Egbert sat on the midnight-blue sofa in his great-aunt’s drawing room, his feet on the cushions and crumbs on his lap. Piet had never sworn in his presence and did so now to reinforce their comrade bond. “We’re ready for a stand against these bastards, Egbert. We must defy them.” He offered the child his hand. “If I lead, will you follow?”
Two weeks later, Agneta Hemels gave way to the temptations that had besieged her since her first sight of New York. Standing on the Lusitania’s deck as she steamed into the harbor, the city’s glinting towers had struck her like a land in a fairy tale. The chaos of porters and automobiles on the quay had given this paradise an earthly dimension. But in the seething swirls of humanity she had glimpsed a treasure that cozy little Amsterdam could never offer: anonymity.
Agneta had spent her life in the company of people who knew her. She had never strayed three streets beyond her home without encountering an acquaintance, and this had required her to spend thirty-two years on guard.
She was a private woman, with a dread of gossip. New York’s utter indifference excited her as much as it frustrated Maarten. As Jacobina’s maid she had traveled extensively through Europe and seen much to admire; but nothing—not Versailles nor the Coliseum, not even the soaring cathedral at Köln—had inspired the rush of love New York did.
She had accompanied her mistress on shopping trips that left her wide eyed with wonder. Crossing town in a hansom cab as the avenues swung out to left and right, she had been unable to contain her enthusiasm or understand Jacobina’s lack of it. The joylessness with which Mevrouw Vermeulen-Sickerts acquired expensive clothes and trinkets disgusted her. It seemed grossly unfair to Agneta that a woman so free from financial constraint should derive so little pleasure from it, and this thought began to undermine her ability to refrain from judging her betters.
From her little room on the top floor of the Metropole, Agneta stared out over the city’s lush park and sparkling rooftops, her heart aflame. She was allowed an afternoon off once a fortnight. Though the first of these was delirious, her second solitary promenade was spoiled by her simple Dutch clothes, which did not at all complement the triumphant splendor of the city.
It was on her return from this unsatisfactory expedition that Agneta was beset by the most seductive temptation of her life. As she put away Jacobina’s latest purchases and added them to the inventory of her clothes, the desire to wear one of them, and to wander down Fifth Avenue like a fine lady, took hold of her. It became imperative when she removed from a box an afternoon gown of peacock-blue satin with a jacket trimmed in ermine. She held it up to the glass. She was not as tall as Jacobina, but she knew that in the closet was a pair of very high-heeled shoes that would solve this problem. She went to the door and locked it, though she knew her mistress was at a fitting. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. She was not on duty again until six. Might she not …?
She did.
She took off her own dress and hung it in the wardrobe. Then she sat at the dressing table and arranged her hair. When that was done to her satisfaction she put on the peacock-blue satin, which did wonders for her eyes. Bravely she stepped into the high-heeled shoes and contemplated herself in the mirror. The transformation was dazzling. She went to the safe and removed Jacobina’s jewel box. From this she took the sapphire choker that had been bought for Constance and a pair of pearl earrings.
Agneta was at heart a modest woman, but the city’s immodesty had infected her. Now she laughed to see how magnificent she looked. She left the Vermeulen-Sickerts’ suite and entered the elevator. Although the operator saw her every day he did not recognize her and bowed. Two gentlemen entered the lift and bowed also.
“May I order a carriage for you, miss?” asked the doorman, as though he could think of no greater honor.
“No, thank you. I prefer to walk.” And Agneta swept past him to find that the crowds on Fifth Avenue parted for her and every gentleman among them doffed his hat.
That same afternoon, October 21st, an unforeseen catastrophe occurred that provided Maarten with conclusive proof of God’s directed wrath. He had an appointment with the chairman of the Knickerbocker Trust Company and had spent the morning honing what he intended to be a brilliant performance. If he could obtain a further million dollars in America, he felt confident of making up any further shortfall with European capital and thus prevailing against the odds. He was aware, however, that nothing repels credit like desperation; and because he was desperate he had taken the step of ordering a cocktail at luncheon.
He emerged from his cab ten minutes early, feeling cavalier. He was disconcerted to find a line outside the company’s offices and annoyed when the doorman refused to let him step past it.
“But I have an appointment with Mr. Barney.”
“Mr. Barney is seeing no one today.”
Over this individual’s shoulder, Maarten could see into the green marble banking room. It took him a moment to decode the chaos at the tellers’ windows. Every person in the long line was withdrawing money, apparently as much as they could. The doorman pushed him roughly aside, and when Maarten said, “I will report this insolence to Mr. Barney himself!” the man shrugged and said, “Mr. Barney’s resigned. Join the line like everyone else.”
To be treated in this peremptory fashion reminded Maarten of slights he had endured in his youth and overcome. Seeing that nothing more was to be gained by complaining, he joined the line, noting with alarm that among the ranks of messenger boys were persons of quality, evidently unwilling to rely on subordinates to retrieve their funds for them. From a lady in green serge and fox fur he learned that Mr. Barney had been implicated in a failed attempt to corner the stock of the United Copper Company; that this had exposed a web of risky commitments between the banks he had an interest in; and that it was rumored the Knickerbocker Trust Company did not have sufficient reserves to honor the claims of its depositors.
“But, madam,” said Maarten. “No bank has sufficient reserves to satisfy all its depositors at once. If everybody would simply calm down …”
But it seemed that no one was prepared to calm down. As 34th Street filled with anxious clients, the panic of the crowd began to take hold of Maarten too. Not only did he require a further million dollars in credit; the $500,000 he had raised in Amsterdam was in the trust company’s vaults and its loss would precipitate a crisis he might not survive.
The Knickerbocker closed its immense bronze doors promptly at five o’clock, while there remained dozens of people ahead of Maarten in the queue. Were it not for the lady in fox fur he might have abandoned his stoicism and begun to shout, as others were doing. Instead he said good-bye calmly and walked through eddying crowds to his hotel. From the newspapers he learned that J. P. Morgan had gathered the city’s leading financiers in his library to find a way of preventing a full-scale run on the banks; also that the National Bank of Commerce had refused to clear the Knickerbocker’s checks.
It annoyed Maarten profoundly to be a nonentity in this tangled city. In Amsterdam he would have been in Morgan’s library, taking decisions. In New York he was just another fellow in a fix.
He found his wife having hysterics in front of the hotel’s manager. A sapphire choker was missing and her pearl earrings. (She had not yet discovered the loss of the peacock-blue dress.) “My maid never forgets to lock the safe. It must have been forced,” she was shouting, her voice high and distracted.
The Metropole’s manager was used to defending his staff from the accusations of absent-minded patrons. He pointed out most respectfully that no violence had been done to the safe. “Could you, perhaps, have taken the jewels off elsewhere, madam?” he asked gently, and when Jacobina insisted that she had not, and that her maid would have found them if she had, he put on his gravest face and said: “Is your own servant wholly to be trusted?”
“Of course,” snapped Jacobina.
But she was wrong.
Agneta Hemels had lived her life scrupulously. She had cared for her
parents, both now dead, and worked very hard to pay her older brother’s gambling debts. She had never stolen anything in her life. But as she stepped daintily down Fifth Avenue in Jacobina’s gown and Constance’s jewels, she found the experience addictively delightful.
She went into a shop and was fussed over by the attendants. It was a jeweler’s, and she asked to see several diamond bracelets. For a happy fifteen minutes she behaved as if she might buy one. No one had ever bowed and scraped before Agneta Hemels, nor told her that wrists as graceful as hers deserved the best. She pretended to consider an emerald ring, but in fact she was weighing another possibility that had opened before her, as glittering as the stone on her finger.
If she chose to disappear in this vast country of adventurers, she was sure she could. “I shall return tomorrow,” she told the tail-suited salesman, deceitfully. “Keep the ring and those two bracelets aside for me.”
She left the shop trembling. It was almost six o’clock. She walked back towards the Metropole, wondering if there was a God and, if so, what He would do to her if she did what she was contemplating. (If He existed, she was sure He was a “He.”) Agneta had sat through hundreds of church services but could never decide if she truly believed. As she reached the hotel she set the Deity a test: she would enter like a guest and ride the lift in her finery. If she was seen and apprehended she would face the consequences. If not, she would claim her reward for the years she had spent anticipating other people’s whims.
The doorman bowed low to her. So did the elevator attendant. Neither Maarten nor Jacobina was in the lobby, and she gained her own room without incident. Once in it she undressed quickly, put on a dress of her own, packed the peacock-blue satin in her valise with all the underwear she possessed, placed the sapphire choker and pearls between its folds, called a bellboy and instructed him to take the case downstairs and to order a cab for her. Next she went to the Vermeulen-Sickerts’ suite, which the hotel’s manager had just left, and expressed the greatest outrage that someone should have profited by her absence to steal from her beloved mistress.
She helped Jacobina undress and advised her to lie down before dinner. She ordered some bouillon for Maarten, whose ashen face irritated her. How easily he could bear the loss of a few precious stones! She left him trying to place a telephone call to Philadelphia and went into his wife’s dressing room. There she selected five gowns, two cloaks, seven pairs of shoes and a muff and packed them in a trunk, into which she also placed the contents of Jacobina’s jewel box and a quantity of cash. She put on a double-breasted traveling dress with a velvet collar and a chic hat. The dressing room had its own door to the corridor and she summoned a footman to take her luggage downstairs.
Again the elevator attendant bowed to her. As the doorman lifted her into her hired carriage, she pressed a dollar bill into his hand. It was all the spending money Jacobina had given her and it gave her pleasure to leave it behind. “Grand Central Station,” she told the driver; and when they had turned the corner and no one had run after her, she began to cry with happiness.
The revelation of Agneta Hemels’ perfidy shook Maarten profoundly and contributed to his conviction that old certainties were crumbling. He discovered that the maid had bolted when she failed to wake them the next morning, and the trauma of the missing jewels delayed him so long that by the time he reached the Knickerbocker Trust Company, the line to its door stretched halfway round the block.
The rumor was that J. P. Morgan and his associates were prepared to let the Knickerbocker fail. Many in line—men and women—were fighting back tears. Others were angry. Maarten took his place burdened by an awful resignation. He knew he had lost his money.
It was the will of God.
And so it proved. Soon after midday, the great bronze doors were closed to screams of protest. In three hours that morning, more than $8 million had been paid out in cash—$500,000 of it was Maarten’s own and lost for good. He could hardly believe it and yet, now that the disaster had occurred, he saw that he had been expecting it.
He went to other banks but he knew it was hopeless and it was. The call money rate on the New York Stock Exchange was nearing 100 percent and no one was lending. “We must go home, my dear,” he told Jacobina. “I can barely pay the hotel bill as it is.” And that evening they took the midnight sailing to Liverpool and for the first time since her girlhood Jacobina packed her own clothes.
The ship’s extravagance reproached Maarten and he spent the first three days of the voyage in bed. On the morning of the fourth he woke early and crept from their darkened cabin to a stretch of isolated deck and thought. It was no use trying to save himself if God was against him. Nothing he attempted would work; the Almighty had made that clear by bringing the entire banking system of the United States to its knees, merely to punish him. Before he took any practical steps it was vital to regain the affections of his Creator—unless, of course, he was predestined to damnation, in which case … He knelt heavily, not caring that a steward had appeared to lay out the deck chairs, and threw himself on the mercy of his Maker. He was used to dreading the flames of hell, but earthly success had so far shielded him from more immediate manifestations of divine disfavor. He prayed until the steward asked him if he would care for some coffee; and this interruption broke his concentration, leaving him answerless and afraid.
Naomi de Leeuw received the telegram announcing her employer’s unexpected return and sent Hilde Wilken to the schoolroom to convey the good news to Egbert. Opening the door in the dining room wall, the maid was confronted by an odd tableau: Piet Barol was balancing precariously on one leg in the middle of the entrance hall while his pupil watched him, shivering. She curtsied. “If you please, Master Egbert, your parents will be home tomorrow.”
Piet had counted on having weeks more to defeat Egbert’s foes. “Thank you, Hilde,” he said sharply, and once she had gone, with a greater sense of urgency, “Call again, old fellow.”
“Black.”
Piet swung his left foot away from his body in a balletic movement and very slowly brought it down on a white tile. “Call again.”
“White.”
Now Piet lifted his right leg and placed it very gently over the intersection of four tiles. He waited. The room was silent. He could hear the boy’s rough breathing and the gurgle of a filling radiator. “Call again,” he said, but Egbert did not speak.
The Vermeulen-Sickerts arrived the next morning, after spending an anxious night in a hotel at Liverpool. Mr. Blok was extremely annoyed to see that Agneta Hemels was not of the party. He assumed she had been let go in New York and regretted the lost opportunity to dismiss her himself. He enjoyed such scenes, which Mrs. de Leeuw’s stable management of the household rarely afforded him.
The news of her protégée’s wickedness shocked the housekeeper to her core. Informed of it by Jacobina, she took the unprecedented step of sitting down in her mistress’ presence, and the first thing she said was: “We must keep this from the lower servants.”
“I quite agree,” said Mr. Blok. “It would set a most unfortunate example.”
And so the fiction that Agneta Hemels had met a man in America, and been proposed to, and departed for Chicago with her employers’ blessing was devised; and when Hilde heard it she went up to the attic and sobbed among the boxes and old trunks and descended in a mood as black as Maarten’s.
Since his unsatisfactory plea for guidance and compassion on the deck of the Lusitania, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts had resorted to extreme self-denial. He had consumed nothing but coffee and bread for the remainder of the voyage, which meant that he endured this interview with his butler and housekeeper in a state of detached despair. It was Monday, October 28th, and the newspapers contained apocalyptic news: on both the previous Thursday and Friday, the New York Stock Exchange had barely made it to the closing bell and call money rates were at 150 percent.
Constance saw at once that something very serious was wrong. She kissed her father tenderly, resolv
ing not to pry, but her curiosity did not long go unsatisfied. Before lunch she and Louisa were summoned to the study.
In his bath it had come to Maarten that only total humiliation, consciously self-inflicted, might cleanse the sin of overreaching. It was necessary to tell his family of their changed situation without subterfuge or excuse, and he did not delay. He did not invite Egbert to the conference, though he wished he could include his tutor—because a man of Piet Barol’s merits might have shared the burden of masculine responsibility. But this was impossible. Methodically, in a voice calmed by hunger, he told his wife and daughters what had happened—the snake-tongued Mr. Dermont and his vision of a potentate’s hotel; his own quiescence in the architect’s sinful grandeur; the disappearance of his partner at the crucial hour; his attempts to struggle on; and the Lord’s final, incontrovertible sanction: the loss of half a million dollars and the abrupt expiry of his credit. “I have asked my friends to come after dinner and will throw myself on their mercy,” he said, bleakly. “Without their help, I will go under.”
Listening to him, Louisa longed to shake her father free of his superstitions and was appalled by the totality of his subjection to them. The protective instincts of which Constance was the usual focus surged within her. How she wished she were a man! She would sail to America; track down this Lionel Dermont in Philadelphia; speak to Mr. J. P. Morgan himself, if necessary; demand and secure the restoration of her family’s money. But all she said was, “We’ll manage, Papa. Of course we will,” and hoped that the interview would end before the delivery of her morning’s purchases. It did not. While the family sat in bewildered silence, Hilde Wilken knocked on the door and staggered into the room beneath a bale of oyster cashmere, the card on which read Urgent Delivery—Paid In Full. Louisa had intended to have matching habits made for herself and her sister, but now the idea embarrassed her. “You may take it upstairs, Hilde,” she said. And to her father, once the maid had left them: “I will return it, Papa. It’s the least I can do.”
History of a Pleasure Seeker Page 13