The Embezzler (21 page)

I went on three Saturday afternoons with Alix and Mrs. Prime to the opera before I was asked to meet their lord and master at Sunday lunch. Chauncey Prime was a smaller, dryer version of Guy's father, similarly immaculate, but instead of holding himself straight he hunched his shoulders and shook his head in endless exercise of an endless capacity for disapproval. He did not once evince the smallest interest at any topic of conversation at lunch.

"I hear you work for Marcellus de Grasse," he said to me gruffly. "I suppose you're a great admirer of his. All the young men seem to be."

"He has a great imagination, sir. In fact, I doubt if any man has a nobler concept of the role of capital in modern society."

Mr. Prime grunted. I should have guessed that enthusiasm was anathema to him. The man who had married his money could afford to admire only the bare fact of its possession.

"De Grasse may be all very well," he continued, "but he belongs to a bygone era. Men like Rockefeller and Carnegie could buy and sell him twenty times over today. He puts me in mind of a baronet in a powdered wig poking about in a steel foundry."

"But surely capital isn't only a question of quantity," I protested, perhaps too warmly. "Isn't the great thing to know where it's needed? A few dollars in the right place can still make industrial history. And I think de Grasse Brothers, with their flair for this kind of thing, will be around as long as your Rockefellers and Carnegies. Perhaps longer."

Mr. Prime gave another grunt and addressed no further remarks to me for the balance of our meal. If there was one thing he hated more than enthusiasm, it was an enthusiastic young man.

Alix walked in the park with me that afternoon. It was the fifth time I had seen her and the first that we had been alone. I was mortified to find that I trembled so that I could hardly speak. When I took her back to her house we had not exchanged a word that could not have been spoken in the presence of both her parents. Yet I was sure, from her own constraint and averted glances, that she was in trouble, too.

All my life I had fancied myself in charge of my destiny. One day, of course, I would marry, and my bride would be Lucy Ames, or a girl much like her. What I had never seen or wanted to see in my cards was an heiress. Yet here I was, choked to incoherence by my passion for a rich girl whom I did not even admire! Why in God's name was love called blind? I saw every fault in poor Alix and every disadvantage to me, by my peculiar lights, of her worldly advantages.

To do her justice, if she did not fit into my picture of what my life should be, she fitted even less into the Primes' picture of what
she
should be. Indeed, there seemed to be no pictures where she did fit. She dressed and talked more like someone playing a society girl on the stage than a society girl. At first I had suspected her of sarcasm, but better acquaintance routed this theory. Her nature was not rebellious. In fact, the very key to her character might have been in her absolute submission to the world in which she found herself. I doubt if it ever crossed her mind to question the validity of her father's rule or the point of her family's gilded vacuous existence. Yet this did not mean that she was lacking in character. Even her younger sisters, who were inclined to make fun of her, did not laugh when Alix's tone rose to shrillness. There were certain things she could not bear: she would clap her hands to her ears at any tale of physical brutality, of man's unkindness to man or to animals. Her greatest distress was that her sensitivity made her useless in any kind of hospital work. Sometimes it seemed to me that she clung to the world of the Primes only because it was so insulated from horror, that she picked her way across the carnage of the universe without daring to look down. But that was what distinguished her from the others. She
knew
that the carnage was there.

Something had to happen. I could not go on so. If I could not speak before Alix alone, I had to speak before others. One Saturday afternoon in that cold early spring, when I called at the house, I saw the tall maroon Daimler parked before the door and met Mrs. Prime and Alix coming out. They were going calling, and Mrs. Prime, in her usual friendly fashion, asked me to join them. She probably had not expected that I would accept, as calling was a ladies' pursuit, but I abruptly decided that this was my moment, and jumped into the car before she could change her mind.

We drove off. Mrs. Prime was dropping cards on the people with whom she had recently dined and on the people who had recently dropped cards on her, and in the smaller society of that day she could dispose of as many as five in a single street. She had a footman as well as a chauffeur, a not uncommon circumstance for the rich of that ostentatious era, and we sat in the back of the car, I on the
strapontin
and Alix and her mother on the cushioned seat, while the footman climbed the long stoops with the little envelopes. The lady of the house usually had the tact not to be "in," but occasionally she was, which would be signaled by a nod to the chauffeur, who would turn to alert Mrs. Prime, who would sigh and grumble and gather up her skirts to descend.

It was wonderful what the fashions of 1909 did to romanticize this simple bourgeois scene. Mrs. Prime's stalwart figure carried well the straight sweeping lines of silk, the puffed shoulders, the wide-brimmed hat with its ostrich feathers, while Alix, demure in a white blouse and plain black skirt seemed absurdly young and very sweetly filial. I think to this day of that street of cluttered brownstone stoops under a slatey April sky as the quintessence of romance.

While Mrs. Prime was making one of her calls, Alix must have felt the contagion of my mood, for she asked me: "What on earth can you be thinking about? You look as pleased as Daddy when someone asks him a genealogical question about old New York."

I burst out laughing. "I was just thinking that I'd like to go on doing just this, forever and ever!"

"Leaving cards?"

"Yes!"

"You must have taken leave of your senses. I should have thought it was purgatory for a man."

"Alix," I exclaimed with sudden gravity, leaning forward, "do you ever feel moods of wild, senseless, violent happiness?"

She studied my face curiously, and when she smiled, it was as if she had taken my hand on a beach, before a cold green ocean, and said: "I'll try it if you will." "I don't know that I do," was what she actually said. "I'm not even absolutely sure that I would want to. Are you feeling one now?"

"Yes! At this very moment! I love this street and this motorcar and that silly little black muff of yours."

"And is it fun to love such things?"

"Well, of course it's more fun to love people."

"People? How can one love 'people'?"

"Not people, then. You."

Alix drew quickly back. "Now you're going to be what Mamma calls 'silly.'"

"Silly? I've never made such sense in my life! Do you want me to sing it? Then it might be like one of your operas, where things happen. Do you remember?" I raised my voice to a chant. "Alix Prime, I love you!"

"Oh, good heavens, do you want the whole street to hear you?" She leaned hastily forward to place her fingers on my lips. "Please, Rex. Things happen in opera, but you forget what I told you. People
die
in opera."

"But they live first!"

"I suppose that's only fair. But hush. Here comes Mamma."

"Mrs. Prime," I exclaimed, as we drove off, in a loud, clear and I fear rather pompous tone, "I want to persuade you that I love your daughter and that I seek the honor of becoming her husband!"

"Alix, is the man out of his mind? We hardly know him!"

"I'm afraid he is, Mamma."

I was so exhilarated that I could only laugh again. Mrs. Prime, red and flustered, looked in bewilderment from me to Alix, and then picked up the voice tube and told her chauffeur to drive around the park.

"I don't know what to say to you, young man. If I had the brains I was born with I suppose I'd stop the car and put you out. Or even call a policeman. Imagine proposing to a young lady while she and her mother are dropping cards!"

"I'll do it any other time you say!"

"Well, at least you're open. Not all the young men who come to the house are. Indeed, some of them are very devious..."

"Mamma!"

"I know, I know, everyone thinks I'm much too frank, but I'm simply trying to help you, my dear, that's all. Of course, your father mustn't hear a word of this. It's much too early. We must keep it strictly between the three of us."

"Keep
what,
Mamma?"

"Well, your engagement or whatever you call it."

"Mamma!" Alix cried in dismay for the third time and then covered her face with her hands. "Really, this is all too mortifying."

"Let me straighten things out, Mrs. Prime," I intervened. "There is no engagement, of course, secret or otherwise. Alix has not admitted any preference for me at all. She probably can't abide me."

"Oh, Rex, I like you very much!"

This threw us all into greater confusion. "I mean any special preference," I insisted. "All I want is for your mother to know how I feel." I turned resolutely again to Mrs. Prime. "I cannot come to your house any longer under false pretenses. I want Alix's family to know that my intention is to urge her to become Mrs. Reginald Geer. And I want to make it perfectly clear that I'm not a fortune hunter. It may take me years before I can properly support Alix, but I'd rather wait those years than live off a single penny of her money."

"Please!" Alix cried with a despairing voice. "Must we talk about money
already?
"

"It might be best," I continued, "if I went back to the house now and had an interview with Mr. Prime."

"No!" both ladies cried in unison.

And then I discovered that for all Alix's seeming vagueness and for all her mother's bustling confusion, they could be very efficient when they acted together. There was no irresolution in their joint attitude that whatever problem I might present, it was one to be solved by the distaff side of the family. The female of the species is much less snobbish than the male. Mrs Prime and Alix did not really care a rap about the Prime social standards, but, with the innate conservatism of their sex, they were perfectly willing to dress me up to look like something of which their old rooster would approve. They were even willing to regard the dressing process as a sacred duty. It was agreed before I got out of the car that afternoon that I was committed to Alix, that Alix was in no way committed to me, and that none of us should tell Papa anything. It served me jolly well right for putting myself in their hands.

Now I am sure it will have struck the reader, as it vividly strikes me in recalling these ancient events, that it was a very odd thing that I should not have told Guy of my love affair. After all, he was my landlord, my business associate, my closest friend and the cousin of my beloved. Insofar as I had a home in the city, he had provided it. Yet it is nonetheless certainly the case that not only did I tell him nothing, but that I took the utmost pains to conceal from him what was going on. I remember not being sure myself why I was so determined about this. It might have been the unconscious flowering of the seed of doubt that Mr. de Grasse had planted. It might have been my reluctance, being Guy's debtor for all my New York life, to owe him my romance as well. Or it might have been, more simply still, an old New England feeling that love was a weakness better kept to oneself. But whatever that instinct, it served me well. It was a pity that it should have ever been betrayed.

N
OW COMMENCED
a curious, unreal phase of my life that lasted only a few months but that was unlike anything that I had experienced before or was to experience after. I continued for the rest of the spring to call faithfully at the Louis XIII
hôotel.
Sometimes I went driving with Mrs. Prime and Alix up Riverside Drive to Grant's Tomb and back; sometimes Alix and I would walk in Central Park; sometimes we would simply sit in two chairs looking over the empty gilded ballroom and talk. Alix was alternately friendly and agitated, and she continued to forbid me to make love to her. It was horribly frustrating. I could not even kiss her.

"You keep saying that you have to establish yourself in business and that it may take years," she would protest in tears. "Then what is the hurry? Why can't we go on like this, being good friends? Why not, Rex?"

"Is that all you want?"

"It's all I want now."

"Why don't you come right out with it and tell me you don't give a damn about me?"

"Because it's not true! I like you very much, Rex. You know that."

"But do you think you can ever love me, Alix? That's the point."

"Yes, I think I might leam to love you, in my own way. Maybe I do now. But how can I be sure it's your way?"

"What's the difference?"

"But don't you see, that's just what I don't
know!
" she wailed. "And if I don't know, how is it fair to you?"

"Why not let me be the judge of that? Kiss me, Alix."

"Oh, Rex, there you go again. And you told me you wouldn't!"

"For God's sake, Alix! Have you no heart?"

It was about this time that Guy discovered my romance, much in the manner that he describes, except that the language which he used about Alix, and for which I knocked him down, was almost obscene. It is perfectly true, however, that he took up my cause after that and that the little houseparty at his parents' in Bar Harbor was of his own engineering. I had not seen my own poor family in a year's time, but I did not hesitate to chuck my plans for a vacation with them and hurry instead to the enchanted island of Mt. Desert to await the arrival of Alix and her mother. I felt a bit guilty about using Guy's hospitality solely to promote my courtship, but I swallowed these feelings as best I could. I was beyond such luxuries. I tried to make it up to him by doing all the things he liked: by playing tennis and climbing his favorite mountains and accompanying him without a murmur on his social calls. But all this broke up with the arrival of his aunt and cousins.