by Willa Cather
One evening Buchanan stopped the Count in the hall.
“May I trouble you for a moment, sir? A friend of mine who is something of a bibliomaniac has sent me from Munich a copy of Rabelais stamped with the Bavarian arms. There is an autograph on the fly leaf, indeed, two of them, and he suspects that one of them may be Ludwig’s.”
The Count adjusted his eye glasses and looked thoughtfully at the faded writing: “Lola M.,” and further down the page, “Ludwig.” “You have certainly every reason for such a supposition. Ludwig was one of the few monarchs who really cared enough for books to put his name and in one Lola Montes’ name, too, for that matter. However, in these autographs one can never tell. If you will step upstairs with me we can soon assure ourselves.”
“O, I did not mean to trouble you; you were just going out, were you not?”
“It was nothing of importance, nothing that I would not gladly abandon for the prospect of your company.”
Buchanan followed him up the stuffy stairway and down the narrow hall. He was conscious of a subdued thrill of quickened curiosity upon entering the Count’s apartments. But as his host lit the gas one covert glance about him told him that he need not exercise rigid surveillance over his eyes. Beyond a number of books and pictures, portraits, most of them, there was little to distinguish the room from the ordinary furnished apartment. There was the usual faded moquette carpet, the same cheap rugs and the inevitable shiny oak furniture. The silver fittings of the writing table, engraved with a crest and monogram, were the only suggestions of the rank of the occupant.
“Be seated there, on the divan, and I will find a signature I know to be authentic. We will compare them.” As he spoke he tugged at the unwilling drawers of a chiffonier in the corner.
“This furniture,” he remarked apologetically, “partakes somewhat of the sullen nature of the house. There, we have it at last.”
He lifted from the drawer a small steel chest and placed it upon the table. After opening it with a key attached to his watchguard, he drew out a pile of papers and began sorting them. Buchanan watched curiously the various documents as they passed through his hands. Some of them were on parchment and suggested venerable histories, some of them were encased in modern envelopes, and some were on tinted note paper with heavily embossed monograms, suggesting histories equally alluring if less venerable. If those notes could speak the import of their contents, what a roar of guttural bassos, soaring sopranos, and impassioned contraltos and tenors there would be! And would the dominant note of the chorus be of Ares or Eros, he wondered?
He was aroused from his speculations by the Count’s slight exclamation when he found the paper he was hunting for. He unfolded a stiff sheet of note paper, and then folding it back so that only the signature was visible, sat down beside his guest. The signature, “Ludwig W.,” stood out clearly from the paper he held.
“Not Ludwig’s, evidently,” said the Count, “now we will look as to the other. I am sorry to say we have that, too.”
He opened the other paper he held, and folded it as he had done the first. The signature in this case was simply “Lola.”
“They seem to be identical. I fancied as much. It was Madame Montes’ custom to take whatever she wanted from the royal library and she seldom troubled herself to return it. The second name is only another evidence of her inordinate vanity, and they are too numerous to be of especial interest. I must apologize for showing you the signatures in this singularly unsatisfactory manner, but the contents of these communications were strictly personal, and, of course, were not addressed to me. I remember very little of the reign of the first Ludwig myself. There are a number of names among those papers that might interest you, if you care to see them and will omit the body of the documents. They are, many of them, papers that should never have been written at all. Such things are inevitable in very old families, though I could never understand their motive for preserving them. There is only one way to handle such things, and that is with absolute and unvarying care. To show them even to an appreciative friend is a form of blackmail. I dislike the responsibility of knowing their contents myself. I have not read any of them for years.”
“And yet you, too, keep them?”
“Certainly, inbred tradition, I suppose. I have often intended to destroy them, but I have always deferred the actual doing of it. Since they have enabled me to be of some service to you, I am glad I have delayed the holocaust.”
The conventional ring of the last remark seemed to politely close all further serious discussion of the subject. Buchanan checked the question he had already mentally uttered, and taking a chair by the table, looked at the signatures his host selected. They were names that consumed him with an overwhelming curiosity and made his ears tingle and his checks burn; single names, most of them, those single names that Balzac said made the observer dream. As the Count took another package of documents from the box his fingers caught a small gold chain attached to some metallic object that rang sharply against the sides of the box as he lifted his hand.
“The iron cross!” cried Buchanan involuntarily, with a quick inward breath.
“Yes, it is one that I won on the field of Gravelotte years ago. It is my only contribution to this box. I have been a very ordinary man, Mr. Buchanan. In families like ours there must be some men who neither make nor break, but try to keep things together. That my efforts in that direction were somewhat futile was not entirely my fault. I had two brothers who bore the title before me; they were both talented men, and when my turn came there was very little left to save.”
“I fancied you had been more of a student than a man of affairs.”
“Student is too grave a word. I have always read; at one time I thought that of itself gave one a sufficient purpose, but like other things it fails one at last, at least the living interest of it. At present I am only a survivor. Here, where every one plays for some stake, I realize how nearly extinct is the class to which I belong, and that I am a sort of survival of the unfit, with no duty but to keep an escutcheon that is only a name and a sword that the world no longer needs. An old pagan back in Julian’s time who still clung to a despoiled Olympus and a vain philosophy, dead as its own abstruse syllogisms, might have felt as I do when the new faith, throbbing with potentialities, was coming in. The life of my own father seems to be as far away as the lives of the ancient emperors. It is not a pleasant thing to be the last of one’s kind. The tedium vitae descends heavily upon one.”
As the Count was speaking, they heard a ripple of loud laughter on the stairs and a rustle of draperies in the hall, and a tall blonde woman, dressed in a tight fitting tailor-made gown, with a pair of long lavender gloves lying jauntily over her shoulder, entered and bowed graciously to the Count.
“Bon soir, mon père, I was not aware you had company.” There was in her voice that peculiarly hard throat tone that stage people so often use in conversation.
“Mr. Buchanan, my daughter, Helena.”
Buchanan bowed and muttered a greeting, uncertain by just what title he should address her.
“No Countess, if you please, Mr. Buchanan. Just plain Helena De Koch. Titles are out of date, and more than absurd in our case. I come from a rehearsal of a concert where I sing for money, attired in a ready-made gown, botched over by a tailor, to visit my respected parent in a fourth-rate lodging house, and you call me Countess! Could anything be more innately funny? Titles only go in comic opera now. I have often tried to persuade my father to content himself with Paul De Koch.”
The Count smiled. “My name was not mine to make, Helena, and I am not at all ashamed of it.”
The young lady’s keen but rather indifferent eyes had dwelt on Buchanan but a moment, but he felt as though he had been inspected by a drill sergeant, and that no detail of his person or attire had escaped her.
She glanced at the table and then at th
e Count. “So you have decided to become practical at last?”
A shade of extreme annoyance swept quickly over the Count’s face. He replied stiffly.
“I have merely been showing Mr. Buchanan an autograph he wished to see.”
“O, so that is all! I might have known it. People do not recover from a mania in a day.” She laughed rather unpleasantly and turned graciously to Buchanan. “Have you persuaded him to show you any of them? The contents are much more interesting than the autographs, rather side lights on history, you know.” Her eyelid drooped a little with an insinuating glance, just enough to suggest a wink that did not come to pass, but he felt strangely repelled by even the suggestion. It must have been the connection that made it so objectionable, he reflected. She seemed to cheapen the Count and all his surroundings.
“No, my interest goes no further than the autographs.”
“A polite prevarication I imagine. You will have to get more in the shadow if you hide the curiosity in your eyes. I don’t blame you, he found me reading them once, and all the old Koch temper came out. I never knew he had it until then. Our tempers and our title are the only remnants of our former glory. The one is quite as ridiculous as the other, since we have no one to get angry at but each other. Poverty has no right to indignation at all. I speak respectfully even to a cabman. Papa shows his superiority by having no cabman at all.”
“I think neither of you need do anything at all to show that,” said Buchanan, politely.
“O, come, you are all like impressarios, you Americans, and the further West one goes the worse it is. I never saw a manager who could resist a title; I only use mine on such occasions.”
Buchanan saw that his host looked ill at ease, so he endeavored to change the subject.
“You sing, I believe?”
“O, yes, in oratorio and concert. Cher papa will not hear of the opera. Oratorio seems to be the special retreat of decayed gentility. I don’t believe in those distinctions myself; I have found that a title dating from the foundation of the Empire does not buy one a spring bonnet, and that one of the oldest names in Europe will not keep one in gloves. One of your clever Frenchmen said there is nothing in the world but money, the gallows excepted. But His Excellency here never quotes that. Papa is an aristocrat, while I am bourgeoise to the tips of my fingers.” She waved her highly polished nails toward Buchanan.
He thought that she could not have summarized herself better. The instinctive dislike he had always felt for her had been steadily growing into an aversion since she entered the room. It was by no means the first time he had seen her, she was almost a familiar figure about the boarding house, and often came to dine with the Count. Her florid coloring and elaborately blonde hair might have been said to be a general expression of her style. Under that yellow bang was a low straight forehead, and straight brows from behind which looked out a pair of blue eyes, large and full but utterly without depth, and cold as icicles, which seemed to be continually estimating the pecuniary value of the world. The cheeks were full and the chill decided in spite of its dimple. The upper lip was full and short and the nostril spare. They were scarcely the features one would expect to find in the descendant of an ancient house, seeming more accidental than formed by any perpetuated tendencies of blood. Her hands were broad and plump like her wrists.
Mademoiselle was on almost familiar terms with the landlady of Crow’s Nest, and Buchanan fancied that she was responsible for the bits of gossip concerning the Count that floated about the house and were daily rehearsed by the languid widow. The widow had gone so far as to darkly express her doubts as to this effulgent blonde being the Count’s daughter at all, and Buchanan had been guilty of rather hoping that she was right. It would be rather less of a reflection on the Count, he thought. But tonight’s conversation left him no room for doubt, and in watching the contrast between her full, florid countenance and the chastened face across the table, he wondered if the materialists of this world were always hale and full-fed, while the idealists were pale and gray as the shadows that kept them company. But one did not find time to muse much about anything in Mademoiselle De Koch’s presence.
“By the way, cher papa, you are coming tomorrow night to hear me sing that waltz song of Arditti’s?”
“Certainly, if you wish, but I am not fond of that style of music.”
“O, certainly not, that’s not to be expected or hoped for, nothing but mossbacks. But, seriously, one cannot sing Mendelssohn or Haydn forever, and all the modern classics are so abominably difficult,” said Mademoiselle, beginning to draw on her gloves, which Buchanan noticed were several sizes too small and required a great deal of coaxing. Indeed everything that Mademoiselle wore fit her closely. She was of that peculiar type of blonde loveliness which impresses one as being always on the verge of embonpoint, and its possessor seems always to be in a state of nervous apprehension lest she should cross the dead line and openly and fearlessly be called stout.
At this juncture a gentle knock was heard at the door, and Mademoiselle remarked carelessly, “That’s only Tony. Come in!”
A gentleman entered and bowed humbly to Mademoiselle. He was a little tenor whom Buchanan remembered having seen before, and whose mild dark eyes and swarthy skin had given him a pretext to adopt an Italian stage name. He was a slight, narrow chested man and a receding chin and a generally “professional” and foreign air which was unmistakably cultivated.
“A charming evening, Count. Chicago weather is so seldom genial in the winter.”
After presenting him to Buchanan the Count answered him, “I have not been out, but it seems so here.”
“Doubtless, in Mademoiselle’s society. But you are busy?”
He glanced inquiringly at Mademoiselle. Buchanan fancied that the question was addressed to her rather than to the Count, and thought he intercepted an answering glance.
“Not at all, we were merely amusing ourselves. Must you leave us already?”
“I think Mademoiselle has another rehearsal. You know what it means to presume to keep pace with an art, eternal vigilance. There is no rest for the weary in our profession—not, at least, in this world.” This was said with a weighty sincerity that almost provoked a smile from Buchanan. There are two words which no Chicago singer can talk ten minutes without using: “art” and “Chicago,” and this gentleman had already indulged in both.
“O, yes, we must be gone to practice the despised Arditti. Come tomorrow night if you can. Tony here will give you tickets. And if Mr. Buchanan should have nothing better to do, pray bring him with you.”
Buchanan assured her that he could have nothing more agreeable at any rate, and would be delighted to go. She took possession of the tenor and departed.
II.
Harold Buchanan accompanied the Count next evening, and his impressions of Mademoiselle Helena De Koch were only intensified. She sang floridly and with that peculiar confidence which always seems to attend uncertain execution. She had a peculiar trick of just seeming to catch a note by the skirts and then falling back from it, just touching it, as it were, but totally unable to sustain it. More than that, her very unconsciousness of this showed that she had absolutely no musical sense. Buchanan was inclined to think that, next to her coarse disappreciation of her father, her singing was rather the worst feature about her. To sing badly and not to have perception enough to know it was such a bad index of one’s mental and aesthetic constitution.
After the concert they went up on the stage to see her, and she came forward to meet them, accompanied by the tenor, and greeted them graciously, bearing her blushing honors quite as thick upon her as if she had sung well.
“It was nice of you to come. Did you catch my eye?”
“I am still glowing with the pleasure of thinking I did so, but I was afraid perhaps it was only a delusion. One so often goes about puffed up over favors that
were meant for the fellow back of him.”
“O, I hoped mine were more intelligible than that. But now you shall be rewarded for your patience. Tony and I are going to have a little supper down at Kingsley’s, and you must come, just us, you know. Papa may come to chaperone us, if it is not too late for him.”
The Count hastily excused himself, and indeed he must have been very dense to have accepted such a hostile invitation, even from his own daughter. But Buchanan had already bowed his acceptance, and felt that it was too late to retreat. Reluctantly he accompanied Mademoiselle and the silent tenor, and saw the Count depart alone. And yet, he reflected, this merciful intervention would relieve him from the awkward necessity of discussing the concert with his friend.
When they were seated at Kingsley’s and had given their orders, it struck him that Mademoiselle had some purpose in bringing him, for it soon became obvious that the tenor’s charms were of that nature which one usually prefers to enjoy alone. What this might be, however, did not at once appear. She discussed current music and light opera in quite an amiable and disinterested manner, and for a time contented herself with this.