by Edna Ferber
The first time she lighted a cigarette in public the piazza shook to the topmost capital of its columns. A woman who smoked! But even fast women didn’t smoke in public. She had lighted a tiny white cylinder one evening strolling in the hotel garden under the rosy light of the gay Japanese lanterns. It was just before the nine o’clock hop. She was accompanied by the timorous Van Steed and she was looking her most bewitching in a short Spanish jacket over a tight basque, a full skirt of flowered silk with a sash draped to the side and caught with a tremendous bow.
Van Steed had watched her with dazed unbelief that grew to consternation as she extracted the cigarette from a tiny diamond-studded case which she took from her flowered silk bag, tapped it daintily and experdy, placed it between her lips and motioned him wordlessly for a light. He struck a match, his hand trembling so that the flame flickered and died. He struck another; she smiled at him across the little pool of light that illumined their two intent faces.
“You smoke cigarettes, Mrs. De Chanfret!” This obviously was a rhetorical question, since she was now blowing a smoke spiral through her pursed lips into the evening dusk. “I—I’ve never seen a lady smoke cigarettes before.” His shocked tone had in it a hint of almost husbandly proprietorship. Even the stout professional madams who marshaled their bevy of girls in the afternoon Broadway carriage parade knew better than to allow them to smoke in public.
Clio shrugged carelessly. “It’s a continental custom, I suppose. I’ve smoked since I was thirteen. There’s nothing so delicious as that single cigarette after dinner.”
Nervously he glanced about, sensing a hundred peering eyes in the dusk. “People will—people will misunderstand. In a hotel, people talk.”
“Oh, how sweet—how kind of you to protect me like that! Perhaps you are right. I am not used to American ways. But a cigarette”—she held it away from her delicately, she looked at it, she laughed a little poignant laugh—”a cigarette is sometimes cozy when one is lonely. Don’t you find this so, dear Mr. Van Steed?”
“Cigar smoker myself,” he said gruffly.
She murmured her admiration. “But of course. So masculine.”
He cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t think you’d be lonely, Mrs. De Chanfret. You never—that is, you’re so popular—a woman of the world.” She was silent. The silence lengthened, became unbearable. In a kind of panic he looked at her. Her face was almost hidden from him; she had turned her head aside, the lashes lay on the white cheeks. “Mrs. De Chanfret! Have I said something! I didn’t mean—”
Still she was silent. They walked beneath the rosy glow of the Japanese lanterns. Inside the hotel the orchestra struck up the popular strains of “Champagne Charlie.” Now she turned to him, she just touched her lashes with her lace handkerchief. “A woman of the world,” she repeated, very low. Her tone was not reproachful; merely sad. “Imagine for yourself that your dear sister should suddenly find herself a widow, and her dear mother dead, too, suddenly—forgive me that I even speak of such a thing—but par exemple only—and she finds herself alone in—shall we say—France. Alone, with only a servant or two, and knowing no one. No one. She follows the ways to which she is accustomed in her own loved America. Is that a woman of the world!” She pressed the handkerchief to her lips.
“Mrs. De Chanfret! Clio!”
Her face was suddenly radiant; she just touched his arm with the tips of her fingers, and pressed it gentiy and gave the effect of gazing up at him, starry-eyed, by leaning just a little. “You called me Clio. How dear, how good, how friendly! Bart!”
“Shall we go in? The—uh—the music has started.”
“She’s smoking a cigarette!” It was as though the scarlet tip of the little white cylinder had lighted a conflagration in the United States Hotel. “He lighted it for her right there in the garden as bold as you please, and now she’s smoking it, walking up and down with a lace thing over her head, and a short velvet jacket like a gypsy. . . . She’s thrown away the cigarette. . . . She’s taking his arm!”
These were the oddments which were dispatched by letter to old Madam Van Steed maintaining her grudging vigil over her expectant daughter in Newport. With the breath of the harpies hot on her neck, Clio Dulaine went her unconventional way.
It became known that she frequently rose at six and ate breakfast with the stable-boys and jockeys and grooms and trainers and horsemen at the race-track stables. Later, this became the last word in chic. Now the very idea was considered brazen beyond belief. The early-morning air was exquisitely cool and pungent with pine; the mist across the meadows pearled every tree and roof and fence and paddock. Clio made friends with everything and everyone from Waterboys to track favorites. She was fascinated by the tough, engaging faces of the stable hangers-on. Theirs was a kind of terse astringent wit. Their faces were, for the most part, curiously hard-bitten and twisted as to features; a wry mouth like a crooked slit in a box; a nose that swerved oddly; an eye that seemed higher than its mate, or that dropped in one corner, with sinister effect. Their hands were slim, flexible, almost fragile looking; their feet, too, slim and high-arched. They wore jerseys, shapeless pants or baggy riding breeches that hugged their incredibly meager knees. There was about them an indefinable style.
“Chic, ça,”Clio would say. “Un véritable type.”
“What’s a teep?” Maroon asked.
“Uh—I must think—” She was being very French for the benefit of Van Steed. The three were breakfasting together.
Van Steed now said, yes, indeed, you’re right, he is, and nodded to show that he too was familiar with the French language. This did little to soothe Maroon’s irritation.
“Spell it,” demanded Maroon.
“Why, t-y-p-e. Type.” She gave it again the French pronunciation.
“T-y—well, hell’s bells! Teep! Type, you mean. Well, it’s too bad you can’t speak American. Are you fixing to stay over in this country long, Mrs. De Chanfret? You ought to learn the language.”
“That depends, dear Colonel Maroon, on so many, many things.”
“What, for instance?” Van Steed asked with pronounced eagerness.
“Oh, things you would consider quite sordid, I’m afraid, Mr. Van Steed. Everything is so expensive over here. It takes so many francs to make one American dollar.”
He spoke with a rush, as though the words had tumbled out before he could check them. “You should never have to worry about money. You’re so—so—you ought to have everything that’s beautiful—and uh—beautifiil.” He stammered, floundered, blushed furiously.
“Perhaps,” wistfully, “if—ah—Edouard had lived.”
“Edouard?”
“My husband.”
“Oh. Oh, I thought you said—that is—I understood his name was Etienne.”
“It was. I—I always called him Edouard. A little pet name, you understand.”
Phew, Maroon thought. That’ll learn her not to be so cute.
Unruffled, she went placidly on eating the hearty stable breakfast of scalding coffee and ham and eggs and steak and fried potatoes and hot biscuits. Everything seemed to her serene and friendly at this hour of the morning. Even the race horses, so fiery and untouchable as they pranced out to the track a few hours later, haughtily spurning the ground with their delicate hoofs, seeming scarcely to touch it, like the toes of a ballet dancer, now put their friendly heads outside their stalls looking almost benign as they lipped a bit of sugar.
Cupide usually accompanied her on these excursions to the stable. It was his heaven. The stables were quick to recognize his magic with horses. They permitted him to exercise their horses, grudgingly at first but freely after they had seen what he did with the fiery Alamo, who was as yet not entirely broken to the race track.
Darting in and out of the stables and paddocks, under horses’ hoofs, into back rooms, he picked up the most astonishing and valuable bits of information, which he imparted to Clint and Clio.
“That Nellie Leonard is an actress, they sa
y she is going to be famous because that James Buchanan Brady has lots of money to put into plays for her. She is taking singing lessons every day. . . . Bet on Champagne Charlie in the third race, don’t let them talk you out of it. I know what I know. . . . That girl in the cottages with Sam Lamar isn’t his daughter at all, she’s his mistress. . . . President of the United States Arthur is coming to the United States Hotel next week. . . . They are going to have a great ball. . . . The Forosini has a new riding horse, pure white. He is trained to bow his head and swing toward her when she mounts the block. . . . Gould is going to buy the Manhattan Elevated Company. He is trying to ruin them so he can get it cheap. I listened at the keyhole when he was talking. . . . Kaka is teaching Creole cooking to Mrs. Lewis at the Club House, and Kaka is playing the roulette wheel from the kitchen. The waiters place her money for her. She won seventy-five dollars last night. They’re afraid to keep any out for themselves because they know she is a witch. . . . The old lady who is the mother of that Van Steed is coming to Saratoga. She doesn’t like you. . . . Tonight Mrs. Porcelain is going to wear a pink dress, tulle, with rosebuds. . . .”
He knew everything. His sources of news were devious but infallible. Bellboys, chambermaids, waiters, grooms, bartenders, faro dealers, stable hands, jockeys, trainers, prostitutes all brought him tidbits and spices with which to flavor the pot-au-feu which was forever stewing in his great domed skull. When he slipped into the hotel front lobby (where he was not permitted), the Negro boys swarmed around him, their faces gashed with anticipatory grins. He postured for them, he danced, he told droll dirty stories, he fabricated tremendous gargantuan lies. For the chambermaids he seemed to have a kind of fascination that was at once unwholesome and maternal. At the track the stablemen and even the jockeys admitted that his knowledge of horseflesh was uncanny.
Now he began his campaign. He wanted Maroon to enter Alamo. He begged to be allowed to ride him. Dawn daily found him at the track. He cajoled, begged, bribed, pleaded undl Maroon, trainer, stable-boys, all were worn down. He took the horse into his charge, bit by bit. Soon he was riding him daily in the early-morning track work. Crouched over the neck of the beautiful two-year-old he looked like a tiny bedizened monkey.
“Let me ride him, Mr. Clint. Let me race him; I promise you he will win. I swear it. Perhaps not first, but we will not shame you, Alamo and I. Think how chic it will be, your own horse to race at Saratoga . . . Miss Clio, speak for me. Speak for me!”
He was like a thwarted lover pleading that they intercede with a mistress. It was difficult to tell whether he was motivated by his slavish admiration for Maroon, his doglike devotion to Clio, or his worship of the spirited animal.
In the beginning Maroon had laughed indulgendy at the dwarf’s pleadings as one treats a child who cries for the moon.
“Listen at him! You’d be a sorry figure and so would Alamo, trailing along at the end of the field like a yearling strayed from the herd.”
Cupide turned to Clio. “Mad’moiselle, tell him how in France I rode in all the most famous races. Tell him—”
“What a lie!” Clio retorted.
Maroon roared good-naturedly. “Get going, Cupide, before I take a boot to you. Why, Alamo’s a big critter; he’d likely turn his head if you were up there on his back, racing, and eat you for a fly.”
“I’ve mounted him every day. You know this!” The little man was near to tears. His barrel-like chest was heaving. “I have the strength of a giant.” He clenched his fists, he made the muscles bulge in the tight sleeves of his uniform.
“Git, Scat! Drag it out of here!”
Suddenly the little man began to shake all over as with a chill. His popeyes searched the room wildly. With a bound he stood before the dreary little fireplace, he seized the iron poker, took it in his two tiny hands and bent it into a circle as though it were a willow twig. As suddenly, then, he threw it, rattling, to the floor, burst into tears and ran from the room.
Maroon, staring after him, shook his handsome head in bewilderment. “How come I ever got mixed up with a hystericky outfit like you folks I’m damned if I know! Why, say, that midget’s downright dangerous. If he was mine I’d sure enough tan him good. Did you see what he just did there! Why—say!”
Unreasonably, then, Clio turned about-face and sided with Cupide. “He’s wonderful with horses. You yourself have seen that. He can ride anything. You are jealous because Alamo loves him more than you.”
“God A’mighty!” shouted Maroon. “Let the sorry scoundrel ride him then. Serve him right if he gets throwed and killed. Only don’t blame me.” He stamped from the room as irate as a humdrum husband.
Cupide was not yet finished. He knew power when he saw it; he had not listened at keyholes in vain. Straight as his little bandy legs would take him he ran to the room where power resided. It was napping time for the feminine guests of the United States Hotel—that hour which stretched, a desert waste, when the heavy midday meal was in the process of digestion and the three o’clock Broadway carriage parade had not yet begun.
Smardy, peremptorily, he rapped at the door of a third-floor suite. There was no answer. He rapped again.
“Go away!” bellowed the voice of Mrs. Coventry Bellop. “I’m sleeping.”
Rat-a-tat-tat, went the knuckles. Then again. Silence within the room. Rat-a-tat-tat. To a mind keyed to plots and petty conspiracies the peremptory knocking spelled exigency. A key turned, the door was opened, Mrs. Bellop, a huge shapeless mass in a rumpled muslin wrapper, peered out into the hall, saw nothing, then, feeling a tweak at her skirts, looked down in amazement over the shelf of her own tremendous bust to see the dny figure hovering in the neighborhood of her be-ruffled knees.
“Good God!” she boomed. “You gave me a start. What are you doing down there?”
“I must talk to you.” He laid one finger alongside his nose like a midget in a pantomime. Perhaps he had, in fact, seen this gesture of secrecy in some puppet show and with his gift of mimicry was unconsciously using it now.
She stood a moment, staring down at him. Then, without a word, she stood aside to let him enter. Accustomed to the fastidious neatness of Clio Dulaine’s apartment, he looked about Mrs. Bellop’s chamber with considerable distaste. A cluttered place in which chairs, tables, shelf were littered with a burden of odds and ends of every description. The froglike eyes of the little man saw everything, made a mental note of all they saw. Garments, letters, papers, half-smoked stubs of very small black cigars; food, gloves, wilted flowers, a hairbrush full of combings; stockings, a cockatoo in a cage, a fat wheezing pug dog whose resemblance to Cupide was striking.
“What do you want?” demanded the forthright Mrs. Bellop. “Who sent you?”
He put his hat in his hand, the polite and well-trained groom, but his tone was that of a plotter who knows an accomplice when he sees one.
“No one sent me. I came.”
“What for? Nothing good, I’ll be bound.”
He looked pained at this. “Would you like to make a thousand dollars?”
“Get out of here!” said Mrs. Bellop.
He put up his little hand, palm out, almost peremptorily. “You need only say one word to Mad’moiselle—to Mrs. De Chanfret, I mean. And spend fifty dollars. You have fifty dollars?”
“Get out of here!” Mrs. Bellop said again. But halfheartedly. It was plain that her interest was at least piqued.
“Madam Bellop,” he began, earnestly, “I am a great and famous jockey.”
“Likely story.”
“It is true. Look at me. Imagine my featherweight on a good horse, with my hands of iron. Listen. I am serious. I want to ride Alamo. You know—Monsieur Clint’s horse. If I ride him I shall win.”
“Ride him then. What d’you mean, rousing me out of my sleep! What’s behind all this twaddle? Quick, or I’ll have you thrown out of the hotel!”
Yet storm as she would, the sad eyes, the sardonic mouth, the stunted body commanded her interest, held her attention. He
spoke simply, briefly, like one who is himself so convinced that he feels he will have no trouble convincing another.
“I will ride Alamo. I will win. That I can assure you.”
“Bosh! How?”
“I will win. Will you tell Mad’moiselle that it would be a good thing for Monsieur Clint and for her? To have a winning horse is very chic. All my life I have wanted to ride a winning horse. But all my life. It is my dream.”
“Look here,” interrupted Mrs. Bellop, testily. “Sometimes you talk like a nigger bootblack and sometimes you talk like a character in a book. I can’t make it out. For that matter, I don’t know why I’m wasting time on you. Get along, now, before I call the front office.” But her tone lacked conviction.
The midget could not be serious long. He shook himself like a litde dog, he grinned engagingly, the big front teeth, spaced wide apart, were friendly as a white picket fence. Suddenly he was all Negro. “Please tell her like I say, Miz Bellop. She do what you say. Looky, effen you ain’t got fifty, why, I put it in for you, you win a thousand dollars. Only”—his face now was a mask of cunning—”only you mustn’t speak a breathin’ word to any folks about it. Just you and Mr. Clint and Miss Clio.”
“Dirty work if I ever saw it,” said the forthright Mrs. Bellop. “She send you?”
“No ma’am!”
“He send you?”
“No ma’am!”
It was impossible to doubt his sincerity. Mrs. Bellop possessed the spirit of adventure; and she was not a lady to forego a chance at gain. Still she hesitated, pondering. Her fine eyes, shrewd, intelligent, searched the froglike face upturned to her. Honor among thieves. Desperate, he played his last card. “No call to feel backward about the fifty, Miz Bellop. No call at all. I can spare it and you can pay me back when you win. I stole it.”
At this engaging example of candor she burst into rollicking laughter, her bosom heaved, her sides shook. “Run along, you imp! I’ve a mind to do it, just out of curiosity. If you’re lying—”