Saratoga Trunk (17 page)

Clio Dulaine had lingered and dawdled in the train so that she was almost the last passenger to step onto the depot platform. The confusion was at its height. Bells clanged, whisties tooted, horses plunged and reared, the hotel runners shouted, “Grand Union bus here! Take your bus for the United States Hotel! Clarendon! Congress Hall this way!”

As she stepped off the train at Saratoga Spa it was characteristic of Clio Dulaine that she was not dressed in the utilitarian black or snuffy brown ordinarily worn for traveling by the more practical feminine world. She was wearing gray, sedate yet frivolous, the costume of a luxurious woman who need not concern herself with travel stains and dust. The litde gray shoulder cape of ottoman silk was edged with narrow black French lace and its postilion back made her small waist look still tinier. Even her traveling hat (known as a Langtry turban) was relieved by its curl of gray and mauve ostrich tips nestiing against the black of her hair. A traveling costume de luxe; a hint of half-mourning whose wearer has long since dried her tears.

As she stepped off the train she looked about her in pretty bewilderment, her expression touched with the half-smile of expectancy. The noise and confusion were at their height as passengers were swept off into waiting carriages or buses; then the whistle, the clangor and the slow acceleration of the engine’s choo-choo-choo-choo-choo-choo-choo-choochoo as the train drew out. The noise reached a crescendo, died down, became a murmur. Sheriff O’Brien’s sorrels whirled him off in his dogcart, the Bissells’ long-tailed bays were twin streaks of red-brown against the landscape, the Forosini landau rolled richly off, the coats of the blooded blacks glinting like sadn in the sunlight. Cupide had trotted oft” to wrestie with the pyramid of trunks and boxes. And still the slim gray-clad figure, drooping a little now, stood on the station platform. Behind her, a sable pillar of support, was Kakaracou. But Clio’s speech, incisive though whispered, belied her attitude of forlorn uncertainty.

“Yes, I was right, Kaka. He’s the one who has been running up and down like a chick without its hen-mother. That must be his carriage with the sorrels and the groom. Look! Now he’s rushing into the waiting room. Quick, fetch Cupide, never mind about the trunks, when he comes out we must be standing near his cart, the three of us, put on your gloves, fool! Hold the jewel box well forward. Cupide! Quick! Here!”

She maneuvered the little group so that they stood between the waiting-room door and the team at the platform’s edge. When he came out he must pass them. And now Bartholomew Van Steed emerged, a somewhat frantic figure. A final searching look up and down the station platform—a look that included and rejected the group of three as being no part of his problem—and he sped, dejected, toward the waiting groom and horses. As swiftly Clio intercepted him.

“Pardon, Monsieur!” He stopped, stared. “Can you tell me where I may find a carriage to take me to the United States Hotel? Please.”

“Uh—why—” He waved a vague arm in the direction of the public hack stand, for he was full of his own troubles. He now saw that the space was deserted. Frowning, he looked back at her, into the lovely pleading face, seeing it now for the first time. His gaze traveled to the black woman behind her, to the strange little man in livery, then returned to her, and now her lip was quivering just a little, and she caught it between her teeth and clasped her gray-gloved hands.

“I was to have been met. Naturally. I cannot understand.” She turned and spoke rapidly to Kakaracou in French, “This is terrible. I don’t want to embarrass this gendemen. Can we send Cupide somewhere, perhaps—” Her appealing look came back to Van Steed. And now for the first time he seemed to see the striking group as a whole—the richly dressed young woman, the dignified Negress, the dwarf attendant, all surrounded by a barricade of hat-boxes, mono-grammed leather cases, fine leather bags, all the appurtenances of luxurious travel.

The brusqueness of perplexity now gave way to his natural shyness. He blushed, stammered, bowed. A tall man who appeared short perhaps because of his own inner uncertainty, perhaps because he stooped a little. Side whiskers and a rather ferocious mustache that did not hide the timidity of the lower face; a fine brow; amber eyes with a hurt look in them; a strong, arrogant hooked nose—the Van Steed nose. Clio Dulaine saw and weighed all this swiftly as she looked at him, her lips parted now like a child’s. Something of a dandy, poor darling, she thought, with that fawn-colored coat and the
sans souci
hat like that of a little boy playing in the Luxembourg Garden.

“Madame,” he began, “that is—Miss—uh—”

“I am the Comtesse—I mean I am Mrs. De Chanfret. I am sorry to have troubled you. It has been such a long and tiring trip. I had expected to be met. I am not fully recovered from—”

Two great pearly tears welled up, clung a moment to her lashes; she blinked bravely but they eluded her and sped down her cheeks. She dabbed at them with a tiny lace-bordered handkerchief.

“But Mrs. De Chanfret! Please! Uh—allow me to drive you to the United States Hotel. I am stopping there myself. I am Bart Van Steed, if I may—”

“Not—not Bartholomew Van Steed!” He admitted this with a bow and with that air of embarrassment which, oddly enough, seizes one when confronted with one’s own name. “But how enchanting! Like being met unexpectedly by a friend in a strange land. It is a strange land for me. But perhaps you are meeting someone else—”

At this his worried look returned, he glanced right and left as though the possibility still remained that he might have overlooked a passenger on the little depot platform. “I was expecting my mother. She telegraphed me that she would be on this train.”

Clio was all concern. “And she didn’t come?”

“I can’t imagine what happened. Maybe she’s on another train. But she never misses a train. And she never changes her mind.”

“Perhaps someone was playing a joke.”

“People do not play jokes on me,” said Bart Van Steed. “I shall send a telegram as soon as we reach the hotel.” He waved her toward the waiting carriage. “Lucky I drove the phaeton. Mother won’t ride in the dogcart. But I’m afraid there isn’t room for all—”

“You are so kind. This will do beautifully—for all of us.” The groom had jumped down, had handed the reins to Van Steed, and now was barely in time to hand Clio up, for her foot was on the step and she was seated beside Van Steed before he had well adjusted the ribbons. “My woman can sit back there with your groom—she’s very thin. And Cupidon can stand on the step, if necessary. . . . The bags just there . . . So . . . Kaka, have you my jewel-case? . . . That large bag here at my feet. I don’t mind. . . . The hotel porter will see to the trunks. . . . Cupide! There, on the steps . . . You see he’s so very little you will never notice he’s... It’s not far, I suppose ... This is wonderful! So kind! So very kind! I don’t know what I should have done if you hadn’t appeared like a shining knight. . . .”

She leaned a little toward him, she smiled her lovely poignant smile. She sighed. She thought, well, lucky I know how to manage, we’d never have been able to pile in. Not with this weak-chinned one.

Away they whirled. White-painted houses. Greek revival columns. Gingerbread fretwork. Ancient wine-glass elms. Smooth green lawns. “Oh, I like this! This is very American!” Clio clapped her hands like a child, and for once she was not acting. “Charming!” She turned slightly to call over her shoulder to Kakaracou, speaking in French. “Look, Kaka, look! This is America—but the real America!”

“ Tiens!’’’’
said Kaka, putting incredible sarcasm into the monosyllable.

“I gather that you have not visited Saratoga before,” said Bart Van Steed, weighdly. “I—uh—I speak some French.” Then, as she turned to him, eager to express her delight in the language with which she was most at ease, he added, hastily, “But only a little. A very little. I—uh—read it better than I speak it. You haven’t been here before, I gather.”

“I haven’t been anywhere. I am discovering America. It is amazing! So big! So new! All my life I have lived in France.” She was having a fine time being very French; little Gallic gestures; her hands, her inflection, the cooing note in her voice. He had noted the crest on her luggage, the initials on the filmy handkerchief, the tiny jeweled monogram on her reticule. The letter C was entwined with vines and fragile leaves and spirals.

“Are you here for the racing season?”

“I am a lover of horses. But I am here in the hope that the waters and the air will help me. Not,” she hastily added, “that I am ill. I never have been ill in my life. But I have heard that the waters are tonic and I hoped that the fresh bracing pine air and the tonic waters would restore my appetite.”

His full blond mustache quivered, his pale gold eyes turned to her sympathetically. “I’ve got a delicate digestion too.”

She thought, grimly, I’ll be bound you have! Aloud she said, “All sensitive people—especially those whose lives are lived in the midst of great responsibilities—are likely to have delicate digestions. Because of his diplomatic duties my husband the Count de—I mean for years my late husband had to have everything
purée,
almost like an infant’s food, really. Yet he was a man of the most brilliant mentality and marvelous achievement, like yourself.”

“My mother,” he announced, plaintively, “can digest anything. Anything. Sixty-seven.”

“How marvelous! But then, she probably isn’t your temperament. Not so delicately organized.”

“She’s as strong,” he announced with surprising and unconscious bitterness, “as an ox—that is—she’s got great strength and— uh—strength.”

“How—wond-er-ful!” she cooed in that paced leisurely voice. “And yet, do you know, sometimes these very, very strong wonderful people become sort of annoying to more highly sensitive ones like you and me—I don’t mean your dear mother, of course.”

He had barely time to say, “No, certainly not!” with guilty emphasis when they drew up before the fantastically columned entrance of the United States Hotel. The three passengers in Bartholomew Van Steed’s equipage stared in stunned unbelief at a sight which could be duplicated nowhere else in America—or in the world, for that matter. Slim columns rose three stories high from a piazza whose width and length were of the dimensions of a vast assembly room. A gay frieze of petunias and scarlet geraniums in huge boxes blazed like footlights to illumine the bizarre company that now crowded the space on the other side of the porch rail.

“Grand Dieu!”
was wrung from Clio Dulaine as she stared in shocked unbelief.

“Nom d’une pipe!”
squeaked Cupide.

“Mais, bizarre! Fantastique!”
muttered Kakaracou.

Up and down, up and down the length of the enormous piazza moved a mass of people, slowly, solemnly, almost treading on each other’s heels. The guests of the United States Hotel were digesting their gargantuan midday meal. Carriages and buses had already disgorged the passengers who had arrived on the half-past-two train, and these had been duly viewed, criticized and docketed by the promenaders. It was part of the daily program.

And now here was an unexpected morsel—a delicious bit to roll under the tongue. The vast company goggled, slowed its pace, came almost to a standstill like a regiment under command. En masse they stared with unabashed American curiosity at Bart Van Steed’s carriage and its occupants. Bartholomew Van Steed, the unattainable bachelor, the despair of matchmaking mamas, the quarry of all marriageable daughters, dashing up to the hotel entrance in broad daylight with a woman—with a young, beautiful and strange woman. One could discern that before she emerged.

Down jumped a midget in livery, gold buttons and all. Out stepped a majestic turbaned black woman looking for all the world like an exiled Nubian queen. Out jumped Bart Van Steed’s groom, then Van Steed threw him the reins and himself handed out the modish figure in gray and mauve.

A simple day, a crude society. Like figures in a gigantic marionette show the piazza faces turned toward the little procession as Clio, her skirts lifted ever so slightly, swept up the broad steps of the piazza into the vast white lobby. Beside her strode Bart Van Steed, and behind her a stream of satellites. Out rushed a covey of black bellboys and joined the parade, each snatching a hatbox, a case, a bag. The women noted the cut of the stranger’s ottoman silk gown, the fineness of the black French lace so wantonly edging a traveling cape; they saw the sly line of the Lily Langtry hat, the way the gray kid boots matched the richly rustling skirt. The men saw the slender ankle beneath the demurely lifted skirt, the curve of the figure in the postilion cape, the lovely cream-white coloring and the great dark eyes beneath the low-tipped hat.

“Why, the sly dog! I wouldn’t have believed it of him! He said it was his mother he was going to meet.”

Out pranced Roscoe Bean, the oily head usher, from his corner under the great winding stairway—Roscoe Bean, who winnowed the hotel wheat from the piazza chaff, who boasted he could tell the beau monde from the demimonde at first glance. A snob of colossal proportions, unctuous, flattering, malicious, he now skimmed toward the party so that the tails of his Prince Albert coat spread fanlike behind him. His arms were outspread, he swayed from the hips, it was a form of locomotion more like swimming than walking.

“Your ladyship!” he began, breathlessly, for his pervasive eye had glimpsed the omnipresent monograms and crests. “Your ladyship!” We didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”

“Please!” She raised a protesting hand. “I am Mrs. De Chanfret.”

“Yes, of course. Beg your pardon. Your letter said—”

She approached the desk. She did not even glance at the tall figure lounging against a pillar just next the clerk’s desk—a figure whose long legs were booted Western style, whose broad-brimmed white sombrero was pushed back slightly from his forehead, whose gaze lazily followed the spiraled smoke of the large fragrant cigar in his hand.

Even as she signed her name in the bold almost masculine hand—Mrs. De Chanfret—maid—groom—the room clerk, the sub-clerk, the hastily summoned manager and assistant manager wrung their hands and wailed in unison like a frock-coated Greek chorus.