by Matthew Head
“Well all right, but an E-string—“
“You couldn’t possibly get one?” Schmitty asked. And if he could ask a silly thing like that, seriously, then I knew Madame de St. Nicaise wasn’t just a small-time irritation. I couldn’t even answer. Schmitty laughed at his end. “See how it is?” he said.
“Yeh,” I said. “Well, I’ll go out there, I don’t know what I’ll do once I get there, but I’ll go.”
“Thanks, Hoop. Give my regards to Madame de, won’t you?”
“That I will, von Schmidt.”
“And Hoop—“
“Yeh?”
“You’re on your honor. Remember—she’s a maiden.”
“————,” I said.
“Dwacious!” said Schmitty, and hung up.
The Morellis’ front door was opened for me by a nice-looking houseboy in an impeccably clean white uniform of the standard type. He was barefoot, as the boys always are in respectable houses. The condition of their feet is an index to the efficiency of the ménage. This boy’s feet were without deformities or amputations, a condition rarer than it sounds. They were as neatly groomed as a concert pianist’s hands, with the nails nicely trimmed, the callouses rubbed down with pumice, and the skin softened and gleaming, like fine old furniture, from oil massage. He showed me into a living room and disappeared in a faint sibilance of starched cotton trousers.
I had time only to glance around me before Madame de St. Nicaise came in. It was a moderately large room of formidable gentility. The furniture was a mixture of awkward, expensive, 1920 Belgian pieces, completely without distinction, and some locally manufactured approximations of the same style. Each piece stood with merciless precision in exactly the spot from which you could tell it must not be shifted. There was a piano, a rarity in Léopoldville, and half a dozen pictures on the walls. One of these was a large, bad, academic-picturesque oil of a canal in Bruges; the others were dry, academic etchings of monuments in Louvain and Brussels, except for a single concession to Italian culture in the form of a tinted Alinari enlargement of a Lippi madonna, in the customary gilded-plaster imitation of a Renaissance frame.
Madame de St. Nicaise entered behind one of those smiles in which the lips retract charmingly from clenched teeth. These teeth had been cared for with the kind of dentistry which puts emphasis on utilitarianism rather than aesthetics, and it had taken a good bit of engineering to keep them in her head. Beyond that, she was not too bad-looking a woman at the routine level. She is hard to describe because her features were without individuality of any kind. She had a generous head of dark brown hair, beginning to streak into gray, parted in the middle and drawn back into a good-sized knot at the nape of the neck. The unexpected simplicity of this coiffure was the most attractive thing about her. There was a suggestion of heaviness to her face which went with her short, rather thick legs.
I had got as far as going up to the big oil to look at it more closely when she came in. I turned and she came up and gave me her hand, lifted only a little too high. I contemplated kissing it, and found the idea unpleasant so early in the day. My name is Tolliver, if I haven’t mentioned it so far, and she said something like “Monsieur Taule le Verre” in the manner of a friendly grand duchess greeting a minor viscount and then, as I released her hand, she waved it elegantly to indicate the picture and said, “C’est un canal de Bruges.” If we were going to speak French, that would be an advantage; I could always hide behind my imperfections. She went on, still in French, “Ah, that Bruges! Down here, Monsieur, we suffer, isn’t it so, we who have known the beauty of life.”
As one lover of the beautiful life to another, I said, “But you have here a most agreeable house, Madame. It is a charming room.”
“You find it so? Well, Monsieur, one does one’s best under difficulties,” but she was pleased.
We sat down on a sofa and talked for a while pretending that she hadn’t got me there to get something out of me. I began to pick up a few cues. Since she was obviously fifteen years older than I was, a certain boyishness was required of me. If I could get down as low as ten, that would make her only twenty-five. I began to feel like an over-age juvenile in a bad amateur theatrical. But mostly she kept striking the note of exile, the duty (and privilege) of the cultured European (and, by sufferance, even the American who had risen above himself) to maintain the Spark for the other victims cast up by willful fate upon this savage shore. At the end of ten minutes, she was practically giving a symphony concert all by herself in a dugout canoe while I sat by and applauded.
When she really got down to business on the E-string deal, it became apparent that she really thought of this concert in terms of a major element in the Allied program. I don’t mean that I don’t thoroughly agree that it’s admirable to have a string quartet in Léopoldville and I don’t mean that I don’t think it was admirable to make this concert a contribution to Belgian relief; I do mean that it was frightening, because insanity is frightening even in its most benign manifestations, to sit there and listen to this woman who in her own mind had contracted the dimensions of a global war to the scale of her own egomania. She saw no reason in the world why I shouldn’t use the Consulate cable to locate an E-string, and get what in an offhand way she called “one of your airplanes” to fly the string to Léopoldville. And her attitude toward me as a person seemed to be that I was fortunate to have been called in to help in an emergency which not only gave me an opportunity to contribute to the war effort, but to meet Madame de St. Nicaise on terms of social equality as well.
As a matter of fact, there was the slimmest kind of chance that I could get the E-string. Our mail plane left that afternoon for Accra. I could ask the pilot to try for an E-string and send it down on the next plane that came our way, and although I’d feel like a fool asking a thing like that, it was possible that the errand might be accomplished. The returning mail plane wasn’t due until after the concert date, but sometimes there were extra flights for one reason or another. It was the smallest chance in the world, dependent on other small chances all the way through, but I found myself giving in to Madame de St. Nicaise as I wouldn’t have given in to a more reasonable person, and saying I would do my best, although I certainly did hate the idea of going up to one of those pilots and asking him to try to get me an E-string.
“Ah!” said Madame de St. Nicaise, “then it is all arranged!” She picked up a small bell from the table at her side and jangled it. The houseboy appeared immediately around the corner of the door with a tray bearing cups and saucers, a coffee pot, and some plates of little cakes. “Now we will celebrate,” she said, and I wondered if I would have got my cup of coffee if I had said I was sorry but I couldn’t do anything.
I had discovered that Madame de St. Nicaise had a passion for at least one creature—herself. Now I discovered another. There was a strange, harsh, resonant whining cry in the hallway, and a large Siamese tomcat entered the room. He paused to appraise me with a clear blue eye, but his flash of interest was momentary. He decided that I was both stupid and inedible, and crossed to the table, where he jumped suddenly with complete grace and precision, and bent his head to sniff at the cookies. He turned to Madame de St. Nicaise and yowled again, objecting in that odd voice, half rasping and half mellow, like a small accordion with laryngitis, that these damn cakes didn’t please him at all.
“Oh-la-la-la!” cried Madame de St. Nicaise. “Naughty Mimette! Pretty Mimette! No-no-no!”
Mimette regarded the spectacle of his mistress waggling her finger and talking baby talk, and swore softly under his breath. “Fool!” he muttered quite plainly, but when Madame de St. Nicaise patted her lap, he picked his way delicately across the table, not touching anything on it with so much as a hair of himself, and jumped down into Madame’s lap and sat there facing me, with an air of complete indifference to both of us. I laughed, and he studied me again briefly, then yawned full in my face, displaying a fine ham-pink tongue with white bristles, and a set of needle-like teeth. �
�Laugh, you dumb bastard,” he said. “It’s three square a day.”
Madame de St. Nicaise made cooing sounds and scratched him back of the ears and stroked him along the spine. She turned him over and subjected him to the indignity of a tickle in the groin. Mimette groaned in humiliation and turned his head away from me. Madame picked him up around the shoulders and raised his nose to the level of her own. He let his body hang like a sack of guts, but when she rubbed her nose against his he was unable to repress a slight tremor. “Kee- ripes,” he said, and when she put him down on the floor he began stalking about the room, complaining rhythmically as he traced and retraced his path—up and over a chair, along the floor to the piano, up across the piano, threading his way through the objects on its top, down again, around the room, back to the chair, up and over, and so on, and at every fifth or sixth step he would give his particular hoarse yowl.
“Does he want out or something?” I asked. Mimette stopped dead in his tracks and gave me just one look, then went on pacing.
“Oh, yes,” said Madame de St. Nicaise. “Cher petit, he always wants out.” She said to Mimette, “Does n’t he.” “Jay zuzz!” cried Mimette, and went out the door into the hall.
“Will the boy let him out?” I asked. He had looked so uncomfortable.
“Oh, no,” said Madame. “We never let him out. It is very bad for cats here, you know,” and when I thought of it, I realized that I hadn’t seen any at all, except for a few mangy ones in the village. “Mimette is never out. He wouldn’t know what to do.”
Then she began on a complete biography of Mimette, all the cute things he had done as a kitten, all his childhood illnesses and how he had weathered them, the sweetness of his disposition and the aristocracy of his lineage, and so on. Mimette was a good guy and I liked him, but I wasn’t interested in his life story. I was sick and tired of Madame de St. Nicaise and good and sore at myself for getting myself into the E-string business, and plenty ready to get out of there. I said, “I really must go, Madame. It has been such a pleasure to talk with you. I remember that I noticed you the other afternoon, with a charming young girl. At the Equatoriale.”
Madame de St. Nicaise seemed to withdraw slightly, and her face maintained an ambiguous expression while she made a hasty effort to take her bearings. “Ah, yes, the Equatoriale,” she murmured. Then, deciding where she was, she said with the faintest suggestion of playfulness, “I am afraid it was not the best introduction—not the one I would have chosen. Of course I seldom go to the Equatoriale—but there is no really good place. Everybody belongs to the Club now—everybody. One might as well go to a café. Of course, in Brussels—” and she left it dangling, suggesting a life of social elegance too rarefied for my experience.
“The young girl with you was very charming,” I said, wondering whether it was within the bounds of human decency, even in association with Madame de St. Nicaise, to mention Liliane’s grand entrance that afternoon. Madame looked at me again with the guarded, ambiguous expression; the conversation was taking new directions a little suddenly. Her eyes wandered from my face on down over my clothes. She seemed to be pricing them, and I half-expected her to reach out to feel the material of my coat-sleeve. Anyone could have read her mind, in a town where eligible young girls are a dime a dozen and eligible young men are hardly to be found at any price. Behind the ambiguous expression she began a concentrated scrutiny of details; perhaps this was not just another government clerk after all. I blurted suddenly: “What a charming day for me! Coffee with you this morning, and this afternoon I am having tea at the Governor-General’s.” It was true that we were going to the Governor-General’s. It was a routine tea for the members of our mission.
Madame de St. Nicaise was too preoccupied with the luminous possibilities I had suddenly embodied to notice anything abrupt or inconsistent in my announcement. She took on the look of a cat who has just discovered that what he had thought was the same old beat-up cloth mouse in the corner was really a live and succulent one. She gave me that terrible smile again, but her teeth seemed to have grown larger, and all their metal re-enforcements took on a new conspicuousness.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes—Jeanne, my niece.” With deliberate effort she managed to relax. She rose and moved easily across the room to the piano; she had rallied. She said, “Come, let me show you her picture, pictures of my little family.”
On the piano top were three photographs in frames which would have done credit to the Royal House if they had been replated at the corners. Madame de St. Nicaise stood before the tryptich and said, “Yes—Jeanne. She is a great comfort to me in my isolation here, Monsieur. She is pretty, don’t you think?”
“Very pretty.”
“And intelligent. A sweet child—and a pianist, too. Have you been much in Europe, Monsieur?”
“Yes, a little.”
“Then perhaps you know our European girls. They are not like your American girls, of course. Oh, your American girls are very pretty too—I am sure I would like American girls very much—although all we knew were the tourists, seeing them in the hotels and in the streets—but we of the old guard—to us it is always a little strange, the American freedom, which can have its dangers—for a young girl. Don’t you think so?”
“Oh, yes. I think so.”
“Yes,” said Madame de St. Nicaise. She wasn’t really getting enough help from me, but she kept on treading water. “Our girls, of course,” she said, “have something—you do not mind my saying this, I know, Monsieur, you are so understanding of our beautiful things, so—I should not say this—so un-American in a way—do you mind?—I was saying that our girls, of course, come to marriage with something—something, after all, which your American girls do not have.”
I said in English, “You mean a certificate of virginity?”
She said blankly, “Pardon, Monsieur?”
I said in French again, “I beg your pardon, Madame. I said, may I look forward to the pleasure of meeting your niece?”
“But of course that must be arranged,” she said. “This is her father, Monsieur Morelli. You have not met him yet?”
The photograph of Morelli showed the face of a young man of about thirty, probably handsome, but so softened by hazy focus and the extensive retouching of the fashionable studio photograph of twenty years ago that it was hard to tell.
“Her father,” she repeated.
Madame de St. Nicaise raised her hand and rested her finger tips on the top of the frame. The air suddenly seemed to grow still around us, relieved of the insistent commotion of her affectations. For a moment she was withdrawn from me, from everything except the photograph. I looked at her face; it had fallen into its natural lines for the first time since she had entered the room nearly an hour before. She looked straight into the eyes of the man in the picture; her lips parted slightly, and in the sudden quiet of the room the clattering echoes of her voice fell away, and I heard the sound of her breath, drawn in slowly, and released in a faint sigh. It was for only the space of that breath, but I had seen. She withdrew her finger tips abruptly.
I said, “No, I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Monsieur Morelli. I will look forward to it. He is in the offices of the Appro, is he not? Of course our office is concerned with them a great deal. He is a very handsome man. What you call your little family makes a very handsome group altogether.”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course, the photograph is quite old. It was taken in Brussels, before we came out here—as you can see. But he is still a very handsome man—and a man of very beautiful character, Monsieur, a man who takes the misfortunes of his—the misfortunes of life in a beautiful spirit. A beautiful spirit. This is Jeanne’s mother. My dear sister.”
I wanted very much to leave. The atmosphere of the room had become oppressive. For a while, with Mimette, Madame de St. Nicaise had seemed only silly. Now I felt an intensity and a troubling dislocation of proportion in everything she said, and I wanted to go.
“She is very beautiful
,” I said automatically, and, still without thinking, I said, “I shall look forward to meeting her also.”
“But she is dead, of course,” Madame de St. Nicaise said. “You know that she is dead.”
“Oh, I am sorry. Forgive me. Yes, I remember now, it was the present Madame Morelli who the other afternoon—”
“At the Equatoriale,” Madame de St. Nicaise interrupted me. “Yes.” She had terminated the possibility of any further mention of Liliane. She walked away from the piano, back to the chairs we had been sitting in. “Will you have another cup of coffee, Monsieur? I must get it heated.” She reached for the bell.
“No, thank you, I can’t,” I said. “I have kept you too long as it is. It has been so”—I thought I could say the word one more time without retching—“charming. I will do what I can about the matter of the string, Madame. I wish that I could guarantee a success.”
“Thank you so much, Monsieur. We shall hope. After all, one can only do one’s best.” She seemed more reserved and reasonable than she had been all morning. She gave a little laugh and said, “Do you know Dr. Gollmer? No? He is the first violinist in our little quartet. A very odd man, but here violinists do not grow on trees, do they? No. Dr. Gollmer says he will make me an E-string. Can you imagine that? It is fantastic. Of course he knows how ces indigènes, these natives, make them for their own instruments, but I think he could never make one for my cello. Although he insists on trying. So we shall hope for your success.”
“I will certainly do my best.”
“You are very good,” she repeated. She reached again for the bell, then she withdrew her hand and said, “No, let me show you out myself. You were good to come—very good.”