Caesar or Nothing Part 28

"No. Susanna is more European every day, and she doesn't care for the shrieking elegance of her compatriots. Besides, her father is here, and that makes her feel less American."

"It is an odd form of filial enthusiasm," remarked Caesar.

"It doesn't shock me. I almost think it's the rule," replied Marchmont; "at home I could see that my brothers and sisters hated one another cordially, and that every member of the family wanted to get away from the others. You two who are so fond of each other are a very rare instance. Is it frequent in Spain that brothers and sisters like one another?"

"Yes, there are instances of it," answered Caesar, laughing.

Mrs. Marchmont arrived, accompanied by an old man who evidently was her father, and two other men. Susanna was most smart; she greeted Laura and Caesar very affably, and presented her father, Mr. Russell; then she presented an English author, tall, skinny, with blue eyes, a white beard, and hair like a halo; and then a young Englishman from the Emba.s.sy, a very distinguished person named Kennedy, who was a Catholic.

_TEA_

After the introductions they pa.s.sed into the dining-room, which was most impressive. It was an exhibition of very smart women, some of them ideally beautiful, and idle men. All about them resounded a nasal English of the American sort.

Susanna Marchmont served the tea and did the honours to her guests.

They all talked French, excepting Mr. Russell, who once in a long while uttered some categorical monosyllable in his own language.

Mr. Russell was not of the cla.s.sic Yankee type; he looked like a vulgar Englishman. He was a serious man, with a short moustache, grey-headed, with three or four gold teeth.

What to Caesar seemed wonderful in this gentleman was his economy of words. There was not one useless expression in his vocabulary, and not the slightest redundancy; whatever partook of merit, prestige, or n.o.bility was condensed, for him, to the idea of value; whatever partook of arrangement, cleanliness, order, was condensed to the word "comfort"; so that Mr. Russell, with a very few words, had everything specified.

To Susanna, imbued with her preoccupation in supreme _chic_, her father no doubt did not seem a completely decorative father; but he gave Caesar the impression of a forceful man.

Near them, at a table close by, was a little blond man, with a hooked nose and a scanty imperial, in company with a fat lady. They bowed to Marchmont and his wife.

"That gentleman looks like a Jew," said Caesar.

"He is," replied Marchmont, "that is Senor Pereyra, a rich Jew; of Portuguese origin, I think."

"How quickly you saw it!" exclaimed Susanna.

"He has that air of a sick goat, so frequent in Jews."

"His wife has nothing sickly about her, or thin either," remarked Laura.

"No," said Caesar; "his wife represents another Biblical type; one of the fat kine of somebody's dream, which foretold abundance and a good harvest."

The Englishman, Kennedy, had also little liking for Jews.

"I do not hate a Jew as anti-Christian," said Caesar; "but as super-Christian. Nor do I hate the race, but the tendency they have never to be producers, but always middlemen, and because they incarnate so well for our era the love of money, and of joy and pleasure."

The English author was a great partisan of Jews, and he a.s.serted that they were more distinguished in science and the arts than any other race. The Jewish question was dropped in an instant, when they saw a smart lady come in accompanied by a pale man with a black shock of hair and an uneasy eye.

"That is the Hungarian violinist Kolozsvar," said Susanna.

"Kolozsvar, Kolozsvar!" they heard everybody saying.

"Is he a great virtuoso?" Caesar asked Kennedy.

"No, I think not," answered Kennedy. "It seems that this Hungarian's speciality is playing the waltzes and folk-songs of his own country, which is certainly not anything great; but his successes are not obtained with the violin, but among the women. The ladies in London fight for him. His game is to pa.s.s himself off as a fallen man, depraved, worn-out. There you have his phraseology.... They see a man to save, to raise up, and convert into a great artist, and almost all of them yield to this temptation."

"That is comical," said Caesar, looking curiously at the fiddler and his lady.

"To a Spaniard," replied Kennedy, "it is comical; and probably it would be to an Italian too; but in England there are many women that have a purely imaginative idealism, a romanticism fed on ridiculous novels, and they fall into traps like these, which seem clumsy and grotesque to you here in the South, where people are more clear-sighted and realistic."

Caesar watched the brave fiddler, who played the role of a man used up, to great perfection.

After tea, Susanna invited them to go up to her rooms, and Laura and her brother and Kennedy and Mr. Russell went.

The English author had met a colleague, with whom he stayed behind talking, and Marchmont remained in the "hall," as if it did not seem to him proper for him to go to his wife's rooms.

Susanna's rooms were very high, had balconies on the Via Veneto, and were almost opposite Queen Margherita's palace. One overlooked the garden and could see the Queen Mother taking her walks, which is not without its importance for persons who live in a republic.

Susanna was most amiable to Laura; repeated to all of them her invitation to come and see her again; and after they had all promised to see one another frequently, Caesar and Laura went down to their carriage, and took a turn on the Corso by twilight.

XIII. ESTHETICS AND DEMAGOGY

_SUSANNA AND THE YOUNGSTERS_

From this meeting on, Caesar noticed that Marchmont paid court to Laura with much persistence. A light-hearted, coquettish woman, it pleased Laura to be pursued by a person like this Englishman, young, distinguished, and rich; but she was not prepared to yield. Her bringing-up, her cla.s.s-feelings impelled her to consider adultery a heinous thing. Nor was divorce a solution for her, since accepting it would oblige her to cease being a Catholic and to quarrel irrevocably with the Cardinal. Marchmont showed no discretion in the way he paid court to Laura; he cared nothing about his wife, and talked of her with profound contempt....

Laura found herself besieged by the Englishman; she couldn't decide to discourage him entirely, and at critical moments she would take the train, go off to Naples, and come back two or three days later, doubtless with more strength for withstanding the siege.

"As a matter of reciprocal justice, since he makes love to my sister, I ought to make love to his wife," thought Caesar, and he went several times to the Hotel Excelsior to call on Susanna.

The Yankee wife was full of complaints against her husband. Her father had advised her simply to get a divorce, but she didn't want to.

She found such a solution lacking in distinction, and no doubt she considered the advice of an author in her own country very true, who had given this triple injunction to the students of a woman's college: "Do not drink, that is, do not drink too much; do not smoke, that is, do not smoke too much; and do not get married, that is, do not get married too much."

It did not seem quite right to Susanna to get married too much. Besides she had a desire to become a Catholic. One day she questioned Caesar about it:

"You want to change your religion!" exclaimed Caesar, "What for? I don't believe you are going to find your lost faith by becoming a Catholic."

"And what do you think about it, Kennedy?" Susanna asked the young Englishman, who was there too.

"To me a Catholic woman seems doubly enchanting."

"You would not marry a woman who wasn't a Catholic?"

"No, indeed," the Englishman proclaimed.

Caesar and Kennedy disagreed about everything.

Susanna discussed her plans, and constantly referred to Paul Bourget's novel _Cosmopolis_, which had obviously influenced her in her inclination for Catholicism.