Part V — Hearts and Treasures
Chapter Twenty-Five I
On a cool February morning a private office in the Maison Paulette, Boulevard Houssman, was occupied by five persons of the feminine sex. Four of the five, gorgeous as to clothes and cosmetics, moved busily about in comet-like orbits that brought them periodically near the desk.
The fifth, seated at the desk itself, dominated the room. She was a striking blonde, whose handsome dull-green dress challenged the glint of gold alike in her pupils and her hair.
Seemingly occupied with a book of accounts, this lady was really engaged in inventing petty tasks for the four young women dancing attendance upon her. (Mariette, ou est le livre bleu? Mon dieu, Gabrielle! les ciseaux; quelqu’un a enleve mes petites ciseaux. Toinette, apportez-moi le boite aux lettres. Tiens, Amelie! Prends ce mouchoir, etc., etc.) These requests for service continued in a fairly steady stream, amidst much hurrying and scurrying, sharp cries of tout de suite, Madame, and a general atmosphere of sulky obsequiousness.
In the thick of the confusion the door was opened by a young woman in a soft suit of brown heather. She stood on the threshold for a moment and, as she looked questioningly towards the lady in command, a slight frown brought a bar of hazel brown over her beautiful gray eyes.
The lady at the desk, who saw everything, affected not to see the figure on the threshold and went on languidly issuing orders.
Thereupon the newcomer, in clear, agreeable English, called out:
“Evidently you don’t want me, Cornelia. Good, I’ll go back upstairs. I’ve stacks and stacks of work to do—”
“Araminta, wait! Of course I want you. I want you most particularly.”
“You’ve got an army here, already. What do you want me for? If you keep on calling me away from the manikins whenever Harry is explaining matters, he’ll never be able to train me into taking charge of them.”
“My dear!” trilled Cornelia, bringing her most musical arpeggio into play. “When you’ve been married as long as I have, you’ll understand that no sensible woman ever interferes with her husband’s work except for a positively overwhelming reason.”
“Really, the reasons here in Paris are as bad as the seasons,” said Janet with a smile. “I wish they’d calm down and not overwhelm us quite so often.”
“Ah, Janet, you well may jest. Little do you know of the heavy responsibilities involved in managing both a business and a husband. If I had only myself to think of the worries and risks would be as a whisper in the wind. But I think of Hercules sharing my anxieties, working himself thin and gray—”
While she went on in this theatrical vein, Janet was thinking to herself: “She makes as great a virtue of being married as she formerly made of not being married. Whatever her condition, there’s a terrible to-do about it.”
Aloud she said:
“Look here, Cornelia, if you want to talk privately to me, hadn’t we better get rid of this retinue?”
Without awaiting a reply, she calmly released Marie and the other manikins from service and sent them out of the room. This done, she took a chair opposite the desk where Cornelia sat staring at her in speechless indignation.
Cornelia cherished a sort of mental chromo of herself as the active ruler of the Paulette community, a ruler at once imperious, genial, and adored. In point of fact, her insatiable appetite for attention, reinforced by a sharp tongue, spread an atmosphere of dread and anxiety around her. Janet was the only person who had ever succeeded in weakening Cornelia’s illusion about herself by bringing it into occasional juxtaposition with reality.
“You’ll greatly oblige me, Janet, by not ordering my servants about under my very nose.”
“Your manikins are not your servants, Cornelia. They’re your employees. You slave-drive them outrageously. If you don’t look out, you’ll have a strike on your hands before long.”
“With you as the strike leader, I dare say?”
“Why not? Your inability to respect other people’s time is simply appalling. The moment some whim pops into your head, one of us is called upon to gratify it. You quite forget that when you arbitrarily take us from our jobs, bang goes continuity, a most important factor in good workmanship. Mazie, who came here grovelling in the dust, is now up in arms; the manikins are unitedly rebellious; Harry is almost a nervous wreck. This, with business simply deluging the establishment. I tell you, unless you stop, we all will.”
Cornelia quailed under these words, although she kept her face admirably. She was in some respects like a wrongly bound volume: half Becky Sharp and half Hedda Gabler. And it was the Hedda Gabler pages she always turned up to Janet.
“Well, what next?” she exclaimed, on the defensive in spite of her brave words. “I’ve rescued Mazie Ross out of the gutter where Hutchins Burley flung her; I’ve sacrificed my own creature comforts to make those of the manikins secure; I’ve given you a very tidy berth and no questions asked; and I’ve worked myself to skin and bones for Harry’s sake. Now you all turn on me and call me an interfering busybody, or worse. That’s human gratitude.”
Janet, giving the faintest ironical shrug, merely looked at her.
Cornelia smothered a sob of rage. After a pause, she informed Janet that Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, her most valued customer, had made an appointment that morning to look at some frocks and gowns. This lady had a single hobby, clothes; and she spent an appreciable fraction of her untold millions (“she’s divorced two multimillionaires, Araminta, and driven a third into the diplomatic service!”) on this hobby. She had expressed profound dissatisfaction with Paulette’s offerings on her last visit two weeks ago. It was therefore of prime importance to please her this time.
“I want you to be in the salon with me when she looks at the models,” said Cornelia. “She’s extremely susceptible to flattery. As the head of the house, I can’t very well lay it on too thick, can I? I have a feeling that your presence will make the sales go smoothly.”
“You’d better leave me out of it, Cornelia. I never sold a thing in my life. Why, I couldn’t sell a sandwich to a starving man.”
“I’ll do the selling, my dear. I simply ask you to be on hand. The fact is, you have a peculiar influence over people. When they get to talking with you, they suddenly forget about things—the earth-earthy things by which we are all so obsessed nowadays—they appear to forget about things and begin to occupy themselves with thoughts and dreams. In that condition, a man or woman will buy anything.”
“Cornelia, you’ll admit that I’ve done all sorts of odd jobs for you without a murmur. But I really don’t like to bamboozle anybody into—”
“Bamboozle! Araminta! No one who buys a Paulette frock is bamboozled. Be quite clear about that.”
She added, less belligerently, that Mrs. Jerome, though so very rich, had no taste in clothes. Or, more bluntly, had a most execrable taste. She went in for suffrage, feminism, woman’s rights, and all that sort of thing. (Here Janet pricked up her ears.) So you might know what to expect. She was, in short, faddy and temperamental. Her purchases were made or not made, as the case might be, because the seller pleased or displeased her. The articles themselves were of quite secondary importance.
“Forgive my curiosity, Cornelia. But you have regiments of customers. Why are you so anxious about just this one?”
“What a question, you babe in the wood! Don’t you know who Mrs. Jerome is?”
“I know she’s rich and that Mr. Pryor had something to do with her coming here.”
“That’s not it, child. She’s the American mother of the Duchess of Keswick. And the Duchess— Well, it’s Madge and Mary between her and the Queen of England. Think, Araminta, what a feather in our cap, if we get the patronage of the Duchess of Keswick, and a Paulette frock is worn at the Court of St. James! It’s the chance of a lifetime. You won’t disappoint me, dear?”
“No. We’ll make it Madge and Paulette and Mary. When is this dowager Mrs. Jerome expected?”
“That’s her carriage now, or I’m very much mistaken,” said Cornelia, all agog. “She hardly ever uses a motor. It’s so ordinary.”
In some amazement Janet watched her old friend going out to do the honors in the reception room. What a transformation a short year had effected in the Cornelia of the Lorillard tenements! Bohemianism, outlawry, and the one-piece dresses of Kips Bay seemed remoter than Mars. Cornelia was attired in the height of fashion, her cheeks were delicately touched up, her hair was elaborately coiffured.
Even her congenital languor had evaporated, for the moment, as the thrills of social snobbery electrified her.
II
Entering the salon, Janet saw that Mrs. Jerome was a podgy little tub of a woman, the symbol of the fortune which her father, Theodore Casey, had made in wash-tubs. She took a chair beside the visitor, who sleepily watched the crack Paulette manikins whilst they exhibited a variety of frocks and Cornelia nervously courted the favor of her outspoken customer.
Mrs. Jerome examined one of the manikins at close quarters.
“I don’t think much of your dresses today,” she said bluntly. “The lines are all wrong.”
“Pardon me, Mrs. Jerome,” said Cornelia with dignity. “But they ought to be at that angle. A Paulette frock is a work of art. It is designed to produce a definite effect from a definite point of view. The lines are like those of a Phidias statue, perfectly right at the proper distance.”
“I don’t care if they do look like a Fiddlesticks statue. Look at that charmeuse gown there. Can’t anybody tell that girl a mile away for what she is?”
“I fear I don’t understand.”
“Well, if the gown don’t hide the fact that she’s a manikin, it won’t hide the fact that my figure’s no Fiddlesticks statue, or whatever you call it.”
This opinion, delivered in an unmistakable New York voice and accent, made Janet laugh. Not disrespectfully. She discerned at once that Mrs. Jerome, like Shakespeare, had far more native wit than college learning. Her judgment was confirmed when the visitor, turning abruptly towards her, said:
“What do you think of these Paulette dresses, young lady. I don’t expect you to say that they’re pretty rotten. But do they satisfy the eye?”
“I think, Mrs. Jerome, that if they don’t satisfy the eye, they’ll at least astound it.”
Mrs. Jerome brightened up at once.
“Well, child,” she said, “when I want to astound people, I’ll do it on less money than a Paulette gown costs. I’ll walk around Columbus Circle in my bathing suit.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you do it, too,” said Janet, at the top of her exuberance.
“Do what?” said Mrs. Jerome, now totally oblivious of the manikins on exhibition and of Cornelia on pins and needles.
“Wear a bathing suit around the house. I used to, regularly. In the tenements in Kips Bay I always did the dishes in my bathing suit. Annette Kellerman tights, a skirt to the knees, no sleeves, no stockings. A dandy rig-out for quick action.”
“Permit me to say, Janet—” began Cornelia, in frigid, authoritative tones.
Mrs. Jerome impatiently waved her away, an indignity so astounding that Madame Paulette could scarcely trust her eyes. Janet, fearing she had been indiscreet, hastened to add:
“Of course, Cornelia—Madame Paulette—doesn’t allow it in Paris. She requires us to be perfectly proper here.”
“She would!” said Mrs. Jerome significantly, her back still turned to Cornelia. “But what good does it do you? Nine-tenths of the people in Paris are perfectly proper; but they don’t look it. The other tenth are perfectly improper; but they, as often as not, don’t look it either.”
The manikins received another inning. A brief one, though, for Mrs. Jerome inspected and dismissed them in quick succession.
“Well, well,” she said, half aloud, “to think that you came from the tenements.”
She gave Janet a quick, sceptical glance.
“I can scarcely believe it.”
“I can scarcely believe it myself,” said Janet, with a perfectly straight face.
Cornelia bit her lips and, flashing an angry look at her friend, went out of the salon, unable to trust her feelings any longer.
“If the Duchess got wind of it,” Mrs. Jerome mused on, “that would finish Paulette’s for me. She don’t think a shop is a classy shop unless the proprietor has a classy pedigree.”
“Oh, our pedigree will seem classy enough to the Duchess,” said Janet, “if you don’t give us away. And you can’t do that, you know. I only told you in the strictest confidence.”
“Don’t you go shifting your responsibilities on me, young woman. If you want your secrets kept, you just keep them to yourself. I’m no safe deposit vault for anyone else’s hidden thoughts. For your comfort I’ll tell you this, though. I’ve never given my daughter food or information that I knew she couldn’t digest. I’m too old to begin doing it now.”
“You’re quite right, Mrs. Jerome. Things slip off my tongue that oughtn’t to. Personally, I don’t care a straw. But other people—”
“Don’t worry about other people, my dear,” said Mrs. Jerome, who had enjoyed the tit-for-tat immensely. “I’m not likely to desert Madame Paulette. At least not while she keeps anyone with your healthy face and fascinating eyes here to talk to me. Mind, I’m not gone on these Paulette frocks. I guess the Madame knows that pretty well. But this establishment is run by a woman, a woman from my own country. That means a good deal to me. For although our sex is coming into its own, the pace isn’t a dizzy one. The men see to that. And so I say, this is a time for all good women to stand by one another.”
The little lady sank back in her seat and, as though exhausted by her long speech, closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Cornelia had returned and the parade of the manikins was resumed.
This spectacle always started Janet on a series of curious reflections. As a result of the training in rhythmics which the girls received at the hands of Harry Kelly, they were free from those grotesque mannerisms of gait, posture, and demeanor which manikins cultivated and which were accepted by the trade as superlative expressions of esthetic correctness. Yet Harry’s talent yoked to the service of fashion seemed as wasteful a thing as an artist’s genius drafted in the service of futility. It reminded Janet of the story of the Medici prince who compelled Michelangelo to mould a statue out of snow.
But to Mrs. Jerome the Paulette manikins were a sight to see. She made Janet sit on the lounge beside her and coaxed her to give an opinion on every frock subsequently shown. She purchased all those that Janet praised and several that she made fun of.
It was one of the best day’s work that the sales department of Paulette’s had ever done.
In spite of which, Madame Paulette considered it her duty to take Mrs. Jerome to one side and apologize for Janet and her artless indiscretions.
“She means well, Mrs. Jerome,” said Cornelia, deferentially. “She’s—well, I might say, she’s naive, incredibly naive in matters of social position. It’s only lack of training, I assure you.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, she’s absolutely ignorant of distinctions of rank. Absolutely. Why, she would talk to a Duchess with no more ceremony than to a scrubwoman.”
“Then I’ll bring the Duchess here to be talked to. It might do her good.”
“Oh, do bring the Duchess. I shall be charmed to display for her inspection the best that the Maison has.”
“No doubt. But let me give you a tip. Don’t waste your time training that dear little Janet girl. She’ll learn the deceitful ways of the world fast enough, and no correspondence course needed either.”
Janet came up to them as they reached the outer door.
“My dear,” said Mrs. Jerome, putting her arm around Janet’s waist, “you’ve given me the best quarter of an hour I’ve had in Paris these two months. It’s been a treat, a royal treat.”
As Cornelia beheld these two, standing there intertwined, a strange expression formed on her face, an expression that bespoke an agonizing doubt of the sanity of the universe.
Unheeding her, Mrs. Jerome continued to say to Janet:
“The people I meet everywhere! In Europe they pick my pockets while they lick my boots; in America they rifle my purse with barefaced assurance. You are the first one I’ve met in a very long time who has talked to me as though I were a human being and not a walking cash box.”
III
The conquest of Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome produced a sensation in the Paulette establishment. It also gave an element of security to Janet’s precarious tenure of office there.
Janet knew full well that Madame Paulette had received her in the Boulevard Haussman with nothing like the enthusiasm that Cornelia had welcomed her in the Lorillard tenements. In the interval between these events the two friends had burned several bridges behind them.
It was obvious that Cornelia was now glutted with hands to wait on her, ears to pay heed to her, and tongues to flatter her. Her natural taste for dependents being completely gratified, she felt less need than ever for friends of an independent turn of mind like Janet.
Moreover, in a year and a half of compact adventure, Janet had matured more rapidly than many young people do in ten years of tame drifting. Time, which had whittled away some of her imprudence, had robbed her of none of her daring; it had left her with her almost naive freedom of utterance intact. Her candor was a trait to which Cornelia had formerly been much drawn. But that was in the days of her first arrival in Kips Bay, the days when the young girl had all but worshipped the experienced woman. Now that blind devotion had given way to challenging criticism, Janet’s candor seemed far less attractive.
That is, far less attractive to Cornelia. As regards Paulette’s in general, Janet was a great favorite. Her official duties were chiefly those of an assistant to Harry Kelly in the physical training of the manikins, (a branch of their professional instruction on which Kelly laid great stress). She bore somewhat the same relation to her chief that the concert master of an orchestra does to the conductor. This arrangement was Cornelia’s doing. In one and the same bold stroke she had thought to cut down the time that Kelly spent with the manikins (this being the time in which his heart lay most); and to shift to Janet’s shoulders the odium that frequently devolves on the deputy chief (who exercises authority without possessing power).
But Cornelia’s spirit of negation, active as ever, accomplished only one-half of its object.
Janet discharged her duties with so much vivacity and with such invincible good-will that she was idolized by everybody in the Paulette firm from Kelly and the manikins down to the work girls and the magnificent porter who daily consented to guard the street door.
In short, she was the life of the house; than which, Cornelia could have brought no stronger indictment against her of unimaginable lese majeste.
The two had a long private conversation in Cornelia’s office the day after Mrs. Jerome’s visit.
“Araminta, you’ve certainly made a hit with the old lady. Just as I predicted. It’s a fine thing for us both. Paulette’s prestige will go up and up. And it should mean a great deal to you.”
“How, I wonder?”
“You can make her friendship a stepping stone.”
“Easy stepping stones for little feet—so to speak?”
“You know quite well what I mean. Some day you’ll go back to America—”
“Is this a hint or a prediction, or both—”
“Don’t be silly, Janet. I’m thinking of your future. Your future in your own country, naturally. Mrs. Jerome is a woman of enormous influence. You know how it is over there. Much gold will wash all guilt away.”
“You mean my chequered past?” asked Janet, with a smile.
“Yes,” said Cornelia, adding handsomely, “although your affair with Claude Fontaine will probably be quite forgotten by that time. Nobody will remember it.”
“Robert Lloyd will!”
Cornelia was up in arms at once. She always was, when Janet mentioned Robert’s name.
“What difference does that make? You aren’t going to marry him, I suppose?”
“I suppose not. He’s too poor, for one thing. He isn’t going to ask me, for another.”
“One would imagine you wanted him to,” said Cornelia, with concise sarcasm.
“We got along splendidly as partners.”
“Partners! What has that to do with marriage?”
“What has anything to do with marriage? I understood your reasons when you believed that marriage was a prison. I confess I don’t understand your reasons now that you believe marriage to be a haven of bliss. Mind, I don’t say it is a prison, and I don’t say that it isn’t a haven of bliss.”
Janet tried to check her sub-ironical impulses: they were irrepressible.
“I feel too much in the dark about the whole thing,” she went on, “to be as cocksure as I used to be. But if one isn’t to marry a man because one has found him to be a splendid companion in the wear and tear of working together, why is one to marry him?”
“How you do run on, Araminta! Prisons and hells, Paradises and havens of bliss—you jump from one extreme to the other. Who mentioned these things? My dear, one marries a man because he calls to what is deepest and truest in one. Because he responds to—”
“The mating instinct?”
“How can you sit there and say such vulgar things?”
“Vulgar! Well, you are going it! Isn’t the mating instinct as deep and true as any of them?”
“It isn’t a reason for marriage,” said Cornelia, in staccato accents. “And you know perfectly well I never said or thought it was. Quite the reverse. I opposed marriage because the sex instinct, which is what induces most people to marry, is a good ground for a temporary union but not a good ground for a permanent one.”
“Then there are good reasons for a permanent union?”
“Yes. And they absorb the sex reason a million times over.”
“It’s easy for you to talk like that, Cornelia, with Harry thinking that the sun rises in one of your eyes and sets in the other. But where shall I find a Harry to be absorbed in me a million times over like that?”
“If you go on making nasty sarcastic replies to all my well-meant suggestions, I shall wash my hands of you,” said Cornelia, rising with frigid haughtiness.
She added, on a superior note:
“You’d better see a little less of poor, bedraggled Mazie Ross, if it’s on her level that you’re being tempted to think.”
IV
Janet hastened after her in a complete change of mood.
“Come back, Cornelia,” she called out, remorsefully. “I had no right to be sarcastic. Forgive me, and I’ll eat all the humble pie you like.”
Cornelia sat down again.
“This is a new tack for you to take,” she said, making the most of an advantage Janet seldom gave her.
“The fact is, Cornelia, I’m—my feelings were ploughed up today, ploughed up from top to bottom. The postman brought me an offer of marriage this morning.”
“An offer of marriage!”
“From Monsieur St. Hilaire.”
Cornelia had of course heard the facts of the whole St. Hilaire episode. She also knew that Janet still corresponded with Henriette, and that all the recent letters of the girl’s father had been sent back unopened.
“I thought you never read his letters?”
“This one was folded up in Henriette’s note. I’m sure the child wasn’t a party to the trick. Here it is. Will you read it?”
Cornelia did so.
“Well, I must say I’m surprised,” she said, returning the letter. “He writes in a very decent, manly strain. Altogether different from what I expected. The devil doesn’t seem to be nearly as black as he’s painted.”
“Oh, he’s not a professional satyr, if that’s what you mean. I never implied that he was.”
Cornelia pondered the matter for a minute. She recalled forgotten particulars about M. St. Hilaire, amongst others, the account of his generous income.
“So he’s in Paris with Henriette,” she mused. “I notice that he says he’s coming here tomorrow to get his answer in person. What will you do about it, dear?”
“I wish I knew. I want to see Henriette again, tremendously. But I don’t want to see her father. Do give me your advice, Cornelia. What do you think I ought to do?”
“Well, why not give him another chance? He’s made you a perfectly straight and honorable offer this time. As I recall the whole story, he wasn’t really repugnant to you, except at that one time.”
“No. But am I lightly to forget that he—that he touched me without my consent, presuming to think that, because I had loved one man, my body was at the free disposal of all men?”
“It was a wretched mistake to make—”
“A mistake! It was a monstrous piece of stupidity and impudence.”
“Quite so, my dear. I’m not standing up for him. Still, don’t let us forget that men are not built like women.”
“That’s a truth that cuts both ways, isn’t it?” said Janet.
She had given up being astonished at Cornelia’s peculiar mixture of the old and the new in the matter of theories about men and women. She merely wondered to what weird angle Cornelia meant to shift her outlook now.
“The point is,” continued Cornelia serenely, “that a woman’s sex emotion is generally excited by something that takes her fancy; a man’s, by something that stirs his blood. The mind plays the bigger part in the one case, the body in the other. That’s why, in the duel of sex, the psychological moment is so important to the woman, the physiological moment to the man.
“These acute distinctions are quite beyond me. A man has as much gray matter as a woman, or even more. Then why should he let his mental processes suffer paralysis whenever a nice woman looks at him?”
“Well, that’s one of the mysteries that marriage helps us to understand, Araminta. In the life of a man there come these physiological moments, these sex storms, different from anything in the experience of a woman. I don’t mean to say that men have more physical passion than women. But there are occasions when their physical passion takes a more violently concentrated form. Mazie, in her vulgar little way, isn’t so far wrong when she says: ‘Scratch a fine gentleman, and you’ll find a cave man.’”
“Do you mean to tell me that there are absolutely no men who feel about love as we do?”
“I’ve never met one. Have you?”
Janet was thinking: “Surely Robert isn’t like that!” Aloud she said nothing. There was a dangerous glint in her friend’s eyes. Cornelia had an uncanny way of penetrating one’s thoughts when Robert was the object of them. Had she accomplished this feat of divination again? At all events, an acrid note entered her voice as she continued:
“Is it really only Monsieur St. Hilaire that you can’t make up your mind about? If so, take my advice. Come down off your high horse and make the most of your good fortune.”
“My good fortune!”
“Let’s be perfectly frank with each other, my dear. Here’s a man who wants to marry you. He’s well-born, cultivated, rich. His one child is a girl who adores you and whom you adore. The only thing against him is that he once committed a serious breach of decorum—”
“And that I don’t love him—” interpolated Janet.
Cornelia blandly ignored the interruption.
“His letter shows,” she went on, “that he is willing to make the most handsome amends, the only amends a man can make in a matter of this sort. What more do you ask?”
“I’m not asking him for amends. I simply want to be let alone.”
“Araminta, let me beg you not to deceive yourself about the changing moral values we hear so much of nowadays. Has the price of virginity really gone down? Judged by the conversation of radicals and Outlaws, yes. Judged by the ticker of the matrimonial exchange, it is still pretty high. Bear that in mind, and remember that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
“Do you mean to say,” exclaimed Janet, in great astonishment, “that you, of all people, advise me to accept this offer?”
Her tone irritated Cornelia.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” she began.
“They can remain beggars,” replied Janet tersely.
“If that’s the way you feel about it, you needn’t ask my advice again. We’re wasting each other’s time.”
Saying which, Cornelia rose and left the office.