The Transgression of Andrew Vane: A Novel

by Guy Wetmore Carryl

"It's the things you happen on which you will enjoy," he said, "not those you go to work to find, by taking a tram or walking a mile. Unpremeditated discoveries, like unpremeditated dissipations, are always the most successful. There's nothing so flat as a plan."

As was to be expected, Mrs. Carnby was not able to monopolize Andrew. Mrs. Ratchett took him into her good graces, and, as was usual with her where men were concerned, contrived to make him think of her between his calls. And there were many others—women characteristic of the American Colony, whose husbands were never served up except with dinner. It was as Mrs. Carnby told him:

"If a bachelor has manners, discretion, and presentable evening dress, he need never pay for a dinner in Paris, so long as the Colony knows of his existence. And remember this. Nothing is dearer to a woman's heart than a man at five o'clock. She will excuse anything, if you'll give her a chance to remember how many lumps you take and whether it's cream or lemon. Attend to your teas, my young friend, and you can do just about as you like about your p's and q's!"

Madame Palffy, too, seeking whom she might entertain (which, in her case, was equivalent to devouring), collected young men as geologists collect specimens of minerals. The analogy was strengthened by her predilection for chipping off portions—the darker portions—of their characters, and handing these around for the edification of her friends. She cultivated Andrew assiduously, though it was not for this reason that he dropped in so frequently at tea-time. Margery, with her clean-cut beauty, appealed to him in a very special sense. They had in common many memories of the free, open-air, sane, and wind-blown life of the North Shore; and now, when they idled through portions of "The Persian Garden," which had been the fad at Beverly, it was by way of getting a whiff of sea air, and an echo of the laughter that had been.

Often he found himself looking at her admiringly. She had the knack of satisfying one's sense of what ought to be. Her dress was almost always of a studied simplicity which depended for its effect entirely upon colour and fit, and could have been bettered in neither. Not the least factor in her striking beauty was its purity, its freedom from the smallest suggestion of artificiality. She was singularly alive, admirably clear-eyed and strong, and in her fresh propriety there was always a challenge to the open air and the full light of day. She had, even in the ballroom, an indefinable hint of out-of-doors. The contrast between her personality and that of Parisian women—of Mirabelle Tremonceau, for example—was the contrast between the clean, dull linen of a New England housekeeper and the dainty shams of an exhibition bedroom; between a physician's hands and a manicure's; between the keen, salt air of the North Shore and that of a tropical island. Her femininity impressed where that of others merely charmed. The majority of women are pink: Margery Palffy was a soft, clear cream.

Nevertheless, Andrew seemed to feel, rather than to see, a subtle alteration in her. A few months had given her a new reserve, almost an attitude of distrust, which puzzled and eluded him. Their talks at Beverly had been different from these. There, they had spoken much of the future, of what they hoped and believed: here they skirted, instead of boldly boarding, serious topics, and were fallen unconsciously, but immediately, into the habit of chaffing each other over meaningless trifles. He was baffled and disconcerted by the change. There was much which he had come to say. He had rehearsed it all many times, and remembering the charming lack of constraint which had characterized all their former intercourse, to say it had seemed comparatively easy. But now he was like a man who has been recalling his fluent renderings, at school or college, of the classic texts, but, suddenly confronted with the same passages, cannot translate a word.

Again, the presence of her family depressed him with something of her own visible distress, humiliated him with something of her own evident shame. There was no such thing as making allowances for either Monsieur or Madame Palffy. From the moment of one's first glimpse of them, they were hopelessly and irretrievably impossible. Not that they had the faintest suspicion of this. They were supremely self-satisfied, and moved massively through life with a firm conviction that they fulfilled all requirements. Madame, with her frightful French, was as complacent in a conversation with a duchess of the Faubourg as was Monsieur, with his feeble and flatulent observations upon subjects of which he had no knowledge, in a company of after-dinner smokers. It was impossible to exaggerate their preternatural idiocy. A bale of cotton, suddenly introduced into polite society, could have manifested no more stupendous lack of resource than they. It was only when tempted with the bait of gossip—most probably untrue—that they rose heavily to the surface of the conversation instead of floundering in its depths. Half the Colony detested them, all of the Colony laughed at them, and none of the Colony believed them. In short—they were Monsieur and Madame Palffy. There was no more to be said.

Had Margery been farther from him, curiously enough she would have been far more readily approached in the manner which Andrew had planned. He was far from comprehending that it was her vital and intimate interest in him which showed her that he would note all the defects of the deplorable frame wherein he thus found her placed. The very fact that they had known each other under different and happier conditions forced her to assume the defensive now that other circumstances were patent to his eyes. She was intensely proud. There must be no chance for him to pity her. So, she assumed a gaiety which she was far from feeling, and sought in the by-ways of banter a refuge from the broader and more open road of surrender. On her side and on his it was a more mature case of the painful embarrassment incidental to the early stages of a children's party. They had played unrestrainedly together, as it were, but now, in the artificial light of a society strange to both of them, were stricken dumb.

From the strain of this baffling position Andrew sought relief in the company of Mirabelle Tremonceau. Here was no constraint, no unuttered solemnities to come up choking into the throat. She was very beautiful, very inconsequent, very gay; but the same light insouciance which in Margery distressed and humiliated him, because of the unsounded deeps which lay below, attracted and amused him in Mirabelle, by simple reason of its essential shallowness. She was altogether different from any woman he had ever known, but her novelty meant no more to him than a part of that charmingly sparkling and intoxicating wine of Paris of which he was learning to take deep draughts. Never for an instant did it alter the strength of the original purpose which had brought him from America, but it went far toward lessening the keen disappointment which Margery's apparent disregard of that purpose caused him. In the latter's presence he was exquisitely sensitive to the possible significance of every word. He thought too much, and the sombre current of these reflections too often darkened the surface of conversation, turned her uneasy and unnatural, and sent him away in a fit of the blues. With Mirabelle, on the contrary, he never thought at all. Since he had nothing to ask of her beyond what she had already granted him—the privilege of her friendship and the fascination of her presence—he enjoyed these to the full. It was his consuming desire for another and more tender relation with Margery that caused him to be blind to the promise of that which existed—almost to despise it.