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The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars

Page 4

by Maurice DeKobra


  “Madame wishes to ask Monsieur’s advice about something.”

  I attacked a barrage of orchids, roses, lilacs, tissue paper and crested cards. I literally jumped over ten or twelve towels smeared with make-up and a kimono stretched out on the floor like the corpse of a Samurai. I thrust aside a hanging and found myself in the presence of Lady Diana.

  I have read a good many stern dissertations on the subject of Modesty throughout the ages. I have studied the Anglo-Saxon soul in the works of patented psychologists and in American Bars, in Sterne’s romances and on French railroad trains. But I must confess that the more I studied it the less I knew about Lady Diana’s character. Consequently, I could not suppress a gesture of surprise when I discovered her in a condition of rigorous undress standing before the odoriferous arsenal of her disordered dressing-table.

  She asked me, admiring herself in the glass without the least embarrassment, “Would you advise me to put this silk scarf on my hair or to wear this garland of white roses?”

  “Those virtuous flowers don’t conform to the paganism of your dances, Lady Diana. If I were in your place I would simply pin that scarf on your glorious golden hair.”

  “You know, I believe you are right.… Juliette, arrange this little thing behind my ears.”

  She arose. Except for a cache sexe no bigger than the hand of a sacristan and held in place by an almost invisible garland of bindweed, two buskins with silver ribbons, and a veil of white mousseline which hung down to her elbows, she was about to hide nothing of herself from 1,500 spectators who were getting more and more impatient every minute on the other side of the curtain.

  “Aren’t you afraid,” I strove to suggest, “that the Lord Chamberlain, who manipulates the scissors of British censorship, will cut his finger—out of sheer emotion?”

  “Why, we are with people of the world, my dear boy. This is a private entertainment. Charity is an excuse for everything. And I don’t mind proving conclusively and to everyone that Lady Bloomingswan has been slandering me.”

  “What has she said?”

  “She has tried to tell whoever would listen that my thighs were shaped like an open umbrella.”

  “Then hurry, my dear—Signora Tetranella has just finished singing the Waltz from Roméo et Juliette. Harry Blow is on now. Remember, you come next.”

  “Oh, don’t be stupid! I am all ready. Go out front, Gerard; listen to what they say while I am doing my number and come back immediately to tell me about it.” And she continued with a defiant look, “So they think I am finished. They already picture me as somebody’s companion, or selling perfume in the Burlington Arcade. I don’t mind giving them a whole fist full of salt right in the eye. A tout à l’heure, chéri—”

  As I sat down at the back of the theater in an obscure corner, I could not help admiring the courage of this woman, who only the evening before had received the official confirmation of her financial ruin. Three quarters of her entire fortune were about to be swallowed up in that financial catastrophe. And still she could face Fate. She did not hesitate to kick scandalously at that giant known as English Hypocrisy—that wooden giant, a trifle angular, who hides the vulgarity of his body and the colossal proportions of his egotism beneath an impressive morning coat.

  The public squirmed a little impatiently. I could hear the bell ring. The footlights changed from gold to blue; the curtain went up slowly. It was a country scene on the Greek order. In a setting of cypress trees—those vesperal growths which shade the sirens on the shores of the Adriatic—Lady Diana came to view, on bended knee, her head bowed low on her bosom, and her hands clasped before her.

  Some women in the orchestra stood up in their excitement. The men, more discreetly, held their breath. There was much whispering and the entire theater manifested its surprise by diverse movements. I heard some disagreeable remarks:

  “But she really is naked!—Oh!”

  “It is scandalous—”

  “No. She is not quite naked. Look at her, Betty, through my opera glasses.”

  “Harry, will you be quiet—!”

  “Since the Laborites have been in power, anarchy reigns supreme. It’s disgusting!”

  Behind me an old beau with side-whiskers, who had evidently been a devil in his day, muttered, “In the time of Prince Albert they would have thrown her out and had her whipped in the middle of Oxford Circus.”

  A college youth protested, “Sir, you are insulting a Priestess of Beauty.”

  The pitch of the interpolations rose little by little, in spite of the fact that the orchestra was playing the first measures of Grieg’s Matin. On the balcony a chair squeaked and a female spectator, with a silver lorgnette, drew herself up indignantly and cried at the top of her lungs:

  “Anybody would think that we were at the Folies Bergères!”

  This decisive declaration brought forth an argument. A gentleman in a box leaned toward the offended lady: “If you weren’t a woman I would box your ears for you.”

  But another spectator came to the aid of the wounded virtue: “This lady is right! Come out in the hall a moment—”

  “Certainly, sir!”

  The two paladins went out. They had the calm and placid air of two citizens of the Latin Quarter, about to break a tooth or put the “singular Siki” out of the way. While all this was going on, the applause was something immense. Lady Diana, as indifferent as a statue, had not even budged. The orchestra leader had cut off the first aria of the Matin with a blow of his baton. Already policemen’s helmets were coming in through the doors, like so many black mushrooms. Remarks passed from box to box. Some argued for the eternal prerogative of Art; others waved the flag of offended Propriety. The Duchess of Southminster, who was responsible for the performance, squirmed in her chair, as nervous as a griddle cake on a hot stove. She disputed with the ladies of the Committee, one of whom was a pretty brunette in a corn-colored chiffon frock, who approved of Lady Wynham’s audacity, and another, a dowager, smothered in powder, whose black ostrich plume, stuck in her hair, shook to the rhythm of her protestations.

  The sudden arrival of the defenders of the law calmed the fault-finding individuals. The orchestra leader struck his desk vociferously. Grieg’s Matin finally arose in a comparative silence—Lady Diana started to dance. The thread of her evolutions did some arabesque embroidery on the motives of the great Norwegian. The most hostile spectators were hushed. They forgot that they had in front of them a Lady of 1927 and that she was shamelessly displaying the elegance of her body, because they were, in spite of who they were, carried back to the marvelous days of pagan Greece. The last chord of the Matin expired slowly while Lady Diana knelt once more, her arms spread out, her ecstatic face turned toward the rising sun as though she were saluting a new dawn, whose freshness would drive out the owls from the balcony and the moles from the orchestra.

  The uncontrolled applause which came from every section of the theater soon changed into an astonishing ovation in which the muttering of a few irreconcilables could scarcely be heard. I rushed to the dressing-room. I bumped into a bevy of reporters who were clenching their fists with expectancy. What a chance for the envoys from Fleet Street!

  There was a real battle going on outside Lady Diana’s dressing-room—a battle of impassioned words. An hour later I found myself beside her in the limousine, almost buried under the bouquets.

  “Gerard,” she said with a triumphant laugh, “I have won! What a scandal! But if you had looked at me through a magnifying glass you would have seen that I was covered with goose flesh. The Duchess of Southminster told me that I had been a great help to the tubercular people but that I would surely be excommunicated. What do I care! They won’t finish discussing my brazenness for at least forty-eight hours.”

  “Then you really do enjoy having people talk about you?”

  “No, not under ordinary conditions but in the present circumstances, yes. It was absolutely essential for me to do something to get my name into every newspaper in
the world.”

  “Why?”

  “To obscure the news of my impending ruin. I am not ready to admit yet that I am down and out, Gerard. And I almost forgot one ace that I have up my sleeve.”

  “Are you talking about the ace of hearts?”

  “I am too tired to explain that to you tonight, but tomorrow—tomorrow, Gerard, I shall take you into my confidence.”

  “And where is that confidence going to take me?”

  “To Berlin.”

  Lady Diana’s dream came true with a vengeance the next morning. The entire London Press commented abundantly on the matinée at the Garrick. From the Times to the Daily News, from the Conservatives to the Liberals—they all gave several columns to the “Pagan Dance.” The Morning Post, that official organ of the British aristocracy, neither dared to approve nor to blame. It headed its account this way: Audacious Exhibition of a Peeress. The Communist Daily Herald, trying to be indifferent to the recreations of important people, felicitated this aristocrat, who openly scoffed at the prejudices of her caste and sacrificed her principles on the altar of Naked Equality.

  I found Lady Diana lying in the middle of her boudoir—swimming in an ocean of newspapers—shaking her disordered hair like a playful puppy. She was reading the reports about herself.

  “Well,” I said, “if this can’t satisfy you, what more do you want?”

  She pointed to the fourth column in the Daily Mirror. “Gerard, look at this imbecile who is trying to insinuate that I want to start a school like Loïe Fuller’s. That certainly is a riot. And the Daily Mail? Have you seen what they say? They interviewed H. G. Wells to find out whether modern society is gradually returning to the integral nude. Oh, that is funny! And the Daily Graphic! Look at the photographs. Trying to compare me with the Cnidian Venus and giving our respective measurements. I am a little thinner through the hips, and about an inch and a half taller. The whole world is going to know that I have the form of a goddess and that all I lack is a Zeus to take care of me.”

  Lady Diana, in raspberry-colored pajamas, crawled on all fours to the sofa and dragged out another newspaper which had slid underneath.

  “Gerard, here is the prize. This will really make you laugh. This reporter says that a proposal is on foot in the House of Commons for a law to regulate the size of costumes on every stage in the United Kingdom—twenty-eight square inches about the navel, to be measured, I suppose, with a compass.”

  “Lady Diana! That is rank blasphemy!” I protested, half serious, half laughing.

  “Oh, Gerard, my dear! I adore you when you put on that air of a Presbyterian minister who has just sat down on a knitting-needle.”

  Then, suddenly becoming very grave, she stood up, led me into her bedroom, closed the door, and sat me down beside her.

  “Now, darling, let’s be serious. I told you yesterday that I still had another arrow which would fit my bow before I would admit that I was a ruined woman—that is, one who has to live on an income of no more than ten thousand pounds a year. This hidden resource is so remote that I had almost forgotten it myself. It is worth what it’s worth, but at least it’s worth the gamble. Gerard, do you speak Russian?”

  “Very badly!”

  She had arisen. She opened a delightful little mahogany desk and took out a quantity of papers wrapped in a green silk handkerchief. She spread the documents out before me and continued:

  “The defunct Lord Wynham, my august husband, who is at this moment amusing himself in paradise, at one time, under the Imperial Régime, filled the post of English Ambassador to the Court at St. Petersburg. Due to certain events of which I am still in ignorance, as far as the details are concerned, he received from the government of Nicholas II, in the guise of a personal present, a concession of fifteen thousand acres of oil land on the slopes of Telav, northeast of Tiflis in Georgia. Lord Wynham had already negotiated with some important financiers to exploit carefully those lands when the revolution wiped out the generosity of which he had been the beneficiary. His fifteen thousand acres were nationalized and the deeds of ownership had no further value. That meant a loss of a few millions for me, his only heir. But the new orientation which the relations of my country are taking with the Communists tempts me to try something.”

  “I suppose you mean that you would like to re-establish your ownership, or at least obtain the authority to exploit the land?”

  “Exactly. The income which I may derive from those oil lands would compensate me for the losses which I have been forced to accept. Yesterday morning, Sir Eric Blushmore, a diplomatic friend of Lord Wynham and a very good friend of mine, of whom I have frequently asked advice, dissuaded me from going directly to the Chief of the Commercial Delegation of the Soviets here in London. It seems that that particular personage is not persona grata in Moscow, that I could gain nothing through his efforts and that my only chance is to strike direct at Berlin. Gerard, dear, I count absolutely on you to replenish my safe deposit box. You must leave for Germany as soon as possible; arrange to meet Mr. Varichkine, the Communist leader there, and try to come out the winner in a combat of which the prize will be twenty naphtha springs.”

  “Lady Diana, you have completely won my friendship. I will do the impossible for the sake of the opulence which is essential to your happiness although I may find that there is no oil in your wells.”

  “You will take these papers with you. Just give the adversary a few little digs—I mean that you should inform yourself as to the eventual venality of Mr. Varichkine. I give you carte blanche. If you find that the gentleman in question must be personally interested in the constitution of the organization, offer him five percent or ten percent of the capital stock—but get around him somehow. The news from India is getting worse and worse. The insurrection in Bengal, engineered by Russian emissaries, is in full sway. Already, Indian Oil stock has gone down forty-five shillings in one week. It is absolutely necessary that you get me floating again, or else, within three months, I shall be forced to do a graceful fall into the arms of a nouveau riche. You really are awfully fond of me, aren’t you, Gerard? You are almost a brother to me. You wouldn’t want to see your little Diana being embraced by a bloated millionaire full of beer and cheese! And so?”

  Ah, how well she knew how to get under my skin! Darling Diana. My affection for her was really that of a brother for a sister, but a sister with a brain a trifle unbalanced—hardly responsible for her actions, incapable of distinguishing good from bad. I loved her with all the indulgence which one must have for something which is purely a luxury—for a woman different from other women because she has escaped from the bonds of conventional psychology.

  Why should we classify all women on the basis of the worn out models on display in Destiny’s Bazaar? The Fatal Woman, the Cold Woman, the Honest Woman, the Capricious Woman? What conceited naturalist would dare to affirm the specific character of a Cold Woman who may be capricious tomorrow with no apparent transition, or a Fatal Woman who may one day shed her tears on Honesty’s doorstep?

  It was in vain that I racked the fugitive fibers of my distracted mind. I was unable to convince myself that Lady Diana could ever be shelved anywhere in modern ethics. She was the product of a libertine Duke and a sentimental, romantic Scotch woman—one of those women nourished by Walter Scott, reared on the elegiac banks of lochs with placid waters. Her maternal grandmother was a remarkable business woman who led the Highlanders around by the nose in the privacy of her own domain at Laurencekirk. Her paternal grandfather was a gentleman poet, very much appreciated at Edinburgh, who poured out the nostalgia of his heart in his archaic ballads. Diana inherited all that. Logic, when she chose to recognize it, was no stranger to her. On the other hand, she knew all the actions and reactions of a moonlight night and the intoxicating values of perfume. Completely instructed as to all moral contingencies, she lived her life, egotistical in her most generous moments, cruel and kind, voluptuous and cold, childlike and mondaine according to the hour, according to the dictat
ion of her whims, according to the unforeseen impulses of a never-satisfied capriciousness.

  On the 12th of May at seven o’clock in the evening a taxicab dropped me at the Hotel Adlon which then embellished the corner of the Unter den Linden and the Pariser Platz with its austere gray attitude of a Berlin Palace.

  I had not been in the Capital of the Imperial Republic since my honeymoon with Griselda. Little was changed. As we rolled down the Friedrichstrasse, I saw the same tireless girls who, ever since the birth of the demi-monde, have been strolling along the sidewalks of this celebrated avenue. Outside the Café Bauer, the same old men who were harangued by August Bebel in the heroic days of the Social Democracy were selling the same newspapers with Gothic titles and slipping into the pockets of their really good clients the latest copies of the Rote Fahne, a publication so terrible that it was even suppressed by the Berlin Police. The black custodians of the Empire were now replaced by the green Schupo, who stood before the Brandenburger Tor. But the Stadtring tramway was still doing its endless circle around the metropolis, whose crest was a bear.

  I dined that evening in a certain little Italian restaurant on the Dorotheenstrasse, where I hoped that I might recall the days when His Majesty was pluming himself on having immortalized the line of Hohenzollerns in lard-like sculpture; when Mr. Reinhardt was not yet producing Tartufe; when the Bals de Veuves still flourished back of the Spittlemarkt, with their gallant squadrons of crones still true to their wedding rings, enticing the dilettantes with crepe veils to which they had no right. Chance favored me. I bumped into Semevski, a Russian pianist, whom I had known at Milan and who made European concert halls applaud the technique and the velocity of Rubinstein, his maestro. I invited him to my table and proceeded to ask him some questions:

  “What do you know about your fellow countryman, Varichkine, the Soviet leader here in Berlin?”

  My friend Semevski seasoned his beer with some cigarette ashes, gazed at me ironically, and sneered:

 

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