Part 12
“Besides,” she continued, “the day will come when I must go to Paris.... You see, I will have to polish off there ... I can live with Lily. It won’t cost anything. You see, we can’t forget that. We have to think of it. It’s nothing new.... I told you that in the beginning.”
* * * * *
For a long time there was no sound in the room save that of Ellen’s music, soft, beautiful, appealing, as if she used it now as a balm for the wounds caused by all she had been forced to say. Presently her strong beautiful fingers wandered into the Fire Music and the tiny room was filled with a glorious sound of flame and sparks, wild yet subdued, thrilling yet mournful. And then for a time it seemed that, wrapped in the color of the music, they were both released and swept beyond the reach of all these petty troubles. When at last the music ceased, Clarence roused himself slowly and, coming to her side, knelt there and placed his arms about her waist, pressing his head against her. There was in the gesture something pitiful and touching, as if he felt that by holding her thus he might be able to keep her always. The little vein in his throat throbbed with violence. There were times when his adoration became a terrible thing.
It was the first time in all their life together that he had ever done anything so romantic, so beautiful, and Ellen, looking down at him in a kind of amazement, must have understood that there were forces at work quite beyond her comprehension--something which, for the moment, overwhelmed even his shame of love. The act, by its very suddenness, appeared to strike a response in the girl herself, for she leaned toward him and fell to stroking his hair.
“I didn’t know,” she said softly, “that you could be like this.... It frightens me.... I didn’t know.”
His arms slowly held her more and more tightly, in a kind of fierce desperation. “You won’t go,” he murmured, “you won’t leave me.... There would be nothing left for me ... nothing in the world.”
“I’ll come back to you.... It won’t be for long. Perhaps, if there is money enough you could go with me.”
But all the same, she was troubled by that simple act of affection. Somehow, she had never thought of _his_ love in this fashion.
* * * * *
The rest of the evening was raised upon a different plane, new and strange in their existence together. Some barrier, invisible as it was potent, had given way suddenly, out of Clarence’s dread of the future it seemed that there was born a new and unaccountable happiness. Ellen, watching him slyly with a look of new tenderness, played for him the simple music which he loved.
But at midnight when, at last, the music came to an end Clarence asked, “Where are you going to play to-morrow?”
“At the house of a Mrs. Callendar ... I don’t know who she is.”
“If it’s Mrs. Richard Callendar ... she’s rich and fashionable. One of the richest women in New York.... Rich and fashionable....” But the rest was lost in a sudden return of a bitterness that seized him of late with a growing frequency. He knew of Mrs. Callendar. Wyck, in his snobbery, had spoken of her. One saw her name in the journals. It may have been that he had thoughts of his own which no one had ever guessed ... not even Ellen.
“It _is_ Mrs. Richard Callendar,” she said.
23
In the beginning Mrs. Callendar had regretted the sudden indisposition of the great pianist she had engaged. It was, she said, _embétant_. But presently as the hour of the reception drew near, the things which old Sanson had said of his unknown prodigy began to have their effect and, being like most women of affairs, a gambler as well, she saw in the approach of the unknown substitute the possibility of an adventure. She was, in any case, willing to take the word of old Sanson; he was, when all was said and done, no humbug. He knew a performer when he saw one. He did not go about his studio in a coat of velveteen calling upon his pupils to address him as “Maestro.” In a satisfactory way, he got down to brass tacks. What he had to offer must at least be interesting.
The drawing-room of the house on Murray Hill was enormous. It extended the full length of one side of the house, finishing in a little alcove where to-night space had been made for the performers, who sat shielded by a lacquered screen reaching almost to the ceiling. Before it a little place had been cleared and a small dais, covered with black velvet, erected to serve as a stage. There was a great piano at one side and then more cleared space reaching out to where the row of collapsible chairs had been placed for the guests.
The room itself was painted gray and high up near the ceiling hung in a row portraits of the Callendars, male and female, who had existed since the immigrating member, an honest Dutch chemist, founded a fortune in America by buying farms that lay north of Canal Street. The usual furniture had been pressed back against the sides of the room or removed entirely, but some of the pieces remained ... chairs and sofas of gilt and salmon brocade, American adaptations of the monstrosities of Louis Philippe--the furniture of some preceding Mrs. Callendar. And in gilt cases of glass there ranged the famous Callendar collection of Chinese bric-à-brac ... bowls and idols of jade, porphyry, and carved sandalwood, row upon row of tear bottles (it was for these that the collection was especially noted) in jade, ivory and porcelain. All these ornaments represented the second period in the fortunes of the Callendar family ... the days when the clipper ships of Griswold and Callendar carried cargoes around the world from Singapore, Shanghai and Hong-Kong. The fortune was now in its third stage. The clipper ships had vanished and the money they once represented was now safe in the best stocks and bonds it was possible to buy.
The room had never been brought up to date. Indeed it had remained untouched since the Seventies, for Mrs. Callendar spent only a month or two of the year in New York and, being thrifty, had not found it necessary to alter anything. The caretaker, once a year when her mistress returned, sent for a small army of charwomen, dusted, cleaned and scrubbed the old house and engaged a corps of servants. The rest of the time it remained empty but solid, immersed in the quiet dignity which is acquired only by houses of great bankers, a symbol in the midst of less enormous and somber dwellings, of all that is enduring and respectable in a changing effervescent world.
At ten o’clock on this particular evening the lacquer screen concealed behind its shimmering walls the figure of a Russian tenor, a Javanese dancer (really a low caste Hindu woman who had her training in some brothel of Alexandria) and the unknown American girl whom Sanson recommended as a fine artist. They were entertainers, mountebanks, brought together only to divert a crowd of guests, who presently would arrive, jaded and somewhat torpid, from monstrous dinners of twenty courses held in houses from Washington Square as far north as the east Sixties. In the behavior of the three performers there was no great cordiality. They sat apart, without interest in each other; indeed there were in their manner unmistakable traces of jealousies as old as their very profession.
Sometimes the tiny dancer, with skin like _café au lait_ satin, stirred restlessly, setting all her bangles into jangling motion, to address the Russian tenor in bad French. He was an enormous blond man with a chest like a barrel and hands that rested like sausages upon his knees, a man gauche in manner, a little like a bear let loose in a drawing-room ... a mountain between the little Hindu woman and the American girl who sat a little apart, slim and tall as Artemis, her black hair wound low over a face that was pale with excitement. She knew no French and so, after the first exchange of “Goot eefning!” with her two weird companions, she lapsed into a silence which concentrated all its force upon a crevice in the lacquered screen. Thus she was able to see the whole length of the great drawing-room and witness the spectacle of the arriving guests.
At first there appeared only her employer, a squat, plump woman laced until her figure resembled the hour glass shape of the ladies in Renoir’s pictures of bourgeois picnics at St. Cloud. From sources hidden in a veritable upholstery of satin and velvet, so cut as to emphasize all her most voluptuous curves, little ladders and tongues of jet sprang forth and glittered darkly at every motion of her tiny plump feet. The face too was plump and, despite a drooping eyelid (which in her youth might have been fascinating and now only made her appear to be in a constant state of sly observation), it must have been lovely, perhaps even subtle. The tight little mouth had an expression that was pleasant and agreeable. It was as if she said, “Ah, well. Nothing in this world surprises me. It will all come out right in the end.”
The sleek black hair she wore pulled back into an uncompromising knot, though in front it was frizzed into a little bang which once might have passed for a weapon of coquetry. Over all this was flung the glittering sheen of jewels, prodigal, indecently Oriental in their extravagance. Above the fuzzy bang reared a tiara of emeralds and diamonds and beneath, sweeping over the mountainous curve of her bosom so that it entangled itself in the plastrons of diamonds fastened beneath, hung a necklace of emeralds. All these repeated their glitter in the rings on the plump hands emerging from long tight sleeves of black satin, which stretched perilously at each dominating gesture employed to direct the small army of servants. But all the jewels were a little dirty. It was probable that no money had been wasted in cleaning them in more than twenty years.
This, then, was _the_ Mrs. Callendar, appearing to-night in _grande tenue_ to receive a small and shrewdly picked list of guests at her only entertainment of the season. To Ellen, peering with breathless curiosity through the crack in the screen, this plump middle-aged woman must have appeared a highly bedizened figure of fun; for Ellen, having come freshly from the provinces, could have known nothing of all the glamour and power that lay concealed in the hour glass of velvet, satin, and soiled diamonds.
There was no secretary hired by this thrifty woman to send lists of her guests to the daily papers and see that her picture or paragraphs concerning her appeared once or twice a week. She did not even give twenty course dinners interrupted by false endings of Roman punch, nor circus entertainments like those of some women who filled the pages of the noisier journals with columns of diversion for shop girls. Through the barbaric spectacle of the late nineties and the early nineteen hundreds she made her way quietly and firmly, knowing perhaps that she was above these things, a power beyond power, living most of the year abroad, seeing only those persons who amused her (for she had learned long ago that in order to survive one must be selective). Indeed her name was more likely to appear upon the pages devoted to stocks and bonds than in the columns given over to what was known variously as the _beau monde_ and the Four Hundred.
Queerest of all was the fact that behind this stout-willed dowager lay an impossibly romantic past.
In the early Seventies when the steam freighters were making their final inroads upon the business of the clipper ships, the house of Griswold and Callendar, Shippers, Importers and Bankers with offices in Liverpool, New York, Marseilles, Bombay and Shanghai, was already on a decline. Already the capital was being shifted into bonds. In these days there remains of this firm no importing business at all but only a great banking house with offices in Wall and Threadneedle Streets and the Boulevard Haussmann; but in the Seventies it was still a great shipping company whose ships circled the globe and dealt alike with Chinese, Indians, Frenchmen, Greeks, and the men of half a dozen other nations. In consequence of these dealings there arose from time to time many disputes, so that always there was some member of the firm on business in a distant quarter of the world. It was to Richard Callendar, the youngest and most vigorous member and the only Callendar in the firm, that most of this traveling fell; and so, in the course of time, he found himself in Constantinople on the business of settling claims with a crafty fellow, one Dikran Leopopulos, whose bank had offices in Calicut and Alexandria with the main house at the Golden Horn.
The contest between the two was drawn out, resolving itself at length into a battle between Yankee shrewdness and Levantine deceit. Leopopulos, a swarthy fellow with narrow green eyes, opened the engagement by an onslaught of hospitality. He entertained his young visitor in the most lavish and Oriental fashion. There were dinners to which the _chic_ foreign world of Constantinople were invited ... ambassadors, secretaries and their ladies, French, German, English and American, in the banker’s palace in Pera; there were _pique-niques_ beside the River of Sweet Waters, and moonlight excursions in caïques propelled by dark oarsmen, on the Bosphorus near the Greek banker’s summer palace; and excursions in victorias to the ruins of Justinian’s fortifications. He sought as a wily means of gaining his end to dazzle the blond, romantic young American, to coddle him by eastern luxury into a false bargain. And to make the entertainment complete, he brought from her seclusion his young daughter, a girl of eighteen, slim, dark, fresh from a French convent, dressed in the very latest modes from Paris, to preside over his entertainments. The girl’s mother was dead, having swooned and later passed away of the heat and confusion at the great Exposition in Paris whither she had gone to visit, after many years, her great-aunts. For the wife of Leopopulos had been French, the daughter of an impoverished, moth-eaten Royalist, and in her child, the slim young Thérèse, there was much that was French ... her wit, her self-possession, her sense of knowing her way about the world. But there was much too that was Levantine.
When at last the revels came to an end, there were bickerings and bargainings in which Yankee shrewdness, in the end, got the better of Levantine deceit. The green-eyed Leopopulos to hide his sorrow gave a farewell dinner aboard the young American’s ship (a Griswold and Callendar clipper named _Ebenezer Holt_) and so, he believed, closed the incident. It was not until the following day, when a veritable army of fat Greek aunts and cousins, wailing and lamenting, burst at dawn into his green bedroom, that he learned the full extent of his sorrow. His daughter, the dark-eyed Thérèse, had sailed on the _Ebenezer Holt_ as the bride of young Richard Callendar.
* * * * *
Thus Thérèse Callendar came to New York, a stranger out of the oldest of worlds entering into the newest, confused a little by her surroundings and by the primness of her husband’s family, so like and yet so unlike the caution of her own Greek aunts and cousins. In those early days at long dinners in rooms hung with plush and ornamented with Canalettos and Cabanels, her sensations must have been very like those of an ancient Alexandrian, civilized, cultivated, and a little decadent among the more vigorous and provincial Romans of Cæsar’s day. In that age of innocence she found it, no doubt, difficult going; for there was in New York no warm welcome for a foreign woman, no matter how great her beauty, her cultivation, or her charm; much less for a Greek from such a frontier as Constantinople, the capital of the cruel and abandoned Turk. An alien was a creature to be regarded as a curiosity, to be treated, unless he possessed a great title, politely but with suspicion. She was, to be sure, probably the first Greek who came to live on Manhattan’s rocky island; but despite this and all the other barriers, she succeeded in the end, because she was, after all, older than any of them, more civilized, more fortified by those institutions which come only of an old race. In her French blood she was old, but in her Greek blood how much older! She was as old as the carved emerald which she wore always upon her little hand, now so plump with middle age, in a ring which legend had it survived the sack of Constantinople. In tradition she was as old as Justinian and Theodora. The family of Leopopulos was proud--so proud and so old that one no longer discussed its pride and age.
After two years she bore a son, and before the end of that year she became a widow when her ardent young husband, swimming in the surf off Newport, went in his reckless way too far out and never returned. The son she called Richard, after the father, and together with her he inherited the great Callendar fortune, to which was added with the passing of years the gold, the olive orchards, the vineyards, and the palaces of the green-eyed old Banker of Pera. But Thérèse Callendar never married again; she devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and to the husbanding of a great fortune which by shrewdness and will she had long since doubled and tripled. She was, in her soul, a Levantine; thrift and shrewdness were a part of her very flesh and bones. She lived here and there, always on the move, now in Constantinople, now in Paris, now in London, now in Cannes, now in New York, even making at times trips to such outlandish places as Bombay and Sumatra; a woman of sorts, of vast energy and sharp intelligence. And slowly as she passed down the corridor of the years the slim chic figure became an hour glass hung with jet and diamonds. Her eyes were no longer good and she was able to see now only with the aid of lorgnettes through which she stared with a petulant intensity into the faces of all her companions.
But she was rich; she was respected; she was fashionable. Indeed in those days of the Nineties and the early Nineteen Hundreds when European titles had not yet acquired a doubtful character, she achieved an added glamour through the unsought visits of bankrupt Royalist relatives, distant in relationship but much in need of American heiresses. And at least two of them took home as brides the respective daughters of an American nickel plate king and a wizard of Wall Street. They were gaudy days, less pleasant perhaps in the eyes of Thérèse Callendar than the quiet provinciality she had known in the beginning as the bride of Richard Callendar. This capital of the new world she knew, in the depths of her racial instinct, to be an awkward affair, flamboyant, yet timid; vulgar yet aspiring; arrogant but still a little fearful. It was the day of twenty course dinners and banquets at which the cost of feeding each guest was estimated in the daily press. The Greek woman knew that some day this city would come of age.
So Ellen, trembling with excitement in her hiding place behind the screen, must have caught a little of the smoldering magnificence that lay hidden in the plump corseted figure, for presently she forgot entirely the bearlike Russian tenor and the exotic dancer with her outlandish bangles. She had eyes only for Mrs. Callendar and the guests who had begun to arrive.
* * * * *
That wise hostess might have written an entire book on the subject of an amusing entertainment. From the procession of guests it was clear that she considered them a part of the evening’s diversion, a kind of preliminary parade about the arena which provided variety and color. She understood that people came when you provided rich food and amusing types, the more preposterous the better.
A Tzigane orchestra, much in fashion, assembled itself presently and played an accompaniment to the grand march of arriving guests. Among the first were the Champion girls and their mother. These represented the old families. The two girls, already past their first youth, wore gowns made by Worth, cut low back and front, which fitted their thin bodies in the Princess style. But these gowns, Thérèse saw instantly, they had ruined; for in a moment of caution the deep V’s, front and back, had been built up with modest inserts of lace and tulle, and short sleeves of similar material had been inserted to shield the upper portions of their white arms. They held themselves stiffly. Nothing of them remained exposed save the fact that they were virgins.
Close upon their heels, so close that the mother in her haste appeared to shuffle her daughters into a corner with the air of a hen covering her chicks from a hawk, came that elderly rake, Wickham Chase, and Mrs. Sigourney, the latter dressed tightly in black and diamonds rumored to be paste--thin, piercing and hard, too highly painted, a divorcée. (None but Thérèse Callendar would have dared to ask her.) And then Bishop Smallwood, whom Sabine Cane called “The Apostle to the Genteel,” a Bishop with a See in the far West, who managed to divide his time between New York and Bar Harbor and Newport ... a fat, pompous man with a habit of alluding too easily to “My wa’am friend Mrs. Callendar” and “My wa’am friend Mrs. Champion” and “My wa’am friend Mrs. So-and-so” ad infinitum through the lists of the wealthy and the fashionable. Trapped between the Scylla of Mrs. Champion and her Virgins and Charybdis of the questionable but very smart Mrs. Sigourney, the poor man found himself at once in an untenable position. Seeing this, the small eyes of his hostess glittered with a sinful light.
Next came the Honorable Emma Hawksby, a gaunt Englishwoman of some thirty-eight summers with a face like a horse, projecting teeth, and feet that appeared to better advantage in the hedgerows than in the ball room. To-night they emerged barge-like from beneath a very fancy gown of pink satin ornamented with sequins and yards of mauve tulle. It was in her direction that the anxious Mrs. Champion steered her two virgins. Was she not a cousin of the notorious Duke of Middlebottom?
And then the four Fordyce sisters, arriving unattended in a hollow square formation, large, dark, powerful girls ranging in age from twenty to thirty-one, filled with an inhuman energy and zeal for good works, the very first of those who struggled for the enfranchisement of women.
Then one or two nondescript bachelors, of the handy sort seen everywhere as conveniences, stuffed with food and wine taken at some monstrous dinner in the Thirties; and on their heels Mrs. Mallinson, who belonged in the category of Mrs. Champion and her virgins, but who had escaped years ago into the freedom of the literary world wherein she wrote long novels of society life. She was a hard woman and beginning to sag a little here and there so that she threw up against the ravages of decay bulwarks in the form of a black satin ribbon ornamented with diamonds about her dewlapped throat. She lived outside Paris in a small château, once the property of a royal mistress, and spoke with a French accent. Because she was literary, she was considered, in Mrs. Champion’s mind, also Bohemian.
In her hiding place behind the painted screen, the dark eyes of Ellen Tolliver grew brighter and brighter. Behind her the Javanese dancer and the Russian tenor had relapsed into a condition of moribund indifference.
More and more guests filtered into the room, old, young, dowdy, respectable, smart, one or two even a little déclassée. They regarded each other for a time, slipping into little groups, gossiping for a moment, melting away into new and hostile clusters, whispering, laughing, sneering, until the whole room became filled with an animation which even the great dinners of two hours earlier could not suffocate.