met in London, the plays he had seen and the exhibition. The “season” had been a gay one; the country was recovering from the great strike, and everybody was making money again. Now and then he would see out of the corner of his eye that his mother was wiping away a tear, but he pretended not to notice. There were eight kind friends waiting for her, and the stimulus of companionship was what she lived by. “What shall I tell them, Lanny? I mean—why I came.”
“Just say you couldn’t miss the fun. That will please them all. But don’t have your eyes red.”
“Are they?” She got the little mirror out of her vanity bag; so he knew she was going to survive.
XII
The Bessie Budd put to sea, with her namesake and the other guests all determined to be happy, and succeeding as well as possible in an unhappy world. It was really too much to expect that Beauty wouldn’t mention her secret; first she told Nina, who in turn told Rick; Lanny told Rosemary, and presently Beauty was tempted to unburden her soul to a kind Jewish mother who had no social pretensions and therefore made it unnecessary for other people to have any. These two female elders enjoyed exchanging wisdom, mostly in the form of personalities, as is the female way.
The marriage arrangements of this strictly brought-up mother of Jerusalem had been made by her parents through the agency of a schadchen, or marriage broker. To Beauty it seemed romantic to have been married in a tenement room, to have stuck to one poverty-burdened man and seen him become the owner of a palace and a private yacht, and seen your first-born make his debut in Carnegie Hall. Mama Robin didn’t say that to her it seemed romantic to have run away from home, and to have been the adored of three remarkable men and the mother of a fourth; but she listened with eagerness to Beauty’s tales about high life, and if she felt moral reprobation she kept it locked in her own bosom. She had known about Kurt Meissner for a long time, and had foreseen the grief that was coming; she was interested to be present at the dénouement, and to provide a receptacle for all the tears her fair but frail guest might desire to shed.
The little yacht slid over the still blue waters to Oslo. The munificent host hadn’t been content with the piano which was fixed in the saloon; he had got an extra one on little rubber-tired wheels, so that it could be rolled onto the deck and made fast there. Hansi did his practicing in his cabin, but if you requested it he would bring his fiddle on deck, and Lanny or Freddi would play his accompaniments, and the cruise of the Bessie Budd resembled Rubinstein’s Ocean Symphony. Johannes had been to his bookseller’s again, and ordered eleven meters of books for the saloon of a gentleman’s yacht, and there they were, safely shut up in glass cases to keep them from spilling. There was something for every taste, and their owner, who had never had time for reading, now proceeded to acquire culture with the same speed and efficiency he had displayed in acquiring ownership of industrial establishments throughout Germany.
He was interested in talking to all these people, who had come from social groups so far removed from his own; he was not frightened by any of their unusual ideas, not even those of a baronet’s son. As for a countess, Johannes had the idea that she would prove not so very different from Mama Robin under the skin. They got along quite amiably; for Rosemary, Countess of Sandhaven, had that comfortable sense of superiority which is so very superior that it never has to assert itself, but takes it for granted. To her the owner of a yacht and the steward of a yacht each had his separate functions; the owner put everything on board at her disposal, while the steward performed the physical labor of bringing things to her, and each had his proper place and knew it. Lanny also had his duties, and performed them without too great reluctance; he was the only male on board who played bridge acceptably, and when Beauty, Nina, and Rosemary united their demands there was no escape for him.
XIII
The Bessie Budd followed in the long-vanished track of the Bluebird up the Norwegian coast. Beauty remembered the places, and noted the changes—there weren’t many. She told about this place and that; she knew where the great waterfalls were, and the saeters to which you could be driven in a car. Up on that mountain slope was one of the very old farmhouses with a hole in the roof for a chimney; beyond that village was a house that had a tree growing in the roof to hold the turf—perhaps it had grown too heavy in fourteen years. Now and then Lanny would recognize a scene from one of Marcel’s paintings; a great moment when Johannes cried: �
��Look, Mama, there is the place that is in our upstairs hall!”
Beautiful rocky shores, dark blue waters, towering mountains! The yacht went all the way north to the Arctic Circle, where there is no night in midsummer. Lanny had read in his anthology of English poetry about “the shore where loud Lofoden whirls to death the roaring whale,” but he had never learned who or what Lofoden was. Now he learned that it was a group of islands much frequented by fishermen, but he couldn’t seem to find any who had ever heard a whale roar.
The yacht put in to buy supplies at the little port of Narvik, where the Swedish iron ore was brought down in long trains of dump-cars, and day and night there echoed through the narrow fiord the sound of heavy minerals sliding down chutes into the oreships. The visitors were plain mortals with no gift of second sight, so they heard no other sounds: no shattering crash of shells, no airplane bombs bursting among the docks and loading machinery; no sheets of white flame, no shrieks of dying men, no rush of waters closing over vessels going down into the darkness. Wait a few more summers, O trim white Bessie Budd, and come back to loud Lofoden once again!
30
Birds of Passage
I
On board the Bessie Budd, Lanny and his lady were as happy as the prince and princess in a fairy-tale; but as the cruise approached its end a tiny rift began to develop between them. “Where do we go from here?” It appeared that the circumstances of their lives were in conflict; Rosemary had her splendid manor house and her children, while Lanny had his home, his mother and his half-sister, and these various possessions were hard to fit into one pattern.
On the Riviera Lanny had learned of some pictures that might be sold, and he had promised to inspect them in September; Rosemary had promised her children to be with them after the cruise, and also she had friends whom she wanted to see. All right, Lanny would go home and attend to his job, and then he would come back to England, and stay—how long? Rosemary wanted to be with the children until after Christmas; since Lanny hadn’t been at home at that season for many years, he could surely afford to miss one more!
But it wasn’t so pleasant for Lanny at Rosemary’s home. He had to pretend to be a guest, and there had to be other guests, to serve as informal chaperons; and whatever he and Rosemary did that was not according to the code of Queen Victoria had to be clandestine. If they went up to London they traveled separately, and stayed at an obscure hotel, and Rosemary was not registered under her own name. All this was inconvenient for a businessman, and seemed rather futile, because if anyone had wished to employ detectives, these wouldn’t have had any trouble in following Lanny.
What was the reason for all this? He could never be quite sure. Didn’t Rosemary trust her husband entirely? She wouldn’t admit it, and perhaps protected him even in her own thoughts. Impossible that an English earl might turn out to be a cad! Lanny knew the law—if Bertie proved one act of infidelity, he could divorce her, turn her out of her home, deprive her of her rights to her children. In that case it would be up to Lanny to marry her, and he would like nothing better; but apparently the Countess of Sandhaven wasn’t satisfied with that solution of her problem.
So there were many difficulties. It was England, not Provence, and the proprieties must be observed. The servants must not be allowed to know that Lanny and Rosemary were lovers. They would know really, but not officially. Robbie Budd said that change in England was like the small hand of your watch; it moved, but so very slowly that no one had ever seen the motion. Lanny could comfort himself with the reflection that a century or two earlier Bertie would have challenged him to a duel, and a century or two earlier still Bertie’s henchmen would have run him through with their swords.
The young art authority became more than ever a bird of passage, flitting back and forth between the Mediterranean and the English Channel, but having no regular seasons like other birds. When he could persuade his sweetheart to stay at Juan, he provided her with every comfort and some luxuries; but it appeared to be a matter of prestige with her to make him spend half his time in or about her haunts; In order to prove that he loved her he had to be damned uncomfortable: he had to miss his music, his books, and his regular habits, to say nothing of his mother and his half-sister. Marceline acquired the place of a stepchild in Rosemary’s life, and her children became stepchildren to Lanny—and it is well known that his relationship is a perilous one. Little inconveniences produce larger jangles, and Cupid goes off in a corner by himself and sulks.
II
Marceline was ten years old, a slender, graceful child, full of eager gaiety. She was at about the same age as Bess when Lanny had first known her in Connecticut, and the difference between them made a study in heredity. Marceline was less intellectual than the daughter of Esther Budd; less concerned to know how the wheels went round, and rarely plaguing you with questions that you couldn’t answer. Nor did she worry about whether what she was doing was right; she acted from the impulse of her heart, and if she was fond of you that was enough. She was the daughter of an artist, and would stand for a long time watching a gaily colored butterfly, drifting from flower to flower in the patio of her home; a sunset would cause her to lose herself as her father had done. When Lanny played the piano, she didn’t want to sit and listen like Bess; every pulse of the music was a call to her feet.
Lanny had taught her all about her father. She had seen his paintings until they had become a part of her life. Lanny had related them to Marcel’s life; so the child was conscious of being a daughter of France; she knew its recent tragic story, and the part her father had played in it. She was her mother’s daughter also, and couldn’t well forget it, with the mother right there to set her an example of beauty culture, to serve as a walking encyclopedia of fashion, of colors, of fabrics, methods of cutting and arranging them, and of displaying or concealing the feminine form divine. There was a dressing-table loaded with perfumes and cosmetics, all in the prettiest jars and bottles labeled with the most seductive names. There were Beauty’s smart friends coming in at all hours to make use of these allurements, keeping up a chatter about them, their uses and effects. Marceline was a little primper, a little modiste, a little coquette.
Also there were the servants, who exercise great influence upon children everywhere, and nowhere more than in Provence, where they consider themselves members of the family, tell you about themselves and their families, give advice about yourself and yours. Leese, the cook, had gradually promoted herself to the position of housekeeper, with the power to hire and fire; so there were two families on the estate, that of the mistress and that of the servant, and neither could have got along without the other. Leese and her nieces and cousins all had their ideas and taught them to the child. When she was kind they adored her, when she was beautiful they raved over her; she ate their foods, spoke their dialect, danced their gay and lively steps.
Also a German musician, a former foe, had played his part in the shaping of the little one’s character. Kurt had taught her discipline and obedience, and it was a serious matter for her when his influence was withdrawn. When Lanny came back in September he saw that she had already made note of the change; she could now have her way with the servants and presently she was having it with her mother. Lanny had the unpleasant duty of interfering; it wasn’t according to his nature, but he, too, had learned a lot from Kurt, and would plead with Beauty to realize the importance of controlling a child’s whims. Beauty would agree, and do her best—but she was part child herself, and needed someone to control her.
There was a gaping cavity in Bienvenu where Kurt had been: the deserted studio, the piano from which came no more rolling thunder; his room, his bed, the empty closets. Beauty had told the servants to pack up all his things and ship them to him, and this had been done: clothes, music, books, assortment of noise-making apparatus. The studio was locked up, and Beauty couldn’t bear to go near it. But the place in her heart was not so easily shut, and Lanny saw her eyes red many a time.
What was she g
oing to do about it? She swore that she was through with men forever, but Lanny didn’t have to believe this; he took it for granted that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life alone, and the question was, what sort of man would it be? If only she would pick some settled retired businessman, like this Mr. Armitage with whom Sophie was getting along so well! But Beauty was flighty, and still had romantic notions buried somewhere inside. Of course, the man who won the love of Madame Detaze, veuve, would step into a warm and well-padded nest, and candidates presented themselves promptly. Lanny began to worry about the sort of men who came to this playground of Europe, and he took counsel with Sophie Timmons and Emily Chattersworth as to how to find a proper beau for his too charming widowed mother. The ladies found this delightful, and the story spread up and down the Coast of Pleasure.
III
Isadora Duncan came back to the Riviera. She put up at a little inn in Juan-les-Pins, and Beauty was quite indignant about it, saying that she would be expecting Lanny to pay the bills. The dancer had a woman friend with her, an American who was supposed to have money, but said that she had spent it all getting Isadora “out of hock.” Beauty said that was the way they all did, they hid their money and said they were broke, trying to put the burden off on others. Well, Beauty was broke, too; she hadn’t paid her dress bills for last season, and here was a new season almost upon them, and was she to go about naked—or to stay at home and die of loneliness and grief?
Between Two Worlds Page 67
