The Transgression of Andrew Vane/Chapter II
- Chapter II. New Friends and Old.
In ordinary, Mrs. Carnby was one of the rare mortals who succeed in disposing as well as in proposing, but there were times when there was not even a family resemblance between her plans and her performances. She had fully intended that young Vane should be the only guest at her Sunday breakfast, but as she came out of church that morning into the brilliant sunlight of the Avenue de l’Alma, she found herself face to face with the Ratchetts, newly returned from Monte Carlo, and promptly bundled the pair of them into her victoria. Furthermore, as the carriage swung round the Arc, and into the Avenue du Bois, she suddenly espied Mr. Thomas Radwalader, lounging, with an air of infinite boredom, down the plage.
“There’s that Radwalader, thinking about himself again!” she exclaimed, digging her coachman in the small of his ample back with the point of her tulle parasol. “Positively, it would be cruelty to animals not to rescue him. Arretez, Benoit!”
Radwalader came up languidly as the carriage stopped.
“Where are you going?” demanded Mrs. Carnby, after greetings had been exchanged.
“Home,” answered Radwalader. “I met Madame Palffy back there a bit, and couldn’t get away for ten minutes. You know, it’s shocking on the nerves, that kind of thing, so I thought I’d drop in at my quarters for a pick-me-up.”
“Well, if I’m not a pick-you-up, I’m sure I don’t know what is,” said Mrs. Carnby. “You’re to come to breakfast. You’ll have to walk, though. We’re three already, you see, and I don’t want people to take my carriage for a panier à salade. I hadn’t the most remote intention of asking you; but when a man tells me he’s been talking for ten minutes to that Palffy, I always take him in and give him a good square meal.”
“You’re very kind,” said Radwalader. “Are you going to play bridge afterwards? If so, I must go home for more money.”
“Nothing of the sort!” said Mrs. Carnby emphatically. “There’s a protégé of Jeremy’s coming to breakfast — a Bostonian, twenty years young, and over here for his health. You must all go, directly after coffee. I’m going to spend the afternoon feeding him with sweet spirits of nitre out of a spoon, and teaching him his catechism. Perhaps you’d like to stay and learn yours?”
“I think I know it,” laughed Radwalader.
“If you do, it’s one of your own fabrication, then — with just a single question and answer. ‘What is my duty toward myself? My duty toward myself is, under all circumstances, to do exactly as I dee please.’”
“If that were the case, my good woman, I should live up to my profession of faith, not only by accepting your invitation, as I mean to do, but by staying the entire afternoon.”
“That’s very nicely said indeed,” answered Mrs. Carnby. “Allez, Benoit!”
Twenty minutes later the whole party were assembled in her salon. Carnby, caught by his wife as he was scuttling into his study, was now doing his visibly inadequate best to entertain Philip Ratchett, who stood gloomily before him, with his legs far apart, his hands in his pockets, and his eyes on the top button of his host’s waistcoat. He was a typical Englishman, of the variety which leans against door-jambs in the pages of Punch, and makes unfortunate remarks beginning with “I say—” about the relatives of the stranger addressed. Society bored him to the verge of extinction, but it is only fair to say that he repaid the debt with interest. He was tolerated — as many a man before and after him has been — for the sake of his wife.
Mrs. Ratchett patronized, with equal ardour, a sewing-class which fabricated unmentionable garments of red flannel for supposedly grateful heathen, and a society for psychical research which boasted of liberal-mindedness because it was willing to admit that, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the causes of certain natural phenomena yet remained unexplained. Her entire conception of life underwent a radical change whenever she read a new book, which she did at fortnightly intervals. She was thirty, clever, and frankly beautiful, hence a factor in the Colony.
The fifth member of the company in Mrs. Carnby’s salon, Mr. Thomas Radwalader, enjoyed the truly Parisian distinction of being an impecunious bachelor who did not accept all the invitations he received. He might have been thirty-five or forty-five or fifty-five. His smooth-shaven, impassive face offered no indication whatever of his age. He was already quite gray, but, in contrast to this, his speech was tinged with a frivolity, rather pleasant than otherwise, which hinted at youth. Mrs. Carnby had once described him as being “dappled with knowledge,” and this, in common with the majority of Mrs. Carnby’s estimates, came admirably near to being exact. Radwalader’s actual fund of information was far less ample than was indicated by the facility with which he talked on any and every subject, but he was master of the science of selection. He judged others — and rightly — by himself, and went upon the often-proven theory that a polished brilliant attracts more attention than an uncut Koh-i-nur. He made the superficial things of life his own, and on the rare occasions when the trend of conversation led him out of his depth, he caught at the life-belt of epigram, and had found his feet again before men better informed had finished floundering. He lived in a tiny apartment, on the safe side of nothing a year, and kept up appearances with a skill that was little short of genius. Gossip passed him by, a circumstance for which he was devoutly grateful, though it was due less to chance than to management.
Such was the company into which Mr. Andrew Sterling had despatched his grandson — in hopes that the change might be of benefit. As he came through the portières, young Vane proved to tally, in the main essentials of appearance, with Mrs. Carnby’s prophetic estimate. He was somewhat more than rather good-looking, and essentially American, with the soap-and-cold-water suggestion strongly to the fore. Mrs. Carnby always noted three things about a man before she spoke to him — his hands, his linen, and his eyes. In the first two Andrew Vane qualified immediately; in the third his hostess was forced to confess herself at a loss. In singular contrast to a complexion dark almost to swarthiness, his eyes were large and of an intense steel-blue. He met those of another squarely, not alone with the frankness characteristic of youth, but with the strange calm of confidence typical of men accustomed to the command of a battle-ship or an army corps. Mrs. Carnby, in ordinary the most self-possessed of women, gave, almost guiltily, before the keen, clear eyes of Andrew Vane.
“He has no business whatever to have eyes like that, at his age,” she told herself, almost angrily. “They ought to grow in a man’s head, after he has seen everything there is to be seen.”
The thought was involuntary, but it recalled to her memory where she had seen their like before.
“Radwalader has them,” she added mentally. “Good Lord! Radwalader! And this child hasn’t even graduated!”
During the brief interval between the general introduction and the announcement of breakfast, she studied her new guest with unwonted interest. He was of the satisfactory medium height at which a man is neither contemptible nor clumsy, slight in build, but straight as an arrow, with narrow hips and a square backward fling of shoulder which spoke of resolution.
“He has ‘No Compromise’ written all over his back,” said Mrs. Carnby to herself. “I should believe everything he told me, and not be afraid of what I told him.”
Then she noted that he was eminently at ease. There is something out of the common about twenty that keeps its hands hanging at its sides, and its feet firmly planted, without suggesting a tailor’s dummy. Andrew was talking to Mr. Carnby about his grandfather and Boston, and from the first to the last word of the short colloquy he did not once shift his position. As he stood thus, in some curious fashion consideration of his years was completely eliminated from one’s thought of him. He was deferential, but in the negative manner of guest to host, rather than in the positive of youth to age; and, at the same time, he was assertive, but with the force of personality, not the conspicuity of awkwardness. He fitted into his surroundings instantly, like a wisely placed bibelot, but he dominated them as well.
“That Palffy,” was Mrs. Carnby’s final resolve, “shall get him only over my dead body.”
And so, unconsciously, Andrew scored his first Parisian triumph.
For the first ten minutes of breakfast, Mrs. Carnby, at whose left he sat, let him designedly alone. It was her belief that men, like saddle-horses, should be given their heads in strange territory, and left to find themselves — this in contrast to the policy of her social rival, Madame Palffy, who boasted of being able to draw out the best there was in a new acquaintance in the first quarter-hour of conversation. In this she was probably correct, though in a sense which she did not perceive — for few good qualities survived the strain of that initial quarter-hour.
But if Mrs. Carnby’s attention appeared to be engrossed by Radwalader on her right, and Mrs. Ratchett beyond Radwalader, she kept, nevertheless, a weather eye on Andrew; and when, presently, his spoon tinkled on his bouillon saucer, she turned to him.
“I’ve been watching you,” she began, “to see how you would take to French oysters. It’s a test I always apply to newcomers from America. If they eat only one Marennes verte, I know at once that they approve of forty-story buildings, and are going to talk about ‘getting back to God’s country’; if they eat all six, I know I may venture to hint that there are advantages about living in Paris, without having my head bitten off for being an expatriate.”
“It would seem your head is quite safe, so far as I am concerned,” laughed Andrew, “for I finished off my half-dozen, and thought them very good.”
“Then you have the soul of a Parisian in the body of a Bostonian,” affirmed Mrs. Carnby. “A liking for Marennes vertes is a survival of a previous state of existence. Here’s Mr. Radwalader, for instance, who can’t abide them, even after Heaven knows how many years in Paris.”
“They taste so much like two-sou pieces that, whenever I eat them, they make me feel like a frog savings-bank,” said Radwalader.
“There you are!” cried Mrs. Carnby triumphantly. “That would never have arisen as an objection in the mind of any one who had known what it is to be a Parisian.”
“Or a frog savings-bank,” said Radwalader. “No, I suppose not. I can’t seem to live down the fact that I was born in the shadow of Independence Hall. But I’m doing so much to make up for the bad beginnings of my present incarnation, that I shall undoubtedly be a Parisian in my next. Have you been here long, Mr. Vane?”
“Three days.”
“Do you speak French?” put in Mrs. Carnby. “No? What a pity! You’ve no idea what a difference it makes.”
“I’ve only such a smattering as one gets in school and college,” said Andrew. “Of course I didn’t know I was coming, over here. But, after all, one seems to get on very well with English.”
“That’s just the trouble, Mr. Vane,” volunteered Mrs. Ratchett. “So many Americans are content just to ‘get on’ over here. That isn’t the cue to Paris at all! It only means that you and she are on terms of bowing acquaintance. You’ll never get to know her till you can talk to her in her own tongue.”
“Or listen to her talk to you,” observed Radwalader. “So long as we’re using the feminine gender—”
“Oh!” interrupted Mrs. Carnby. “A remark like that does come with extreme grace from you, I must say. Here,” she added, turning to Mrs. Ratchett, and indicating Radwalader with her fish-fork, “here’s a man, my dear, who spent two solid hours of last Monday telling me the story of his life. And it reminded me precisely of a peacock — one long, stuck-up tale with a hundred I’s in it. Radwalader, you’re a brute!”
Carnby, with his eyes fixed vacantly upon a spot midway between a pepper-mill and a little dish of salted almonds, appeared to be revolving some complicated business problem in his mind; and, as his wife caught sight of him, her fish-fork swung round a quarter-circle in her fingers, like a silver weathercock, until, instead of Radwalader, it indicated the point of her husband’s nose.
“That person,” she said to Andrew, “is either in Trieste or Buda. His company has an incapable agent in both cities, and whenever he glares at vacancy, like a hairdresser’s image, I know he is in either one town or the other. With practice, I shall come to detect the shade of difference in his expression which will tell me which it is. Mr. Ratchett — some more of the éperlans?”
Ratchett was deeply engaged in dressing morsels of smelts in little overcoats of sauce tartare, assisting them carefully with his knife to scramble aboard his fork, and, having braced them there firmly with cubes of creamed potato, conveying the whole arrangement to his mouth, where he instantly secured it from escape by popping in a piece of bread upon its very heels. He looked up as Mrs. Carnby spoke to him, murmured “’k you,” and immediately returned to the business in hand. Radwalader and Mrs. Ratchett had fallen foul of each other over a chance remark of his, and were now just disappearing into a fog of art discussion, from which, in his voice, an abrupt “Besnard” popped, at intervals, as indignantly as a ball from a Roman candle, or, in hers, the word “Whistler” rolled forth with an inflection which suggested the name of a cathedral.
“Tell me a little about yourself,” said Mrs. Carnby, turning again to Andrew.
“If it’s to be about myself,” he answered, “I think it’s apt to be little indeed. I’ve been in college almost three years, but I’ve been kept back, more or less, by a touch of fever I picked up on a trip to Cuba. It crops out every now and again, and knocks me into good-for-nothingness for a while. I’m not sure that I shall go back to Harvard. You see, I want to do something.”
“What?” demanded Mrs. Carnby.
“I’m not sure. I’m over here in search of a hint.”
“And a very excellent idea, too!” said his hostess. “Because, if you will keep your eyes open in the American Colony, you’ll see about everything which a man ought not to do; and after that it should be comparatively easy to make a choice among the few things that remain.”
“You’re not very flattering to the American Colony,” said Andrew.
“That’s because I belong to it,” replied Mrs. Carnby, “and you’ll find I’m about the only woman in it, able to speak French, who will make that admission. I belong to it, and I love it — for its name. It’s about as much like America as a cold veal cutlet with its gravy coagulated — if you’ve ever seen that! — is like the same thing fresh off the grill. But I don’t allow any one but myself to say so!”
“You’re patriotic,” suggested Andrew.
“Only passively. I’m extremely doubtful as to the exact location of ‘God’s country,’ and, even if you were to prove to my satisfaction that it lies between Seattle and Tampa, I’m not sure I should want to live there. America’s a kind of conservatory on my estate. I don’t care to sit in it continually, but, at the same time, I don’t like to have other people throwing stones through the roof. But about what you want to do?”
“I really haven’t the most remote idea. I want it to be something worth while — something which will attract attention.”
“Nothing does, nowadays,” said Mrs. Carnby, “except air-ships and remarriage within two hours of divorce.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Mrs. Ratchett, suddenly abandoning the argument in which it was evident that she was coming out second best.
“My choice of a profession,” replied Andrew. “I don’t want to make a mistake. But everything seems to be overcrowded.”
“Exactly,” observed Radwalader. “It isn’t so much a question of selecting what’s right as of getting what’s left. Haven’t you a special talent?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Andrew.
“And if you had, it wouldn’t do you much good in the States,” commented Mrs. Carnby. “Nothing counts over there but money and social position. It’s the only country on earth where it’s less blessed to be gifted than received.”
“I had thought of civil engineering,” said Andrew.
“Civil engineering?” repeated Mrs. Carnby. “But, my dear Mr. Vane, that’s not a profession. It’s only a synonym for getting on in society. We’re all of us civil engineers!”
She pushed back her chair as she spoke.
“We’ll wait for you in the salon,” she added, “and, meanwhile, Mrs. Ratchett and I will think up a profession for Mr. Vane. Jeremy, you’re to give them the shortest cigars you have.”
“I was once in the same quandary,” said Radwalader to Andrew, when the men were left alone, “and concluded to let Time answer the question for me. You may have noticed that Time is prone to reticence. So far, he has not committed himself one way or another.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t the patience for that,” said Andrew. “Besides, it’s different in America. One has to do something over there. It’s almost against the law to be idle.”
“Of course. The only remedy for that is to live in Paris. You might do that. It’s a profession all by itself — of faith, if nothing else. Only one has need of the golden means.”
“I think I am a homeopathist, so far as Europe is concerned,” said Andrew. “I’m already a little homesick for the Common.”
“It’s a bad pun,” answered Radwalader, “but is there anything in America but — the common?”
“You can’t expect me to agree with you there.”
“I don’t. I never expect any one to agree with me. It takes all the charm out of conversation. You may remember that Mark Twain once said that it’s a difference of opinion which makes horse-races. He should have made it human races. That would have been truer, and so, more original. But a homeopathist is only a man who has never tried allopathy. You must let me convert you by showing you something of Paris. If I’ve any profession at all, it’s that of guide.”
“You’re very kind,” said Andrew, “but you mustn’t let your courtesy put you to inconvenience on my account. There must be a penalty attached to knowing Paris well, in the form of fellow countrymen who want to be shown about.”
“‘Never a rose but has its thorn,’” quoted Radwalader. “If you know Paris well, you’re overrun; and if you don’t, you’re run over. Of the two, the former is the less objectionable. When we leave here, perhaps you’d like to go out to the races for a while? If you haven’t been, Auteuil is well worth seeing of a Sunday afternoon.”
“I should be very glad,” said Andrew.
“Then we’ll consider it agreed. I see Carnby is getting to his feet. He is about to make his regular postprandial speech. It is one to be commended for its brevity.”
“The ladies?” suggested Jeremy interrogatively.
“By all means!” said Radwalader, as his cigarette sizzled into the remainder of his coffee. “It’s a toast to which we all respond.”
“By the way,” said Ratchett, as they moved toward the portières, “I was going to ask you chaps about membership in the Volney.”
The three men gathered in a group, and Andrew, seeing that they were about to speak of something in which he had no concern, passed into the salon. Here he was surprised to find three women instead of two — still more surprised when the newcomer wheeled suddenly, and came toward him with both hands outstretched.
“How do you do? ” she said. “What a charming surprise! Mrs. Carnby was just speaking of you, and I’ve been telling her what jolly times we used to have last summer at Beverly. How delightful to find you here! Mrs. Carnby’s my dearest friend, you must know, Mr. Vane.”
“Miss Palffy is one of the few people to whom I always feel equal,” observed Mrs. Carnby.
“I can say the same, I’m sure,” agreed Andrew.
“That means that you and I are to be friends as well, then,” answered Mrs. Carnby, “because things that are equal to the same thing are bound to be equal to each other. Are you going out with Jeremy, Margery?”
“Yes — our usual Sunday spree, you know. He’s a dear!”
She bent over as she spoke and buried her nose in one of the big roses on the table.
“Lord, girl, but I’m glad to see you again!” said the inner voice of Andrew Vane.