Book Read Free

MRS2 Madame Storey

Page 22

by Hulbert Footner


  I carried his name into Mme. Storey, and presently ushered him into her presence. From the manner of their greeting I gathered that they had met before, but only casually. Mr. Starr cast an appreciative glance around at my mistress's room.

  "I wish I could get an effect like this," he murmured, "but it takes genius."

  Mme. Storey smiled in her slow way. She is not insensible to the right sort of flattery.

  Mr. Starr's eyes twinkled at the sight of Giannino in cap and bells, making faces at him from a corner. The man was no fool. One liked him rather, in spite of his disgusting riches.

  I understood by a private sign from my mistress that she wished me to remain in the room. When he saw me sit down, Mr. Starr looked a little blank. It became evident that under his air of careless good humour he was nervous. He was understood to murmur politely that he would like to speak to Mme. Storey alone, to which she made her usual reply:

  "Miss Brickley is present at all interviews. She is my memory."

  He took the seat she indicated, but seemed to be at a loss how to begin. Mme. Storey offered him a cigarette, and took one herself. That helped. He presently said with a careless laugh, which was not, however, without a note of bitterness:

  "I assume that you know all about me from the newspapers. It will save time."

  "I know what the newspapers report," said Mme. Storey dryly, "but I do not suppose that is the whole story."

  "Oh, it's true in the main," he said. "We Starrs seem to have made a mess of things generally. We're not a bad lot, either. But I suppose we haven't got the moral natures to measure up to our incomes."

  "Nobody has," said Mme. Storey. "Moral natures are only developed by poverty."

  "You're right of course," he agreed. "Money's a curse, just as the copy-books say. But what is one to do?"

  Mme. Storey shrugged.

  "Life gets you into a net," he murmured, lowering his eyes. "Not being of heroic stuff, I have never been able to cut myself out."

  This was rather painful to hear from the boyish man with his happy-go-lucky air.

  "You are frank about yourself," said Mme. Storey kindly.

  "Not much use my coming to see you if I were not," he murmured.

  Mme. Storey merely waited for what was coming.

  "I was married when I was twenty-three," he said, plunging all at once into the middle of his story. "I was seeing life, you understand. The usual young fool! My father gave me as much money as I wanted on condition that I used an assumed name in my pleasures, and did not run any bills...Did you ever meet my wife?" he broke off to ask.

  Mme. Storey shook her head.

  "No, you wouldn't," he went on. "She was Bessie Jewett, the elder of the Jewett sisters, famous music hall stars of that day. They were the queens of the silly little world I moved in, the world, I thought it was. That is, Bessie was the queen, for Tessie, the quiet one, was no more than a foil for her. I thought in my youthful vanity that Bessie was taking me for myself alone. I meant to surprise her on our wedding day with my real name. But it was no surprise to her. In fact, she...Oh, well, I don't want to abuse her. I need only say that she was ten years older than I. I was married before I had time to take a long breath.

  "I was speedily disillusioned, of course. From the first day she had me with her bad temper. I hate rows. I gave in to her, and of course every time I gave in, it made my position more abject. She retired from the stage and set up as an exemplar of respectability. She assaulted the citadels of society—there was a society in those days, and was humiliatingly repulsed. She found to her astonishment that money couldn't buy some things. It turned her temper worse than before. Like most violent people, I believe that she is a little unhinged. But that doesn't help me any. Her mother is quite mad.

  "Her crowning folly was the building of Bolingbroke Castle—she claims to be descended from Henry Bolingbroke, you know. Not that it matters. A castle she had to have, reproduced stone by stone from one of the mediæval fortresses of England. I weakly assented—anything for peace, without realising what I was being let in for. It was from the castle that she designed to make her grand sortie upon society. It was five years building; five years it kept me poor. I never told anybody how much it cost me; I was ashamed. I will say, though, that during those years I enjoyed a kind of peace. She had an absorbing object in life that kept her busy; then, too, she had to be half-way decent to me in order to extract the vast sums of money that were called for.

  "But when it was finished I discovered that she expected me to go there and live with her. I balked at that. It is really a magnificent pile, I believe; she had the wit to employ the best talent. In fact, it made the fortunes and the reputations of a small army of architects and decorators, though it never did its owners any good. Perched up there on Patching Mountain overlooking a sea of suburban villas with fertilizer factories in the distance! How unspeakably ridiculous! A donjon keep with battlements and machicolations. Stone-vaulted corridors and vast chambers. Fancy living in such a place. A common or garden American like me. It made me turn hot and cold to think of the way my honest neighbours would grin when they caught me driving in or out of the place.

  "It was the castle which finished me. I visited Bessie there two or three times, but the spectacle of the ex-music hall favourite established amidst such grandeur was too much. My God! she was so common! It gave me the courage to chuck it altogether. She raged like a madwoman—she always claimed that it was my abandonment of her that prevented her from getting into society, but I kept out of her way. I felt as light as air.

  "In the course of time she resigned herself to the situation and set her wits to work to devise ways of tormenting me. That has become her grand object in life. She sued for and obtained a judicial separation, and the court awarded her an enormous allowance which I do not begrudge her, God knows! I'd give up every cent I possess sooner than live with her again. She still lives with her mother and sister in that nightmare of a castle. With what guests she can bribe to come visit her. Second-rate hangers-on.

  "One of her latest caprices was to drive tally-ho up and down the precipitous Patching roads. Oh, she has courage of a sort. The spectacle has been described to me; the gargantuan purple-faced Bessie, attired in pale pink perched up on the box screaming curses at the horses, while some trembling sycophant beside her held a pink parasol over her head. Ah! if she had only broken her neck that way! After one or two narrow escapes of doing so, she probably reflected that the risk of giving me my final release was too great, and she gave away the horses.

  "I was not long exulting in my freedom before I learned that I was not free at all. Therein lay her cunning. Legally I am still her husband, and she takes care not to let me forget it. She is continually bringing ridiculous suits against me, which she invariably loses, but she gains her object, which is to drag my name into the newspapers again. And one way or another I always have to pay the costs. She is a woman who must continually be engaged in litigation.

  "She has me constantly watched and followed. She has a trick of turning up to accost me when I am entertaining friends, or whenever she thinks it will most humiliate me. There have been times when I have been ready to die under the crude humiliations she has put upon me—this woman who spends a thousand dollars a day of my money. I needn't go into details. She is certainly insane. Her hatred of me has become a mania, and she will stop at nothing in order to gratify it. Nevertheless, until lately I was prepared to put up with all this. A man always has ways of escape. But now...but now..."

  He hesitated. It was not hard to guess what was coming next.

  "I came here to make a clean breast of the matter," he presently went on in a lower tone. "...I have fallen in love with another woman. The real thing. It is the first time I have experienced it. It changes the whole colour of my life. With the help of such a woman I might make something of myself. I feel as if she were my only hope of salvation I may say that she loves me in return...But with such a woman as she, there could not be
any relation except an open and straightforward one I am bound to this other! Is it any wonder I feel as if I were going out of my mind!

  "You have all my sympathy," said Mme. Storey gently. "But—if you will pardon the blunt question, why do you come to me? Should you not rather consult your lawyer?"

  "Oh, I've been in the hands of lawyers for the past eight years!" he said hopelessly. "What Bessie has left me they have taken. I have sued her for divorce. My case was thrown out of court. She takes good care to give me no legal cause. Moreover, it appears that the judicial separation militates against it. Oh, she has me tied hand and foot."

  "I must repeat my question," said Mme. Storey. "Why do you come to me?"

  "You are a psychologist," he said with a wistful air; "not a mere professor of psychology, but a practising psychologist. On every hand I hear of the wonderful things you have accomplished through your extraordinary insight into the human heart—particularly the feminine heart..."

  "Mostly in the direction of solving crime, was it not?" asked Mme. Storey with rather a wry smile—this is a sore point with her.

  "Yes," he admitted, "but why stop with crime? The same gifts would enable you to..."

  "Surely," said Mme. Storey. "When I began to practise, I scarcely considered crime. I hoped to do a little towards straightening out tangled human relations...Unfortunately I soon discovered that wrong people do not want to be set right. So crime was about all that was left for me...What is it exactly, that you wish me to do?"

  "See my wife," he pleaded. "With your skill you can surely bring her to listen to reason. She has nothing to gain by her present course. She..."

  Mme. Storey interrupted him with a grave shake of the head. "You overrate my skill," she said. "I am sorry, but I cannot undertake it. In the first place it would make matters worse—you have drawn only too convincing a picture of your wife. Any move that I might make would only gratify her hatred...In the second place, after one or two unfortunate experiences I was obliged to make an absolute rule never to undertake anything in connexion with marital relations."

  It was only too clear that she meant what she said, and Mr. Starr wasted no time in attempted persuasion. He got up heavily. There was now no look of youth about him. "I scarcely expected you to say anything else," he said dully. "I just took a chance. One snatches at anything...It is only too true you cannot touch pitch without being defiled...You think there is no hope for me then, short of my wife's death?"

  "I must be honest with you," said Mme. Storey gravely. "I see none."

  He went out without another word.

  "A pitiful case," murmured my mistress, abstractedly extinguishing her cigarette. "The girl he is in love with is Mary Lansdowne. I had it from another source. She's a girl in a thousand..."

  II

  During the afternoon of the same day, the door of my office was rudely pushed open, and a monumental female strode in. I knew at a glance it could be no other than the famous Bessie Jewett Starr. Monumental! I ought rather to have written mountainous! A tall woman and fat beyond all credence. Her fat was accentuated by the harness she wore which thrust it out at you, so to speak. And all this was swathed in yards and yards of mauve chiffon which made her look even bigger. Her face was puffy and, I suspect, scarlet in its natural state. Coats of whitewash had reduced it to a strange violet hue. Perhaps that was why she wore mauve. She was dressed to represent thirty years old; a simple-minded person might have been deceived. You could see that she had once been a gloriously beautiful woman; that made the ruin more tragic. She demanded to see Mme. Storey. Her arrogant glance bade me to fall down and grovel at her feet.

  I did not.

  "If you will wait a moment..." I began.

  "I am Mrs. Bessie Jewett Starr; I am not accustomed to be kept waiting," she said, and thrusting me out of her path (she was several times my size) she opened the door of Mme. Storey's room.

  I was not much put about, for I knew she'd meet her match in there. I followed to see the fun.

  Giannino fled to one of the picture frames where he sat squeaking with indignation.

  Mme. Storey was writing at her table. She looked up calmly. "Ah, Mrs. Starr," she said at once.

  "You know me!" exclaimed the fat woman, somewhat taken aback.

  "How could I fail to do so?" said Mme. Storey sweetly. "Won't you sit down?"

  Mrs. Starr sat on the edge of a Florentine chair, which creaked alarmingly. I saw a lightning glance of anxiety cross Mme. Storey's eyes—not for the woman, but for the chair.

  "You'll find the upholstered chair more comfortable," she said politely.

  Mrs. Starr merely glared at her and at me, and settled herself more firmly where she was.

  "A cigarette?" asked Mme. Storey.

  "I don't use them," snapped Mrs. Starr.

  Mme. Storey helped herself from the silver box, and lighting up with a malicious deliberation, puffed a great cloud of smoke towards the ceiling. Mrs. Starr watched her, biting her lip. Her brusque entrance having fallen flat, the fat woman found herself for the moment at a loss. Her eyes glittered painfully and hatefully at my mistress. Mme. Storey, beautiful, slender and smiling, was a ghastly reproach to the other woman. Under any circumstances Mrs. Starr would have been obliged to hate her.

  Suddenly Mrs. Starr said, like the villainess in a melodrama, through her teeth: "My husband's been here!"

  "But yes!" said Mme. Storey, elevating her eyebrows. "Why not?"

  "I can see that he has filled you up with his slanderous lies about me!"

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that," said Mme. Storey deprecatingly. "He must have drawn me a fairly true portrait of you, mustn't he? because you see, I recognised you at once."

  The fat woman snorted with rage. "What did he come for?" she demanded.

  "I must plead privilege there," said Mme. Storey blandly. "A professional matter."

  "Professional! Do you call this a profession? Snooping, I call it!"

  Mme. Storey smiled delightedly at her cigarette.

  "I know what he came for!" Mrs. Starr went on in a strident, hateful voice that made one ashamed for her; made one wish not to see her give herself away like that. "He came here to hire you to help him get rid of me! Well, I wish you joy of the job! He's tried everything already. And here I am still. I'm a healthy woman, too, thank God! I'll live for twenty-five years yet to plague him! I'll outlive him, the poor weed! He has no constitution."

  "Ah," said Mme. Storey, "you are strongly attached to him!"

  "Attached to him!" shouted Mrs. Starr. "I despise him! A worthless idler. Never did a day's work in his life. Always going around and whining against me to anybody who will listen to him! He's not a man! There isn't a bone in his body. A jellyfish!"

  "I should think you would have cast him off long ago," remarked Mme. Storey with a dry affectation of sympathy.

  "Oh, do you," said Mrs. Starr with a hateful smile. "Well, that's my affair...I don't believe in divorce."

  The last statement sounded unspeakably droll from those angry lips. Mme. Storey looked at me, her face broke up incontrollably, her silvery laugh was heard. The sound of it set me off, too.

  It infuriated the fat woman. She sprang up and started cursing us like a drunken teamster. It was startling, but it was very funny. I'm afraid we only laughed the more.

  Mrs. Starr shook a stubby forefinger at Mme. Storey. Until I saw her, I didn't think anybody did that except on the stage. "I came here to warn you to keep out of this," she shouted. "If you don't, you better look out, that's all. I can make myself damned unpleasant when I want..."

  "So I see," murmured Mme. Storey—but I doubt if Mrs. Starr heard her. She was shouting too loud.

  "If anybody makes an enemy of me, I don't care what I do! If you don't believe me, ask your friend Norbert! He can come snivelling around to you or anybody, but he dare not stand up to me!"

  There was a lot more of this. Mme. Storey, making her eyes big, wickedly led the woman on. I'm afraid my mistress was enj
oying the situation. Giannino got hysterical. I was obliged to capture him, and put him in his box in the middle room.

  Mrs. Starr did not see my mistress press the button under her desk, but I did.

  "I'll expose you in the newspapers," the former was shouting. "I can command as much space as I want! How will you like that? How will you like that?" More play with the forefinger.

  The door from my office opened, and John, our stalwart young engineer, appeared. He had eyes for no one in the room but Mme. Storey. John would jump off the top of the Woolworth Building to serve her.

  "John, this lady feels unwell," said Mme. Storey blandly. "Will you please assist her to her car downstairs?"

  John got it. "This way, ma'am," he said briskly.

  For the space of a moment Mrs. Starr was struck dumb with indignation. Then speech returned with a roar. "I'll go when I get damned good and ready!"

  John merely smiled hardily, and made a significant move towards her.

  "I am Mrs. Bessie Jewett Starr!" she shouted. "Don't you dare to lay hands on me!"

  "I don't care if you're Mary Queen of Scots," said John unabashed. "Come on, if you don't want to be helped."

  Mrs. Starr suddenly thought better of it, and bolted through the door. These people who deal in imperatives always run the risk of coming up against an imperative. For a fat woman she moved with an astonishing celerity. John touched his cap to Mme. Storey, and followed, grinning.

  Presently we heard the resounding slam of a car door in the street. Mme. Storey disdained to look out of the window, but I could not be so strong-minded. I saw the superbly appointed car move away, with the wooden chauffeur in front—he kept his face though his mistress could not. I saw her, and she saw me. She leaned over and, looking up, shook her fist at me like a washerwoman. I burst out laughing afresh. It was so exactly in character!

 

‹ Prev