Guy Carryl - The Transgression of Andrew Vane - A Novel

"With pleasure," said Andrew, adding, as her glove touched his sleeve, "I was going to suggest it, but I don't know French etiquette as yet, and I was afraid I might be presuming."

He was unconscious that, as they passed through the throng, many heads were turned, among them that of the young officer of chasseurs , who drew the end of his mustache between his lips, and gnawed it savagely. A perfectly appointed victoria, drawn up at the edge of the driveway, was awaiting them, with Radwalader standing at the step.

It was close upon seven o'clock when the two men emerged from Mademoiselle Tremonceau's apartments on the Avenue Henri Martin, and, hailing a passing cab, set off for the Tour d'Argent. Radwalader evinced no desire to talk, as they bowled across to and then down the Champs Elysées, and Andrew was conscious of being grateful for the silence. He wanted to think. He did not wholly understand the hour and a half which had just gone by. There had been no sign of Mademoiselle Tremonceau's family. Tea was served in a salon crowded with elaborate furniture, and softly illumined by rose-shaded electric globes on bronze appliques . Liveried servants came and went noiselessly, through tapestry curtains, and over an inlaid floor, polished to mirror-like brilliance, and strewn with mounted skins. The double marqueterie tea-table gleamed with a silver samovar and candlesticks, Baccarat glass, and thin, cream-coloured cups and saucers, with a crest in raised gold. Here and there, huge Gloire de Dijon roses leaned sleepily from silver vases, and, on a little stand, a great bunch of wild violets breathed summer from a blue Sèvres bowl. An indefinable atmosphere of luxury and languor pervaded the room. From the girl herself came a faint hint of some strangely sweet, but wholly unfamiliar, fragrance, which Andrew had not noted in the open air. He watched her, fascinated, as her slender white hands, with their blazing jewels, went to and fro among the cups and saucers. Her every movement was deliciously and suggestively feminine, as had been her tightening of her veil, an hour before, and exquisitely languid and deliberate, as if the day had been a thousand hours long instead of twenty-four. She said but little, Radwalader maintaining a running thread of his half-banter, half-philosophy, with its ingenious double-meanings and contortions of the commonplace, whereby, in some fashion of his own, he contrived to simulate and stimulate conviction.

Andrew had found, presently, that he was growing sleepy. The abrupt change from the cool air of outer afternoon to the perfume-laden atmosphere of Mademoiselle Tremonceau's salon , the drone of Radwalader's voice, the soft light, in contrast to the sunshine they had left – all contributed to his drowsiness. Once, for nearly a minute, the whole room melted, as it were, into one golden-gray mist, through which silver and glass and fabrics glowed only as harmonious notes of colour, and wherein the face of his hostess seemed to float like a reflection in troubled water. Then, as suddenly, every detail of his surroundings appeared to bulge at him out of the haze, and stood fixed and clear. For an instant he thought that Radwalader had raised his voice. He seemed to be speaking very loudly; but, when the first nervous start had passed, Andrew realized that this was his own imagining, and that neither of his companions had noticed his momentary somnolence.

At the end, he had held Mademoiselle Tremonceau's hand for a second beyond the limit of convention. She made no motion to withdraw it, but looked him frankly in the eyes.

"We've been neglecting you, haven't we?" she said. "Mr. Radwalader and I are such old friends, that we're inclined to selfishness, and apt to forget that our talk is not as interesting to others as to ourselves. Perhaps you'll come in to tea on Tuesday, about five, and I'll try to prove myself a more considerate hostess."

"Thank you," said Andrew. "I shall be very pleased – though I suspect you are undertaking the impossible."

The fiacre was passing the Rond Point when Radwalader spoke.

"This is the hour when Paris seems to me supremely to deserve her title of siren," he said. "In spring and summer, at least, I always try to pass it out of doors. There is a fascination for me, that never grows stale, in the coming of twilight, when the street-lamps begin to wink, and the cafés are lighting up. Did you ever feel softer air or see a more tenderly saffron sky? And this constant murmur of passing carriages, this hum of voices, broken, more often than anywhere else on earth, by laughter – isn't it life , as one never understands the word elsewhere? Isn't it full of suggestion and appeal? I've never been able to analyze the charm of the Champs Elysées at sunset, more nearly than to say that it seems to blot out one's remembrance of everything in the world that is sordid and commonplace, and to bring boldly to the fore the significance of all that is sweet and gay. Can you imagine considering the price of stocks or the drift of politics just now? I can't. I think of flowers, and Burgundy in slender-stemmed glasses, and tziganes playing waltz music, and women with good teeth, laughing. I smell roses and trèfle . I see mirrors, and candlesticks with openwork shades, silver over red, and sleek waiters bending down with bottles swathed in napkins. I hear violins and the swish of silk skirts. I taste caviar – and I feel – that I have underestimated Providence, after all!"

"There is no Paris but Paris, and Radwalader is her prophet!" laughed Andrew.

"That suggests a religion," said the other, "and I suppose, all said and done, that Paris is my religion. How did you like Mirabelle Tremonceau?"

"Even more than I expected."

"That's well – and very unusual. One almost always expects too much of a beautiful woman. Beauty has this in common with an inherited fortune – that it's apt to paralyze individual effort. Looking into mirrors and cutting coupons don't leave one much time for anything else. But she's exceptional. You're right in liking her, and what's more, you'll probably like her better and better as time goes on."

"She asked me if I was married," said Andrew.

"Did she?" answered Radwalader. "Well – are you?"

"No, assuredly not."

"Engaged, perhaps."

Instead of replying, Andrew glanced curiously at his companion, his lips set in a thin, straight line. Radwalader met his glance fairly.

"I beg your pardon, Vane," he said immediately. "That was unwarranted impertinence, which you're quite justified in resenting. I'm too prone to trifling, and the remark slipped out thoughtlessly. Pray consider it unsaid."

"With the best will in the world," said Andrew heartily. "There is nothing more admirable, I always think, than a frank apology."

In the words there was a faint, curiously suggestive echo of the tone in which Radwalader was wont to voice his glittering generalities.

Madame Raoul Palffy would, in all probability, have been intensely surprised and entirely incredulous had any one informed her that hers was an irritating personality. But the fact remained. She was flagrantly complacent, and her placidity enraged one immeasurably, and goaded nervous temperaments to the verge of frenzy. Tradespeople had been known to grit their teeth and swear almost audibly at her, and at least two guards upon the Métropolitain had lost their positions because her leisurely manner of locomotion had moved them irresistibly to breaches of the courteous treatment enjoined upon them by the General Manager's notice to the public.

Madame Palffy was a large, florid person with a partiality for jet and crimson velvet, and whose passing, much in the manner of a frigate under full sail, was apt to be fatal to fragile ornaments standing unwarily too near to table-edges. About her there was always a suggestion of imminent explosion, due to her chronic shortness of breath, the extreme snugness of her gowns, and the fashion in which her pudgy palms, unmercifully compressed into white gloves two sizes too small, crowded desperately out of the little ovals across which the top buttons yearned toward their proper holes. Harmoniously, her face was fat, and dappled all over with ruddy pink, with the eyes, nose, and mouth crowded together in the centre, as if for sociability's sake, or in fear of sliding off the smooth slopes of her cheeks and chin. Her hair, with its variety of puffs and curls, appeared to have been laid out by a landscape gardener.