The Embezzler (12 page)

For had they not always despised me? Did I not make Rex's success cheap in his own eyes by representing too vividly the very world he had spent a lifetime trying to conquer? One toiled and toiled in order to be what? Guy Prime! Exactly, Guy Prime, the symbol of well-born affluence, of the grandeur of old New York! And did I not, by being as much of a gentleman as Angelica professed to be a lady, make mock of her airs and traditions? Even of her sacred family?

They could not take it. They could not take my honesty, as the generation before them could not stomach my father's. My grandsons may be embarrassed to read the story of my courtship of Angelica—sex, curiously enough, is not expected in progenitors—but I beg them to remember that they were raised in hypocrisy and that a little truth may do them little harm. They are probably immune to it, anyway.

I
N
1910 I
RESIGNED
from de Grasse Brothers. Armed with my small inheritance from mother, abandoning New York to my successful competitor, Rex Geer, and sighing with what I hoped was a sigh of relief at being free of a bank that was evidently going to be all his, I went off to see the world. The world turned out to be London and Paris. I went to a great many parties, hunted a great many foxes, had two flattering affairs with celebrated beauties and met all the people in politics, arts and letters whom one is apt to encounter in a fashionable memoir of the Edwardian period. In those days celebrities traveled in packs. I went to crushes at Lady St. Helier's and to small picked dinners at Lady Ottoline Morrell's; I visited the studios of Boldini and Helleu, and attended lectures by Bergson and receptions in the old faubourg that I was later to recognize in reading Proust. But as I never had another exit in mind when I rang each bell, it is hardly surprising that, like Omar Khayyam, I always came out by that same door wherein I went.

I was too robust, too young, too healthy, too handsome, if I may say so again, to be taken quite seriously. I particularly wanted to cultivate artists, but I found that young writers and painters, who were glad enough to play with me and drink with me and even, in the female cases, to make love with me, refused, except jokingly, to talk shop with me. When I at last realized how much outside the pool of European life I still was, after more than a year of diving in, clambering out and diving in again, I resolved unhappily to take myself home to the consoling arms of my always admiring father, and I would have done so had it not been for a lunch party that I attended, a week before my scheduled sailing, at the Paul Bourgets'.

Father had supplied Bourget with much of the material for his Newport chapter in
Outre Mer,
and the great novelist had been very gracious to me during my Paris sojourn. I think he may have been contemplating a story with an American setting, for on several occasions, in his perfect, ceremonious English, he questioned me closely about the frequency of adultery in the New York fashionable world. What I contributed, however, to his knowledge of my country, was nothing to what he contributed to mine. For I met a new America that day at lunch when I found myself seated next to Mrs. Lewis Irving Hyde.

"Going home?" she exclaimed, when I had told her my plans. I found out later that people always told their plans to Mrs. Hyde. There was something about her straightforward yet not inquisitive air that made one come to the point. "But my dear young man, you've only done the commonplace things. My daughter and I are going to Senlis tomorrow with Henry Baylies. I think you had better come along!"

"What is Senlis?"

"Well, there you are, you see. It's simply one of the finest small cathedrals in northern France."

I looked into those large dark snapping eyes that matched so perfectly with the raven hair and wondered if the latter was "touched up." Mrs. Hyde had already told me that she had known my mother as a girl and must, therefore, have been well past fifty. I had never known a woman of that age to be so forthright and knowledgeable. She was dressed in a dark suit with a black velvet hat that had a vaguely equestrian air. She was what was beginning to be known as the "well-tailored woman."

"You make me feel that my year abroad has been quite thrown away."

"Not at all. There are certain things that have to be got out of one's system. I think it's very sensible to begin with the sights that all Americans see. It's a kind of oat-sowing. After that you make the
real
start."

"But who will help me? Who will be my guide?"

"In the novels that kind of task is usually reserved for a sympathetic older woman."

"Would
you?
Oh, please!"

If anything could have surprised Mrs. Hyde, this might have. As it was, she burst into high, frank laughter. "Oh, I didn't mean that much older."

"You don't seem old to me."

This may seem crude, but I had noticed a little pink mother-of-pearl heart pinned to her coat, as incongruous as a daisy in a stern college quadrangle. Might not this tall splendid large-nosed woman want to be flattered?

"Would you be malleable?" she asked, looking at me more critically. "As I remember the Primes from my young days, that was not their distinguishing characteristic."

"But I don't want to be just a Prime!" I exclaimed in sudden heat. "I don't want to be just an American. I want to know things. I want to know the things
you
know. Please, Mrs. Hyde, won't you help me?"

"What a curious young man you are. Well, I won't undertake your education, but I'll take you to Senlis. That much I can do."

Even today I rarely think of Angelica for long without thinking of her mother. Mrs. Hyde dominated her offspring, not in the modern method of possessiveness (indeed, she was an indifferent parent by today's standards) but by the simple method of outwitting them. She was the most "superior" woman I have ever known. She had the feelings of superiority of the wellborn for the parvenu, of the erudite for the unlettered, of the devout Catholic for the agnostic Protestant, of the expatriate for the stay-at-liome, even of the equestrian for the man on foot. She had an insatiable, ravenous appetite for the first rate; she wanted to explore the twelfth century with Henry Adams and the twentieth with Theodore Roosevelt. Small wonder that Lewis Hyde, an affable, red-faced clubman, adored of his own sex and a crony of T.R.'s, preferred, when not on minor diplomatic posts to which he was appointed by the latter, to remain in Tuxedo Park for golf and drinking and let his wife run about Europe on her heterogeneous quests.

I went with her and Angelica the next day to Senlis. Mr. Baylies, a rich old bachelor scholar, very kind and fussy and knowledgeable, whom Mrs. Hyde obviously had at her beck and call, acted as our guide. I had the good instinct to be silent, and it seemed to me, listening to him and Mrs. Hyde discuss arches and apses, that I was indeed only beginning my real European experience. Never had I heard from people whom, as Father would have put it, "one knew," such expertise so easily and so humorously bandied back and forth. I had always assumed that the only purpose of such talk was to "show off," but Mrs. Hyde, easily striding about the cathedral and talking in her normal tone even at the altar, was obviously indifferent to impressing me. And then there was Angelica. Angelica also was something I had not encountered before.

She never once spoke to her mother and hardly once to me. Even to Mr. Baylies, who, as I later learned, chartered yachts on which to take Mrs. Hyde and her family cruising, she was only grudgingly attentive. She seemed entirely concerned with herself and her mannerisms; she kept pushing back her long dark hair from her brow and running her finger tips along the wall and over the surfaces of whatever objects she happened to pass. Her deportment was in marked, probably intentional contrast to her mother's large, disciplined movements, but she had charm, the charm of a pre-Raphaelite
gamine.
If she spoiled some of her effect by a petulant restlessness, she made it up in the exquisiteness of her physical details: in her finely carved, upturned nose, in her aristocratic high cheek bones, in her large brown brooding eyes. She bore no resemblance to her mother but neither, as I later found out, did her brothers. The distant clubman of Tuxedo Park must have had strong genes.

It was obvious, as we strolled about, that I was to walk with Angelica while her mother paired off with Mr. Baylies. It was equally obvious that this was her mother's plan, not Angelica's, for the latter made no effort to be even tolerably pleasant. Indeed, the mere fact that I was her mother's discovery seemed to brand me as a simpleton, if not an actual fraud. If I admired an artifact she would stare at it silently, as if she would never have otherwise observed it, and then murmur affectedly: "Yes, it's delicious, isn't it? Absolutely too yummy!"

"You sound as if you were in a pastry shop," I remonstrated the fifth time that she did this.

She turned to me wide-eyed. "But isn't that exactly how one is meant to sound?"

"See here, Miss Hyde, why do you take me for such a nincompoop?"

"But I don't, I assure you. I take you for an eager, up-and-coming American youth."

"Which to you is the height of inanity."

"Which to me, Mr. Prime, is the height of nothingness," she retorted in a sharper tone. "Don't worry. Europe isn't going to do you a bit of harm. We guarantee to send you back the same as when you came."

"We? Do you speak for Europe, Miss Hyde?"

"If I do, it's because I've earned the right. By having been made to swim all my life in seas of deliciousness. Oh, don't misunderstand me," she added with a surprising rush of anger in her tone. "I'm not being snooty. I'm simply sick to death of Americans who wander about in Europe ohing and ahing. I'm a jaded Daisy Miller if you like. A Daisy Miller who's stayed over here too long and lost her color. For that's what happens to us, you know. We don't die of fevers, as poor old doddering Mr. James thinks. We simply fade."

"Your mother hasn't."

"No, but then Mother's not quite human." Angelica, like all the Hydes, as I was soon to learn, could be quite independent out of her mother's earshot. "She actually
eats
culture."

It suddenly provoked me that this girl, who had thrust upon her all the things in Europe that I had come to seek, should be so churlish about them.

"I know your type," I said scornfully. "You're the kind of daughter who likes to slam Mamma without letting go of the apron strings. You can be as snotty as you like, but will you budge an inch without her?"

Angelica's surprise at this was not feigned. "Budge where?"

"Will you come out with me tonight and see Paris? Will you give up chapels and chaperones and have a look at life?"

"Men who suggest improprieties always call it living."

"Isn't it?"

"You're very pushing, Mr. Prime. I don't know what I've said to give you the idea I might be willing to run around Paris with you."

"Why everything!" I exclaimed. "You sneer at Europe and my presuming to want any part of it. You seem to regard it a kind of privately issued book that only you know. Well, I'll bet I could show you parts of Paris you haven't dreamed about, Angelica Hyde. Or only dreamed about. And it'll be a perfectly proper tour, too. You needn't worry. Only we won't take your mother."

"A pity," she murmured. "She'd love it so."

"I'm glad you'll concede her that much humanity. But tonight I'm just asking you."

She hesitated, and for a moment I thought she might actually be going to accept. Then she closed her lips suddenly in a tight little line and turned away to join Mrs. Hyde. "I'm sorry, Mr. Prime. I have letters that I simply must write tonight."

"Coward!"

She made no reply to this, but her silence conceded that the last word had been mine. From that moment there was no idea of my returning to New York. I had decided that I was going to see a great deal of Angelica Hyde.

The next day, I skulked about the Hydes' hotel until I saw Mrs. Hyde come out and walk to her victoria. Then I pretended to be passing by and raised my hat.

"Why, Mr. Prime," she said in her strong, pleasant tone, "what good fortune sends you just as I'm tempted to give up my shopping for a drive in the Bois? Get in. Now don't tell me you have business. No young man as well dressed as yourself could have business on a spring morning like this!"

We had not traveled as far as the Rond Point before I discovered that Angelica had revealed my proposition and that her mother had placed the worst construction on it. Yet she bore me no grudge. She was European enough to expect a young man to go as far as he could. Only the girl was blamed if he succeeded.

"I've been thinking about your mother," she now went on, a bit incongruously, to observe. "It brought back those dear dead days in Newport. I remember how well she did in the archery contests. We were all Dianas then. I was so sorry to hear she had died."

The tone was certainly matter-of-fact. Mrs. Hyde accepted many things, and death was one of them. Yet it was so long since I had been with anyone who had even perfunctorily mentioned Mother that to my mortification I found my eyes filled with tears.

"I'm sorry," I muttered. "I miss her so terribly."

"That's all right, dear boy. Those tears do you credit. I wonder how many of
my
brood would shed them a year after I've gone. Tell me now about yourself and what you're going to do with your life. Will you be like your uncles? I seem to recall that they went in rather heavily for the social game."

"They all married fortunes," I explained, glad of the chance to set the record straight. "I shall have to earn my own way. Father wants me to go into the stock market, and maybe I shall. But in the meantime I have this." I tried to take in Paris with a wave of my arm. "All this that you're going to show me."

"'The time is short, the interim is mine,'" she quoted with an approving nod. "I like you, Guy Prime. Why don't you come cruising with us this summer? Darling Henry Baylies has chartered a boat to do the Greek islands, and I'm helping him make up the party. A handsome, unattached young man who wants to see beautiful things is always welcome. Come along!"