She referred to her experiences abroad. She had not liked Europe—being quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County a foreigner was a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants, and was under suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The people she had met under her husband’s charge had been socially indubitable, but still, they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never really be sure what they meant.
There was, for instance, the young son of a German steel-king, a person of amazing savoir faire, who had made bold to write books and exhibit pictures, and had travelled so widely that he had even heard of Castleman County. He had taken Sylvia to show her the sights of Berlin, and had rolled her down the “Sieges Allée,” making outrageous fun of his Kaiser’s taste in art, and coming at last to a great marble column, with a female figure representing Victory upon the top. “You will observe,” said the cultured young plutocrat, “that the Grecian lady stands a hundred meters in the air, and has no stairway. There is a popular saying about her which is delightful—that she is the only chaste woman in Berlin!”
I had been through the culture-seeking stage, and knew my Henry James; so I could read between the lines of Sylvia’s experiences. I figured her as a person walking on volcanic ground, not knowing her peril, but vaguely disquieted by a smell of sulphur in the air. And once in a while a crack would open in the ground! There was the Duke of Something in Rome, for example, a melancholy young man, with whom she had coquetted, as she did, in her merry fashion, with every man she met. Being married, she had taken it for granted that she might be as winsome as she chose; but the young Italian had misunderstood the game, and had whispered words of serious import, which had so horrified Sylvia that she flew to her husband and told him the story—begging him incidentally not to horse-whip the fellow. In reply it had to be explained to her she had laid herself liable to the misadventure. The ladies of the Italian aristocracy were severe and formal, and Sylvia had no right to expect an ardent young duke to understand her native wildness.
11. Something of that sort was always happening—something in each country to bewilder her afresh, and to make it necessary for her husband to remind her of the proprieties. In France, a cousin of van Tuiver’s had married a marquis, and they had visited the chateau. The family was Catholic, of the very oldest and strictest, and the brother-in-law, a prelate of high degree, had invited the guests to be shown through his cathedral. “Imagine my bewilderment!” said Sylvia. “I thought I was going to meet a church dignitary, grave and reverent; but here was a wit, a man of the world. Such speeches you never heard! I was ravished by the grandeur of the building, and I said: ‘If I had seen this, I would have come to you to be married.’ ‘Madame is an American,’ he replied. ‘Come the next time!’ When I objected that I was not a Catholic, he said: ‘Your beauty is its own religion!’ When I protested that he would be doing me too great an honour, ‘Madame,’ said he, ‘the honneur would be all to the church!’ And because I was shocked at all this, I was considered to be a provincial person!”
Then they had come to London, a dismal, damp city where you “never saw the sun, and when you did see it it looked like a poached egg”; where you had to learn to eat fish with the help of a knife, and where you might speak of bitches, but must never on any account speak of your stomach. They went for a week-end to “Hazelhurst,” the home of the Dowager Duchess of Danbury, whose son van Tuiver, had entertained in America, and who, in the son’s absence, claimed the right to repay the debt. The old lady sat at table with two fat poodle dogs in infants’ chairs, one on each side of her, feeding out of golden trays. There was a visiting curate, a frightened little man at the other side of one poodle; in an effort to be at ease he offered the wheezing creature a bit of bread. “Don’t feed my dogs!” snapped the old lady. “I don’t allow anybody to feed my dogs!”
And then there was the Honourable Reginald Annersley, the youngest son of the family, home from Eton on vacation. The Honourable Reginald was twelve years of age, undersized and ill-nourished. (“They feed them badly,” his mother had explained, “an’ the teachin’s no good either, but it’s a school for gentlemen.”) “Honestly,” said Sylvia, “he was the queerest little mannikin—like the tiny waiter’s assistants you see in hotels on the Continent. He wore his Eton suit, you understand—grown-up evening clothes minus the coat-tails, and a top hat. He sat at tea and chatted with the mincing graces of a cotillion-leader; you expected to find some of his hair gone when he took off his hat! He spoke of his brother, the duke, who had gone off shooting seals somewhere. ‘The jolly rotter has nothing to do but spend his money; but we younger sons have to work like dogs when we grow up!’ I asked what he’d do, and he said ‘I suppose there’s nothin’ but the church. It’s a beastly bore, but you do get a livin’ out of it.’
“That was too much for me,” said Sylvia. “I proceeded to tell the poor, blasé infant about my childhood; how my sister Celeste and I had caught half-tamed horses and galloped about the pasture on them, when we were so small that our little fat legs stuck out horizontally; how we had given ourselves convulsions in the green apple orchard, and had to be spanked every day before we had our hair combed. I told how we heard a war-story about a ‘train of gunpowder,’ and proceeded to lay such a train about the attic of Castleman Hall, and set fire to it. I might have spent the afternoon teaching the future churchman how to be a boy, if I hadn’t suddenly caught a glimpse of my husband’s face!”
12. I did not hear these stories all at once. I have put them together here because they make a little picture of her honeymoon, and also because they show how, without meaning it, she was giving me an account of her husband.
There had been even fewer adventures in the life of young Douglas van Tuiver than in the life of the Honourable Reginald Annersley. When one heard the details of the up-bringing of this “millionaire baby,” one was able to forgive him for being self-centred. He had grown into a man who lived to fulfil his social duties, and he had taken to wife a girl who was reckless, high-spirited, with a streak of almost savage pride in her.
Sylvia’s was the true aristocratic attitude towards the rest of the world. It could never have occurred to her to imagine that anywhere upon the whole earth there were people superior to the Castlemans of Castleman County. If you had been ignorant enough to suggest such an idea, you would have seen her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver; you would have been enveloped in a net of bewilderment and transfixed with a trident of mockery and scorn. That was what she had done in her husband-hunt. The trouble was that van Tuiver was not clever enough to realise this, and to trust her prowess against other beasts in the social jungle.