III
One Saturday the telephone rang, and it was Vernon Roscoe calling Dad. Bunny happened to answer, and heard the jovial voice, “Hello, how’s the boy Bolsheviki? Say, Jim Junior, I thought you were coming up to my place! Eventually—why not now? Annabelle is resting from ‘Pangs of Passion’—she’ll be glad to see you. Vee Tracy is there, and Harvey Manning—quite a bunch of people over Sunday. Sure, I’ll be up! You go ahead, your old man will tell you the way.”
Bunny told Dad he had accepted the invitation, and Dad said that Mr. Roscoe’s domestic arrangements were such that Bunny ought to be told about them in advance. Annabelle Ames, the moving picture actress, was what people called his mistress, but it wasn’t really that, because she was devoted to him, and all their friends knew about it, and it was jist the same as being married; only, of course, there was Mrs. Roscoe, who lived in the house in the city, with her four sons. Mrs. Roscoe went in for society and all that, and had tried to drag Verne in, but he wasn’t cut out for that life. Sometimes Mrs. Roscoe would go out to the Monastery, as the country place was called, but of course not when Miss Ames was there; Dad said they must have some system to keep from running into each other. Miss Ames had her own house, near to the studio, and the Monastery was a “show-place,” where they took their friends over week-ends.
You drove up behind a chain of mountains that lined the coast: another of those wonderful roads, a magic ribbon of concrete laid out by a giant’s hand. The engine purred softly and you raced ahead of the wind, up long slopes and down long slopes, and winding through mazes of hills; there were steep grades and vistas of tumbled mountains, and broad sweeps of valley, and stretches of shore with fishermen’s huts, and boats, and nets drying in the sun; then more hills and mountain grades—for hours you flew, as fast as you pleased, for you were twenty-one now, and Dad no longer expected you to obey the speed-laws.
There was a road that branched off towards the ocean, and after climbing ten miles or so, you came to a high steel fence, and steel gates, and a sign: “Private: Turn Back Here.”—and a wide place in the road, made especially so that you might obey! The gate was open, so Bunny drove on, and climbed another hill, and came over the brow, and then, oh, wonderful!—a great bowl of yellow and green, two or three miles across, with one side broken out towards the ocean, and in the center of the bowl the grey stone towers of the Monastery! Mountains on every side, and the oil magnate owned everything in sight, both the land and the landscape; if the public wanted to see his retreat, it would have to get a row-boat, or swim.
You rolled down the winding drive, through tumbled masses of rocks and clumps of live oaks a century or two old, and came to a fork in the road, and one way said “Delivery,” and the other said, “Guests.” If you were so fortunate as to be a guest, your road led under a porte-cochere big enough for half a dozen double-decker stages; a footman appeared, and summoned a chauffeur to take your car to the garage, and you were escorted into a living-room—well, it was like going into a cathedral, your eyes would follow the arches overhead, and you might trip yourself on the skin of an aurochs or a gnu or whatever the dickens it was. What grim sardonic architect had played this jest of Gothic towers and steeples and crenellations and machicolations—here in the midst of a new pagan empire, and called by such a very suggestive name! Assuredly, the Monastery would need to be of pre-reformation style, to fit the ways of the monk who occupied it!
The transept of the cathedral concealed an elevator, Bunny discovered; and out of it tripped suddenly a diminutive vision in lemon-colored chiffon, with lemon-colored stockings and shoes, and a big lemon-colored hat such as shepherdesses used to wear when having their portraits painted. It was complete and costly enough for a fancy-dress ball; and no introduction was needed, for Bunny was one of that ninety percent of all males in the civilized world, and perhaps seventy percent in Madagascar, Paraguay, Nova Zembla, Thibet and New Guinea, who could have told the number of lashes in each of Annabelle Ames’s eyelids, or drawn a diagram of her dimples, and the exact course of a tear down her cheek. He had seen her as the “wild” daughter of a Pittsburg steel king, duly chastened and brought to faith in mother, home and heaven; as the mistress of a French king, dying elegantly to expiate elegant sins; as the mistreated and eloping heiress of a Georgian manor-house; as a bare-legged “mountainy-girl” in the Blue Ridge—“Howdy, stranger, be you-all one of them revenooers?” All this in the “movies”; and now here she was in the “speakies!”
“So this is Mr. Ross!” Her “speakie” was a queer little high treble. “Papa has told me so much about you!” (Papa was Mr. Roscoe.) “I’m so glad to have you here, and do make yourself at home. Do whatever you please, for this is liberty hall.” Bunny recalled the caption—but was it from “Hearts of Steel,” or from “The Maid of the Manor?”
“And here is Harve,” the mistress of the manor was saying. “Oh, Harve, come here, this is Bunny Ross; Harvey Manning. It’s the first time Mr. Ross has been here, and please be nice to him so he’ll come back. He’s going to college, and reads a lot and knows everything, and we’re going to seem so ignorant and frivolous!”
Harvey Manning was coming in through one of the French windows which took the place of the stations of the cross in this cathedral. He was walking slowly, and did not increase his pace; he talked slowly also, a dry sort of drawl—having never had to hurry, because he came of one of the old families of the state. He had a queer, ugly face, with a great many wrinkles, and Bunny never was clear whether he was old or young. “Hello, Ross,” he said, “pleased-to-meecher. I got an uncle that’s spending a hundred thousand dollars to put you in jail.”