Firecrackers/Chapter 9
The disappearance of Gunnar, on the whole, aroused comparatively little astonishment in Campaspe; she was not, however, altogether free from a certain sensation of relief. There had been, she was fully aware, underground rumblings in their latest conversation which foretold in hollow tones the advent of emotional earthquakings. To tread lightheartedly over such fissures, portents of the anger of nature, had not been, hitherto, too difficult for a lady who protected herself with an adroitly secure philosophy, a philosophy which, supported by a few simple rules in respect to conduct, had never yet failed her even when the way split, figuratively speaking, under her feet. In this instance, however, she foresaw that the fissures would open between her and another, whose guiding star of idealism might not lead him safely to stable ground. He might conceivably, she argued, with a part of herself that seldom became conscious, appeal to her for aid in this extra-emergency, and push or pull her with him into the aching jaws of the chasm. He had had, she assured herself, a like premonition of impending disaster, and had rescued himself by the obvious device of running away from the danger, a habitual propensity of his, she noted, not without annoyance. Campaspe's own temperament forbad her to run away from anything. She was prepared to face whatever came towards her; in most instances, indeed, to welcome it; more, to beckon it excitedly. She had, as a matter of fact, up to this moment, taken the initiative in the precise drama undergoing her present consideration, and so it was with a curious foreboding that she experienced, quite uncharacteristically, this vast sensation of relief in the knowledge of Gunnar's flight, combined with the feeling that his action had preserved her, at least momentarily, from an unknown peril of which she was just a little afraid. Nevertheless, with this sensation of relief came to her simultaneously a glimmering of regret, for there was that unique perversity in her emotional make-up which made her grieve for nothing quite so poignantly as for discarded experience. It was Gunnar, however, who had created the vacuum, if there were a vacuum—sometimes, pondering in an obscure and contradictory reverie, it was given to her to doubt even this—a thought which afforded her sufficient consolation so that, along with whatever other loss she had suffered, she suffered no concomitant loss of self-respect.
Meanwhile the rapidly unwinding panorama of New York life continued to display itself before her somewhat listless perceptions. A tenet of her serviceable philosophy informed her that, if the complete satisfying of any desire were for some reason impossible there was always a substitute, a theory which, if it did not appear to hold as much plausibility as formerly, was at any rate still sufficiently reassuring to encourage her to look about, and, as always, she found something to look at. Laura, trembling before the precocity of Consuelo, in turn applauded by George, was a complex spectacle that would have commanded her attention to the exclusion of all other exhibitions in a more propitious period. Even in her present mood this show succeeded in arousing a good deal of her latent interest. Further, the extraordinary case of Paul offered her abundant material for cogitation. Paul, invading Cupid's realm, apparently a slave to the hitherto unsuspected delights of the marts of trade and commerce, served to excellently substantiate her conviction that it was never advisable to decline to drink out of any fountain before one had sampled the water. Vera, too, unhappy Vera, plunged alternately into depths of liquid melancholy and unpleasant and ungovernable demonstrations of blustering fatuousness by this metamorphosis in the supposedly natural characteristics of her spouse, was another object to repay at least superficial study.
Musing in such a manner one day, Campaspe began to believe that enough blessings in the way of vicarious emotion had been vouchsafed her so that she might devote a few idle moments to the casual inspection of a book with an unpromising title. Upon examination, this unlikely volume rewarded her none too close scrutiny with novel information concerning certain architectural aberrations in the world with which she had been, until then, entirely unfamiliar. It was delightful, for example, to read about the insane but realized structural fantasy known as the Villa Palagonia. The eccentric Prince who had caused the erection of this edifice had filled his courtyard with statues of unseemly monsters, of which, it appeared, he lived in some fear. Another of his idiosyncrasies was the collection of the horns and antlers of every known mammal that carried these utilitarian decorations. He also indulged a frantic passion for mirrors. His ball-room was roofed and walled with looking-glasses. Further, it had been the Prince's fancy to construct his dining-room in the form of a horse-shoe, a symbol repeated in the shape of the table. The walls of this chamber were inlaid with Chinese porcelain, giving the place the appearance of a huge vase, while the furniture was inlaid with mirrors. Nor was it disagreeable to peruse the account of the Palace-Convent of Mafra, erected near Lisbon by King João V, in an attempt, more or less successful, to rival the gloomy splendour of the Escurial. The chambers of this building were of such mammoth proportions that the walls could scarcely be counted on interminably to support the heavy ceilings, but these walls were so cunningly constructed that if they fell they would fall inward, burying under the weight of stones the secret of the creation of this palace, if there were a secret. Again, it was diverting to become acquainted with the baroque harmonies of the Prefettura and Seminario, reared in a stone of a golden hue, so soft when quarried that it might be carved into the most fantastic shapes before, in a few days, it hardened, in the Apulian town of Lecce which, she noted with a smile, was famous for the manufacture of that essential eighteenth century commodity, castrati, an industry as much frowned on legally in that epoch as bootlegging is today. There was always, Campaspe still believed, something left to think about.
Moreover, as the day wore on, other distractions presented themselves so that, as yet, there seemed to be no occasion for her to apply to Swamis, Coués, or Freuds. She recognized the fact, however, that the world in general, and New York in particular, would lose a great deal of their savour if there were not some persons who continued to subscribe to the panaceas advocated by these hierophants, performing all the prescribed rites with due solemnity. They were an essential part of the human circus and she knew that she would miss them if they were absent. Nevertheless, what she craved most in her present mood was a certain wholesome sanity, and where could she ever hope to find that again? Was there, she wondered, no shadow of it left on this sphere save that by no means modest share which she locked in her own bosom?
The distractions were various. A cabinet-maker arrived for the purpose of restoring a Boulle desk of which a great deal of the brass scroll-work was missing, but, after an interview with him, Campaspe decided to leave the wreck, for the time being, in its present condition. The artisan was so little conversant with the properties of this type of furniture that he had even referred to the tortoise-shell as lacquer. A little later, she tried some Chinese records, which had just been sent to her, on the phonograph, and was amazed to discover how clear and pellucid, how limpidly lovely, this music was. It was the kind of music, indeed, that the more sophisticated French and Spanish composers were just beginning to compose, and Chinese music had always been referred to as ugly noises! I might have known, she averred to herself, that a race which has understood every other art for centuries would not be backward in the art of music. And she marvelled that it had been possible for any admirer of Mozart to disregard the magic of this oriental melody with its odd rhythms, its rigidly irregular monotony, and its fascinating clang-tints. From Chinese music her thoughts escaped to a consideration of the curiously sure genius of a young Mexican boy, Miguel Covarrubias, who created caricatures of celebrities, whom he knew only by sight and name, which exposed the whole secret of the subjects' personalities. Here was clairvoyance. And his drawings of Negroes crystalized the essential characteristics of the race, withal each was drawn with as eager an eye for individual traits as directed the pen of Albrecht Dürer. Material for admiration here. This meditation was interrupted by a summons from the cook.
Now ordinarily—indeed, invariably—the cook was Frederika's job. Frederika engaged the cook, ordered the meals, and when she was unsatisfactory, discharged her. Campaspe could not recall that she had ever seen this particular cook, so that it was not without a certain amount of curiosity that she received Frederika's breathless announcement that this servant demanded an audience. She insists on complaining to you personally, Frederika apologized, and says she'll go if you won't see her. She's a very good cook, the maid added, in palliation for this unusual procedure of the unloading of her own troubles on Campaspe's back. Campaspe decided at once that she would humour the woman, but she spent a few moments amusing herself by selecting the setting for the interview. Should she invade the kitchen or should she invite the cook to confer with her in the drawing-room? She gave her ultimate approval to the former location and was pleased with her choice when she stood facing this great, raw-boned, gaunt and elderly, Irish female, with stray wisps of grey hair and red face with promnent cheek-bones, lustily stirring a mixture in a brown crockery bowl on the table before her. She did not desist when confronted by her mistress, nor did she invite her to sit down. Was it etiquette, Campaspe demanded of herself, for a cook in her own domain to request her employer to seat herself? She listened to the cook's complaint, which included a diatribe against the scullery-maid whose belief in Christian Science made her presence distasteful to the cook who was a Catholic. The waitress, it appeared, had a policeman keeping company with her, and Frederika occasionally helped herself to a nip of sherry. These denunciations were delivered in a belligerent fashion and accompanied by a prodigious stirring of the mixture in the bowl which, Campaspe realized with a sort of awe, was something she herself would be eating later in the day. The performance was concluded with a florid peroration of some length in which the cook summed up her troubles and cried, Them or me goes, standing arms akimbo, the great wooden spoon stuck out at a right angle, so that it suggested some mysterious medizval weapon. Never previously, Campaspe assured herself, had she known so much about the private lives of her servants. It gave her the impression that she was a feudal lord dispensing justice to his serfs. Nevertheless, she recognized her impotence. She could scarcely limit the choice of the waitress in the matter of young men, nor could she instruct the scullery-maid to alter her faith. Frederika's taste for sherry, as a matter of fact, seemed highly creditable. As Solomon, Campaspe said to herself, I am a failure. I cannot render decisions. She relied, instead, on a formula which had proved efficacious in many similar situations in other ranks of life. She entreated the cook to comprehend that she was a superior person who should be able to get along with her inferiors. They know no better, these others, she explained; so let them have their way. This argument, she could see, was not without making its effect. The cook, indeed, warmed perceptibly, sufficiently, at any rate, so that she returned to her work. As an additional precaution, Campaspe suggested to Frederika the advisability of offering the cook a nip of sherry now and then. She also inquired of the waitress if she were acquainted with another policeman sufficiently blind to feminine charm so that he might be persuaded to call occasionally on the cook. Then she dismissed the matter from her mind.
The letters of the past few days had gathered on a tray and it now occurred to Campaspe that she might take the time to look these over. For the most part, as she had presurmised, they were not of any great import. The inspection of invitations and bills never succeeded in giving her much pleasure, but it was fun to open an invitation to a luncheon which had been given the day before to "meet Lady Diana Manners," and to read a typewritten epistle requesting her to serve on a committee to decide what kind of animal the Girl Scouts of America should present to the Bronx Zoo. I think, she murmured to herself, that I shall recommend a garter snake. A characteristic note from Lalla Draycott she dropped after glancing at a line or two. At the bottom of the heap, or as near the bottom as Campaspe ever penetrated, she discovered a large envelope from the Ritz, addressed in a feeble, scrawling hand, which she did not immediately recognize. On examination it proved to be from the Countess Nattatorrini who, it seemed, had arrived in New York.
Campaspe had met the Countess one afternoon several years before at the hôtel of the Duchess of Guermantes. The occasion, on the whole, had been dull enough; still, Campaspe had derived a certain oblique entertainment from listening to Oriane discuss the peculiar reasons why she could and did know certain people and the still better reasons why she could not know others. Presently, the Countess, who even then must have been in her seventies, had gravitated towards her, believing her doubtless to be a person of some importance, as she was the only American, with the exception of her titled self, she had ever known Oriane to invite to her house. The curious confusion of grande dame and courtesan which Campaspe had at once sensed in the countenance of this elderly lady had caused her to make an effort to create a sympathetic atmosphere, which had proved sufficiently alluring so that the Countess had asked her to lunch with her the next day, and then and there began a friendship based, on the part of the Countess, on a blind desire to discover an indulgent listener, and, on Campaspes part, on a willingness to listen. Then one day, the confessional had become a shambles. Throwing off what little remained of her reserve, the Countess had related the sorry details of her curiously monotonous career, like casting swine before pearls, Campaspe thought, and she wondered if she had been the Countess's only confessor save the priest, so complete was the woman's self-denigration and so passionate her enjoyment of it. Their relationship had assumed more formality after this breach in decorum—it is natural to turn against a person to whom you have told too much about yourself—and soon after Campaspe had left Paris. Since then, whenever she had visited the French capital, the Countess had been away en villegiature or in London, so that this was the first opportunity offered her to renew the acquaintanceship. Noting that the letter had been mailed two days earlier, she sent Frederika at once to the telephone with instructions.
In a few moments the maid returned. The Countess is not feeling very well, she explained, and does not wish to go out. She asks if you will lunch with her.
Of course, Campaspe replied. Tell her I shall be delighted.
On the way to the Ritz she recalled that she had agreed to join Hubert Miles and his young wife at Voisin's, but she did not regret this lapse of memory which, perhaps, had not been altogether unconscious. Driving up Park Avenue she peered ahead at the terraced apartment houses rising on either side. Soon, she mused, New York will resemble ancient Babylon. It will become a city of terraced palaces, with balconies and aerial gardens. How much New Yorkers like to move! There is the endless search for a new environment. The average life of any smart colony is only five years. It will soon be as bad form to live on Park Avenue as it is now to live on Riverside Drive. The present pilgrimage is towards the East River around Sutton Place or Beekman Place. In ten years, First Avenue, which adjoins these localities, will probably be the Park Avenue of its decade. Then Campaspe's mind reverted to a street further up the river she had herself discovered, a delightfully quiet street facing a little park. Later, in the spring, the boats on the stream could be discerned through the green of the trees. No one else had yet marked the charm of this particular spot. If I bought a house there I suppose enough of my world would follow me to make it a profitable investment, Campaspe reflected.
The formal Louis XVI drawing-room, in the suite occupied by the Countess, invaded by the contents of her trunks, was in appalling disorder. Robes were strewn over all the chairs, but tall crystal vases of American Beauty roses gave a sense of decorative grace to the place. Through an open doorway Campaspe caught a glimpse of three innovation trunks standing open in the bedroom. Chairs, bed, and floor were littered with a profusion of hats and gowns from the Parisian couturieres, while a maid struggled futilely to put an end to this confusion.
My trunks have just arrived; I had such difficulties with the douane, the Countess explained, after kissing Campaspe on both cheeks. You will pardon the appearance of my rooms . . .
She chattered on in a kind of passionate endeavour to keep from thinking, Campaspe decided, as she made a rapid examination of the figure before her. At first, the false teeth, the hollow cheeks, artfully tinted with red, the ravaged throat, concealed beneath a broad band of black velvet, were a trifle repulsive, but in a little while, this unfortunate initial impression wore away. After all, Campaspe summed it up, she is seventy-seven; may I look as well when I attain that age! She was truly amazing, this woman. Her figure was not bad: her dress made it even presentable. Her white hair gave her an air of distinction, and Campaspe again mentally admired the contradictions in her face, her full sensual lips and staring eyes, mingled with an expression that stamped her at heart as utterly conventional. Possibly Iowa had presented her with this paradoxical respectability. However that might be, it was the quality that had saved the Countess from the gutter, Campaspe realized.
It soon became evident that Madame Nattatorrini was fortunate only in appearance. In other respects she was a pathetic, old woman, as restless as the Wandering Jew, always searching and never finding. The undiscovered secret of perpetual motion might, after all, be lust. Why had no inventor ever contrived to enslave this terrifying force, to turn it to practical account? There was not, to be sure, more than a hint of this vehement, unsatisfied desire in the actual words used by the Countess in speaking, but it was easy for Campaspe to look through the nervous, the almost shrill, commonplaces of what was said into the harassed soul of senile agony and longing.
Paris is so tiresome! the Countess was complaining, after an extended account of her prolonged argument with the customs officials. I felt I could bear it no longer. I was dying for a change! She threw out her arms and tossed her head. Would New York, I wondered, offer me what I wanted? I have heard so much about the post-war gaieties here. Some of my friends have told me that it is the most brilliant city in the world today. I wanted to try it. Shall we lunch up here? I don't feel very fit today, not well enough to face a crowd in the restaurant. Alceste, nous voulons dejeuner ici. But, she continued, without a break, it is so cold, so rainy, so forbidding. I recall that the sun used to shine in America in the winter. I think I should like to go to Buenos Ayres, to the Argentine, to get warm. I saw Valentino in that picture! What a handsome fellow he is! South America must be warmer, but there is no one to go with me.
I wish I might take the trip with you, Campaspe interjected, instantly detecting the Countess's mental rejection of any such proposal.
I should have married again; I am so much alone, the Countess sighed, while the waiter offered her the menu. Will you try the sole? I should have borne children, like you. When you reach my age you will have your babies, your own sons—Ella's expression was avid at the mention of this sex—to be with you, to go with you where you will. I am all alone. What will you eat?
That question settled, the waiter having departed to execute the order, the Countess burst forth again: He was extremely good-looking. There was a line to his nose. Do they have Greek waiters here? The Swiss are so short. . . . Paris is so dull. What is every one doing here? No, I don't play Mah Jong. . . . I know so few people in New York intimately—I've spent so much of my life with foreigners. Perhaps, it has been all wrong. Do you think it is too late? O, Campaspe, you must help me to undo the effect on my spirits caused by this rain! Does it rain all the time here? It's even worse than Paris.
You'll see the sun occasionally, Campaspe replied. On days like this I usually keep my curtains drawn. I never know that the weather is bad unless I go out.
I'm tired of the theatre, the Countess went on. I hear that Gareth Johns is in town. Twenty-six years ago, she sighed, it was that . . . Have you seen him? Have you met his wife?
Not yet. I expect to meet them next week.
What is his wife like? Have you heard? He married her, you know, for her money.
No, I haven't heard, but I know what she must be like. She's a quiet, little woman, rather frumpy probably, who smoothes out his moods and polishes off the rough contacts. The life of an author's wife is the life of a laundress. Always washing and ironing!
Campaspe, you are delicious. The Countess was amused for the first time, and an expression of pleasure spread over her countenance. I knew I should do well to come to New York. You will cheer me up in spite of the rain!
An hour later, as she drove away from this encounter, Campaspe felt a new twinge of her morning dissatisfaction. There was getting to be too much of this sort of thing in the world. Was there, she asked her gods, no hint of sanity anywhere?