The House of Mirth
turned on at once. This impression was presently heightened by the
way in which a consciously conspicuous group of people advanced
to the middle front, and stood before Selden with the air of the
chief performers gathered together by the exigencies of the final
effect. Their appearance confirmed the impression that the show had
been staged regardless of expense, and emphasized its resemblance
to one of those “costume-plays” in which the protagonists walk
through the passions without displacing a drapery. The ladies stood
in unrelated attitudes calculated to isolate their effects, and the
men hung about them as irrelevantly as stage heroes whose tailors
are named in the programme. It was Selden himself who unwittingly
fused the group by arresting the attention of one of its members.
“Why, Mr. Selden!” Mrs. Fisher exclaimed in surprise; and with a
gesture toward Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Wellington Bry, she added
plaintively: “We’re starving to death because we can’t decide where
to lunch.”
Welcomed into their group, and made the confidant of their
difficulty, Selden learned with amusement that there were several
places where one might miss something by not lunching, or forfeit
something by lunching; so that eating actually became a minor
consideration on the very spot consecrated to its rites.
“Of course one gets the best things at the TERRASSE—but that looks
as if one hadn’t any other reason for being there: the Americans
who don’t know any one always rush for the best food. And the
Duchess of Beltshire has taken up Becassin’s lately,” Mrs. Bry
earnestly summed up.
Mrs. Bry, to Mrs. Fisher’s despair, had not progressed beyond the
point of weighing her social alternatives in public. She could not
acquire the air of doing things because she wanted to, and making
her choice the final seal of their fitness.
Mr. Bry, a short pale man, with a business face and leisure
clothes, met the dilemma hilariously.
“I guess the Duchess goes where it’s cheapest, unless she can get
her meal paid for. If you offered to blow her off at the TERRASSE
she’d turn up fast enough.”
But Mrs. Jack Stepney interposed. “The Grand Dukes go to that
little place at the Condamine. Lord Hubert says it’s the only
restaurant in Europe where they can cook peas.”
Lord Hubert Dacey, a slender shabby-looking man, with a charming
worn smile, and the air of having spent his best years in piloting
the wealthy to the right restaurant, assented with gentle emphasis:
“It’s quite that.”
“PEAS?” said Mr. Bry contemptuously. “Can they cook terrapin? It
just shows,” he continued, “what these European markets are, when a
fellow can make a reputation cooking peas!”
Jack Stepney intervened with authority. “I don’t know that I quite
agree with Dacey: there’s a little hole in Paris, off the Quai
Voltaire—but in any case, I can’t advise the Condamine GARGOTE; at
least not with ladies.”
Stepney, since his marriage, had thickened and grown prudish, as
the Van Osburgh husbands were apt to do; but his wife, to his
surprise and discomfiture, had developed an earth-shaking fastness
of gait which left him trailing breathlessly in her wake.
“That’s where we’ll go then!” she declared, with a heavy toss of
her plumage. “I’m so tired of the TERRASSE: it’s as dull as one
of mother’s dinners. And Lord Hubert has promised to tell us who
all the awful people are at the other place—hasn’t he, Carry? Now,
Jack, don’t look so solemn!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Bry, “all I want to know is who their
dress-makers are.”
“No doubt Dacey can tell you that too,” remarked Stepney, with an
ironic intention which the other received with the light murmur,
“I can at least FIND OUT, my dear fellow”; and Mrs. Bry having
declared that she couldn’t walk another step, the party hailed
two or three of the light phaetons which hover attentively on the
confines of the gardens, and rattled off in procession toward the
Condamine.
Their destination was one of the little restaurants overhanging
the boulevard which dips steeply down from Monte Carlo to the low
intermediate quarter along the quay. From the window in which
they presently found themselves installed, they overlooked the
intense blue curve of the harbour, set between the verdure of twin
promontories: to the right, the cliff of Monaco, topped by the
mediaeval silhouette of its church and castle, to the left the
terraces and pinnacles of the gambling-house. Between the two,
the waters of the bay were furrowed by a light coming and going
of pleasure-craft, through which, just at the culminating moment
of luncheon, the majestic advance of a great steam-yacht drew the
company’s attention from the peas.
“By Jove, I believe that’s the Dorsets back!” Stepney exclaimed;
and Lord Hubert, dropping his single eye-glass, corroborated: “It’s
the Sabrina—yes.”
“So soon? They were to spend a month in Sicily,” Mrs. Fisher
observed.
“I guess they feel as if they had: there’s only one up-to-date
hotel in the whole place,” said Mr. Bry disparagingly.
“It was Ned Silverton’s idea—but poor Dorset and Lily Bart must
have been horribly bored.” Mrs. Fisher added in an undertone to
Selden: “I do hope there hasn’t been a row.”
“It’s most awfully jolly having Miss Bart back,” said Lord Hubert,
in his mild deliberate voice; and Mrs. Bry added ingenuously: “I
daresay the Duchess will dine with us, now that Lily’s here.”
“The Duchess admires her immensely: I’m sure she’d be charmed
to have it arranged,” Lord Hubert agreed, with the professional
promptness of the man accustomed to draw his profit from
facilitating social contacts: Selden was struck by the businesslike
change in his manner.
“Lily has been a tremendous success here,” Mrs. Fisher continued,
still addressing herself confidentially to Selden. “She looks ten
years younger—I never saw her so handsome. Lady Skiddaw took her
everywhere in Cannes, and the Crown Princess of Macedonia had her
to stop for a week at Cimiez. People say that was one reason why
Bertha whisked the yacht off to Sicily: the Crown Princess didn’t
take much notice of her, and she couldn’t bear to look on at Lily’s
triumph.”
Selden made no reply. He was vaguely aware that Miss Bart was
cruising in the Mediterranean with the Dorsets, but it had not
occurred to him that there was any chance of running across her on
the Riviera, where the season was virtually at an end. As he leaned
back, silently contemplating his filigree cup of Turkish coffee,
he was trying to put some order in his thoughts, to tell himself
how the news of her nearness was really affecting him. He had a
personal detachment enabling him, even in moments of emotional
high-pressure, to get a fairly clear view of his feelings, and
he was sincerely surprised by the disturbance which the sight
of the Sabrina had produced in him. He had reason to think that
his three months of engrossing professional work, following on
the sharp shock of his disillusionment, had cleared his mind of
its sentimental vapours. The feeling he had nourished and given
prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape: he was like a
traveller so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at
first he is hardly conscious of his bruises. Now he suddenly felt
the latent ache, and realized that after all he had not come off
unhurt.
An hour later, at Mrs. Fisher’s side in the Casino gardens, he was
trying to find fresh reasons for forgetting the injury received in
the contemplation of the peril avoided. The party had dispersed
with the loitering indecision characteristic of social movements
at Monte Carlo, where the whole place, and the long gilded hours
of the day, seem to offer an infinity of ways of being idle. Lord
Hubert Dacey had finally gone off in quest of the Duchess of
Beltshire, charged by Mrs. Bry with the delicate negotiation of
securing that lady’s presence at dinner, the Stepneys had left for
Nice in their motor-car, and Mr. Bry had departed to take his place
in the pigeon shooting match which was at the moment engaging his
highest faculties.
Mrs. Bry, who had a tendency to grow red and stertorous after
luncheon, had been judiciously prevailed upon by Carry Fisher to
withdraw to her hotel for an hour’s repose; and Selden and his
companion were thus left to a stroll propitious to confidences.
The stroll soon resolved itself into a tranquil session on a bench
overhung with laurel and Banksian roses, from which they caught a
dazzle of blue sea between marble balusters, and the fiery shafts
of cactus-blossoms shooting meteor-like from the rock. The soft
shade of their niche, and the adjacent glitter of the air, were
conducive to an easy lounging mood, and to the smoking of many
cigarettes; and Selden, yielding to these influences, suffered Mrs.
Fisher to unfold to him the history of her recent experiences. She
had come abroad with the Welly Brys at the moment when fashion
flees the inclemency of the New York spring. The Brys, intoxicated
by their first success, already thirsted for new kingdoms, and
Mrs. Fisher, viewing the Riviera as an easy introduction to London
society, had guided their course thither. She had affiliations
of her own in every capital, and a facility for picking them up
again after long absences; and the carefully disseminated rumour
of the Brys’ wealth had at once gathered about them a group of
cosmopolitan pleasure-seekers.
“But things are not going as well as I expected,” Mrs. Fisher
frankly admitted. “It’s all very well to say that every body with
money can get into society; but it would be truer to say that
NEARLY everybody can. And the London market is so glutted with new
Americans that, to succeed there now, they must be either very
clever or awfully queer. The Brys are neither. HE would get on well
enough if she’d let him alone; they like his slang and his brag and
his blunders. But Louisa spoils it all by trying to repress him and
put herself forward. If she’d be natural herself—fat and vulgar and
bouncing—it would be all right; but as soon as she meets anybody
smart she tries to be slender and queenly. She tried it with the
Duchess of Beltshire and Lady Skiddaw, and they fled. I’ve done my
best to make her see her mistake—I’ve said to her again and again:
‘Just let yourself go, Louisa’; but she keeps up the humbug even
with me—I believe she keeps on being queenly in her own room, with
the door shut.
“The worst of it is,” Mrs. Fisher went on, “that she thinks it’s
all MY fault. When the Dorsets turned up here six weeks ago, and
everybody began to make a fuss about Lily Bart, I could see Louisa
thought that if she’d had Lily in tow instead of me she would have
been hob-nobbing with all the royalties by this time. She doesn’t
realize that it’s Lily’s beauty that does it: Lord Hubert tells me
Lily is thought even handsomer than when he knew her at Aix ten
years ago. It seems she was tremendously admired there. An Italian
Prince, rich and the real thing, wanted to marry her; but just at
the critical moment a good-looking step-son turned up, and Lily
was silly enough to flirt with him while her marriage-settlements
with the step-father were being drawn up. Some people said the
young man did it on purpose. You can fancy the scandal: there was
an awful row between the men, and people began to look at Lily
so queerly that Mrs. Peniston had to pack up and finish her cure
elsewhere. Not that SHE ever understood: to this day she thinks
that Aix didn’t suit her, and mentions her having been sent there
as proof of the incompetence of French doctors. That’s Lily all
over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and
sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest
she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.”