Lord Peter Views the Body (2 page)

    ‘Well, it really started ages ago,’ said the actor, ‘seven years it must have been – just before America came into the war. I was twenty-five at the time, and had been in the film business a little over two years. There was a man called Eric P. Loder, pretty well known in New York at that period, who would have been a very fine sculptor if he hadn’t had more money than was good for him, or so I understood from the people who go in for that kind of thing. He used to exhibit a good deal and had a lot of one-man shows of his stuff to which the highbrow people went – he did a good many bronzes, I believe. Perhaps you know about him, Masterman?’

    ‘I’ve never seen any of his things,’ said the poet, ‘but I remember some photographs in
The Art of Tomorrow
. Clever, but rather over-ripe. Didn’t he go in for a lot of that chryselephantine stuff? Just to show he could afford to pay for the materials, I suppose.’

    ‘Yes, that sounds very like him.’

    ‘Of course – and he did a very slick and very ugly realistic group called Lucina, and had the impudence to have it cast in solid gold and stood in his front hall.’

    ‘Oh, that thing! Yes – simply beastly I thought it, but then I never could see anything artistic in the idea. Realism, I suppose you’d call it. I like a picture or a statue to make you feel good, or what’s it there for? Still, there was something very attractive about Loder.’

    ‘How did you come across him?’

    ‘Oh, yes. Well, he saw me in that little picture of mine,
Apollo comes to New York
– perhaps you remember it. It was my first star part. About a statue that’s brought to life – one of the old gods, you know – and how he gets on in a modern city. Dear old Reubenssohn produced it. Now, there was a man who could put a thing through with consummate artistry. You couldn’t find an atom of offence from beginning to end, it was all so tasteful, though in the first part one didn’t have anything to wear except a sort of scarf – taken from the classical statue, you know.’

    ‘The Belvedere?’

    ‘I dare say. Well. Loder wrote to me, and said as a sculptor he was interested in me, because I was a good shape and so on, and would I come and pay him a visit in New York when I was free. So I found out about Loder, and decided it would be good publicity, and when my contract was up, and I had a bit of time to fill in, I went up east and called on him. He was very decent to me, and asked me to stay a few weeks with him while I was looking around.

    ‘He had a magnificent great house about five miles out of the city, crammed full of pictures and antiques and so on. He was somewhere between thirty-five and forty, I should think, dark and smooth, and very quick and lively in his movements. He talked very well; seemed to have been everywhere and have seen everything and not to have any too good opinion of anybody. You could sit and listen to him for hours; he’d got anecdotes about everybody, from the Pope to old Phineas E. Groot of the Chicago Ring. The only kind of story I didn’t care about hearing from him was the improper sort. Not that I don’t enjoy an after-dinner story – no sir, I wouldn’t like you to think I was a prig – but he’d tell it with his eye upon you as if he suspected you of having something to do with it. I’ve known women do that, and I’ve seen men do it to women and seen the women squirm, but he was the only man that’s ever given
me
that feeling. Still, apart from that, Loder was the most fascinating fellow I’ve ever known. And, as I say, his house surely was beautiful, and he kept a first-class table.

    ‘He liked to have everything of the best. There was his mistress, Maria Morano. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything to touch her, and when you work for the screen you’re apt to have a pretty exacting standard of female beauty. She was one of those big, slow, beautifully moving creatures, very placid, with a slow, wide smile. We don’t grow them in the States. She’d come from the South – had been a cabaret dancer he said, and she didn’t contradict him. He was very proud of her, and she seemed to be devoted to him in her own fashion. He’d show her off in the studio with nothing on but a fig-leaf or so – stand her up beside one of the figures he was always doing of her, and compare them point by point. There was literally only one half inch of her, it seemed, that wasn’t absolutely perfect from the sculptor’s point of view – the second toe of her left foot was shorter than the big toe. He used to correct it, of course, in the statues. She’d listen to it all with a good-natured smile, sort of vaguely flattered, you know. Though I think the poor girl sometimes got tired of being gloated over that way. She’d sometimes hunt me out and confide to me that what she had always hoped for was to run a restaurant of her own, with a cabaret show and a great many cooks with white aprons, and lots of polished electric cookers. ‘And then I would marry,’ she’d say, ‘and have four sons and one daughter,’ and she told me all the names she had chosen for the family. I thought it was rather pathetic. Loder came in at the end of one of these conversations. He had a sort of a grin on, so I dare say he’d overheard. I don’t suppose he attached much importance to it, which shows that he never really understood the girl. I don’t think he ever imagined any woman would chuck up the sort of life he’d accustomed her to, and if he was a bit possessive in his manner, at least he never gave her a rival. For all his talk and his ugly statues, she’d got him, and she knew it.

    ‘I stayed there getting on for a month altogether, having a thundering good time. On two occasions Loder had an art spasm, and shut himself up in his studio to work and wouldn’t let anybody in for several days on end. He was rather given to that sort of stunt, and when it was over we would have a party, and all Loder’s friends and hangers-on would come to have a look at the work of art. He was doing a figure of some nymph or goddess, I fancy, to be cast in silver, and Maria used to go along and sit for him. Apart from those times, he went about everywhere, and we saw all there was to be seen.

    ‘I was fairly annoyed, I admit, when it came to an end. War was declared, and I’d made up my mind to join up when that happened. My heart put me out of the running for trench service, but I counted on getting some sort of a job, with perseverance, so I packed up and went off.

    ‘I wouldn’t have believed Loder would have been so genuinely sorry to say good-bye to me. He said over and over again that we’d meet again soon. However, I did get a job with the hospital people, and was sent over to Europe, and it wasn’t until 1920 that I saw Loder again.

    ‘He’d written to me before, but I’d had two big pictures to make in ’19, and it couldn’t be done. However, in ’20 I found myself back in New York, doing publicity for
The Passion Streak
, and got a note from Loder begging me to stay with him, and saying he wanted me to sit for him. Well, that was advertisement that he’d pay for himself, you know, so I agreed. I had accepted an engagement to go out with Mystofilms Ltd in
Jake of Dead Man’s Bush
– the dwarfmen picture, you know, taken on the spot among the Australian bushmen. I wired them that I would join them at Sydney the third week in April, and took my bags to Loder’s.

    ‘Loder greeted me very cordially, though I thought he looked older than when I last saw him. He had certainly grown more nervous in his manner. He was – how shall I describe it? – more
intense
– more real, in a way. He brought out his pet cynicisms as if he thoroughly meant them, and more and more with that air of getting at you personally. I used to think his disbelief in everything was a kind of artistic pose, but I began to feel I had done him an injustice. He was really unhappy, I could see that quite well, and soon I discovered the reason. As we were driving out in the car I asked after Maria.

    ‘“She has left me,”’ he said.

    ‘Well, now you know, that really surprised me. Honestly, I hadn’t thought the girl had that much initiative. “Why,” I said, “has she gone and set up in that restaurant of her own she wanted so much?”

    ‘“Oh! she talked to you about restaurants, did she?” said Loder. “I suppose you are one of the men that women tell things to. No. She made a fool of herself. She’s gone.”

    ‘I didn’t quite know what to say. He was so obviously hurt in his vanity, you know, as well as in his feelings. I muttered the usual things, and added that it must be a great loss to his work as well as in other ways. He said it was.

    ‘I asked him when it had happened and whether he’d finished the nymph he was working on before I left. He said, “Oh, yes, he’d finished that and done another – something pretty original, which I should like.”

    ‘Well, we got to the house and dined, and Loder told me he was going to Europe shortly, a few days after I left myself, in fact. The nymph stood in the dining-room, in a special niche let into the wall. It really was a beautiful thing, not so showy as most of Loder’s work, and a wonderful likeness of Maria. Loder put me opposite it, so that I could see it during dinner, and, really, I could hardly take my eyes off it. He seemed very proud of it, and kept on telling me over and over again how glad he was that I liked it. It struck me that he was falling into a trick of repeating himself.

    ‘We went into the smoking-room after dinner. He’d had it rearranged, and the first thing that caught one’s eye was a big settee drawn before the fire. It stood about a couple of feet from the ground, and consisted of a base made like a Roman couch, with cushions and a highish back, all made of oak with a silver inlay, and on top of this, forming the actual seat one sat on, if you follow me, there was a great silver figure of a nude woman, fully life-size, lying with her head back and her arms extended along the sides of the couch. A few big loose cushions made it possible to use the thing as an actual settee, though I must say it never was really comfortable to sit on respectably. As a stage prop. for registering dissipation it would have been excellent, but to see Loder sprawling over it by his own fireside gave me a kind of shock. He seemed very much attached to it, though.

    ‘“I told you,” he said, “that it was something original.”

    ‘Then I looked more closely at it, and saw that the figure actually was Maria’s, though the face was rather sketchily done, if you understand what I mean. I suppose he thought a bolder treatment more suited to a piece of furniture.

    ‘But I did begin to think Loder a trifle degenerate when I saw that couch. And in the fortnight that followed I grew more and more uncomfortable with him. That personal manner of his grew more marked every day, and sometimes, while I was giving him sittings, he would sit there and tell one the most beastly things, with his eyes fixed on one in the nastiest way, just to see how one would take it. Upon my word, though he certainly did me uncommonly well, I began to feel I’d be more at ease among the bushmen.

    ‘Well, now I come to the odd thing.’

    Everybody sat up and listened a little more eagerly.

    ‘It was the evening before I had to leave New York,’ went on Varden. ‘I was sitting—’

    Here somebody opened the door of the brown room, to be greeted by a warning sign from Bayes. The intruder sank obscurely into a large chair and mixed himself a whisky with extreme care not to disturb the speaker.

    ‘I was sitting in the smoking-room,’ continued Varden, ‘waiting for Loder to come in. I had the house to myself, for Loder had given the servants leave to go to some show or lecture or other, and he himself was getting his things together for his European trip and had had to keep an appointment with his man of business. I must have been very nearly asleep, because it was dusk when I came to with a start and saw a young man quite close to me.

    ‘He wasn’t at all like a housebreaker, and still less like a ghost. He was, I might almost say, exceptionally ordinary-looking. He was dressed in a grey English suit, with a fawn overcoat on his arm, and his soft hat and stick in his hand. He had sleek, pale hair, and one of those rather stupid faces, with a long nose and a monocle. I stared at him, for I knew the front door was locked, but before I could get my wits together he spoke. He had a curious, hesitating, husky voice and a strong English accent. He said, surprisingly:

    ‘“Are you Mr Varden?”

    ‘“You have the advantage of me,” I said.

    ‘He said, “Please excuse my butting in; I know it looks like bad manners, but you’d better clear out of this place very quickly, don’t you know.”

    ‘“What the hell do you mean?” I said.

    ‘He said, “I don’t mean it in any impertinent way, but you must realise that Loder’s never forgiven you, and I’m afraid he means to make you into a hatstand or an electric-light fitting, or something of that sort.”

    ‘My God! I can tell you I felt queer. It was such a quiet voice, and his manners were perfect, and yet the words were quite meaningless! I remembered that madmen are supposed to be extra strong, and edged towards the bell – and then it came over me with rather a chill that I was alone in the house.

    ‘“How did you get here?” I asked, putting a bold face on it.

    ‘“I’m afraid I picked the lock,” he said, as casually as though he were apologising for not having a card about him. “I couldn’t be sure Loder hadn’t came back. But I do really think you had better get out as quickly as possible.”

    ‘“See here,” I said, “who are you and what the hell are you driving at? What do you mean about Loder never forgiving me? Forgiving me what?”

    ‘“Why,” he said, “about – you
will
pardon me prancing in on your private affairs, won’t you – about Maria Morano.”