Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (18 page)

 
          
“When?
Oh, as you were leaving the boat? Well, he looked
uncommonly like Julian Brand. You’ve never heard him? Not much in that line,
are you?
Thought not.
They gave you a cigar, I hope?”
he added, suddenly remembering his duties.

 
          
Kilvert
waved that away too. “I’m not particularly musical. But his head struck me.
They were sitting near me on the boat.”

 
          
“They?
Who?” queried Breck absently, craning his head back
toward the saloon to make sure that the
liqueurs
were being
handed.

 
          
“This man.
He was with a woman, very dark, black hair
turning gray, splendid eyes—dreadfully badly dressed, and not young, but
tingling.
Something gypsy-like about her.
Who was she,
do you suppose? They seemed very intimate.”

 
          
“Love-making, eh?”

 
          
“No.
Much more—more
intimate
than that.
Hating and loving and despairing all at once,” stammered Kilvert, reluctant to betray
himself to such ears, yet driven by the irresistible need to find out what he
could from this young fool. “They weren’t husband and wife, either, you
understand.”

 
          
Breck
laughed.
“Obviously!
You said they were intimate.”

 
          
“Well,
who
was
she then—the woman? Can you tell me?”

 
          
Breck
wrinkled his brows retrospectively. He saw so many people in the course of a
day,
his uncertain frown seemed to plead. “Splendid eyes,
eh?” he repeated, as if to gain time.

 
          
“Well,
burning—”

 
          
“Ah,
burning,” Breck
echoed,
his eyes on the room. “But I
must really … Here, Count Dossi’s the very man to tell you,” he added, hurrying
away in obedience to a signal from Mrs. Roseneath.

 
          
The
small, dry waxen-featured man who replaced him was well-known to Kilvert, and
to all cosmopolitan idlers. He was an Anglo-Italian by birth, with a small
foothold in Rome, where he spent the winter months, drifting for the rest of
the year from one centre of fashion to another, and gathering with impartial
eye and indefatigable memory the items of a diary which, he boasted, could not
safely be published till fifty years after his death. Count Dossi bent on
Kilvert his coldly affable glance. “Who has burning eyes?” he asked. “I came
out here in search of a light, but hadn’t hoped to find one of that
kind
.” He produced a cigarette, and continued, as he held it
to Kilvert’s lighter: “There are not so many incandescent orbs left in the
world that one shouldn’t be able to identify them.”

 
          
Kilvert
shrank from exposing the passionate scene on the boat to Count Dossi’s
disintegrating scrutiny; yet he could not bear to miss the chance of tracing
the two who had given him so strange a cross-section of their souls. He tried
to appear indifferent, and slightly ironical. “There are still some….”

 
          
“Oh, no doubt.
A woman, I suppose?”

 
          
Kilvert
nodded.
“But neither young nor beautiful—by rule, at least.”

 
          
“Who
is beautiful, by rule? A plaster cast at best. But your lady interests me. Who
is she? I know a good many people. …”

 
          
Kilvert,
tempted, began to repeat his description of the couple, and Count Dossi,
meditatively twisting his cigarette, listened with a face wrinkled with irony.
“Ah, that’s interesting,” he murmured, as the other ended. “Musicians’ hands,
you say?”

 
          
“Well,
I thought—”

 
          
“You
probably thought rightly. I should say Breck’s guess was correct. From your
description the man was almost certainly Brand, the ‘cellist. He was to arrive
about this time for a series of concerts with Margaret Aslar. You’ve heard the
glorious Margaret? Yes, it must have been Brand and Aslar. …” He pinched his
lips in a dry smile. “Very likely she crossed over to Fusina to meet him. …”

 
          
“To meet him?
But I should have thought they’d been together
for hours. They were in the thick of a violent discussion when they came on
board…. They looked haggard, worn out … and so absorbed in each other that they
hardly knew where they were.”

 
          
Dossi
nodded appreciatively. “No, they wouldn’t—they wouldn’t! The foolish things….”

 
          
“Ah—they
care so desperately for each other?” Kilvert murmured.

 
          
Dossi
lifted his thin eyebrows.
“Care—?
They care
frantically for each other’s music; they can’t get on without each other—in
that respect.”

 
          
“But
when I saw them they were not thinking about anybody’s music; they were
thinking about each other. They were desperate … they … they …”

 
          
“Ah, just so!
Fighting like tigers, weren’t they?”

 
          
“Well,
one minute, yes—and the next, back in each other’s arms, almost.”

 
          
“Of course!
Can’t I see them? They were probably quarrelling
about which of their names should come first on the programme, and have the
biggest letters. And Brand’s weak; I back Margaret to come out ahead…. You’ll
see when the bills are posted up.” He chuckled at the picture, and was turning
to re-enter the room when he paused to say: “But, by the way, they’re playing
here tomorrow night, aren’t they? Yes; I’m sure our hostess told me this
afternoon that she’d finally captured them. They don’t often play in private
houses—Margaret hates it, I believe. But when Mrs. Roseneath sets her heart on
anything she’s irresistible.” With a nod and smile he strolled back into the
long saloon where the guests were dividing into groups about the bridge-tables.

 
          
Kilvert
continued to lean on the stone balustrade and look down into the dark secret
glitter of the canal. He was fairly sure that Dossi’s identification of the
mysterious couple was correct; but of course his explanation of their quarrel
was absurd. A child’s quarrel over toys and spangles! That was how people of
the world interpreted the passions of great artists. Kilvert’s heart began to
beat excitedly at the thought of seeing and hearing his mysterious couple. And
yet—supposing they turned out to be mere tawdry
cabochons.
Would it not be better to absent himself from the
concert and nurse his dream? It was odd how Dossi’s tone dragged down those
vivid figures to the level of the dolls about Mrs. Roseneath’s bridge-tables.

 
          
  

 
          
Kilvert
had not often known his hostess to be in the field as early as ten in the
morning. But this was a field-day, almost as important as the day of the fancy
ball, since two or three passing royalties (and not in exile either) had
suddenly signified their desire to be present at her musical party that
evening; and Mrs. Roseneath, on such occasions, had the soldier’s gift of being
in the saddle at dawn. But when Kilvert—his own
cafè-au-lait
on the balcony barely despatched—was summoned to her
room by an agitated maid, he found the mistress even more agitated.

 
          
“They’ve
chucked—they’ve chucked for tonight! The devils—they won’t come!” Mrs.
Roseneath cried out, waving a pale hand toward a letter lying on her brocaded
bedspread.

 
          
“But
do take a mouthful of tea, madam,” the maid intervened, proffering a tray.

 
          
“Tea?
How can I take tea? Take it away! It’s a catastrophe,
John—a catastrophe … and Breck’s such a helpless fool when it comes to anything
beyond getting people together for bridge,” Mrs. Roseneath lamented, sinking
back discouraged among her pillows.

 
          
“But
who’s chucked?
The Prince and Princess?”

 
          
“Lord,
no! They’re all
coming
; the King is too, I mean. And
he’s
musical, and has stayed over on
purpose…. It’s Aslar, of course, and Brand…. Her note is perfectly insane. She
says Brand’s disappeared, and she’s half crazy, and can’t play without him.”

 
          
“Disappeared—the ‘cellist?”

 
          
“Oh,
for heaven’s sake, read the note, and don’t just stand there and repeat what I
say! Where on earth am I to get other performers for this evening, if you don’t
help me?”

 
          
Kilvert
stared back blankly. “I don’t know.”

 
          
“You
don’t know? But you must know! Oh, John, you must go instantly to see her.
You’re the only person with brains—the only one who’ll know how to talk to such
people. If I offered to double the fee, do you suppose—?”

 
          
“Oh, no, no!”
Kilvert protested indignantly, without knowing
why.

 
          
“Well,
what I’d already agreed to give is colossal,” Mrs. Roseneath sighed, “so
perhaps it’s not that, after all. John, darling, you must go and see her at
once! You’ll know what to say. She must keep her engagement, she must telegraph,
she must send a motor after him; if she can’t find
him
, she must get hold of another ‘cellist. None of these people
will know if it’s Brand or not. I’ll lie about it if I have to. Oh, John, ring
for the gondola! Don’t lose an instant … say anything you like, use any
argument … only make her see it’s her duty!” Before the end of the sentence he
was out of her door, borne on the rush of Mrs. Roseneath’s entreaties down the
long marble flights to the gondola….

 
          
Kilvert
was in the mood to like the shabbiness, the dinginess almost, of the little
hotel on an obscure canal to which the gondola carried him. He liked even the
slit of untidy garden, in which towels were drying on a sagging rope, the
umbrella-stand in imitation of rustic woodwork, the slatternly girl with a
shawl over her head delivering sea-urchins to the black-wigged landlady. This
was the way real people lived, he thought, glancing at a crumby dining-room
glimpsed through glass doors. He thought he would find a pretext for moving
there the next day from the Palazzo, and very nearly paused to ask the landlady
if she could take him in. But his errand was urgent, and he went on.

 
          
The
room into which he was shown was small, and rather bare. A worn cashmere shawl
had been thrown over the low bed in a hasty attempt to convert it into a divan.
The centre front was filled by a grand piano built on a concert-stage scale,
and looking larger than any that Kilvert had ever seen. Between it and the
window stood a woman in a frayed purple silk dressing-gown, her tumbled grayish
hair streaked with jet tossed back from her drawn dusky face. She had evidently
not noticed Kilvert the previous evening on the boat, for the glance she turned
on him was unrecognising. Obviously she resented his intrusion. “You come from
Mrs. Roseneath, don’t you?
About tonight’s concert?
I
said you could come up in order to get it over sooner. But it’s no use
whatever—none! Please go back and tell her so.”

 
          
She
was speaking English now, with a slightly harsh yet rich intonation, and an accent
he could not quite place, but guessed to be partly Slavonic. He stood looking
at her in an
embarrassed
silence. He was not without
social adroitness, or experience in exercising it; but he felt as strongly as
she evidently did that his presence was an intrusion. “I don’t believe I know
how to talk to real people,” he reproached himself inwardly.

 
          
“Before
you send me away,” he said at length, “you must at least let me deliver Mrs.
Roseneath’s message of sympathy.”

 
          
Margaret
Aslar gave a derisive shrug.
“Oh, sympathy—!”