Edith Wharton - SSC 10

by The World Over (v2. 1)

  The World Over.

   1936 

  Contents

  Charm Incorporated.

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  Pomegranate Seed.

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  Confession.

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  Roman Fever.

  I.

  II.

  The Looking-Glass.

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  Duration.

  I.

  II.

  III.

  Charm Incorporated.

  I.

  Jim! I’m afraid… I’m dreadfully afraid…”

  James Targatt’s wife knelt by his armchair, the dark hair flung off her forehead, her dark eyes large with tears as they yearned up at him through those incredibly long lashes.

  “Afraid? Why—what’s the matter?” he retorted, annoyed at being disturbed in the slow process of digesting the dinner he had just eaten at Nadeja’s last new restaurant—a Ukrainian one this time. For they went to a different restaurant every night, usually, at Nadeja’s instigation, hunting out the most exotic that New York at the high tide of its prosperity had to offer. “That sturgeon stewed in cream—” he thought wearily. “Well, what is it?”

  “It’s Boris, darling. I’m afraid Boris is going to marry a film-star. That Halma Hoboe, you know… She’s the greatest of them all…” By this time the tears were running down Nadeja’s cheeks. Targatt averted his mind from the sturgeon long enough to wonder if he would ever begin to understand his wife, much less his wife’s family.

  “Halma Hoboe? Well, why on earth shouldn’t he? Has she got her divorce from the last man all right?”

  “Yes, of course.” Nadeja was still weeping. “But I thought perhaps you’d mind Boris’s leaving us. He will have to stay out at Hollywood now, he says. And I shall miss my brother so dreadfully. Hollywood’s very far from New York—no? We shall all miss Boris, shan’t we, James?”

  “Yes, yes. Of course. Great boy, Boris! Funny, to be related to a movie-star. ‘My sister-in-law, Halma Hoboe’. Well, as long as he couldn’t succeed on the screen himself—” said Targatt, suddenly sounding a latent relief, which came to the surface a moment later. “She’ll have to pay his bills now,” he muttered, too low for his wife to hear. He reached out for a second cigar, let his head sink back comfortably against the chair-cushions, and thought to himself: “Well, perhaps the luck’s turning…” For it was the first time, in the eight years of his marriage to Nadeja, that any information imparted to him concerning her family had not immediately led up to his having to draw another cheque.

  

  II.

  James Targatt had always been on his guard against any form of sentimental weakness; yet now, as he looked back on his life, he began to wonder if the one occasion on which he had been false to this principle might not turn out to be his best stroke of business.

  He had not had much difficulty in guarding himself against marriage. He had never felt an abstract yearning for fatherhood, or believed that to marry an old-fashioned affectionate girl, who hated society, and wanted to stay at home and darn and scrub, would really help an ambitious man in his career. He thought it was probably cheaper in the end to have your darning and scrubbing done for you by professionals, even if they came from one of those extortionate valeting establishments that used, before the depression, to charge a dollar a minute for such services. And eventually he found a stranded German widow who came to him on starvation wages, fed him well and inexpensively, and kept the flat looking as fresh and shiny as a racing-yacht. So there was no earthly obligation for him to marry; and when he suddenly did so, no question of expediency had entered into the arrangement.

  He supposed afterward that what had happened to him was what people called falling in love. He had never allowed for that either, and even now he was not sure if it was the right name for the knock-down blow dealt to him by his first sight of Nadeja. Her name told you her part of the story clearly enough. She came straight out of that struggling mass of indistinguishable human misery that Targatt called “Wardrift”. One day—he still wondered how, for he was always fiercely on his guard against such intrusions—she had forced her way into his office, and tried to sell him (of all things!) a picture painted by her brother Serge. They were all starving, she said; and very likely it was true. But that had not greatly moved him. He had heard the same statement made too often by too many people, and it was too painfully connected in his mind with a dreaded and rapidly increasing form of highway robbery called “Appeals”. Besides, Targatt’s imagination was not particularly active, and as he was always sure of a good meal himself, it never much disturbed him to be told that others were not. So he couldn’t to this day have told you how it came about that he bought Serge’s picture on the spot, and married Nadeja a few weeks afterward. He had been knocked on the head—sandbagged; a regular hold-up. That was the only way to describe it.

  Nadeja made no attempt to darn or scrub for him—which was perhaps just as well, as he liked his comforts. On the contrary, she made friends at once with the German widow, and burdened that industrious woman with the additional care of her own wardrobe, which was negligible before her marriage, but increased rapidly after she became Mrs. Targatt. There was a second servant’s room above the flat, and Targatt rather reluctantly proposed that they should get in a girl to help Hilda; but Nadeja said, no, she didn’t believe Hilda would care for that; and the room would do so nicely for Paul, her younger brother, the one who was studying to be a violinist.

  Targatt hated music, and suffered acutely (for a New Yorker) from persistently recurring noises; but Paul, a nice boy, also with long-lashed eyes, moved into the room next to Hilda’s, and practised the violin all day and most of the night. The room was directly over that which Targatt now shared with Nadeja—and of which all but the space occupied by his shaving-stand had by this time become her exclusive property. But he bore with Paul’s noise, and it was Hilda who struck. She said she loved music that gave her Heimweh, but this kind only kept her awake; and to Targatt’s horror she announced her intention of leaving at the end of the month.

  It was the biggest blow he had ever had since he had once—and once only—been on the wrong side of the market. He had no time to hunt for another servant, and was sure Nadeja would not know how to find one. Nadeja, when he broke the news to her, acquiesced in this view of her incapacity. “But why do we want a servant? I could never see,” she said. “And Hilda’s room would do very nicely for my sister Olga, who is learning to be a singer. She and Paul could practise together—”

  “Oh, Lord,” Targatt interjected.

  “And we could all go out to restaurants; a different one every night; it’s much more fun, isn’t it? And there are people who come in and clean—no? Hilda was a robber—I didn’t want to tell you, but…”

  Within a week the young Olga, whose eyelashes were even longer than Paul’s, was settled in the second servant’s room, and within a month Targatt had installed a grand piano in his own drawing-room (where it took up all the space left by Nadeja’s divan), so that Nadeja could accompany Olga when Paul was not available.

  

  III.

  Targatt had never, till that moment, thought much about Nadeja’s family. He understood that his father-in-law had been a
Court dignitary of high standing, with immense landed estates, and armies of slaves—no, he believed they didn’t have slaves, or serfs, or whatever they called them, any longer in those outlandish countries east or south of Russia. Targatt was not strong on geography. He did not own an atlas, and had never yet had time to go to the Public Library and look up his father-in-law’s native heath. In fact, he had never had time to read, or to think consecutively on any subject but money-making; he knew only that old man Kouradjine had been a big swell in some country in which the Bolsheviks had confiscated everybody’s property, and where the women (and the young men too) apparently all had long eyelashes. But that was all part of a vanished fairy-tale; at present the old man was only Number So-much on one Near East Relief list, while Paul and Olga and the rest of them (Targatt wasn’t sure even yet how many there were) figured on similar lists, though on a more modest scale, since they were supposedly capable of earning their own living. But were they capable of it, and was there any living for them to earn? That was what Targatt in the course of time began to ask himself.

  Targatt was not a particularly sociable man; but in his bachelor days he had fancied inviting a friend to dine now and then, chiefly to have the shine on his mahogany table marvelled at, and Hilda’s Wiener-schnitzel praised. This was all over now. His meals were all taken in restaurants—a different one each time; and they were usually shared with Paul, Olga, Serge (the painter) and the divorced sister, Katinka, who had three children and a refugee lover, Dmitri.

  At first this state of affairs was very uncomfortable, and even painful, for Targatt; but since it seemed inevitable he adjusted himself to it, and buried his private cares in an increased business activity.

  His activity was, in fact, tripled by the fact that it was no longer restricted to his own personal affairs, but came more and more to include such efforts as organizing an exhibition of Serge’s pictures, finding the funds for Paul’s violin tuition, trying to make it worth somebody’s while to engage Olga for a concert tour, pushing Katinka into a saleswoman’s job at a fashionable dress-maker’s, and persuading a friend in a bank to recommend Dmitri as interpreter to foreign clients. All this was difficult enough, and if Targatt had not been sustained by Nadeja’s dogged optimism his courage might have failed him; but the crowning problem was how to deal with the youngest brother, Boris, who was just seventeen, and had the longest eyelashes of all. Boris was too old to be sent to school, too young to be put into a banker’s or broker’s office, and too smilingly irresponsible to hold the job for twenty-four hours if it had been offered to him. Targatt, for three years after his marriage, had had only the vaguest idea of Boris’s existence, for he was not among the first American consignment of the family. But suddenly he drifted in alone, from Odessa or Athens, and joined the rest of the party at the restaurant. By this time the Near East Relief Funds were mostly being wound up, and in spite of all Targatt’s efforts it was impossible to get financial aid for Boris, so for the first months he just lolled in a pleasant aimless way on Nadeja’s divan; and as he was very particular about the quality of his cigarettes, and consumed a large supply daily, Targatt for the first time began to regard one of Nadeja’s family with a certain faint hostility.

  Boris might have been less of a trial if, by the time he came, Targatt had been able to get the rest of the family on their legs; but, however often he repeated this attempt, they invariably toppled over on him. Serge could not sell his pictures, Paul could not get an engagement in an orchestra, Olga had given up singing for dancing, so that her tuition had to begin all over again; and to think of Dmitri and Katinka, and Katinka’s three children, was not conducive to repose at the end of a hard day in Wall Street.

  Yet in spite of everything Targatt had never really been able to remain angry for more than a few moments with any member of the Kouradjine group. For some years this did not particularly strike him; he was given neither to self-analysis nor to the dissection of others, except where business dealings were involved. He had been taught, almost in the nursery, to discern, and deal with, the motives determining a given course in business; but he knew no more of human nature’s other mainsprings than if the nursery were still his habitat. He was vaguely conscious that Nadeja was aware of this, and that it caused her a faint amusement. Once, when they had been dining with one of his business friends, and the latter’s wife, an ogling bore, had led the talk to the shop-worn question of how far mothers ought to enlighten their little girls on—well, you know… Just how much ought they to be taught? That was the delicate point, Mrs. Targatt, wasn’t it?—Nadeja, thus cornered, had met the question with a gaze of genuine bewilderment. “Taught? Do they have to be taught! I think it is Nature who will tell them—no? But myself I should first teach dressmaking and cooking,” she said with her shadowy smile. And now, reviewing the Kouradjine case, Targatt suddenly thought: “But that’s it! Nature does teach the Kouradjines. It’s a gift like a tenor voice. The thing is to know how to make the best use of it—” and he fell to musing on this newly discovered attribute. It was—what? Charm? Heaven forbid! The very word made his flesh creep with memories of weary picnics and wearier dinners where, with pink food in fluted papers, the discussion of “What is Charm?” had formed the staple diet. “I’d run a mile from a woman with charm; and so would most men,” Targatt thought with a retrospective shudder. And he tried, for the first time, to make a conscious inventory of Nadeja’s attributes.

  She was not beautiful; he was certain of that. He was not good at seeing people, really seeing them, even when they were before his eyes, much less at visualizing them in absence. When Nadeja was away all he could ever evoke of her was a pleasant blur. But he wasn’t such a blind bat as not to know when a woman was beautiful. Beauty, however, was made to look at, not to live with; he had never wanted to marry a beautiful woman. And Nadeja wasn’t clever, either; not in talk, that is. (And that, he mused, was certainly one of her qualities.) With regard to the other social gifts, so-called: cards, for instance? Well, he knew she and Katinka were not above fishing out an old pack and telling their fortunes, when they thought he wasn’t noticing; but anything as scientific as bridge frightened her, and she had the good sense not to try to learn. So much for society; and as for the home—well, she could hardly be called a good housekeeper, he supposed. But remembering his mother, who had been accounted a paragon in that line, he gave thanks for this deficiency of Nadeja’s also. Finally he said to himself: “I seem to like her for all the things she is not.” This was not satisfactory; but he could do no better. “Well, somehow, she fits into the cracks,” he concluded; and inadequate as this also sounded, he felt it might turn out to be a clue to the Kouradjines. Yes, they certainly fitted in; squeezing you a little, overlapping you a good deal, but never—and there was the point—sticking into you like the proverbial thorn, or crowding you uncomfortably, or for any reason making you wish they weren’t there.

  This fact, of which he had been dimly conscious from the first, arrested his attention now because he had a sudden glimpse of its business possibilities. Little Boris had only had to borrow a hundred dollars of him for the trip to Hollywood, and behold little Boris was already affianced to the world’s leading movie-star! In the light of this surprising event Targatt suddenly recalled that Katinka, not long before, had asked him if he wouldn’t give Dmitri, who had not been a success at the bank, a letter recommending him for some sort of employment in the office of a widowed millionaire who was the highest light on Targatt’s business horizon. Targatt had received the suggestion without enthusiasm. “Your sister’s crazy,” he said to Nadeja. “How can I recommend that fellow to a man like Bellamy? Has he ever had any business training?”

  “Well, we know Mr. Bellamy’s looking for a book-keeper, because he asked you if you knew of one,” said Nadeja.

  “Yes; but what are Dmitri’s qualifications? Does he know anything whatever about book-keeping?”

  “No; not yet. But he says perhaps he could buy a little book about
it.”

  “Oh, Lord—” Targatt groaned.

  “Even so, you don’t think you could recommend him, darling?”

  “No; I couldn’t, I’m afraid.”

  Nadeja did not insist; she never insisted. “I’ve found out a new restaurant, where they make much better blinys. Shall I tell them all to meet us there tonight at half-past eight?” she suggested.

  Now, in the light of Boris’s news, Targatt began to think this conversation over. Dmitri was an irredeemable fool; but Katinka—what about giving the letter for old Bellamy to Katinka? Targatt didn’t see exactly how he could word it; but he had an idea that Nadeja would tell him. Those were the ways in which she was really clever. A few days later he asked: “Has Dmitri got a job yet?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “No; as you couldn’t recommend him he didn’t buy the book.”

  “Oh, damn the book… See here, Nadeja; supposing I were to give Katinka a letter for old Bellamy?”

  He had made the suggestion with some embarrassment, half expecting that he would have to explain. But not to Nadeja. “Oh, darling, you always think of the right thing,” she answered, kissing him; and as he had foreseen she told him just how to word the letter.

  “And I will lend her my silver fox to wear,” she added. Certainly the social education of the Kouradjines had been far more comprehensive than Targatt’s.

  Katinka went to see Mr. Bellamy, and when she returned she reported favourably on the visit. Nothing was as yet decided about Dmitri, as she had been obliged to confess that he had had no training as an accountant; but Mr. Bellamy had been very kind, and had invited her to come to his house some afternoon to see his pictures.

  From this visit also Katinka came back well-pleased, though she seemed not to have accomplished anything further with regard to Dmitri. She had, however, been invited by Mr.