This Side of Glory (15 page)

“I think she’s odious,” Eleanor exclaimed, though she was amused in spite of herself. “She sent you out so she could give me some advice on how to be happily married.”

“I thought it must be for something of the sort. Sylvia was married twelve years to Cousin Conrad, who was a very affable fellow and endured her by a combination of Christian fortitude and good whiskey. I never saw a man so literally driven to drink.”

“So now she tells everybody else—”

Kester was vastly tickled. “Certainly. Once he had gone to his reward she mourned him devotedly, had him cremated and set the ashes right up in her bedroom so she could worship them always.”

“Revolting,” said Eleanor.

“So be careful,” Kester ended, “if you ever go to her house for supper and she takes you upstairs to primp. She keeps the ashes in a jar by the mirror and if you aren’t careful you’ll powder your face with Conrad.”

Eleanor could not help laughing, though she still thought it was foolish to pay for any kind of dance when they had so little money. But she liked dancing, and agreed with Kester that she needed entertainment, so she was glad when the evening arrived and they dressed and went to the Hunt Club. It was there that she met Isabel Valcour.

For a week everybody had been talking about Isabel Valcour, and Eleanor had looked forward to making her acquaintance. Isabel had grown up in Dalroy, but she had married a German—an excessively rich German, they said—seven years ago, and since then she had lived abroad, apparently not remembering the United States at all until she had had to flee the war. The afternoon before the Buy-a-Bale dance was to be held Violet dropped by Ardeith for a cup of coffee with Eleanor and reported that she had just been to call on Isabel, who had moved into her deceased father’s old house on the river road. “Utterly incongruous, my dear,” said Violet. “Cosmopolitan, better-looking than ever, dressed in clothes that are going to be in style sometime next year—how she’s going to pass her time till the war’s over I
don’t
know.”

“Where’s her husband?” asked Eleanor. “In the army?”

“No, in heaven. It seems she’s been a widow three years, following the seasons from Norway to Scotland to Monte Carlo to Paris—or wherever it is they go, I never thought I’d be trying to describe the odysseys of the international millionaires—and now to Dalroy, Louisiana. Imagine!”

Eleanor thought Isabel sounded interesting, and asked if she was going to attend the Buy-a-Bale dance. Violet didn’t know; she had left Isabel’s house because Clara Sheramy had come to call, and though Clara was a sweet little thing there were limits to what one could stand of her stupidity.

Her curiosity aroused, when they were driving to the Hunt Club that evening Eleanor asked Kester if he remembered Isabel. Certainly he did, Kester said, he had known her all her life.

“Is she as pretty as they say?” Eleanor asked.

“She used to be. I can’t answer for her now.”

“Shall we see her tonight?”

Kester had not inquired, but he supposed they would. Everybody else would be there, and it was a good chance for Isabel to meet her old friends.

A chill autumn fog had swooped down, and the club house was brilliant by contrast. The rooms were full of people, and when Kester and Eleanor arrived the dancers were doing the fox-trot. Bob Purcell came to meet her, saying he had been waiting for her to dance with him; to Eleanor’s protests that she had never tried the fox-trot he insisted that it was not difficult and quite an orderly pastime after the breathless hugs and hops of the past few seasons. She waved Kester a temporary goodbye. In a few minutes she was having a very good time indeed, and she did not think of Isabel again until she saw her.

It was in the space after the first set of dances. She and Bob walked over to join the group around the punch-table, where a little lake of champagne sparkled in the hollow of a mold of pineapple ice. As they approached, Eleanor observed that in the center of the group was a slender blonde woman in sea-green satin, who stood with a glass in her hand answering questions with an air of amused detachment. Violet reached to take Eleanor’s hand and draw her in among them, and the stranger paused, turning upon her a pair of enormous hazel eyes. Evidently this was Isabel Valcour. Eleanor hoped she was not staring.

Isabel was not only the most beautiful woman in the room but probably the most beautiful woman in the state of Louisiana. A product not only of good fortune but a carefully casual art, she looked like the archetype of a voluptuous and sophisticated group that had been used to moving among the capitals without seeing anything but the inside of its own circle. Though she was not tall, her figure was of the sort that seems to have been designed by heaven for the sole earthly purpose of wearing clothes, and her green dress, close-fitting except for a swirl at the hips, made an exquisite setting for her white shoulders and the perfect line of her throat. She had hair of a rare gold, brushed into shining ripples, and a face of such classic outlines that one could not help being surprised at the worldly cynicism of its smile. Without having been told beforehand, Eleanor thought she would have known that Isabel had returned to this town on the Mississippi River from a region as remote by philosophy as by distance; she was an alien, lost in her present situation unless she had—as she appeared so far to have— sufficient sense of humor to be amused by it. Surmising that the war must be the first event of many years that had found Isabel unprepared, Eleanor was suddenly sorry for her, and at the same time grateful for herself to be reminded that other lives than her own had been interrupted by the breaking apart of the world’s order.

She must have been facing Isabel for only an instant, for she heard Violet say,

“We’ve been hearing about the horrors of war first hand—oh, I’m sorry, of course you two don’t know each other. Mrs. Larne, Mrs.—Isabel, what
is
your name?”

Isabel answered with a slow smile. “Schimmelpfeng.”

“There,” said Violet to Eleanor. “You heard it.”

Eleanor laughed. “Yes. But forgive me if I can’t say it,” she added to Isabel. “How do you do.”

“Don’t apologize. It took me a month to learn to say it myself.” Isabel’s voice was as lovely as her face. “Mrs. Kester Larne?”

“Yes.”

“I remember Kester so well. Is he here tonight?”

“He’s here, yes. Don’t let me interrupt you. You were talking about the war?”

Isabel shrugged as though she would have been happy to stop talking about it, but Clara Sheramy chirped eagerly.

“She’s been telling us about her adventures getting out of Europe. It’s terribly exciting. Do go on, Isabel. It happened all of a sudden—” she paused expectantly.

Isabel yielded. “Yes, it was quite terrifying. Europe—well, galvanized, that’s the only word I can think of. You woke up one morning to find every placid village turned into a center of mobilization. There were bright pink bulletins tacked up everywhere proclaiming the war and army orders.”

Eleanor accepted a glass of punch from Bob Purcell. “Go on,” Bob said to Isabel. “Where were you? In Germany?”

“No, in Italy, by the grace of God. If I’d been in Germany I’d probably still be there. Italy was technically neutral, though it was nearly as bad there as in the other countries. The streets were full of foreigners who had been called to the armies, saying tearful goodbyes and promising to meet again as soon as it was over—”

“How lucky you were neutral!” Clara exclaimed.

Isabel gave a little astonished laugh. “But I wasn’t neutral, dear child. Legally I’m a German,
hoch der Kaiser
and all that.”

“Are you really?” breathed Clara.

“Of course she is,” said Violet.

Isabel held out her glass. “Will somebody fill this for me? I haven’t drunk champagne punch like this since the last time I went to a ball in Vicksburg.”

Eleanor nearly chuckled at the vision of Isabel at a ball in Vicksburg. But of course, she reminded herself, Isabel in those days had not been the Isabel she was seeing now. Three gentlemen sprang to replenish her glass, and smiling graciously at them all Isabel acceded to the requests around her that she continue.

“I went to Rome,” she told them, “and began storming the American consulate like the rest. There must have been hundreds of us there every day, Americans who had suddenly discovered we were yearning for apple pie and Mount Vernon and willing to pay anything we possessed for a berth in any ship heading west. You know how those countries adore American visitors, bowing and holding out their itching palms to us—we’d been used to that, and here we found ourselves reduced to the status of public nuisances.”

She talks well, Eleanor reflected. With that hair and figure I’ll wager she didn’t have much trouble.

Isabel’s next line might have been an answer to her thoughts. “Then luckily, just as I thought I was going to have to stay in Rome or be shipped back to Germany for the length of the war, who should turn up at the consulate but a most delightful man, Louisiana born like myself, from Baton Rouge, of all places. I’d forgotten how Louisiana looked, but did I remember then! Crayfish bisque, river-boats, cotton, sugarcane, levees, cornbread—they began to trip off my tongue as though I’d never been a mile from the river.”

Overcome by the image of Isabel’s transformation into a honey child, Eleanor laughed out loud. Isabel’s eyes met hers, at first surprised, then she laughed too. “You’re quite right,” she said to Eleanor, and went on speaking to the group at large. “We became very good friends. He had a steamship ticket he couldn’t use, as he was there on business and his firm had cabled him to stay in Rome. So I got out, bringing such luggage as I had with me.”

“Where are the rest of your things?” asked Clara.

“In Berlin, darling. Want to try and get them?”

Behind Isabel a voice called, “Hello, everybody!”

They saw Kester, approaching with a general grin at the company. Eleanor watched him, wondering how it was that no matter what his circumstances Kester always looked like a fortunate youth immune from the common plagues of life, and as always she was proud of him. “Can a man get a drink here?” he was asking. “Bob, you left a treatise on leprosy at my house. Well, for heaven’s sake—Isabel Valcour!”

They had moved to make way for him. Isabel turned her glass by its stem as she glanced up. “Hello, Kester.”

“It’s good to see you.” He looked her up and down. “But that’s not Berlin. It’s Paris. Or am I wrong?”

“No, Paris.” She smiled, watching him. “Don’t tell me I haven’t changed a bit.”

“Of course you’ve changed,” said Kester.

“Seven years?” Isabel asked.

“No,” said Kester. “The world.”

“You haven’t changed,” said Isabel.

Kester accepted his drink from the waiter. Instead of answering her last observation he asked, “How did you get out?”

“Isabel has been telling us,” Clara contributed eagerly. “It was awful at first, then there was one man who thought she was wonderful.”

“Why Isabel,” asked Kester, “how did you happen to be in a place where there was only one man?”

“Act your age,” said Isabel.

The orchestra began to play again. After promising several other men to dance with them later, Isabel went off with Neal Sheramy. Eleanor saw no more of her until they were summoned to supper, when she found herself again in a group around Isabel, who was holding her plate on her knees and still answering questions, though by now she was abrupt, as though bored with being a cynosure. Eleanor did not blame her, for their queries about the war sounded silly.

“Isabel, why did the Germans march through Belgium?”

“To get to France.”

“But why did they have to go through Belgium?”

“Because it’s in the way. Look at the map.”

“But the French didn’t try to go through.”

“The Germans got there first.”

“Why did they burn Louvain?”

“I don’t know.”

“But don’t you think it was dreadful?”

“Yes, it must have been.”

“Have you ever seen the Kaiser?”

“Yes, I’ve seen him.”

“Where?”

“In parades.”

“Has he really got a crippled arm?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Is it true Belgium had a secret alliance with England?”

“I don’t know.”

“But the papers say Count Bernstorff claims—”

“Maybe they did, then.”

“What do you think about the atrocity stories?”

“Flapdoodle.”

“You mean the Germans wouldn’t do such things?”

“Those I know wouldn’t.”

“But the papers say—why do you think not?”

“I don’t know much about armies,” Isabel returned shortly, “but I should imagine that invaders with a campaign on their hands would be too busy to get drunk and drag naked women through the street.”

“Mhm—maybe, but it all sounds so dreadful. You’re pro-German, aren’t you?”

Eleanor interrupted. “Why shouldn’t she be pro-German? This is a neutral country.”

Isabel gave her an astonished look. “Thank you, Mrs. Larne,” she said after a moment. “This country is so neutral,” she added tersely, “that I’ve noticed the restaurants are having their bills of fare printed in English throughout, because sympathizers won’t order dishes with names in French or German or Russian.”

They laughed, and with an evident attempt to relieve Isabel of more catechizing Kester asked, “Did you see that England has put another tax on tea?”

But Cousin Sylvia was there, and she persisted, “Isabel, do you think England was right in going into the war?”

Isabel drew a short breath. “Listen, all of you,” she exclaimed. “I haven’t seen a German newspaper since last summer, I didn’t read a paper once a week while I lived there, I don’t know anything about the war. I’m glad I’m off their blasted continent and I’m going to build a monument to Christopher Columbus in my front yard.”

She was evidently on the verge of exasperation. Though an hour ago she had seemed to be enjoying her homage, she was behaving now like a cross child, and Eleanor wondered if it were merely boredom or if something had happened meanwhile to irritate her. With his usual tact Kester was intervening. “Let’s sing songs. Violet, if you’ve finished supper, will you play?”