Self Condemned (34 page)

“You did not — and I thought that very, very civil of
you
.”

Mr. Starr slipped smoothly into the chair indicated by René.

“Well, now you are going to lift the veil, aren’t you, on Momaco?”

“Yes.” Starr was completely bald, except above the ears, and his ears seemed to cling back against his head, as the ears of dogs do when abashed or guilty. He smiled and smiled and nodded.

“It is a strangely interesting place, is it not, Mr. Starr?”

“Wildly — fantastically — interesting!”

“Has it always been interesting?” enquired Hester.

“Always? It is one of those places where you have to have a guide. I shall be your guide, and I shall make you acquainted with the most entrancing people. It will be a revelation to you both.

I wish I had met you before, for it must have been very dull for you. I am so sorry. — But we will start tomorrow.”

“As soon as that?” René enquired, smiling. “I am busy tomorrow.”

“Well, the next day.”

René and his wife laughed.

“Count me out,” said Hester. “I am room-ridden. One says bedridden; why shouldn’t one say room-ridden? I am room-ridden.”

“But how terrible!” protested Mr. Starr, with smiling politeness. “Would not your physician allow you to go abroad, to have dinner with a woman who is probably the most intelligent person in Momaco?”

“I’m afraid not. His name is Dr. Fell. He has prescribed
this
room
and I have got so used to it, I am afraid I should feel strange outside it now.”

“But how perfectly terrible.”

“I thought so at first. But it is amazing what one can get used to.”

“Oh dear!” Mr. Starr still smiled, but his smile was full of polite pain.

“I have my family of squirrels. They are the only people in Momaco who do not mind my being English.”

“English! But that is absurd. To go no farther, there are the Daughters of Empire …”

René laughed.

“Yes, there are the Daughters of Empire!” He turned to Hester.

“I will take a peek at one of these human marvels of Mr. Starr’s.”

“You are laughing at me,” said Mr. Starr.“But marvels they are.”

At length it was arranged that René should meet Mr. Starr at a restaurant for lunch, to make the acquaintance of one of Mr.

Starr’s marvels. She was a Mrs. Glanz. Her husband was a Buffalo German, and of course she was rich.

All Mr. Starr’s friends were women, and all rich. He had once, twenty years before, been in New York. But a rich man left him there very suddenly with only a season ticket for a box at the opera and no money. Since he had grown bald he had nestled in the lap of wealthy old women, whom he apparently drenched in a scented torrent of flattery, poured equally over their faces and their minds. But
he
was of humble origin: his brother was a workman, he revealed. It was wonderful, he said, how he went about in the most exclusive circles.

“If Mrs. Moir only knew,” he told them. “But they think I am like themselves.”

At 11:30, an hour before the luncheon engagement, Starr telephoned. He said Mrs. Glanz had started.

“How do you mean?” asked René.

“She has just left.”

“Left where?”

“Oh, she lives rather a long way off. Four miles.”

“It won’t take her an hour to move four miles,” René objected.

But Mr. Starr was evasive or at least confused.

“But I believe, I certainly believe, she will be there.”

René remained silent.

Mr. Starr burst into a suppressed cough. “You must really excuse me, Professor Harding, I get this occasionally. I have been lying down.”

“Not well?”

“I am quite well, thanks,” Mr. Starr said hurriedly, “but I have these attacks. I hope you won’t mind, but I have asked Charles Brooks to go to the restaurant and meet the woman, and introduce you.”

“So you will not be there yourself?”

Mr. Starr had a fit of shrill coughing.

Charles Brooks, according to Mr. Starr, was an Englishman, who worked in a publisher’s office and wrote plays himself.

René had not met him: so at one o’clock he telephoned the restaurant, asked for Mr. Brooks, and told him he was prevented from coming to lunch. To make his excuses to the lady.

“I don’t know if I shall recognize her,” Brooks said.

“Why, don’t you know her?”

“Never seen her in my life.”

René banged down the instrument and told Hester what had happened. Instead of Mr. Starr, there was a certain Charles Brooks (presumably gone there at Mr. Starr’s request) waiting in the restaurant for a woman he had never seen, and therefore would be unable to recognize. In any case, from Mr. Starr’s evasive and disjointed remarks, it did not seem likely that this unknown lady would be at the restaurant. “I was right, you see,” he said.

They discussed this further piece of Momacoishness with some disgust. René knew it was his fault. Both he and Hester had scrutinized Mr. Starr, sceptically and derisively. From such a figure nothing could be expected but nonsense. He had not the money, anyway, to take people out to restaurants. Still, it was just more and more of Momaco.

“I have asked Brooks around this evening to have a drink,” René told her. “He seems a fairly rational person. He is English.”

He found Brooks in the beverage room at the appointed time. He was a stocky, dark and fattish fellow about thirty-six. René’s
Secret History of World War II
he had read, and appeared to know a good deal about him. He was a not unattractive man, frank and well behaved: with René’s permission, he would put him in touch with a wealthy friend of his — it might serve to relieve the social monotony of Momaco. He then went on to describe the friend.

Mrs. Stevenson was a married woman (her husband stationed in England). She was his mistress. She had a daughter of eighteen, who was very beautiful. This bewitching young lady cried herself to sleep every night.

“Nothing between you and the daughter?” René said, frowning. He felt sure that there was something between him and the daughter, and possibly half a dozen other women.“Certainly!” Brooks answered firmly and incisively. “I have slept with her too.” But was it necessary to inform him about all this copulation, so soon after they had met, and in connection with an invitation to Hester and himself to be made acquainted with these persons?

“I see,” René observed drily. “They appear to be most desirable acquaintances.” He gazed at this Cricklewood Casanova with a somewhat cold curiosity.

“Women like that, who have all the money in the world, are as easy as anything. I confine myself to them.”

“A capital plan.”

“None of those girls in Mansfield’s [the large department store] would get on her back, you’d be fooling around for months.”

“I suppose so.”

Brooks had of course noticed that a certain displeasure had replaced René’s original affability. At this point he said, “I hope you understand, Professor Harding, that I should not suggest a
serious introduction
to such a woman as Mrs. Stevenson. I even feel that I ought not to suggest that your wife …”

“No, it is all right, my wife has become hardened to anything in this place.”

“Oh, I am glad. I thought you might be rather bored. And these people are quite indecently rich.”

“That is as it should be.” There was a short silence.

“Well, when shall I arrange for the party?” Brooks asked briskly. “Practically any evening you like. I am with her every night, I can arrange it how you like. Would you prefer a big party; four hundred people? She often throws big parties. It’s an enormous penthouse. She loves it. Or shall we make it a smaller party? Some interesting people, that sort of thing.”

“It’s as you like,” said René.

Some evenings later, Mr. Starr put in an appearance, his ears pressed back on the side of his head. Brooks apparently was not well. Nothing much: well, it was kidney trouble. René burst into a “belly laugh.”

“I am not surprised,” he said.

But Mr. Starr had an aversion to direct references to anything sexual.

“Brooks says, ‘You must rescue the Hardings socially.’ Well, I have arranged that you should meet
Mrs. Moir
.”

Mrs. Moir was his Dulcinea. Mr. Starr had never spoken to her, except once. A few words. But when he was at a party Mrs.

Moir was conscious of him all the time. He saw it. He knew it.

She wished to speak to him. They did, in effect, telepathically converse. —
She
was one of the Marvels of Momaco.

At Mrs. Taylor’s — that was where they would meet Mrs. Moir. — However, some weeks later he dropped in and said he had not been able to get Mrs. Taylor going. Though she was very rich she had complained that to entertain the Hardings would cost fifteen dollars, Mr. Starr told them (they began looking at him more and more disagreeably). She had totted up the main items.There would be a little wine; then she would have to hire a maid; there were many other things, such as tomato soup, which stood between the Hardings and a visit to Mrs. Taylor.

Hester got up, and saying that she must go down and try to find Affie, she left the Room.

René scrutinized his visitor carefully, and he considered getting up, opening the door, and shooing him out. But instead he threw his head back disgustedly and yawned. What a ham! What an insulting old fairy, pack full of fairy malice. Ugh!

But Mr. Starr was very apologetic. Some severe things passed his lips with reference to Mrs. Taylor’s parsimony. Mrs. Taylor was not a
Marvel
herself, though one of the charmed circle.

All these Marvels crumbled into dust, however, in spite of the intense genteelness of the conjurer. The fact that he had rather brutally recounted his squalid interview with old Mrs. Taylor — for he now mentioned that she was seventy years old, suggesting this as a sort of excuse — showed that he recognized that that comedy was finished.
This
sweet-scented manuscript was closed — though to life in general still clung the same cloying perfume, inseparable from the act of living with this Proust-drunken parlour-treader. Thenceforth the Marvels were not mentioned.

But Mr. Starr felt unmasked. A slightly nasty glint came into his eye. Hester returned, looked down at Mr. Starr, hesitated, and then sat down as before. Mr. Starr almost immediately took his leave. He did so with great dignity, as if he had been in some way offended, but was determined to take no notice of it. Hester was not looking in his direction during this ceremonious leave-taking. “Must we continue to see that dreadful little man?” Hester asked rather angrily. “He is making fools of us, in the way all these beastly people do if they get a chance. I do really think that we might dispense with his visits.”

“Yes, let’s do that. The only reason I have gone on seeing him is that he is so comic.”

“Yes, I know he is
comic
….”

In spite of this, when a discreet tap came at the door a few weeks later, they let him in, laughing at him as they said “Sit down.” They were rewarded by further information about this remarkable little bald fairy. In the course of quite a long talk they learned that as “Lord Herbert” he carried on a correspondence with a lady (a socialite in Montreal who was quite unknown to him.) He addressed her in his letters as “Lady Louise.”

René wondered how many of these transplanted domestics bestowed upon themselves titles of nobility, for certainly Herbert was not the only noble lord in Momaco: he was shown one of these missives which Lord Herbert had just composed. It ran as follows. “Dear Lady Louise,” it began. “How your last letter intrigued me — I could see your eyes moving as I read it, your very beautiful veiled eyes full of secrets.Your lips had a queer dear smile, as if you knew that I was watching you. I always watch you as I read what you write. There is a perfume in the words you choose. Did you know words secreted perfumes? They do. No one else arranges words that way. They are as personal to you as your arms or your hair.”

René tossed it back to Mr. Starr.

“Lord Herbert, you are a fair deceiver!”

“Not at all. — I make such money as my simple tastes demand by writing slogan pieces for Mansfield’s. It’s second nature with me to write like that. I think like that.”

“I often wondered, Mr. Starr, how you made your living,”

Hester remarked, looking at his exposed scalp, though he was still a very dapper man — gnawing at forty perhaps, or else fighting stubbornly with the early forties themselves, the first and toughest, as only a fairy can fight.

He gave her a darting smile of recognition, and breathed softly at her “Mee-owww!”

At his first visit it was soon apparent to René that Proust was the bible of Mr. Herbert Starr. He had peopled Momaco with Proustian figures. Mrs. Moir, or Mrs. Taylor, or Mrs. Baker, or Mrs. Glanz would be cast for the role of the Duchesse de Guermantes, or Madame de Marsantes. He had transformed Momaco so thoroughly that it was unquestionably, for him, a marvellous place, inhabited by diaphanous, secretly enamoured
grandes dames
. But it was, perhaps, merely a sideline of an advertisement-man which no one was intended to take seriously, any more than his literature on behalf of Mansfield’s Department Store. But his Proustian intoxication was a real thing at least. He lived himself in a Proustian world, but he did not expect other people to follow him into it, however much he might mouth about it.

However much he may have got in René’s hair, there was one person to whom Mr. Starr had introduced him who proved to be of some use. This was a figure which did not crumble into dust the moment you went in quest of it. This one feather in Mr. Starr’s cap will be produced in the sequel.

XVI
THE WORD “BRUTE” IS NOT
LIKED IN THE BEVERAGE
ROOM

R
ené had a chat with Jim Greevy soon after he became a manager of the beverage room; he was standing in the reception desk for some reason, and displayed a beautiful black eye. But his expression was very disagreeable; it was obvious that he did not at all relish this manly discolouration.

“See this?” he growled. “I got that doing my duty, Mr. Harding. For the
last time
.Would Mrs. Plant buy me a new pair of spectacles if these were stamped on? No. Mrs. Plant is not that sort of woman. I confine myself in future to taking the money. They can break up the whole blooming place as far as I’m concerned.” (He pointed to his eye.) “A dirty little trouble-maker I had no option but to push out. As gentlemanlike as possible. As I turned to go back, what did the little bastard do but come up behind and land me this shiner. By great good luck, my glasses wasn’t on my nose.Yes, Mr. Harding, if Mrs. Plant wants a bouncer she will have to hire one.
I
am not applying. I shall say to the boys tonight, ‘I am here to take your money. If you want to break up the dratted place, it’s okay with me. Pay no attention to me. I’m neutral.’”