“No, no. Only you might give us a ring if you really do find out anything about the fellow. And, I say, ought we to let the Princesse know, or will he do that for himself?”
“I doubt if he’ll do anything sensible off his own bat,” King remarked gloomily. “I’ll call in at ‘Anarajapurah’ on my way home, and tell her. Honestly, he doesn’t really seem to me as if he were fit to be going about the world by himself.”
On this last pessimistic assertion the agent took his leave, and Lucien went into the house.
There was no one in the hall, but he could hear voices in the big drawing-room that opened out of it and looked in.
Bat Clutterthorpe was sitting at the piano, and on the window-sill, her hands clasped in her lap and her face turned towards him, was Sophie.
Lucien immediately walked out again.
He met Fitzmaurice in the hall.
As a rule, they avoided speaking to one another, but Lucien’s stepfather now appeared to be unable to refrain from inquiry.
“What’s your mother doing? She’s got the ice-cream man, or whatever he is, in the library, talking nineteen to the dozen. I heard her order a bedroom for him.”
“Perhaps he’s going to live here,” suggested Lucien wearily.
Fitzmaurice appeared to see nothing humorous in the idea.
“My God! Do you realize that he was the co-respondent in my divorce case, and that I ought to take him out and thrash him or something? Instead of which,” groaned Fitzmaurice, “just because it’s your mother’s house, I shall have to sit and drink champagne with him at the dinner-table.”
XI
CONVERSATION IN A TAXI
ALTHOUGH experience of Clarissa, and his own easy-going temperament, had long ago exhausted in Fitzmaurice any possibilities of self-assertion, he unwillingly sought his wife in her small writing-room that evening before dinner. He stood in front of the fireplace, balancing himself on heels and toes alternately, and said uneasily:
“I say, Clarissa, you can’t do this.”
“Can’t?” she echoed scornfully.
“You can’t have this musical fellow — this Dago — in our own — in your own — house, with me and Sophia and everything. It’s not decent.”
“My dear Reggie!” Clarissa’s laugh was not of an agreeable kind, but at least, thought Fitzmaurice, she wasn’t in one of her rages. “Do you think we’re still living under Queen Victoria? You’re not usually un-modern, I will say that for you. Try and pull yourself together.”
“But what’s the point?” Fitzmaurice demanded uneasily. “This long-haired ass is on his way to see the old Princesse — let him go there. How or why he ever landed himself here, the devil only knows. There’s no point in letting him into the house that I can see, and it’s — it’s dam’ bad taste, Clarissa.”
“Don’t be a fool, Reggie. The house-party wants something to put some pep into it, quite too desperately. It’s just not going, and I’ve been sick to death about it. I didn’t get to sleep till nearly three o’clock this morning — worrying. It’s Lucien’s fault partly, and that little dead-weight of a Wingate girl — and Bat Clutterthorpe is bothered to death at having to make up his mind. (No wonder, either. I can see his point of view, even though it’s giving me my chance with Sophie.) But what you don’t seem to realize is that the whole responsibility of not having a dead failure this week-end rests with me. I’m spending my vitality the whole blessed time. It’s just me that keeps the whole thing going at all.”
Fitzmaurice knew the rising tone of self-pity in Clarissa’s voice. It usually drove him straight out of the room. But he now felt compelled, however unwillingly, to stand his ground and reiterate his protest.
“I know all that, old girl, and I’m sure you’re doing marvels. In fact, I don’t know why you say the party’s a failure. It seems to me all right. But, anyhow, I don’t see what you’re going to get out of having that fellow here in the house.”
Clarissa’s lips tightened.
“Don’t you?” she said tensely. “Then I suppose I shall have to make you see. Can’t you understand that the Delmars and Bat can get a kick out of seeing me entertain your first wife’s lover — the co-respondent in your divorce case? It’s an American commonplace, of course, but it’s an absolutely new note in a house like this one. It’ll give Leila Delmar something to scream about, wherever she goes, for the rest of the year. I’m going to take the line of being completely frank about the whole thing. Talk about it quite openly with every one of them. Then they can all discuss it, behind my back, and say what they’d have done in my place. That’s the sort of thing that gets up an atmosphere, Reggie, in a small house-party.”
“Clarissa, you’re dam’ clever,” said Fitzmaurice, with genuine conviction.
“I know I am. And I work much harder than anybody realizes.”
“But I don’t like it,” finished Fitzmaurice. “Well, darling, I hate saying it, but this is my house, and I don’t ask anybody’s leave as to whom I have inside it. So I’m afraid that’s that.”
Clarissa rose.
“Incidentally, the Radow creature is a sort of minor genius, isn’t he? Wasn’t he quite fairly well known?”
“Supposed to be — anyway, abroad.”
“Well, we can make the most of that. I shall probably get him to play.”
“You can’t. They’re touchy about that kind of thing. Besides, he hasn’t got his beastly fiddle or whatever it is.”
“I’m sending for his luggage.”
“Is he going to live here?”
“I’ve telephoned for the doctor to have a look at him; men don’t faint about nothing.”
“Foreigners do,” ejaculated Fitzmaurice. “You don’t know them as well as I do.”
“Probably a couple of days’ rest will put him all right, but you can get this quite clear, my dear: I’m going to make the most of the chance. Take it or leave it.”
Well, he’d have to take it, Fitzmaurice knew — if taking it meant that he would submit, without further discussion, to Clarissa’s hard, driving determination. After all, he’d told her he didn’t like it. That should save his self-respect.
Reggie Fitzmaurice shrugged his shoulders and went to order himself a drink.
The only other person to whom Clarissa proffered any explanation of her strange caprice was Lucien.
He listened in silence, and then said:
“I shall be late if I don’t go and dress now.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” she said angrily.
“Absolutely.”
“Listen to me, Lucien,” said Clarissa, white and trembling. “I don’t know what you think your grievance is, and I don’t want to know. But there’s one thing you’ve got to understand. You’re absolutely dependent on me, in every possible way. This place is mine — the money’s mine — the whole thing is mine. You’re mine, for the matter of that. My son. As soon as I’ve got some of this estate business straight — and nobody on earth realizes all the work that it means for me, personally, to get it done — I’m going to take you in hand, and make up my mind what you’re to do for the next few years. And I’ll tell you this much, Lucien; it’ll be something that’s going to teach you, once and for all, the difference between living at home with my position and my money at the back of you and trying to find your own level without my help.”
Her large, light eyes, with a deepening expression of strain, looked straight into his, taunting him with his youth and his dependence.
“I’m going to make a man of you, Lucien,” said Clarissa. “You may think you’re one already, my poor boy, but you’ll find that you’re not. You’re just as dependent on me as if you were a child in the nursery. You all are — every one of you. Sophie, and her father, and you. And then — then — you’ve the nerve to dispute my right to do whatever I please, in my own house! You can understand this once and for all, Lucien: As long as you’re all living on me, what I say goes.”
They looked at one
another in silence. Both were shaking a little.
Clarissa was the first to recover herself.
“Darling, you know I love you — adore you. I’ve got to speak to you like this, for your own sake. You owe everything in the world to me, Lucien, and you’ve simply got to realize it. That’s She waited, but he was still motionless.
“Haven’t you anything to say to me?”
Lucien made no reply.
“Very well,” said his mother bitterly. “Sulk, if you want to, Lucien. It’s a pose you’ll get tired of, I imagine, when you’re rather less of a child.”
She paused.
“I suppose it doesn’t occur to you that, after a tiring day, and a scene with Reggie, and another with you, I’ve got to carry on just exactly as if nothing had happened, and shoulder the responsibility of the evening and of making it a success. My God — if anybody knew what I’ve got to put up with!”
She rang the bell violently, and Lucien, leaving the room, heard her suddenly screaming for her maid.
He moved blindly along the corridor, and at the end of it paused.
Sophie’s room lay just beyond the landing, on a slightly lower level.
Lucien, his face a mask of misery, stood hesitating. A servant, coming up the stairs, approached him.
“Do you know where the — the foreign gentleman can be, sir? A lady has come for him in a taxi, sir.”
“What lady?” said Lucien, stupefied.
“An elderly lady, sir. She didn’t give any name.”
Lucien was assailed by an incredible suspicion, and rushed downstairs.
The most disreputable-looking taxi, Lucien felt, that he had ever seen, was drawn up under the lime-trees at a little distance from the hall door. Looking from the window was the lined, beautiful, curiously unconcerned face of the Princesse de Candi-Laquerriére, draped in her black mantilla. She gave him her hand through the window, then suddenly leant forward and opened the door.
“What is the matter?” she asked softly.
Suddenly feeling it to be a natural, almost an inevitable procedure, Lucien climbed into the incredible machine, and sat down on the seat beside her.
The driver, he noted with a vague relief, had got down from his seat and was standing in an attitude that somehow suggested contempt, smoking, under the trees.
“It’s my mother,” said Lucien. “She makes me hate her.”
He dropped his face in his hands, and felt that the tears were choking him.
“My poor child,” said the voice of the Princesse above his head — a gentle, unastonished, infinitely saddened voice.
Presently she patted him on the shoulder.
“You’ve been unhappy such a long time. It will be better, now that you’ve said it.”
“But I’ve no right—” began Lucien, looking up, curiously unashamed that she should see the marks of weeping on his face.
“Hush,” said the Princesse. “Why no right? We all have the right to look for help where we can find it. I had no right whatever to come here this evening — far from it — but,” she added simply “what a good thing that I did!”
“A good thing indeed,” said Lucien — and suddenly he could smile at her.
“I came for poor Radow, my son-in-law, and found you, who are so much more important.”
“Am I?”
[DELAFIELD CLARISSA BOOK]
“To me, yes, for I think you love Sophie.”
“You know everything,” said Lucien.
The Princesse shook her head.
“But,” she said, as though modifying an unspoken denial, “about the emotions — about personal relations — I do know a great deal. They are what interest me. To me they matter most.”
“That’s why you understand?”
“Yes. It is also why I do not understand, as poor Cliffe would tell you, when it comes to other things more practical, like journeys and money and houses. It may be want of balance,” said the Princesse serenely, “but we are as we are made. Tell me, does Sophie know that you love her?”
“I’ve never told her. You know that we’ve always been made to look upon ourselves as brother and sister.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It was my mother’s way of safeguarding both of us, I suppose. She — she wouldn’t want us to marry.”
“She wouldn’t want you to marry Reggie Fitzmaurice’s child — well,” the Princesse conceded, “I can quite understand that. And for Sophie she wants a very brilliant match that will be a better one than anything that her friends can achieve for their daughters?”
“She’s well on the way to getting what she wants, then,” said Lucien bitterly.
He told the Princesse about Bat Clutterthorpe. “There is a great deal to be said for the manage de convenance. Myself, I approve of it,” said the Princesse thoughtfully. “But Sophie is in many ways English, and you, of course, are entirely so. There would be no question of a satisfactory arrangement between you after marriage.”
“None,” said Lucien, feeling much disposed to laugh.
“Then you must tell her that you love her. Ask her to marry you.”
“How can I? I’m entirely dependent on my mother, as she always says.”
For the first time he saw surprise in the look that the Princesse turned upon him.
“But you’re young. You can work. Why not go to America?”
“Go to America?” Lucien echoed. The Princesse had said it so very much as anybody else might have said “Why not go into the next room?”
“America. Alberta can tell you all about it. There are jobs there. Or there are other countries, plenty of them. To go to another country is very often a solution,” said the Princesse reminiscently, “or if not a solution, at least a distraction. Ask poor Cliffe Montgomery.”
“Wouldn’t my going to another country make it more difficult for Sophie — that is, if she cared to wait for me?”
It was the turn of the Princesse to echo the words of her companion.
“Wait for you? But you must marry, and take her with you.”
“Without my mother’s consent?”
“Certainly,” said the Princesse blithely.
Lucien gazed at her in admiration.
“I never can see,” said the Princesse, “that economic considerations, as poor Cliffe calls them, are so very important. Myself, when I married, it was necessary to obtain the consent of the Tsar, and the opinion of my relations — and of my husband’s. We had a civil marriage and a religious marriage, and there were settlements and endless papers to sign, and consultations without finish. And after all, it turned out badly, my marriage. Neither of us could endure the other after about a year of it. I do not in the least mind saying so — it was all so long ago, and many much worse things have happened since then. But everything in my life has gone to prove to me that precautions and prudence in affairs of the emotions are worse than useless. The thing that matters is experience — good and bad alike. In all my life I regret nothing except the times that I have said ‘No’ to experience.”
He felt that, whether or not she was mistaken, she was both courageous and sincere.
“It’s difficult,” he said gently, “to see it like that when one’s been brought up as I have been.”
The Princesse nodded assentingly.
“Naturally. And, of course, many people would say that I was giving you very bad advice. I have not done at all well with my own children. Poor little Aldegonde — Sophie’s mother — she married that swine Fitzmaurice, and had to take a lover to console herself, and what a lover! Better than Fitzmaurice, of course, but much younger than herself, and nothing to depend upon. I remember Raoul Radow,” interpolated the Princesse, “as an infant prodigy, in Berlin. All sausage-curls and crochet-lace collars. His father used to beat him every day to make him practise more. A child of spirit would have run away. That poor Radow —
how like him to lose himself and to turn up here, of all places!”
“How did you know t
hat he was here?”
“Cliffe went to the station for him and he was not come, only his luggage. That did not surprise us in the least. Then for the next train I went myself. And a message had come from here to say that he was at Mardale and the luggage would be sent for. So I thought it was better to come and get him myself. You must find him for me, Lucien. I can’t come in.”
“My mother wants him to stay.”
The Princesse shrugged her shoulders.
“I shall not dispute him to her.”
“She has sent for the doctor. He fainted.”
“Did he?” said the Princesse indifferently. “He is of the epileptic type. Well, well, let him remain — he can come on to me when Clarissa is tired of him. I shall go home now. My dear Lucien, come and see me soon.”
“As soon as I possibly can. To-morrow?”
“Yes. Bring Sophie.”
She kissed him maternally before he descended from the taxi, and summoned the contemptuous driver.
Just as the man had started his engine and climbed to the driving-seat, the Princesse leant from the window and raised her voice to make it audible above the shattering, irregular noise of the machine.
“A man called Lawrence may turn up here.”
“What?” cried Lucien, doubtful if he could have heard her aright.
“A man called Lawrence — Raoul Radow’s agent — he is—”
The taxi started with a violent jerk.
“ — in these parts,” shrieked the Princesse, waving from the window. “They were to meet — .
He will probably follow him — Lawrence, his name is....”
The taxi turned, apparently on two wheels, and rattled away down the avenue.
“A man called Lawrence,” repeated Lucien, dazed, as he turned into the house. “What next?”
In actual fact, he next met his mother’s butler, who told him, with an air of compassion, that dinner was just about to be announced.
“Make my apologies, Fraser, and say that I shall be down in ten minutes and I hope they won’t wait.”
Lucien dashed upstairs, and within the specified time was in the dining-room.
He avoided Clarissa’s displeased glance, and looked round the table. Radow’s arrival had necessitated a complete rearrangement of places, and Sophie and her stepfather shared the foot of the table. Delmar sat next to Sophie, with Delphine Wingate beyond. Then came Bat Clutterthorpe, Clarissa at the head of the table, and the strange violinist on her right. A place had been left for Lucien between Leila Delmar and Fitzmaurice.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 332