House of All Nations (34 page)

‘Don't go out with him publicly, Haidee.'

‘Naturally, I will. I have every right to. He's my lover.'

‘No wonder your daughter thinks about nothing but sex.'

‘Press the bell again, darling. She must be snoring her head off, the lazy devil.'

Dimitri pressed it and hung his head. ‘What sort of a home have I?' She laughed, got up very sprightly. ‘You've a five months' home here and a seven months' home in Paris. I threw in four children for a bonus. How many has she got? You've only spent ten thousand pounds on your Paris girl. She's economical! You've spent one hundred and forty thousand pounds on this home in the last twenty years, for running expenses. I've still done better because my marriage settlement is intact. Suzette! Bring me some tea and some writing paper: I want you to take round a note to Mr. Konstantin's house as soon as it is light.'

The maid, a pretty young Greek girl, laughed, ‘Yes, Madame. And Monsieur, some tea?'

‘Yes, bring him the cup with the pink roses that Mr. Konstantin likes so much!'

‘Yes, Madame.'

‘I was going to divorce you, Haidee,' said Dimitri severely, ‘but now I find this out, I will do no such thing. Have you running round the Mediterranean with Munychion a few weeks after the divorce and everyone pointing at me: the fat old businessman. No! You've gone too far. Now you'll get no divorce. And I'll cut off your allowance. You'll have to pay for yourself.'

She had a self-satisfied chuckle. ‘Then Papa will sue you for the twelve hundred pounds you stole from him when you were in his office. We shall see with whom I will be riding and who will be handing me clysters, you mildewed meat pie! I tapped all your telephone calls the last two years. Ha! That surprises you!'

Dimitri had gone red and then pale. ‘You did that?'

‘Yes.'

He suddenly began to laugh, ‘Ah, ah, ah—that's a joke, that's funny. Ah, ah, ah!'

‘What's so funny,' she said sharply, ‘it is funny, old coal sack, the way you run out with fifteen waitresses in one month.'

‘Ah, ah, ah,' he cried, with tears in his eyes, ‘and I was tapping you, Haidee: for the past eighteen months I was tapping your telephone, too. That was why I was so surprised about Munychion.'

She sat bolt upright. ‘I knew very well you were tapping me: I found the receiver in your collar case. I just fooled you, darling: I just faked all those calls. All the time I wrote to Konstantin!'

‘It is funny just the same, ah, ah, ah!'

‘Yes, it really is funny: ah, ah.'

When Suzette came back she found them both in the merriest mood and she put the rose cup down in front of Dimitri laughing too, ‘Ee-ee-ee.'

‘And then you slept with Suzette on the fifteenth of May last,' laughed Haidee.

‘Oh, yes, it is too funny,' said Dimitri and pinched Suzette on the arm.

‘Suzette,' said the lady, ‘run along, now, my girl. Get your sleep. You must run off to Munychion first thing in the morning.'

Dimitri stopped laughing. ‘No, now that's going too far.'

Haidee kicked her ruby velvet slippers and wound the edge of the silk bed sheet in her fingers. She looked gravely at Dimitri. ‘Old man, you don't know how far I'm going. I have sent a book of poems to the publisher's, and they are coming out in two days: they have Konstantin's name on the title page. You will be forced then. I knew you, you coward. I have given Konstantin jewels too: he gets nothing, the poor, sweet darling, from that boat company he runs.'

‘You should see,' said Dimitri sitting up, ‘what I gave Mme. Eloth: five diamond bracelets, all in one night.'

‘Oh, indeed! It's too much, you miserable fellow! Five! You gave me a pearl brooch for my birthday! Go to the devil with your disgusting Eloth. I'll kill you. I won't stand that. Oh, you misery.' She rushed to him, took him by surprise, laid him out and so kicked, pinched, cuffed, and scratched him that he began weeping and saying weakly, ‘Don't, Haidee, don't, darling dear, don't. You're hurting me, Haidee.'

In the morning Haidee rode out with Konstantin Munychion dressed beautifully and modestly in black, with diamonds and ebony ornaments. Konstantin's emerald bracelet flashed in the sunlight. Haidee's dignified carriage and sweet, melancholy smiles made everyone feel she was only doing the right thing. A woman has to protect herself in this life.

* * *

Scene Thirty-one: Poor Pasteur

Letter from Mme. Mimi Eloth to Dimitri Achitophelous, in Constantinople, June, 1931

Hôtel Baur-au-Lac, Zurich

D
arling,

Thanks for you letter from the 17th and I think already thanked you for you letter to Paris. I am very sorry you still have troubels with you daughter and you are so lonely with no one to love you: but for one thing I wouldn't take the responsibility to force you daughter to wedding with a nice boy yet if she is unwilling. As for you newphew: do not worry about him: he wants nothing but money. Do you not realize, darling, that all these people only troubel you so much because you give them a handout? You are the richest of you family: that is a curse. They do not respect you more for it, darling. I see these peopel with the eye of you good friend, like a man. Do not take you wife so soon to that doctor about indigestion: perhaps it is not a cure. If it
was
, the world would know about it. Indigestion is not an uncommon troubel, after all. But still, who can tell? If you read the great Pasteur's life you feel what scientists have to go
through
before they gat
acknowledge
. I know this now myself through bitter sorrow—I mean what peopel have to go through to get knowledge of the world. I have written different letters to you about the bonds which are mine and about the annuity of which I have usufruct. My lawyer tells me that different letters he had addressed to you concerning all this have not been answered: I do not know if you got these darling, or if someone else got them. If it is not interesting to you any more, I can do no more. All other things with me develop not favorable. But what can I do? It is not my mistake and yet my mistake. I should have stayed in my homeland and settel. What is there to do for me now but to commit suicide? I could go to the Midi and live in poverty in a littel hovel for £20 monthly and my expenses for dresses, etc., down to ten thousand francs yearly, for whom have I to dress for? or I can take out life insurance for 100,000 guilder in your name and my poor mother's name and after three years is up suicide. I go to the hairdresser, make up, laugh but underneath I am a mummy. I am certainly home at our home in Paris the 10th July to present you with a birthday cake and wish and fifty-one candles. I am the only one you say who ever geb you a birthday cake. I am terribly down and depressed: my tears really don't stop a minute and I feel a big fool in life. Please make enquiries about the life insurance and the limit for suicide as I begged you above I think it is three years. Saturday I leave for
Rome
, then to Zurich again, then for Berlin to see my friends. But though I travel and travel, I know I have fail in life. You have shown me this. Why is this? And I thought you promised me so much! How fate makes us a great fool, all of us.

Love, M.

P.S. I am sorry I cannot find the diamond bracelet you ask me for back to get altered. I move so much, I mislay things. I will look for it. I am so sorry you have business losses. This was the only thing I love most and what proves it is the other things I have put in a safe-deposit in my mother's bank, also the lovely fur coat you geb me. But if you want it back, I will get it and will not mind been a little cold if my darling has had business losses.

M.

P.P.S. Forgive, as always, my
Greek
: I learn it but recently because I think I am going to preside at dinner-table of my darling. But now it is not so and really I am so sad I cannot write good Greek. M.

From Dimitri Achitophelous to Mme. Mimi Eloth, June, 1931

Constantinople, June, 1931

My Own Sweetie,

I have your letter, my darling. Business is very bad. I will be in Paris on the 9th for our party on the 10th. I am so worried about business, sweetheart darling, and about my troubles at home that I cannot think about anything else. I cannot make out how your lawyer's letters to me went astray. I look in every post for letters from you. We will look for the bracelet when I get home. Do not worry about me. When I have made another million I will get out of business and solve our life problems. And so I must work!

D.

P.S. I was too bullish and I lost some money this week. D.

* * *

Scene Thirty-two: Real Romance

H
enri Léon was very happy. At the age of forty-three he was once more head over heels in love. He was full of love and gratitude for Margaret Weyman who so unexpectedly unsealed the fountains of his earliest passions and thrust him out into a deafening wind storm of desires with a few stars above, the Venus of adolescence, the early twilight globes of hope, content, and fresh blood, the rare warm rain of love given again. Léon called himself a Don Juan and Casanova indifferently, but for the greater part of his life he was no more than a great cock, calling on compliant women, getting and giving little joy, arousing no love.

He had good looks, lustihood, power. He smiled and sang sweetly, spent money freely on women, pursued them relentlessly. But his obsession was money-making and his great appetite degenerated into a petty satyriasis: he picked up the women who were in the love business, because it saved time, and muffed the few affairs that sprang up spontaneously with pretty, plump, respectable, middle-class women, the kind he really admired, because he wanted the consummation as quickly as with café women and because, taking advantage of their respectability, he gave them their fare home instead of large presents.

And even the splendid women that, with a sultan's eye, he picked out occasionally in the great hotels and on the fashionable boulevards, like Mme. Vera Ashnikidzé and the so-called Russian Princess, he treated no better, except that, as they were in the thousand-franc class, he gave them a thousand francs where he gave some poor girl frequenting the dark corners of the Place Vendôme at night, one hundred.

But Léon was at heart still the village lad who rushes the village girls and likes to count the number of his triumphs. True, he only counted them over to himself, but his chief satisfaction in venal love was, as in money-making and bondholding, the
number
of women he slept with. He was modest. Still like a village lad, he feared and rejected the multifarious arts of the great strumpets.

For years Léon proclaimed to all his friends that he was looking for a love affair. He regularly regaled Méline, Raccamond, little Kratz, with stories of Mme. Léon's stupidity and wept over his misfortunes, even though his eye would stray during his stories and he would note with swelling bosom every pretty leg that came within a hundred yards. His children he said, didn't love him (but he was never at home), his wife never talked to him (but he only talked about money and she had enough of her own).

On the chapter of his love conquests it was that little Kratz was able to make the most biting comments. ‘You a great lover! Huh. You buy your women like a grocer. You have a lot of money, so you buy more than I can, that's all. Don't make me laugh.'

‘Listen,' Léon would answer good-humoredly, ‘Kratz—it's true I buy them. But look at me: a great dome, a great tail, short, thick, and forbidding, the money type, not the love type. There are a hundred dandies and grenadier guards and Rudolph Valentinos hanging round every night club. But they all go for me and I get them for the same price as the Valentinos. So? So I must have some winning ways.'

‘You buy them,' Kratz shouted in malicious triumph, ‘you buy them. They go for you because the dandies look like monthly allowances and you look like the king of the stock exchange. You sound, talk, look, smell fat money. When you're out to get a whore you buy the dearest champagne, you bring out that million-dollar wallet of yours, you command, unwrap a roll of domestic and foreign bills of the largest denominations, you snap your fingers rudely like a man used to ordering a clutter of miserable clerks about. You fool, you look like big vulgar money.'

‘Not vulgar,' Léon would say in a softer voice, disappointed. ‘They know men. They know I spend freely on them. I'm not mean.'

‘You buy them,' triumphed little Kratz, ‘you buy them. Look at me, thin, rat-faced, poor: obviously your hanger-on. I get women for nothing.' Léon would frown. Kratz did get them for nothing, but he was a mean, poor-spirited fellow—he only went out with hopeless nursemaids, servant girls, and ignorant poor lonely women, timidly trying to help out their miserable fare given them in the kitchens they inhabited, too fearful and too stupid to put a price on their favors.

This insult, repeated and stuck on to others, was one of the reasons for the separation of the old cronies.

Léon had been looking round for some years and had begun to feel really pathetic, when Mrs. Weyman appeared, told him he had a challenging personality and a handsome face and refused to go to bed with him. Instead of angling for flowers and scents, she gave him a swagger cigarette case of ebony and chased gold, with his initials inset. This was the first time Léon had received any gift from any woman but his daughter.

Léon could not sleep without the gold cigarette case, looked at it a hundred times a day, drew it out as often as he could: besides being his unique present, it had cost Margaret Weyman, he calculated, fully eight thousand francs! Léon fell in love ‘at first sight.'

Léon therefore prepared to go into his love affair in the style of a pasha. His little house was one of the most charming in Amsterdam, in a rich and progressive district. He had drawn up a maintenance agreement between himself and Margaret. In the meantime, Mrs. Weyman had united affection and interest and fallen in love with Henri Léon and there was talk of divorce and marriage. Mrs. Weyman had, in fact, already instituted divorce proceedings against her husband. When Léon asked her to sign the contract that he had prepared, she became thoughtful. To tell the truth, she was disappointed. ‘Be honest with me, Henri. If you're not going to marry me, tell me, and I'll make other plans.'