Lanny got the little pair of glasses with which he had been wont to examine vessels. When he lifted the glasses to his eyes, the yacht leaped toward him, as if it were right by the shore. Oriole was the name; vaguely familiar, but he didn’t connect it at once. By the rail stood a line of people, enjoying the view; one was a tall gentleman in a white suit and yachting cap, and beside him stood a girl: Lanny could see that she was blonde and graceful, and then he saw her lift glasses to her eyes. Quickly he put his down, for it didn’t seem polite to be staring at a lady, even so far away. When he raised the glasses again the yacht had moved on, and the girl had lowered her glasses and turned her eyes to the man at her side.
Lanny smiled to himself at the thought: “Your fate is approaching!” Assuredly that was how it would happen if Beauty Budd could have her way; the girl who got Lanny would arrive on a large and elegant private yacht! Of course she must be a good girl, too, and spiritual like Parsifal Dingle and his spouse; but there was no reason why she shouldn’t be those things on a yacht belonging to her father or her brother or some other close relative.
Lanny found it amusing to tell his mother at lunchtime: “I observed my fate on its way to the yacht basin. The name sounds familiar—the Oriole.”
“Why, of course!” exclaimed Beauty, whose mind was an international Who’s Who. “The Oriole, of Baltimore. It belongs to Mr. Holdenhurst; you met him at Emily’s, three years ago.”
Lanny remembered, but vaguely, for he was interested in yacht owners only if they collected paintings, or if they took part in pro-Fascist activities. “There was a pretty girl standing by his side.”
“That would be his daughter. I forget her name. She was wearing pigtails when she was here before.”
“Well, I couldn’t tell about that,” replied the incorrigible. “She didn’t turn her back.”
“He takes a cruise every winter,” remarked his mother, ignoring his foolishness. “His health is delicate. It is a very distinguished Baltimore family, old friends of Emily’s. No doubt we’ll be meeting them again.”
“It is my fate!” grinned Lanny.
IV
Mrs. Parsifal Dingle, née Mabel Blackless, then Beauty Budd and Madame Detaze, was only mildly interested in problems of precognition, and didn’t care if she spoiled an experiment by meddling and taking charge of the future. It didn’t take her more than a minute to get her wealthy friend Emily Chattersworth on the telephone and let her know that the Oriole was arriving. “Oh, yes,” said Emily. “I had a postcard from Reverdy at Cairo saying they were coming. No doubt he’ll be phoning me, and we’ll get up some sort of shindig.”
“Lanny saw them through the glasses, and says there’s a nice-looking girl on board.”
“That is Lizbeth, the daughter. She was a lovely child. She’s about eighteen now, and should be ready for her début.”
That was all the instrument of fate needed to know at the moment; she waited till lunch was over and Lanny had gone off to keep one of his mysterious engagements. Then she called again, and revealed her dark purpose, “Lanny seems to have noticed that girl, and that doesn’t happen very often. It might be a good idea to invite him alone, and leave me out of it. You know what I mean.”
Yes, Emily knew; she was more than ten years older than Beauty, and was even less pleased with what she saw in the mirror. She understood that the mother was performing an act of self-abnegation, for nobody in the world got more pleasure out of smart luncheons and dinner parties and the gossip of people just off a yacht. But young people, in the bottom of their hearts, resent the existence of the old; so the wise châtelaine of Sept Chênes would invite father and daughter, and Lanny alone to meet them. She would keep “Reverdy” busy, and leave opportunity for Lanny to get interested in Lizbeth if he would. In any case he would be polite and friendly, as always when his mother and near-foster-mother had placed some débutante on the carpet before his fastidious eyes.
It is the custom, wherever in the de luxe world a yacht draws up alongside a pier, for a cable to be run on board, so that owner and guests can communicate with the outside world. So presently Emily reported that father and daughter were coming to dinner—black tie and tux would do—and Beauty had only to get hold of her wayward son and send him up to the villa on the heights. The mother spent the afternoon telephoning off and on to various places where Lanny might be, but he wasn’t there. The provoking fellow came strolling in, bland and insouciant, a half hour or so before dinnertime; Beauty grabbed him and shoved him into his room, and laid out his things with her own hands while he washed and shaved.
Meantime she poured out upon him all the details she had been able to gather concerning the people he was to meet. When she had got him exactly right, even to the nice little waves which appeared spontaneously in his brown hair, she saw him out to his car and then went back to her boudoir and locked herself in for a few minutes of prayer after the fashion which her husband had taught her. God was All-good and All-wise and you must never tell Him what to do; you must say, and mean it: “Thy will be done, not mine.” But in the deeps of Beauty’s soul rested the firm conviction that God couldn’t help agreeing with her this time, and, as a sort of contrabass to all her other prayers, was the one: “Dear God, please take a hint!”
V
The gentleman with the somewhat unwieldy name of Reverdy Johnson Holdenhurst was the scion of one of the old Baltimore families; he had been named after a Supreme Court justice, a states’ rights Democrat who had stood by the Union and therefore occupied an honored place in Maryland’s history. The present Reverdy’s father had been one of those domineering men who have their own way regardless. In a fast-growing harbor he had seen docks, railroad sidings, and other privileges to be obtained from a pliable city council and state legislature, and he had been the one to shove his way in and grab them. The World War had come along and he had become one of the city’s richest men; he had left behind him three sons, neglected by a preoccupied father and spoiled by an indulgent mother. The family fortune was now represented by securities, among the most secure in the land, so that all the sons had to do was to clip coupons off the bonds and deposit dividend checks in the family bank, and then take life easy.
The other sons were “drinking men,” in Emily’s polite phrase. Reverdy was the best of them, and he was almost too good for his own good: a kindhearted fellow whom everybody had imposed upon. Some politicians had persuaded him to run for United States Senator—wanting his money, of course. What he had discovered of treachery and corruption in his home city and state had given him a case of shellshock and caused him to retire from the world.
“He enjoys delicate health,” said Emily, and that was not a “bull”; she meant that her friend was following the medical formula for longevity, to get yourself a good disease and take care of it. His trouble was his throat; it began to give warning at the least exposure to cold and dampness, and he had convinced himself that it would mean his end if a single snowflake ever had a chance to light upon his shoulder. So he had got himself a perfectly appointed yacht, custom-built, and about the first of every November the Oriole of Baltimore sailed out of Chesapeake Bay and headed south. Anywhere, it didn’t make much difference, so long as it was a place free from atmospheric disturbances. Anybody would be taken along who wanted to go, provided it was somebody free from emotional disturbances.
Reverdy was a tall, slender man of fifty or so, not especially frail-looking, well tanned by tropical suns. His features were sensitive, his chin rather weak, his manner hesitating and absent-minded. But when he started talking you were surprised to find that he was quite free-spoken. Lanny guessed that he had adopted this as a matter of conviction, a way of combating his inferiority complex. He was a conscientious person and had given much thought to what he ought to do; some of his decisions were unusual and took you some time to get adjusted to.
VI
And then Lizbeth; that was her name, not an abbreviation. Just as, in the precession of the equinox
es, there is a moment when the sun is at its highest point, so in the development of a girl there must be some moment when she is at her loveliest, and it seemed to Lanny Budd that this must be the day and hour for Lizbeth Reverdy Holdenhurst. She had fair hair, so light in texture that it was hardly to be confined; she had sweet features, a complexion which made you think of all the flower petals you had ever seen, and lips of the sort which had caused an old-time English poet to cry: “Cherry ripe, ripe, ripe!” Doubtless she had been told that she was to meet an “attractive” man; and doubtless there had been women friends on the yacht, and a well-trained maid who had helped to choose this low-cut dress of filmy pink chiffon with velvet shoes to match. Lanny knew what such things cost, for he had watched ladies being arrayed in them and chattering about prices since the time when he had been knee-high to a grasshopper.
Her father adored her—you could see that in every glance. No doubt he had done his best to spoil her, as his mother had done with him. How much he had succeeded was a question which could hardly be answered on short acquaintance. When people have nothing to do but eat a properly prepared meal and engage in mild conversation concerning the places they have visited and the friends they have met, you get only the most agreeable impression concerning them—and that is the way they have planned it. That constitutes “good” society, and you are not supposed to probe deeply, saying: “Well, lovely belle from Baltimore with the flower-petal cheeks and the cherry-ripe lips, how is it with your soul? What faith do you live by, and what is your conception of your duty to your fellow-man?”
Reverdy’s grandmother had been a schoolmate of Emily Chattersworth’s mother. Lanny remembered well the latter old lady, Mrs. Sally Lee Sibley, who had come from the city which she called “Bawlamaw,” and had seen the Fifth Massachusetts regiment attacked while marching through the city at the outbreak of the Civil War. He spoke about her now, and heard reminiscences of the two families, and then of the cruise of the Oriole, seven-eighths of the way around the world. Lizbeth had a girl friend whose parents were medical missionaries in the Fiji Islands, and they had taken her home by the Panama Canal. That was the way with all their cruises, the father explained: somebody wanted to go to some unlikely place, and they took him. They had known somebody in Bali, so they had gone on to that island. A cousin was wintering in Cairo, so that had been the next port, and now they had stopped in Cannes on Emily’s account. They would stay a week or so if the mistral, the cold north gale, didn’t start up; if it did, the Oriole would skirt the lee shores of France and Spain, and flee down the coast of Africa.
Presently Lanny found himself sitting alone with Lizbeth in the library. It had been that way many times at Sept Chênes; mothers and fathers would take the châtelaine’s word for it that Lanny was the proper sort of man for young girls to be left with. Lanny would tell about his travels, and the adventures which had befallen him in the line of his profession of art expert, unique and distinguished. He had made two different trips into “Red” Spain to bring out old masters, and one into “Nationalist” Spain for the same purpose; bullets had come whining past his ears in Barcelona, and several had come down through the top of his car from a plane near Saragossa. He discovered that Lizbeth knew nothing about the politics involved in this war, and he did not attempt to enlighten her, or say anything about new wars expected soon on this unhappy old continent. It would have frightened her, and to what purpose?
VII
Returning to Bienvenu, Lanny faced one of those scenes which had become routine. “Well, what is she like?” and “What did you talk about?” and “What did she have on?” and even “What did you have for dinner?” All questions had to be answered in detail, and no answer was ever enough—he must go back and recall more to satisfy his mother’s impatient clamor.
“Listen, old darling,” said the son—and this too was routine. “She’s a beauty, and apparently a nice girl; she will make some man happy, but it can’t be me, so don’t waste your time scheming.”
“Oh, Lanny!”—and then all the arguments. “What on earth is the matter with her?” and “What is the matter with you?”
That would have been quite a story, and Lanny couldn’t tell it. He had his work to do, and it wasn’t buying paintings; but he couldn’t give his mother the least hint of that fact. He would only have set her to worrying, even more than over the fact that he had no wife. All he could say was: “I could never make a girl like that happy; it would be the Irma story all over again. She would want me to go cruising in the yacht, or to settle down in suburban Baltimore—and what would I do there?”
“You say that without knowing a thing about her! It might be that she’d find Bienvenu the most romantic place in the world. There’s The Lodge that you could have—” It was the house which Irma had built, but years had passed, and it had been well disinfected, so to speak, by other friends who had occupied it. “A girl at that age is unformed, and the man who wins her love can make her into what he pleases.”
“Yes, old darling—I don’t think! That’s the spiel you women give us; but the truth is she was formed when she was in the cradle, and all the years afterwards, by her mother and her nurses and servants and every woman who got near her—all helping to teach her the routine of fashion. Now she is what you call ‘finished’—and I would be the same if I let the ladies fool me.”
Beauty Budd, whom nobody could fool, sat gazing at her son intently. “Lanny, you are still tied up with that German woman!”
He would have liked to reply: “That German woman is dead.” But if he said it, what excuse could he give for refusing to tell about her—when, where, how, and what did she look like, and have you got a picture of her, and so on? Better to keep her as a protecting shield behind which to retire when his mother started probing into his love life! “Bless your heart!” he evaded. “I wish I could be what you want and do what you want; but you know that we all have our different ideas and interests, and have to live our own lives.”
“Lanny, I have never objected to your living your own life, but I can’t see why you have to shut your mother out of it.”
“I have always told you my own secrets, but I can’t tell you other people’s. That is the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not.” Beauty Budd had been a preacher’s daughter, and knew what he was quoting.
VIII
She couldn’t give up, of course; but she would work underground. It became Lanny’s social obligation to escort his mother and their best friend to the yacht. Once on board, it became his duty to take Lizbeth for a stroll about the deck, and tell her about the sights of the harbor; to point out the Île Ste.-Marguerite where the German residents of the Riviera had been interned during the World War, and the place where he, as a boy, had seen a submarine emerge from the golfe at night, and, farther out, the place where he had seen a tanker blown up and burning. He told about goggle-fishing, which is swimming under water and spearing fish; about flower-growing on the Cap, and the perfume factories where women worked half buried in rose petals, and got headaches from it. In all this he tried to be fatherly, but he was aware that a girl ready for her début wasn’t mistaking an eligible man for her father. She was going to sail away for the Gold Coast and the bulge of Brazil and he would probably never see her again; he didn’t want her to carry away any memories or dreams that would cast a shadow over her happiness.
But Lanny’s fate wasn’t through with him yet, not with a bevy of ladies of fashion co-operating with it and against him. There was every reason why the Holdenhurst family and guests should be entertained by American society on the Riviera; and it didn’t take long for word to spread that Beauty and Emily were playing at matchmaking, a delightful game in which everybody wishes everybody success. For example, good old Sophie, Baroness de la Tourette—she was still that, according to European custom, though she had long ago divorced her French husband and taken one from her native land. Sophie got up a real affair at her villa on the other side of the Cap: an afternoon lawn p
arty, with a colored band in red and gold uniforms, and dancing on a platform which she had built for the purpose—in sections which could be unscrewed and stored away out of the weather. The hardware lady from Cincinnati had what she wanted whenever she wanted it, including fair weather; for it was like the first day of spring, and all the smart folk came, the ladies in the dizziest costumes and hats which had been created since the days of Marie Antoinette.
Sophie had known Lanny Budd since he was a babe in arms, and had on her drawing-room walls half a dozen examples of French paintings which he had brought out of Spain and sold to her at a price she could boast of. She turned this show into an occasion for the glorifying of her protégé. Her grand piano was hauled out onto the loggia, and the guests drew up their lawn chairs and listened while Lanny displayed his finger technique, a mixture of half a dozen styles taught to him in boyhood by half a dozen teachers whom Sophie had helped to select.
“None of your heavy stuff now,” she commanded. “They like it short and sweet.” So Lanny played the Rachmaninoff C-Sharp Minor Prelude, which gives people the shivers, though they don’t know what it’s about, and perhaps the composer didn’t either; and for an encore a piano transcription of Schumann’s Widmung. “I love thee in time and eternity!”—Lizbeth Holdenhurst wouldn’t have heard the words, but she would get the excitement if she cared anything about music. In any case she would have impressed upon her young mind the fact that here was a talented man, known to all the important people in this ultra-fashionable place and cordially applauded by them.
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