XI.—IN WHICH WE GET INTO THE FLASH AND GLITTER OF HIGH LIFE
NEXT evening Betsey and I went to dinner with Mrs. Moses Fraley, of Terre Haute, at a fashionable hotel. There we saw a show-window in one of the greatest matrimonial department stores in Europe. Buyers and sellers and bought and sold were there in full force to inspect the bargains, and we were able to note reliably the undertone of the market; and our observations had some effect, I believe, on the fortunes of Miss Norris.
Nothing was said of “the count” in our invitation, but we hoped to have at least a look at him. We put on our best clothes, and our plain, agricultural natures were well disguised when the impressive head porter at our destination helped us out of Norris's car and almost touched his forehead on the pavement at sight of us. That bow was easily worth a two-franc piece, and he got it.
“The Yank and his franc are easily parted,” Betsey remarked, as we entered the great whirling door.
We were in the game, and I was firmly resolved to keep pace with our compatriots from Terre Haute for one evening, anyhow. Two more double-franc pieces in the coat-room established my reputation. With a good suit of clothes and the sudden expenditure of two dollars and a half you can acquire a reputation in any European hotel. Reputations are the cheapest things in Europe, but the costs for upkeep are considerable. Every young man in the place was trying to do something for us and I began to feel the rich, blue blood in my veins.
Mrs. Fraley and her niece, in long trains, received and presented us to their guests. Among them was the lady from Flint who had got the cramp in her leg at Hadrian's Villa, and who lived at the same boarding-house with Mrs. Fraley. Her name was Sampf—“Mrs. Sampf,” they called her. I always have to go to my note-book when I try to think of that name. We always refer to her as the lady whose name sounded like boiling mush. There were also a sad but handsome young woman of the name of Rantone, a Minnesota girl who had married an Italian doctor; Mr. Pike, the whiskered lumber king who was studying the history of the world and whose bust we had surveyed in the studio of De Langueville, and a certain young man connected with one of the embassies.
“The count couldn't come,” said Mrs. Fraley. “He wrote that nothing would please him more than to meet Mr. and Mrs. Socrates Pot ter, but that he was, unfortunately, quite ill.”
I did not know until then that these good people had come to meet us.
“Perhaps you'll help us to appraise our loss by giving me his name,” I suggested.
“Oh, it is the wonderful Count Carola!” said she. “He is about the most fascinating creature that I ever saw.”
My brain reeled and fell at her feet and called silently for help. In half a second it had picked itself up again.
We went into the dining-room. What a fair of jewels and laces and fresh-cut flowers! At eleven o'clock they were going to have a dance—kind of a surprise party! They called it The Ball of the Roses. Our table had a big crop of red and white roses, and in the middle of it was a little fountain among ferns. Its spray fell with a pleasant sound upon water-lilies in a big, mossy bowl.
The retired lumber king sat opposite me, and a retired frog sat between us on a lily-pad at the edge of the fountain-bowl. He was a goodsized real frog who was planning to return to active life, I judged, for he sat with alert eyes as if on the lookout for a business opportunity. I observed that he looked hopefully at me when I sat down at the right of Mrs. Fraley, with Mrs. Sampf at my side, as if willing to abandon the frivolous life any minute if I could suggest an opening for an energetic young frog. Mrs. Fraley explained that the frog was tied to the edge of the bowl by a silk thread which was fastened about his neck. I ceased then to fear and suspect him.
I could not help thinking how much good Terre Haute money had gone into these decorations, and we should have been just as well pleased without the frog and the fountain.
Here we are at last right in the midst of things—grandeur! high life! nobility! abdominal hills and valleys! fair slopes of rolling, open country with their stones imbedded in gold and platinum! toes twinging with gout! faces with the utohel look on them!
What a pantheon of rococo deities was this dining-room—princes and princesses, counts and discounts, countesses and marquises, Wall Street millionaires and millionheiresses, and average American wives and widows with friends and dining-men. What is a dining-man? He's a professional diner-out. He has only to look aristocratic and speak Italian—or English with a Fifth-Avenue accent—and be able to recognize the people worth while. A fat old English duchess with a staff in her hand and the royal purple in her hair made her way to her table with the walk of an apple-woman. There was no nonsense about her, no illusions, no clinging to a vanished youth. She was a real woman, and I could have kissed the hem of her garments for joy.
A lady sat at one of the tables who suggested the chloride of nitrogen, being so fat and fetched in at the waist that her shoulders heaved at every breath, and one could not look at her without fearing that she would explode and fill the air with hooks and eyes and buttons.
A large, swell-front, fully furnished Pennsylvania widow sat near us with her young daughter and a marquis and a well-earned reputation for great wealth. It seemed to be a busy, popular, agreeable reputation, with many acquaintances in the room. The widow's costume pleaded for observation and secured it, for she sat serene and prodigious in jeweled fat and satin, dripping pearls and emeralds and diamonds. There was a battlement of diamonds on her brow and a cinch of them on her neck, surrounded by a stone wall of pearls as big as the marbles that I used to play with as a boy. Hanging from her ears were two mammoth pearls, either of which in a sling might have slain Goliath. Her shoulders glowed with gems, and a stomacher of diamonds adorned her intemperate zone. What a fresco of American abundance she made in the remarkable decorations of that room. By and by she drew a wallet from her breast and paid her bill.
“How wonderful!” our hostess exclaimed, suddenly.
A princess in red slippers and with no stockings on her feet, as Mrs. Fraley informed me, strode in with her young man and took a table near us. She had been a Wisconsin girl, and her happy Fifth Avenue dialect rose like the spray of a fountain and fell lightly on our ears.
“We had a sockless statesman in our country, but I never heard of a sockless princess before,” Mrs. Sampf sputtered. “They tell me that some of these aristocrats are very poor.”
Mrs. Sampf had been to Egypt and the Holy Land, and talked freely of her travels.
“Yes, we went up the Nile to see the dam,” she said. “It's a good dam, I guess, but I didn't care much for it. What I wanted to see was the life. The folks are awful dirty; I wanted to take a scrubbing-brush and some Pearline and go at 'em.”
“A few American women with scrubbing-brushes would improve the Egyptian race,” I suggested. “How about the food?”
“Heavens! I've et everything there is going, I guess; it would take you a month to learn the names of the vittles. I've got 'em all in my diary.”
“I suppose you enjoyed the ruins,” I said.
And she went on:
“I saw a bull temple; it was very nice. You know, they used to worship bulls. I don't know what for. They must have been hard up for something to worship. There was five of us traveling on our own hooks. We saw one temple that was quite nicely carved—had crows and goats on it. I love goats. Sometimes I think that I must have been a goat in some previous life.”
I disagreed with her.
“The pyramids were curious things,” she continued. “Some folks never slid down into 'em at all after traveling all that distance, but I slid. Since I was a child I have always loved sliding. The most interesting thing I saw was three baby camels and some Highland soldiers in Jerusalem with no pants on and funny little skirts that came down to their knees,” she continued. “In the Holy Land I saw a lot of men in skirts with baggy pants reaching from their knees down.”
She was apparently much interested in the subject of pants, and hurried on:
“I found a wonderful old knocker there. By the way, I'm making a collection of knockers. Have you seen any good ones here in Rome?”
“Not a knocker! But I haven't been looking for them.” And I added, “I wonder some one doesn't make a collection of pants—pants of every age and clime.”
“What kind of pants did the ancient Romans wear?” she asked.
“The same as Adam—the style hadn't changed in ages.”
This woman had got a knocker in Jerusalem, and seen some baby camels and a number of pantless men; she had seen a bull temple and slid into a pyramid in Egypt; she had “et vittles” everywhere, and suffered from cramp in sundry places, and languished in a hot, stuffy state-room with a quarrelsome lady from Connecticut, all for sixteen hundred dollars and four months of time. Yet far more than half of the great caravan of American tourists invading Europe and the East get no more than she did. The poetry and beauty of the Old World and the money of the New are thus wasted on each other.
“America is a pretty good country,” I suggested. “There are buildings in New York as wonderful as any you will see here, and our scenery is excellent.”
“But we have no ruins,” said Mrs. Fraley.
“On the contrary, we have the grandest ruins in the world,” I insisted. “We have the ruins of slavery and of the old error of unequal, rights; there all our feudal inheritance has been turned into ruins. Even that everlasting lake of fire, which is still needed in Europe, is with us a cold and mossy ruin. Nothing in it but garbage these days. We have physical ruins, too, and very ancient ones, but we are a working community, not a show. In our structures, like the Pennsylvania Station, is the sublimity of hope and promise, not the sublimity of death and decay.”
My friends looked at me with surprise. They had heard only the lyrical chorus of their countrymen accompanied by the jingle of francs.
“You're right,” said the lumber king. “I thought that I'd try to live here a few years because I can't find enough playmates in America; every one is busy there. So I thought I'd come over here and study and fool around. It's done me good.”
“Fooling around is better than nothing if done with energy and vigor,” I suggested. “A capable fool-arounder isn't worth much, but he can keep his liver busy. Here they have professional fool-arounders with gold letters on their caps to set the pace. It's all right for a while, but you'll want to get back to the lumber business.”
“Maybe you're right, but Europe has done me a lot o' good,” said Mr. Pike. “The cure up at Kissingen fixed my stomach trouble. Cost like Sam Hill, but it knocked it out.”
“What was the cure?” I asked.
“Made me walk ten miles a day, and take baths and give up pastry, and go to bed at nine.”
“And you had to travel four thousand miles and give up a lot of good American money to learn that?” I asked. “Old Doctor Common Sense, assisted by a little will-power, would have done that for you without charge right in your own home. Is it possible that the old doctor has gone out of business in Prairie du Chien?”
“He died long ago,” said the lumber king. “We have to be led to water like a horse these days.”
“We follow Cook in the trails of Baedeker instead of following the hired man, and we value everything according to its cost,” I answered. “But it's good for the Yankee to travel in a pieless world.”
“Travel is such a wonderful thing!” exclaimed Mrs. Fraley, who preferred to paddle in the heavenly gush-ways. “Don't you love Italy?”
I took off my mental shoes and stockings and began to paddle with her.
“Grand country!” I splashed.
Then she lay down in the stream and got wet all over as follows:
“It's so wonderful! I love the churches and their music, and mosaics and statues, and the palaces and the nobility,” Mrs. Fraley chanted. “These well-bred Italians look so aristocratic!”
“And they act so aristocratic—nothing to do but eat and drink and sleep and dance and get married!” was my answer. “We're rather careless about those things in America. A real aristocrat always gets married very carefully and so rescues himself from the curse of toil if need be. We don't take any pains with our marrying. We marry in the most offhand, reckless fashion just to gratify our emotions.”
“We forget that a dollar married is better than two dollars earned,” said Betsey.
“And isn't soiled by perspiration,” I said. “In this room are some of the shrewdest marryers in the world—men who by careful attention to the business have amassed fortunes. Here, too, are some of the most promising young marryers in Italy. They are sure to make their mark.”
“Indeed! You must tell me of them,” said the good soul.
“I shall tell you of one only—not now but before I leave you,” I answered.
There was a high, moral purpose back of this remark, but it seemed to get me into trouble, for I had no sooner finished it than the frog gave a swift leap, broke his halter, and landed on me. I suppose that he was an Italian frog. Possibly he had only slipped his halter—I never learned the precise facts. Anyhow, he had got on the edge of the bowl unobserved, and picked out a partner. He could not have chosen a worse place to land, for he struck my shirt with a noisy thud just under my necktie, and bounded into a dish of French dressing and out of it. I saw him bracing, and was about to seize him when he fetched a leap that took him over the head of the lumber king. The frog landed with a wet thump on the bare back of the sockless princess—who sat close behind Mr. Pike—and tumbled into her train. He was not much of a bareback-rider, that's a sure thing. The princess gave a rebel yell and jumped to her feet and in honest Wisconsin English wanted to know what in God's name it was. The frog had got his toe-nails caught in some lace, and was captured by a waiter. Ladies who had not spoken the American language in years used it freely.
The princess left the room with her friends and a quantity of French dressing on her back. The diplomat looked at me and smiled and said:
“The princess is in hard luck, and I can't help speaking of it. If a meteor should fall into Italy it would land on the princess. Her husband gets drunk now and then and beats her up. I believe that he has worn out several canes on her person. I saw her once when she had been beaten black and blue. She decided then to leave him.”
“But didn't?” I asked.
“No; her husband made love to her again, and she couldn't resist him. He's a great love-maker. Two or three times she has been on the point of going back to her people, but hasn't. Poor thing! She's too proud to go home and acknowledge the truth—that she has been a fool and her husband a brute.”
I was now pretty well prepared for my next talk with Mrs. Norris.
We left the dining-room, and I took Mrs. Fraley to a seat in the corridor and told her of the knight-like temperament of the young Count Carola, and of his high rank as a discoverer of wealth and beauty.
She showed no surprise, but said: “We had heard that he was engaged to Miss Norris, but the count says that the report is untrue. He has not really asked my niece to marry him yet, but he calls her the most beautiful woman he ever saw. Do you blame him?”
“Not a bit, although your niece is the second girl to whom he has awarded the first premium within three days. There may be others, but that is going some.”
All this had no effect on the armor-clad, brain-proof lady to whom it was addressed.
“It's his natural chivalry,” she said, as I rose to go.
“And discovering the most beautiful woman in the world is his daily habit,” was my answer; and we bade each other good night.
When Betsey and I were going home she gave me an account of her talk with Mrs. Rantone. The young woman's father had been a successful Minnesota grocer. The family came to Italy on a Cook's tour. The young man fell in love with the grocer's daughter, and they met him everywhere they went. He followed them to Minnesota, and the two were married there. Mrs. Rantone had said that he was a fine man and an excellent doctor, but that his friends would have nothing to do with her because she was the daughter of a tradesman of moderate means. They had supposed that every American who traveled abroad was rich, as indeed such travelers ought to be. After living nearly eight years in Rome she had only three Italian friends. She naturally felt that she was a dead weight on the shoulders of her husband; that she could contribute nothing to his success and she was most unhappy.
“Are your parents still living in Minnesota?” Betsey asked.
“They're all alone in the old home,” said the poor expatriate.
“They must miss you terribly.”
“Well, why did they bring me here?” was her pathetic answer.
I could see that Betsey was recovering from the fascinations of the marriage market.
“The 'devil-op-ments' of this night should have some effect on the price of Romeos,” I remarked.
“And the insanity of Juliets,” said Betsey. “I'm going to spring this on Gwen and her mother. But they won't believe it.”
When we arrived at our hotel its porter gave me a note from Norris which said:
“Please come to my room on receipt of this.”