The Plutocrat (Tarkington)/Chapter 15
IN THE morning, having slept little, he beheld from his balcony the magnificent departure of the Tinkers. A quarter of an hour earlier a deferential formality attended the setting forth of the Hereditary Prince Orthe XVIII of Fühlderstein and his bride, who had been spending part of their honeymoon in Algiers. The manager of the hotel and the concierge, with the two chief porters, the maître d'hôtel, two valets de chambre and an agent of police, all bowed respectfully as the amiable-looking young couple were driven away in an Italian touring car; but this, as the melancholy playwright observed, was only a one-act curtain-raiser, as it were, preceding the full-sized drama of the American family's departure. Looking down from his stone-railed box, he saw the brisk yet imposing arrival of two long and powerful French automobiles, new and glistening; one a landaulet, the other a limousine. The chauffeurs, trim young men of capable appearance, jumped down, and, with them, the good-looking courier Ogle had seen in charge of the Tinkers the day before. More impressively, there descended from the landaulet a stout and smiling man who wore a white camellia upon the lapel of his frock coat and a broad black watch guard across his white waistcoat. The playwright recognized him as M. Cayzac, the chief personage of the tourist-agency and branch banking-house to which his letters were consigned.
M. Cayzac was apparently in high spirits, yet solicitous that all might go well with so important an undertaking as he had on hand this morning;—the manager of the hotel came forth to salute him, attended by the concierge; and the three conferred seriously, the gestures of M. Cayzac meanwhile becoming fluent, vigorous, and almost operatic. Then porters appeared, laden with small trunks, large black leather bags, rugs, fur coats, hat boxes, vacuum bottles and lunch baskets, for this was a motoring expedition of wide scope and no small moment; that was to be seen with half an eye. The trunks were strapped to the back of the limousine and upon its roof; the bags, boxes, bottles, furs, and baskets were stowed away inside; and while this was being done more employés of the hotel began to appear and collect themselves gravely in small groups between the landaulet and the principal entrance.
There was a pause; then a bowing began near the doorway, and Mrs. Tinker came forth, whereupon M. Cayzac rushed to her and gracefully kissed her hand—an act of courtesy visibly embarrassing to her; indeed she seemed doubtful of its propriety. He also kissed the hand of Olivia, who followed her mother, looking prettier than ever and not quite so resentful as usual, Ogle thought.
Now a mild commotion was perceptible, and Tinker appeared, wearing a gray ulster over his travelling clothes, for the morning was brisk; his hands were full of paper money, and his great anxiety, obviously, was to get rid of it. Since it was pink in colour and flimsy in texture, possibly he did not regard it as money at all, but merely as an encumbrance. However that may have been, every polite assistance was rendered him in his determination to depart without it; and when he had finished by pressing the last of it upon the manager, he seemed to feel, and was, relieved. Moreover, in this impersonation of a Christmas Tree moving between the door of the hotel and the landaulet, he inspired, for himself and for the golden land whence he came, a passionate enthusiasm combined with a beautifully concealed amazement.
The manager presented bouquets of violets and roses to the two ladies; a gardener presented them with two bouquets of greater variety; the maître d'hôtel presented Mrs. Tinker with a dozen jonquils; another gardener presented Tinker with three camellias, which a valet de chambre reverently pinned upon a lapel of the gray ulster. Then, when Tinker and Mrs. Tinker and Olivia were seated within the landaulet, and the courier had taken his place beside the chauffeur, the manager, the concierge, the maître d'hôtel, the three clerks from the bureau, two chief porters, two waiters, four valets de chambre, and two gardeners stood bowing their adieus; but those of M. Cayzac were vocal as well as gesticulative. With amiable fervour, he made what had the air of being an oration of tribute, as the two cars began slowly to move through the garden; and a clapping of hands and something like a slight cheering from the waiters and porters and gardeners encouraged his effort. Guests of the hotel, American, English, French, Italian, Greek, and Turkish, leaned from their balconies and came out upon the terrace, wondering what potentates incognito could thus be honoured.
M. Cayzac waved his arms ardently. "Bon voyage, Madame, Mademoiselle et Monsieur, et merci mille fois, Monsieur Tankaire!" he cried in conclusion. "Au plaisir, Monsieur Tankaire!"
And Tinker, leaning from the window of the landaulet, and waving his soft hat, shouted cordially in return, "Alley vooze on! We, we! Mon Doo! Mellican man say velly much oblige'! Goo'by!"
The expedition passed out of sight round a turn in the garden driveway, tooted its small brass horns at the gates, then was forth upon the adventure; and the hotel employés returned gayly to work, affluent even beyond expectation. Ten minutes later, General Sir William Broadfeather, with one of the middle-aged ladies and the long-nosed girl, got into a small touring car; a porter and the concierge seeing them off; and to each of these Sir William gave a silver coin, but not until the engine was in full agitation.
Ogle, returning into his room pained by the contrast—for again it was the Americans who had made spectacles of themselves—found the gossiping femme de chambre engaged in making his bed. "Good-morning, gentleman," she said; and, with a bright glance at him she added: "Las' night I have seen my cousin that is marry with the chauffeur at 'Colline des Roses.' You know what happen, I think?"
"No. I don't know."
"Well, my cousin she don' know herself," the femme de chambre admitted. "Her husban', 'e don' know too; but is somesing."
"Something happened at the Daurels' villa, you mean?"
"Yes, surely," she said, and nodded three times for emphasis. "Surely is somesing happen. It has been going to happen all the time since they were in North America, my cousin she think; but now it happen the most of all. It is yesterday and the day before. Mademoiselle Lucie Daurel, she cry very much and Mademoiselle Daurel is angry—oh, she is angry! They hear her say that Monsieur Hyacinthe Momoro is a bad, bad boy! Bad!"
"What!" Ogle exclaimed. "How on earth is he 'bad'? What's he been doing?"
She shook her head. "Nobody can tell. The servants in the 'ouse, that is all they know, but they say Mademoiselle Lucie cry so much because she think 'e is bad, too. Mademoiselle Daurel tell her so before they arrive; but she won' believe. Now she cry because she mus' got to believe it. You see Madame Momoro?"
"No."
"Well, maybe she is going to tell you what happen. Maybe she will tell you when you see her; I think not."
Ogle thought not too; but his greater doubt was that he should see her; and after Tinker's naïve disclosure he was no longer sure that he indeed wished to see her. He was morose that morning and inclined to be a woman-hater, as he walked down the long hill to M. Cayzac's office. M. Cayzac was there, somewhat pompously affable behind his desk; but the letters Ogle expected had not arrived, which made him anxious; for they should have reached Algiers by this time, if sent by way of Havre and Marseilles, as he had directed. He took a taxicab back to the hotel and found the terrace occupied by only two people:—one was the Arab merchant, asleep in the sunshine against the wall, and the other was M. Hyacinthe Momoro.
Tilted forward in a painted iron chair, the youth sat with his elbows upon the white stone railing of the terrace balustrade and stared vacantly into the garden. His attitude was one of blank dejection; and, on the part of this quiet and rather lonely boy, it was not without pathos. Moreover, when he turned his head at Ogle's impulsive "Hello there," violet tintings under his eyes suggested to the playwright a suspicion that Mlle. Lucie Daurel might not have been the only one to weep, of late, at the villa "Colline des Roses."
Hyacinthe rose, bowed in his formal way, and stood silent, as if respectfully waiting for the older man to say something more.
"You didn't happen to be calling on me again?" the American inquired. "I'm sure I hope so."
"You are very kind," Hyacinthe returned. "No. We have come to stay in the hotel a few days. Then we mus' go to Marseilles."
"'We'? You mean your mother is here with you?"
"In the hotel. Yes, she is here."
Then it appeared that Ogle's doubts about wishing to see Mme. Momoro again had not been well founded. "I wonder if there is an hour when I might call on her," he said. "I wonder if I might"
"I will ask her," Hyacinthe said quietly, and went straightway upon this errand. He returned within three minutes and reported a favourable response. "She will be very glad."
"She will? When?"
"At any time to-day. Now, if you wish."
"Thank you. Then now, if you think"
"I will show you," Hyacinthe said.
He led the way into the hotel and to the second floor, where he knocked upon a door and then, without waiting for a response, opened it, and stood aside while Ogle entered.
Hyacinthe did not follow him. "My mother will come very soon, I am sure," he said, and, having closed the door, went away.
The room was a small salon furnished in the Moorish manner of the public apartments downstairs—that is to say, it was Moorish after a Gallic interpretation, and reminded Ogle of "oriental rooms" he remembered seeing in a few American houses in his childhood. Here, however, where veritable Moors walked the streets, it seemed less out of place; though after what he had seen of the Arab quarter it did not have the air of being truly Moorish; for it was clean and comfortable and odourless.
Before him, as he stood, there was a doorway with a portière made of painted bits of hollow reed and green and rose glass beads strung upon long cords; he was conscious of movements behind this gay curtain, and presently a faint spiciness seemed to drift out from it upon the air as if released from an opened vial of scent in the room beyond. Someone spoke softly in French; it was a woman's voice, perhaps that of a maid or a femme de chambre of the hotel; and Mme. Momoro's deeper tone replied to it quickly, her words indistinguishable—but when the rich sound of that low and hurried music came to his ears, the young man waiting felt the warm colour rush upon his cheeks and temples.
She had treated him abominably; he was sure of that; and yet now, when he heard her speak again and knew that in a moment he should see her, he could not for his life keep himself from blushing. Then an exquisite, long white hand, smooth and without a ring upon any of the shapely fingers, grasped some strands of the beaded curtain as if to open a passage through it; but Mme. Momoro paused invisible, speaking again to the woman beyond;—and Ogle, looking at that beautiful hand, began to tremble.
The next moment the portière rushed aside with a clattering of beads; she swept in, long, graceful, swift, enhelmed in her pale gold and dramatically intimate in glimpsed lace and a silken robe that swathed her in a fantasia of sombre colours. With the beautiful hand outstretched to him, she crossed the room; and then, tragic and sweet, stood looking down into his eyes.
"My poor friend!" she said. "You must forgive me. I have not been very happy."
There was a lingering skepticism within him, even though he blushed and even though he trembled; but he could not doubt that she told the truth when she said that she had not been happy. Her face was almost haggard with the traces and shapings of emotion, and yet these traces and shapings were indefinite; they gave her no lines, and marvellously no age; it was as if she had been misted over with sorrow, not marked.
She retained his hand and led him to a chair close beside another. "Will you sit and listen to me?" she asked; and as he obediently did as she wished, she released his fingers from the gentle pressure with which she had enclosed them, turned away, walked to the window, and there turned again to face him. She lifted her arms high in a gesture eloquent of her inability to express what she felt, and, as her hands descended, clasped them behind her head. "Oh!" she cried. "I think it would be very difficult to believe. No one could believe that such a woman as she exists!"
"Do you mean Mademoiselle Daurel?" he asked.
"Who else? You do not have such people in America! No, nor in England. Nowhere else but in a Latin country could you find natures so extraordinary."
"What has she done?"
"It is incredible," Mme. Momoro said, seeming not to hear him. She came back to the chair beside him, sank down in it, and then, not looking at him but before her, said again: "It is incredible."
"I'd like to ask you something," he began huskily. "On the 'Duumvir,' was it on her account"
"Everything was on her account," Mme. Momoro said bitterly. "Everything! How long I have devoted myself to her! Always I have proved it; and I don't say that always she has been unkind to me, because often she has been very kind—except for her jealousy. That has grown insufferable. You see, she is old; she has been very spoiled all her life—so many, many years in everything she has had her way. Even in the War she lost nothing. So everybody must do each little thing exactly as she wishes. My friend, you saw how it was upon the steamer: after she came out of her cabin again, I did not dare to speak to you. It was for fear of displeasing her; for fear she would make a terrible scene with me. I was afraid even to look at you!"
Ogle was still capable of doubting her. "But you weren't afraid of looking at—at that Tinker!" he said. "You certainly"
"No, no!" She turned to him, surprised. "Not after she was well again. Until then, yes; but not after."
"What!" Ogle cried indignantly. "Why, he told me himself you've been going about with him here in Algiers. He said you"
"Oh, in Algiers; yes," she returned frankly; and in spite of her tragic overcasting, there was a twinkling in her eyes. "I could not resist that! Algiers is larger than a steamer. I told dreadful lies at 'Colline des Roses' and ran away to be with him because I thought if I could be amused I could endure a little longer what that terrible old woman was making me suffer. It was because with him I could laugh a little bit and forget Mademoiselle Daurel."
"I see!" Ogle said grimly. "With me you couldn't hope to be amused. So you didn't even answer my note."
She put her hand lightly upon his. "I knew he was going away in such a few days, and you were going to stay in Algiers." Then she smiled faintly and said in a wistful voice: "Sometimes, can't you understand, a woman like me must find something to laugh at to keep from crying?"
"But why couldn't you have written me at least a word of explanation, when you had all that time for him?"
She laughed ruefully, shook her head, and removed her hand from his. "You don't understand; perhaps you couldn't. I was in that house: I didn't dare to write a note. I didn't write to Mr. Tinker; I had promised on the boat to meet him at M. Cayzac's office. But what you must think of, please, it is that I knew you would stay in Algiers a long time; I knew I would see you. But I wish to be frank with you: he interests me, that man. I like him very, very much."
"Yes," Ogle said coldly. "I think you've made it apparent."
She gave him a long look then, and smiled sorrowfully. "I am afraid you resemble other men in one thing: you would not allow a woman to be your friend and still be herself, with her own mind and her own likings. No; those things, they must all be yours!"
"Not at all. Only"
"Only it is true," she said. "Very well. There is a simple solution; we need not be friends." And she rose, offering him her hand.
He stood up, to face her. "Your solution mightn't be so simple as you think—for me. Unfortunately, no matter how you treat me, I haven't been able to get you out of my head since the first moment I saw you, not for an instant. Yet I don't understand you. I don't know you. You mystify me in everything. You write me asking me to 'be kind,' begging me to 'understand'—and then you freeze me because an old woman is 'jealous' of you, you say; and after that you 'don't dare' even write a word to me; and you drive all afternoon with another man. It doesn't seem to me you've given me much chance to be your friend."
She looked at him thoughtfully. "Then I will now," she said; and they sat down again. "I will try to make you understand. Mademoiselle Daurel has been much more than jealous of me. The proprieties of an old Frenchwoman of her type who has never married are beyond anything you could ever have known in your own country. She is fanatically religious, and a great part of her jealousy of me is for my soul."
"For your soul?" he echoed; and he frowned in more puzzlement. Yet, remembering the withering frostiness of Mlle. Daurel—that look of a very old Puritan, dead—he had a gleam of light, and he consented to smile. "She is afraid you may not go to heaven?"
Mme. Momoro laughed painfully. "She knows that I am damned. But she wished that I do not lose my soul altogether, so that I may at least reach purgatory after an eternity of hell."
"What in the world do you mean?" he cried; for she was serious.
"It is very simple. I am divorced. Colonel Momoro was not Catholic, and there was a person he should be free to marry. So it was done. Well, you see, the Church will not recognize such a divorce, and because I permitted it, Mademoiselle Daurel believes that I was placed in defiance of the Church, and damned—but because I haven't married again I still have a soul. I may reach purgatory, if I am always careful—careful beyond anything you could guess of carefulness! She has long wished for me to become a nun."
"What!" he exclaimed. "You aren't in earnest?"
But he saw that she was, and he knew too that what she was telling him must be true; her eyes were wholly truthful and so was her voice. "Mademoiselle Daurel believes that only as a nun could I make my soul safe for purgatory," she said. "You see it has been unfortunate that gentlemen sometimes think me worth speaking to. And whenever she discovered that they did and that I answered them—well, she would pray for me all night! That, I could endure; but unfortunately she would make me pray with her. What horrible nights!"
"Make you?" he said. "How could she make you?"
At this she coloured a little and looked down. "I hoped—well, I must be frank. In part it was inertia and the habit of friendship; people you are with a long time can make you do a great deal; you bear many things rather than quarrel. But in part I own to you that it was—well, it wasn't noble. Both of them adored Hyacinthe, and they have no nephews or nieces. You see, I hoped they might think of him when they made their wills. I would undergo great sacrifices for that." She looked at him, and suddenly her eyes and lashes were brilliant with tears. "Do you think it is very brutal of me—to have been so great a hypocrite for my son's sake?"
When she looked at him as she did look then, through that quivering diamond brightness, he had no more doubt of her at all; he was overwhelmed by the thought that the superb creature, always until then so bravely and surely poised, now wept before him, trusted him with her tears.
He caught both her hands in his. "Aurélie!" he said. "I think only—only that you're divine."
She drew her hands away, laughing ruefully. "No. You think I suffered all that because I am mercenary. That is what you think."
"Never, never!" he protested. "I do understand. Give me the chance to be kind, as you asked me."
"Do you truly wish to be?"
"You know that I do."
"Then don't distrust me any more," she said; and her wan smile ineffably touched him.
"You'll have no more distrust from me," he said. "Was that the last thing you had to bear from Mademoiselle Daurel—distrust?"
She shook her head, and her lips set angrily. "No! She wished to take my life from me. They would do everything for Hyacinthe—only I must give him up! Well, I have borne ten thousand things; but that is what nobody must ask a mother to do. I will do anything—anything in this world; but I will not do that."
"I don't understand," he said, puzzled again. "I thought"
"She wished to take him away from me; that is all. The first day we were again in Algiers both those women came to me and they propose' to me that they will adopt Hyacinthe. I am to be no longer his mother."
"What? Why, I thought"
She sprang up, not noticing that he had spoken. "They have taken everything from me—my friends and all this time that I have given them—and now they want to take all that I live for! They will give him everything except his mother and me everything except my son. No, no! That was the end of those people for me!" And again she strode across the room, lifting up her arms on high. "No!" she cried loudly. "Nobody can be my child's mother except me. There are other things beside money that he could starve for." And once more she turned to the young man. "Do you think that is selfish? Do you think Hyacinthe himself would consent if I did? Never! Ask him!" She strode back to her chair, sank into it, closed her wet eyes, and touched them with a handkerchief. "You will think I give you a scene from some drama of the emotions, I believe," she murmured. "The Aurélie Momoro you knew on the ocean didn't seem to be so excitable a lady, I am sure." Then she opened her eyes, laughed ruefully, and said: "Well, the scene is over. I am rational. What shall we talk about?"
One thing he might have liked to talk about, incidentally, was the gossiping of French servants. The cousin of the femme de chambre had been sufficiently far from the truth in her account of poor Hyacinthe's "badness," he perceived; and he wondered if this lower-world rumour could do the boy any harm. Probably not, he decided; especially since Hyacinthe and his mother were so soon returning to France;—then the thought of their departure gave him the subject she asked for.
"Why are you going to Marseilles?"
"It is only en route. We go at once from there to Paris."
"Well, why are you going to Paris?"
She made the effect of shrugging her shoulders, but without actually moving them; her hands were lifted a little distance from her lap, then dropped. "Why go anywhere? In six weeks Hyacinthe should be in Paris to make his report; it is as well to go now."
"But it's winter in Paris, isn't it?" he urged. "And here it is so beautiful! You have six weeks. Why not spend them here?"
"Algiers?" she said, and shook her head slowly. "Algiers is nothing. You should not stay here long, yourself: there is so much for you to see."
"I shouldn't care to stay long," he told her gloomily, "if you aren't going to be here. Shall I come to Paris?"
"No, no! Nothing is there now but rain and snow, and it is dark by four in the afternoon. It would be wicked for you not to see Algeria. You should go to Bougie and to Biskra and the Desert and to Constantine and across into Tunisia and"
He interrupted her. "No, I don't care about it. If you're to be in Paris I shouldn't be interested in those places."
"You shouldn't?" She laughed, and with the tips of her fingers touched his shoulder indulgently, as if she patted a petulant child. "You must not be ridiculous, my friend. I think sometimes you don't know quite how young you are. You are what ladies love to call 'a nice boy'; but perhaps you have still a little to learn and a little to see. You are in a country that is the Arabian Nights, and you aren't 'interested'! My dear, go and get an automobile and leave Algiers behind you. Go up into the Djurdjurra Mountains among the Kabyles and down to the Desert. After that, write to me and tell me, if you can, that you were not interested!"
She was herself again, cool, faintly amused, kindly impersonal; and he was piqued by the change. "I'm not what 'ladies love to call a nice boy'," he said, with a little indignation. "I'm a rather tired, rather lonely man of the world. I'm tired because I've worked too hard, and I'm lonely because I'm not able to like many people, which I realize is a fault"
He was going on; but she interrupted him. "Do you realize that? Aren't you a little proud of it, my dear?"
"That's the second time you've called me 'my dear'," he said sharply. "I wish you wouldn't. It sounds as if you were my aunt. Well, you're not."
"No," she said gently. "I hope I am your friend. I shall—I shall regret to be so far away from you day after to-morrow. Day after to-morrow is not long; it always comes so quickly."
"If you will regret it, why do you go?"
"Because I can't stay here. It is not pleasant to be where I might see people who" Threatened by a sudden tendency to sob, she stopped speaking and covered her face with her hands. "I can't—I can't stay here," she murmured brokenly.
Upon that he was at last dazzled by an idea. "Then why won't you go with me?"
"What?" she murmured. "Go with you? Where?"
"Wherever you want to. To those places you said I ought to see. We could take a motor"
"No, no! I couldn't." She dropped her hands from her face, and turned to him, smiling sadly. "I am not very conventional; but neither am I eccentric, and I fear such an expedition might have an air of some eccentricity."
"Aurélie!" he cried. "You're merely mocking me. What would be either eccentric or unconventional about a motor trip with your son and me? Be serious."
She frowned, smiled vaguely at him, then rose and walked about the room; paused by a table and let her fingers drum upon it an accompaniment to her perplexity.
Meantime he urged her. "We'll go anywhere you wish to go—anywhere. I don't care where we go. It won't matter." He came to her where she stood. "It won't matter to me where I am, if I can see you, if I can listen to you, if I can be with"
But at that she laughed outright; and when he seemed astonished that she did, and a little offended, she put her hand upon his shoulder with a charming complete friendliness. "My dear," she said, "you must not be cross with me if I call you that—like your aunt—and even if I laugh. You see" She broke off, and then, with a coquetry that enchanted him, she said: "Well, you don't want us both to be ridiculous, do you—not upon an expedition among the Berbers? Go and find Hyacinthe!"