VIII
The Château de Bruyne bore that imposing title because for a couple of centuries it had belonged to the gentle family of the neighborhood; but really it was no more than a modest villa. Just as Lanny had imagined, it had a lovely garden, including a wall with a southern front and pear and apricot trees trained like vines against it. They were in bloom now, and so were the tulips and the fleurs-de-lis, the hyacinths and crocuses and narcissi. Everything was dressed up for the lovers, and they had the place to themselves for two or three blessed hours, the master of the house being in the city and the boys not expected until the morrow.
The old house was built of a reddish stone, and had some modern improvements. Marie explained that her husband’s family had been ruined in the days of the Panama Canal fiasco, and the family had lost this home. Denis had made his own fortune and bought it back and had it fixed up for his bride. Better not think too much about that; better go upstairs and see the chamber assigned to Lanny, which had a door connecting with Marie’s. A table would be kept in front of the door when it was not in use. This was supposed to fool the servants, but of course it wouldn’t; they would tell the other servants of the neighborhood, and these would tell their mistresses in the regular way. But that did no harm, for an affaire remained a secret so long as you pretended it was; it didn’t become a scandal unless you let it get into the courts or the newspapers.
All this suited Lanny; but he had to admit to some trepidation when the car of Denis de Bruyne rolled up to the door. It is one thing to read about la vie à trois in romances, but it is something else to be formally inducted into it. M. de Bruyne was in his early sixties—so Lanny could comfort himself with the reflection that if he was twenty years too young for Marie, her husband was twenty years too old for her. He was a solidly built, good-looking man, gray-haired, with dark, melancholy eyes and rather pale, aristocratic features. He was scrupulously polite to Lanny, treating him as an honored guest and not as a punishment for Denis’s sins.
The pair practiced the French art of conversation, which meant that neither tried to force his ideas, but each brought forward such wit or wisdom as he possessed, and the other listened and in return received an equal share of attention. They talked about the state of the world, and the position of France in relation to her friends and her foes. They talked about the precarious condition of business, and also about the new salon, the opera, and the current drama—the fact that Denis de Bruyne was managing a large fleet of taxicabs did not keep him from being informed about these matters. If Lanny knew anything to the point he said it, and if he didn’t he listened, and so the host was able to satisfy himself that the lady who bore his name had chosen a youth of discretion and taste.
Also, Lanny had the further task of winning the regard of two lads with whom he was to stand in loco parentis. This proved to be in no way difficult, for they were friendly and well brought up. Denis fils was fifteen and Charlot a year younger; they were dark-eyed and handsome like their father, and had their mother’s sweet disposition. After the fashion of French boys they wore stockings which stopped far below their knees, and pants which stopped far above them, so there was a long bare stretch upon which the mosquitoes fed voraciously.
Most young Americans whom Lanny had met in Europe had seemed to him undisciplined and vacant-minded. These two French lads were serious, and accepted hard work as their destiny. Even during their holidays each practiced the piano for an hour a day, and gave another hour to reading some worthwhile book. So they had something to talk about; and when Lanny showed them Dalcroze dancing they found him a delightful companion. They played tennis with him, and on one accasion took him fishing, and his ideas concerning one aspect of French life were completely revolutionized—they caught no less than five small fishes.
Marie had repudiated Lanny’s horrid idea of telling these children the truth about her lover; they took him as a family friend, and on that basis he passed a week of agreeable domesticity. Then Marie told him that her husband had received word that a widowed sister was arriving in Paris next day, and it would be necessary to invite her to the home. Denis was not yet prepared to share their secret with this lady, who was “devout” and at the same time observant; so Lanny was asked to spend a few days in Paris, after which the boys would be going back to school and Marie would be returning to Cannes. Of course one could always have a pleasant time in La Ville Lumière, especially in the delightful month of April; there was the salon to be visited, and plays about which Lanny could tell Rick. The world of art was reviving, and the art lovers of Europe were resuming their cosmopolitan attitude, flocking from one great capital to another to see what new wonders were on display.
9
Consider the Lilies
I
Imagine that one could walk freely into the Hotel Crillon, no longer sacred territory, guarded by American naval yeomen in white caps! Lanny strolled in, just for the fun of it, but he didn’t put up there, because he told himself that one must economize in these hard times. He went to the smaller hotel where his mother had stopped, and where they knew him and were glad to see him. Again he didn’t need any Cicero to tell him that it was pleasant to sit in the foyer and not shiver at the thought of the Sûreté Générate lurking behind the pillars.
Paris hadn’t been able to afford a new coat of paint, but the ladies on the boulevards had. The tourists were returning, and everybody was trying to look cheerful and receptive. It was only if you went out into the suburbs that you would find war wreckage which had not yet been cleared away; only there would you be apt to notice the great numbers of young women in black, and the undue proportion of elderly men and cripples. Everybody agreed that victory was glorious, that fashions were daring, and the salons more brilliant than ever; the cafés and theaters were crowded every night, and if the ladies on the stage were not more naked, it was only because it is the nature of nakedness to be neither more nor less.
Fortunately intellectual entertainment had not been entirely overlooked. All the smart people were talking about the Chauve Souris, a refugee group of the Moscow Art Theater; a kind of “highbrow” vaudeville, clever and well acted. You sat in a hall of green-painted wood decorated with bunches of pink-painted roses, and having yellow-painted columns with white-painted teapots around them. A waiter in white overdress brought you iced drinks and preserves, while a droll little man by the name of Balieff introduced the scenes on the stage. First you saw a Russian episode with dancing, and then you saw Voltaire, and then the German Kaiser.
Between the acts Lanny looked about, and recognized a young attaché of the French Foreign Office whom he had come to know during the conference. Lanny joined him and they talked about times old and new. Lanny’s attention was directed to the fashions, which were très snob—a word of praise in French. Some ladies were wearing a sort of elaborately embroidered apron—only they wore it behind instead of in front! They wore red hats of the most glaring shades—or else they wore black ones made of monkey-fur. Extraordinary the ravenous craving for monkey-fur which had seized upon women in the season of 1921; capes, collars, muffs, sleeves, handbags—the monkey tribes of all tropic lands were near to extermination, and still there wasn’t enough, so the goat tribes were being sacrificed. Lanny said that some of the furs looked as if they were the trimmings from beards in the Quartier Latin; but his companion denied that any beards had been trimmed there.
Lanny was invited to spend the night in a place where they would find tres chic ladies; but he explained that he had an engagement with a particular one, and returned to his hotel. Next day he went to the Grand Palais to inspect the newly opened Salon des Indépendants, and spent many hours remarking the hard, bright colors in which French painters were seeing the world. Oddities of many sorts provided topics for conversation. A nude woman being carried between the horns of a large brown bull against a green background was called The Abduction of Europa. A pink triangle set against an orange background and covered with spots of green and red
—that was An Expression of Simple Happiness.
II
After Lanny had enjoyed his fill of such happiness he wanted to tell someone about it, so he telephoned to his friend Emily Chattersworth, who had just returned to Les Forêts. When he explained why he was in town, this hospitable soul replied: “Why don’t you come out and stay with me? Isadora will be here tomorrow.”
“Oh, gosh!” he exclaimed. “Are you sure I wouldn’t be in the way?”
“Not in the least. You can play for her and she’ll be delighted.”
“You won’t have to say it twice!”
Next morning when he arrived at the château, there was the divine one already installed, and saying very kindly that she remembered him from the days before the war. Possibly she did, but she had had a swarm of children on her hands, and he had been one more. Isadora Duncan at this time was forty-three, and her loveliness had become maternal; her gentle features showed the ravages of grief and pain. “The poor soul is terribly distraite,” said Emily Chattersworth. “Try to keep her from drinking.”
“I surely won’t lead her into temptation,” replied Lanny, and his friend said: “That’s one reason I wanted you.”
Isadora had just come back from a sojourn in Greece, and wore the costume of that land in its days of glory. Her art was based on the Greek spirit, and so was her life; in a long white stola, caught up and draped at the waist, she looked like a noble and gentle caryatid. She had regular and sweet features, with lovely brown eyes, and brown hair coiled into a loose knot at the nape of her neck.
She told about her adventures under the government of Venizelos, which had made her into a national institution. She had brought with her a few of the children whom Lanny had watched her training just a few’ days before the outbreak of war; she had taken this troupe to the United States, and then back to France, and so to Greece. They had danced among the splendid ruins which Lanny would never forget; he told how he and Marcel Detaze had stood among them and watched the dying of the sun and speculated about the dying of worlds. Isadora perceived that here was a kindred soul, and she talked glowingly about her life and labors.
She was the frankest-spoken person Lanny had ever met; she hid nothing from anybody, and said what she thought about everything. She had never really got over the tragic death of her two lovely children, followed by the loss of a newly born baby on the day the French troops were called to war; all this heaping up of calamities had come near to unhinging the reason of a sensitive artiste. The world was a dreadful and cruel place! The hotel at Bellevue which she had planned to make the temple of a new art had served as a hospital for broken bodies and was now being made into a factory for poison gases. Greece, to which she had hoped to restore its ancient glories, had fallen prey to the pro-German King Constantine, who had driven Isadora’s patron into exile and turned her and her school adrift. Now she had come to Paris and about ruined herself with all patrons by hailing Soviet Russia as the last remaining hope of mankind. She had waved a flaming red scarf during some of her dances, and so wasn’t invited to dance very often.
III
She desired that this agreeable young man should play for her. He did so, and she was pleased. She took off her Greek sandals and put on one of her light dancing tunics. A servant set the furniture of the drawing-room back against the walls, so that the hostess could enjoy a treat—but not a free one, no, for Isadora was the most impecunious person who ever lived; all her life she had spent all her earnings on her school, and now somebody, man or woman, had to put up the funds for her and her art and her pupils, wherever on earth they might be. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin!
The dancer was no sylph, and seemed better equipped to represent Les Feuilles d’Automne than the Spring Song of Mendelssohn or of Grieg. But life which had battered and bruised her cruelly had not tamed her ardor; she danced everything, and when the spirit possessed her she rose above the limitations of the flesh. Lanny had never seen her dance, and didn’t see much of it now, for he had to sit at the piano and work hard. She was an exacting taskmistress; the best wasn’t good enough for her, and she never stooped to flattery. Over his shoulder he got glimpses of the most graceful motions he had ever seen made by a human body; and when the dance was over and the dream had fled, there was a well-fleshed middle-aged woman, puffing audibly, lying down and covering herself with a robe, but still trying to communicate her vision, telling Lanny what the music meant and what the motions meant, and how the two were blended info something entirely new in the world. Isadora Duncan wasn’t modest about her genius, and didn’t need to be, for she had proved it in every great capital of the world. Starting an, unknown girl from San Francisco, she had created her art, and enormous audiences had accepted it with acclaim rarely seen in the theater.
Freedom was her watchword; freedom in her thinking, in her personal life, in her representations. She hated all chains upon the human mind and spirit; she hated injustice and stupidity, and when these things were brought to her attention she raged at them. She despised the conventional ballet; toe-dancing was to her simpering idiocy, and such forms as the minuet were expressions of conventionality based upon class dominance. The Anglo-Saxon peoples were long-limbed and free, and she gave them a long-limbed and free art form.
Lanny was startled to meet another defender of the revolutionary upheaval in Russia. He questioned her about this, and found that she didn’t really know much about what was going on there—not as much as he himself had learned from Lincoln Steffens and Bill Bullitt and his uncle Jesse. Isadora took it on faith, because she had to have something to believe in, and because the so-called “capitalist world” had horrified her by its blind and bloody slaughters. She described to Lanny one of the great moments of her life, her first visit to St. Petersburg in the year 1905. Her train had been late and she had arrived alone in arctic cold and darkness, and while being driven to a hotel had seen a long procession of dark figures staggering under heavy burdens—it was the funeral of the workers who had been slaughtered by the Tsar’s troops on the previous day. Against that age-old oppression her heart had registered a vow of hatred, and that same heart had leaped with joy when the peasants and workers had thrown off their shackles. “Peace, Land, and Bread”—how could any free spirit fail to acclaim that slogan? Surely not Isadora, who, before the revolution, had put on a scarlet tunic and danced the Marseillaise in the Metropolitan Opera House, to the great dismay of the wealthy patrons of that great New York institution.
IV
“Oh, Lanny,” she said, “do stay for a while! You understand my work so well; and I must practice to keep my condition.”
“I’ll stay as long as I can,” he promised. He played everything he knew and everything Mrs. Emily had, and Isadora became possessed of her daimons, or muses, or both. She gave him glimpses of her Omar Khayyam dances, the first creation of her youth. To his infinite delight she showed him the dance she had made on her first visit to Greece, the chorus of the Suppliants of Aeschylus. She danced a Chopin prelude and a polonaise, and Schubert’s Marche Militaire. She danced snatches of Beethoven’s Seventh, and of Tschaikowsky’s Pathétique. Both of them toiled and sweated—it was no unusual thing for her to lose four or five pounds in one morning’s practice. Lanny had been working for years to acquire speed in reading, and now he knew what he had done it for.
The hostess had to go to the city, and they gave her a list of music scores which she promised to bring back. They were alone in the wide-spaced drawing-room, Lanny playing the Second Hungarian Rhapsody of Liszt. Here was a great musician and a great soul, Isadora said; the world didn’t rate him highly enough. She rated him a tumultuous dance, ending in a wild climax; when she finished, she fled to Lanny and fell upon her knees, clasped her arms about him and clung to him, breathing as if all the air in the large drawing-room were not enough for her needs. She was a genius, and physically a colossal engine, the most thrilling that Lanny had ever encountered. He
knew that artists and theatrical people were demonstrative in their manners, so he rested his hands upon her shoulders and waited for her to recover from her tremendous exertions.
Gradually he realized that she was going to stay right there. After her breathing had become normal, she still held him tightly, and her head lay against him. “Lanny,” she whispered, “wouldn’t you like to take me driving?”
“Why, surely, if you wish,” he said.
“I am crazy about motoring. Nothing gives me such a thrill as to drive fast—very fast—ninety miles an hour!”
When this youth had received a present of a car, he had made promises to his father on the subject of speed. But he didn’t think it necessary to go into details now. If Isadora wanted a ride he would provide it, and fast enough would be enough. “Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere; I don’t care, so long as it is far. Let us drive and drive, and not come back for a while, perhaps not ever. It has been a long time since I have met a man who might mean as much to me as you.”
Lanny was startled, and not a little disturbed. He was made of flesh and blood, and here was a woman who had been one of the loveliest in the world, and still was one of its greatest artists. He knew that she proclaimed “free love” as a part of her religion; but he had had the idea that Emily would have told her about Marie, and so he would be able to play the piano and treat her as the Muse Terpsichore.
His hands trembled as they rested upon her; but that wasn’t enough. “What’s the matter, Lanny?” she whispered. “Don’t you want to love me?”
“Listen, dear,” he said—one must be as kind as possible—“I must tell you—”
He felt her recoil. “Oh, you are going to refuse me!”