VIII
Cosmo Rand
ON Saturday Gurdy brought down three young men who hadn’t met Margot. He busily noted the chemistry of passion as two of his friends became maniacal by Sunday morning. Against the worn composure of Lady Ilden, the girl had the value of a gem on dim velvet. The third young man wanted to talk Irish politics to the Englishwoman who evaded him and retired to write a letter in her bedroom above the lawn.
She wrote to her husband at Malta: “I had always thought that Margot’s success in London was due to her exotic quality. But she seems quite as successful on her native heath. This leads me to the general platitude that boys are the same the world over. I am a success here, too. Many callers, mostly female, in huge motor cars. The American woman seems to consider frocks a substitute for manners and conversation. Mark is anxious that Margot should marry Gurdy Bernamer and Gurdy is plainly willing. It would be suitable enough. The boy has smart friends and will inherit £10,000 from old Mr. Carlson. Margot can float herself in local society no doubt. She is now playing tennis with two young brokers and a 22 year old journalist whose father owns half of some State. I have mailed you a strange work, ‘Jurgen’ by some unheard of person. Do not let any of the more moral midshipmen read it.” She stopped, seeing Gurdy saunter across the lawn toward the beach and pursued him to where he curled on the sand. “You frighten me,” she said, taking her eyes from the scar that showed its upper reach above his bathshirt, “you lie about two thirds naked in this sun and then tell me it’s a cool day.—But I want to be documented in American fiction. I’ve read five novels since Wednesday. It seems to be established that all your millionaires are conscious villains and all your poor are martyrs except a select group known as gangsters. That’s thrilling when the reviewers so loudly insist that your authors flatter the rich.”
“Some of them do,” Gurdy said, lifting his legs in the hot air.
In a bathsuit he lost his civilized seeming, was heroic, sprawled on the sand. Olive told him: “You’re one of those victims of modernity, old son. You belong to thirteen forty. Green tights and a dark tunic trimmed with white fur. Legs are legs, aren’t they?”
“Heredity’s funny,” he said, “I look exactly like my father.”
“Margot’s Uncle Eddie? She talks of him a good deal and of your mother. I was rather afraid her metropolitan airs and graces would shock your people but she seems to have had a jolly time down there—New Jersey’s down from here, isn’t it? She enjoyed herself.—Metropolitan airs and graces!—That’s a quotation from something. Sounds like the Manchester Guardian.—Should I like your people?”
“You might. Grandfather’s an atheist. Dad’s a good deal of a cynic. They’re awfully nice small town people. My sisters all wish they were movie stars and my kid brothers think that a fighting marine is the greatest work of God.”
“And Margot says they all think you’re the last and best incarnation of Siegfried. I should like to see them.”
Gurdy shuddered. Grandfather Walling and Mrs. Bernamer held Lady Ilden responsible for the ruin of Margot as a relative. He imagined her artifice and her ease faced by the horrified family—a group of frightened colts stumbling off from a strange farmhand. He poured sand over his arm and lied, “You’d scare them. Mark’s always talked about you as though you were the Encyclopædia Brittanica on two legs. You might be interested, though.—I say, Mark’s decided that he will produce ‘Todgers Intrudes.’ Thinks he’ll have Cosmo Rand play the Earl. Can Rand really act?”