Most of the costumes were less imaginative. Bourbon court ladies and Napoleonic officers, pirates and milkmaids rubbed shoulders, breasts, and buttocks on the dancefloor with clowns, Greek goddesses, Roman senators, and Oued Nail dancing girls. A few gentlemen honored their hostess by appearing as Mandarins. A half-dozen Manchu ladies were burdened by heavily embroidered, calf-length silk tunics over wide-legged pantaloons; their hair was hidden beneath jet-black wigs as their ornately enameled faces were behind the half-masks. Charlotte was herself one of those ladies, for she would not reveal herself as the hostess.
The strings struck up a polonaise, and the perspiring throng, heated with champagne and brandy, hurled itself into the dance, but subsided into a gentle fox-trot when the orchestra glissaded into the most popular song of the season, “Tangerine.” Some couples gratefully halted their exertions to watch the jugglers, acrobats, and conjurers who wandered through the orchid-hung chambers; others drifted into curtained booths on the enclosed veranda, where they dared each other to unmask.
As three in the morning approached, most revelers had departed. Some dallied in the booths, where bamboo settees with satin palliasses offered both invitation and opportunity, while others retired to the bedrooms. The sallow district officer from Nongkhay was snoring on his pallet, his opium-pipe cradled in his emaciated arms.
Two tall men dominated the remaining eight revelers, who included three Manchu court ladies and a shepherdess. One wore the orders and stars of a marshal of Napoleon, the other the red regimentals of a general of Wellington. Both were flushed with champagne, as were the pirate and the clown who sprawled on Louis Quinze settees. Only flickering candles lit the orchid-hung glade, and the guests, still masked by their hostess’s command, were dim in each other’s sight.
Stately despite his ludicrous costume, the butler presented a crystal bowl on a silver salver.
“Mesdames et messieurs, le cocaine,” he entoned. “In silence, if you please.”
The guests plunged minuscule, filigree-silver spoons into the white powder and sniffed the drug. Alternately sipping champagne and inhaling cocaine, they sat in contented silence for half an hour. A delicious, disembodied sensation possessed them.
The butler reappeared carrying a woven-silver basket filled with folded red and blue paper bows.
“Les ballots, mesdames et messieurs,” he said gravely. “I am asked to remind you that speech is not permitted.”
Each lady selected a rose-red bow, each man a gentian-blue bow. Grave as children obeying the rules of a new game, the ladies and men matched the numbers they had drawn. The couples then withdrew, some to vacant bedrooms, others to the curtained booths. One of the Manchu ladies had drawn the Napoleonic marshal, the other Wellington’s general.
The first pair decorously entered the dim booth in the far corner of the veranda. When the curtains closed, the Manchu lady was in the marshal’s arms, murmuring “Mon cher, je t’aime, mon cher!”
The masked man returned her kisses in silence, while his hands roamed over her body. She pressed closer, and her heavy tunic parted. Impatiently, she untwined the confining sash, and cast off the heavy silk tunic to stand nude to the waist. The man cupped her breasts in his hands for a minute before pulling her down to the settee. She wore only a diaphanous cache-sexe beneath the pantaloons his eager hands removed. The next instant, she was naked except for her half-mask and wig. His fingers strayed along her thighs, and his lips brushed her nipples.
The man had discarded his gold-encrusted tunic. While he caressed his partner’s shadowy figure, her eager hand fumbled with his belt-buckle.
“Les sabots, les sabots” she whispered, her husky voice unrecognizable. “The boots, the boots.”
Pulling off his trousers and jackboots, the man offered himself to the woman’s hands. He was four inches shorter without the built-up boots.
“My God!” she gasped. “Who are you? Who in the name of God? I fixed the ballots. My God, you’re not Randall. Who are you, then?”
Abashed at the strange turn the game had taken, the man sensed with rising horror that he knew his partner’s identity. Her quick hands clawed his mask, and she stood gaping in revulsion.
“Thomas!” she screamed. “Thomas! My God, what are we doing?”
Thomas Sekloong stood mute before his sister’s anguished surprise.
“Get out! Get out!” she shrieked hysterically. “I never want to see you again! We must never see each other again!”
Thomas Sekloong fled from the booth and from his sister’s house, abandoning both the uniform tunic and the built-up boots. He was numbed by the obscenity they had almost committed.
Charlotte Sekloong Way d’Alivère, Comtesse de Samlieu, wrapped the Manchu tunic around herself and scurried to her bedroom. Beyond sensation, she collapsed screaming onto the broad bed. Her Bohemianism shattered by the incestuous foreplay, she was horrified. She wept with the hopeless abandon of a small girl, and a terrible jealousy mingled with her grief. She herself had unwittingly arranged for her lover, the American actor Randall Martin, to make love to another woman by confusing the paper bows so carefully arranged. Even after exhaustion finally bore her into sleep, her slender figure was still shaken by wracking spasms.
The Comtesse de Samlieu did not dine with her youngest brother Charles the next night. He was turned away at the door. She kept to her bedroom for a week, refusing to speak even to her doctor, who was summoned by the servants. The bewildered physician treated her inexplicable condition as best he could. He kept her heavily sedated and told the curious servants that she was suffering from a “severe virus fever.” But tout Paris whispered that the Comtesse’s dissipations had finally destroyed her strength. She was dying, the all-knowing reported. And no surprise, the partisans of the Comte de Samlieu retorted, since only a miracle had prevented its happening much sooner.
Yet the invitations to the Comtesse’s annual Christmas reception were not recalled—as the malicious half-hoped and the pleasure-bent half-feared. Just two weeks after the disastrous masked ball, Charlotte Sekloong Way d’Alivère played the hostess with enchanting verve and bubbling gaiety. She had, the four hundred guests whispered, never been so radiant, so vitally alive.
“Thank you for asking, my dear.” The same glowing smile answered the genuinely concerned and the maliciously disappointed. “But reports of my imminent death were grossly exaggerated. Just a touch of fever. So good of you to come. And a very Merry Christmas.”
Behind her façade of gaiety Charlotte was, she confessed to herself, as nervous as a bride on her wedding night. It was a strange sensation for her and an even stranger analogy. She had already experienced too many mock wedding nights—too many carnal encounters inspired only by restless lust—as well as the two blessed by the Church. But her pulse pounded, and a tide of crimson flowed over her shoulders and cheeks when the big man entered the room. He was well over six feet tall, and his broad shoulders strained his chalk-striped blue suit. Beneath a mane of blond hair, his regular features were boyishly open. Randall Martin was forty-two, but looked no older than thirty. Even if his face had not stared from a hundred thousand billboards, no one could have taken the actor for anything but an American. His ingenuous features were unmarked by time. His face looked not as if he had used it for four decades, but as if he had put it on brand new that evening with his blue suit and red foulard tie.
The motion-picture star greeted Charlotte with the kiss on the cheek that was the equivalent of a handshake in their milieu. She automatically offered him her other cheek to seal the greeting.
“I didn’t,” he whispered in the dark baritone that had insured his success when the motion-pictures began to talk. “I was, she said, ungentle-manly. Nanette de Courcy will never speak to me again. But I didn’t.”
“I’m glad,” Charlotte whispered, “very glad.”
“And you?”
She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. She was astonished by her pleasure at being able to te
ll the truth and by her delight in Randall’s fidelity.
“Dinner tomorrow night?” The actor drew her aside proprietorially, for all the world knew they were lovers.
“No, Randy, darling, I can’t.”
Charlotte was amused by the hurt bewilderment that clouded his open features. Straining hard for originality, one critic had written that Randall Martin commanded only three expressions: “frank joy, wild anger, and bewilderment—one more than absolutely necessary.” But the women who stormed box offices in three hundred cities were not troubled by his histrionic limitations, while their husbands and boyfriends grudgingly conceded: “This Martin’s okay, not a greasy lounge-lizard.”
“And why not?” Martin demanded, anger beginning to replace bewilderment.
“The night after is fine, but I have another engagement tomorrow.”
“Who is he?”
“My youngest brother Charles. He’s the priest you see over there, talking to the British military attaché.”
“Your brother’s a priest?” Randall Martin’s incipient anger relapsed into bewilderment succeeded by white-toothed joy. “We don’t know enough about each other, do we? Dinner, definitely, the night after?”
“Yes, darling. Yes. Yes.”
Charles and Charlotte dined alone at the unfashionably early hour of 7:30 in the small morning-room rather than the formal dining room. Despite her own confused emotions, she interrogated him closely. The possessive protectiveness she had felt for her baby brother reasserted itself, though she had made no effort to see him during her years in Europe. When she had satisfied her curiosity, she offered the only apology of which she was capable.
“I’m sorry, Charlot,” she explained contritely. “I meant to come see you, but something always came up. Life was so exciting, and I was enjoying myself so.”
“You say was.” Charles’s prim manner recalled the infant the family had called the Little Mandarin. “Does that mean you’re not enjoying yourself now?”
“Of course not,” she flared defensively. “That was just a way of speaking. Of course I’m enjoying myself. I love my life.”
“Charlotte?”
“What, Charles?”
“Just … Charlotte?”
“Oh, all right,” she conceded. “No, it’s not fun any more. I feel terribly soiled. That’s why I haven’t been home. I can’t face Mother.”
“If you feel that way, Charl, your troubles are half-solved. Have you told your confessor?”
“My confessor?” she laughed bitterly. “What confessor? How can I confess my sins—and promise not to sin again?”
“Everything is possible to a contrite heart.”
Monsignor Charles sounded stiffly inadequate even to himself. But he persisted, as he had been taught. Any soul in anguish merited his assistance, and this was his sister, his favorite sister. He had always been drawn more closely to madcap Charlotte than to sober Gwinnie.
“Everything is possible with His help,” he repeated.
“But not remarriage, Charlot.”
“Remarriage, Charl? I heard d’Alivère wanted an annulment so he could remarry. Do you, too?”
“I want it terribly,” she said softly. “You see, Charlot, I’m in love, truly in love, for the first time.”
“The first time?” He did not conceal his surprise.
“Yes, I married Manfei because it seemed the thing to do. It pleased Father and the Old Gentleman. Besides, everyone was getting married, all my friends.”
“But you fought Mother as if the world would end if you didn’t marry Manfei.”
“Yes, Charlot,” she smiled wistfully. “Some things they didn’t teach you at the Seminary. I wanted to get away from Mother, probably wanted to spite her. Mothers and daughters, they’re natural rivals. She was too strong for me.”
The priest sipped his claret in silence. If his teachers had not revealed the labyrinthine mysteries of the female heart to him, they had at least taught him when to be quiet.
“Then, when Manfei died and I came to Europe, to Paris, I guess I married Raymond for security—and the title, too,” his sister continued. “But it didn’t work, and now we’re bound together. I got a civil divorce from Raymond to keep the money from him. But, as you know too well, remarriage within the Church is impossible without annulment. I’m truly in love, but I can never marry Randy properly.”
“I do know the rules,” he said tartly. “But Randall Martin?”
“Yes, Randy. I want to marry him. Properly. In the Church.”
“I’m glad, Charl. Love is precious, even when it makes life difficult.”
“That sounds beautiful. But it’s not true.”
“Charlotte, when you married d’Alivère, did you truly mean to love and cherish him as long as you both lived, and to give him children?”
“Of course not, Monsignor,” she mocked. “Even Alaine was an accident.”
“Then, perhaps, something can be done. Since you did not sincerely enter into a lifelong marriage, wanting children. I must make inquiries.”
“You really think so, that I can get an annulment?”
“I can’t promise. I’m not a canon lawyer. I’ll make inquiries. But it will take time.”
“Oh, Charlot, if you could!”
Christmas of 1939 in Europe was a season of gaiety, if not joy. The victorious Germans celebrated with the traditional rock-hard cookies called Lebküchen and the sentimental carols the Nazis could not forbid, though Deutschland über Alles, the anthem of conquest, and Das Horst Wessel Lied, the Nazis’ marching song, were sung as often as Stille Nacht. The French sated themselves with their traditional Christmas Eve reveillon, absolutely convinced that the Germans would never dare attack the impenetrable Maginot Line. No German bombs had yet fallen on French soil, and his countrymen believed they owed their immunity to Premier Edouard Daladier’s stern warning of the terrible retribution that would be wreaked upon Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. The British consumed their roast goose, sang their Christmas carols, and happily carried on their ancient traditions by decorating their Christmas trees, a practice introduced by the German Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, Queen Victoria’s consort, less than a century earlier. A few Britons worried about the war at sea, the only active front of the phony war. German submarines were still sinking too many of the merchant ships that carried not only the arms, but the food essential to Britain’s survival. Yet the rate of attrition was still in Britain’s favor, the tonnage sunk less than new-built or purchased tonnage. Besides, British intelligence reckoned that the Royal Navy was sinking three times the actual number of Unterseebooten it actually sank.
The three wartime capitals were all complacent for the same reason. Germans, French, and Britons believed alike that Adolf Hitler was, if not sated, at least satisfied. Cramming themselves with Polish hams and sausages, the Germans told themselves that der Führer had, once again, brilliantly proved his political acumen. Britain and France would remain on the defensive, the gesture of declaring war having satisfied their honor and fulfilled their pledge to Poland. The men who knew in Germany predicted peace within months. They did not know that Hitler’s peace overtures had already been rejected by Daladier and Chamberlain, who, those insiders declared with absolute certainty, could not be foolish enough to refuse a generous settlement. The French and the British were reassured by the lull in the ground fighting. Since the German conquest of Poland the phony war had become a war of words. The belligerents’ radio stations bombarded each other with charges and countercharges, with rumors and counterrumors. Along the static front lines, the only troops heavily engaged were those manning the enormous loudspeakers that hurled propaganda across no-man’s land. The enemies’ themes were identical: “Lay down your arms and go home. You have no hope of prevailing. Why die in an impossible cause?”
While men talked of peace, hoped for peace, and believed in peace in the midst of war, Major General Thomas Sekloong slipped out of Paris in late January 1940. He did not bid fa
rewell to his sister Charlotte, whom he was not to see again until June 1970, except for a chance encounter at a diplomatic reception in London in 1947, when they ignored each other. But he had several long talks with his brother Charles before embarking on the long voyage from Marseilles through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean that was to land him in Hong Kong for a two-day visit with this family before he boarded a twin-motored DC-2 for the dangerous, roundabout flight to Chungking. After arrival, his lengthy written report would merely confirm his gloomy cabled dispatches. His mission had failed.
“They can’t understand this is a common effort against the same two enemies, Fascism and Communism,” he had told Charles bitterly two days before his departure. “Plenty of sympathy’s available, but not arms, money, or even quiet diplomatic support.”
“The Communists seem to be the only ones helping,” Charles observed. “I’m told Chungking’s received almost a quarter of a billion dollars, American dollars, in Soviet loans. And airplanes, too. Maybe a thousand.”
“The Russians are reinsuring themselves,” Thomas said. “What I couldn’t tell you about those planes and the Soviet advisers.… But I won’t spoil your day.”
“It’s a funny war,” Charles persisted. “The Russians and the Japs are at bayonet’s point. The Russians are practically allies of the Germans. But the Japs are the Germans’ allies. The Finns should logically be German allies. Yet they’re fighting the Russians, while London and Paris talk of helping the Finns.”
“I’ve warned you against logic, youngster,” Thomas snapped. “The Allies won’t help the Finns any more than they’ll help China. Apply logic to this international lunacy, and you’ll go mad too.”
“Speaking of logic, I have a few tidbits from London.”
“Make me unhappier,” Thomas said. “Tell me.”
“It won’t make you happy. As you know, Winston Churchill is a licensed gadfly since he got back the Admiralty. I suppose he’s entitled to interfere, but his audacity’s breathtaking.”
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