Уильям Моэм - Cosmopolitans

The president was astounded.

“But, Coralie, my dear, I do not know what you mean. Has anyone dared to claim money from you that the law does not sanction or that I know nothing about?”

He gave his secretaries a suspicious glance. They tried to look innocent, but though they were, only succeeded in looking uneasy.

“It is the law we complain of. Ruin stares us in the face.”

“Ruin?”

“So long as this new divorce law is in existence we can do no business and we may just as well shut up our beautiful houses.”

Then Madame Coralie explained in a manner so frank that I prefer to paraphrase her speech that owing to this invasion of the town by beautiful ladies from a foreign land the three elegant houses on which she and her two friends paid rates and taxes were utterly deserted. The young men of fashion preferred to spend their evenings at the Grand Hotel where they received for soft words entertainment which at the regular establishments they could only have got for hard cash.

“You cannot blame them,” said the president.

“I don’t,” cried Madame Coralie. “I blame the women. They have no right to come and take the bread out of our mouths. Don Manuel, you are one of the people, you are not one of these aristocrats; what will the country say if you allow us to be driven out of business by blacklegs? I ask you is it just, is it honest?”

“But what can I do?” said the president. “I cannot lock them up in their rooms for thirty days. How am I to blame if these foreigners have no sense of decency?”

“It’s different for a poor girl,” said La Gorda. “She has her way to make. But that these women do that sort of thing when they’re not obliged to, no, that I shall never understand.”

“It is a bad and wicked law,” said Carmencita.

The president sprang to his feet and threw his arms akimbo.

“You are not going to ask me to abrogate a law that has brought peace and plenty to this country. I am of the people and I was elected by the people, and the prosperity of my fatherland is very near my heart. Divorce is our staple industry and the law shall be repealed only over my dead body.”

“Oh, Maria Santisima, that it should come to this,” said Carmencita. “And me with two daughters in a convent in New Orleans. Ah, in this business one often has unpleasantness, but I always consoled myself by thinking that my daughters would marry well, and when the time came for me to retire they would inherit my business. Do you think I can keep them in a convent in New Orleans for nothing?”

“And who is going to keep my son at Harvard if I have to close my house, Don Manuel?” asked La Gorda.

“As for myself,” said Madame Coralie, “I do not care. I shall return to France. My dear mother is eighty-seven years of age and she cannot live very much longer. It will be a comfort to her if I spend her last remaining years by her side. But it is the injustice of it that hurts. You have spent many happy evenings in my house, Don Manuel, and I am wounded that you should let us be treated like this. Did you not tell me yourself that it was the proudest day of your life when you entered as an honoured guest the house in which you had once been employed as errand boy?”

“I do not deny it. I stood champagne all round.” Don Manuel walked up and down the large hall, shrugging his shoulders as he went, and now and then, deep in thought, he gesticulated. “I am of the people, elected by the people,” he cried, “and the fact is, these women are blacklegs.” He turned to his secretaries with a dramatic gesture. “It is a stain on my administration. It is against all my principles to allow unskilled foreign labour to take the bread out of the mouths of honest and industrious people. These ladies are quite right to come to me and appeal for my protection. I will not allow the scandal to continue.”

It was of course a pointed and effective speech, but all who heard it knew that it left things exactly where they were. Madame Coralie powdered her nose and gave it, a commanding organ, a brief look in her pocket mirror.

“Of course I know what human nature is,” she said, “and I can well understand that time hangs heavily on the hands of these creatures.”

“We could build a golf-course,” hazarded one of the secretaries. “It is true that this would only occupy them by day.”

“If they want men why can’t they bring them with them?” said La Gorda.

“Caramba! cried the president, and with that stood on a sudden quite still. “There is the solution.”

He had not reached his exalted station without being a man of insight and resource. He beamed.

“We will amend the law. Men shall come in as before without let or hindrance, but women only accompanied by their husbands or with their written consent.” He saw the look of consternation which his secretaries gave him, and he waved his hand. “But the immigration authorities shall receive instructions to interpret the word husband with the widest latitude.”

“Maria Santisima!” cried Madame Coralie. “If they come with a friend he will take care that no one else interferes with them and our customers will return to the houses where for so long they have been so hospitably entertained. Don Manuel, you are a great man and one of these days they will erect a statue to you.”

It is often the simplest expedients that settle the most formidable difficulties. The law was briefly amended according to the terms of Don Manuel’s suggestion and, whereas prosperity continued to pour its blessings on the wide and sunny capital of this free and independent state, Madame Coralie was enabled profitably to pursue her useful avocations, Carmencita’s two daughters completed their expensive education in the convent at New Orleans, and La Gorda’s son successfully graduated at Harvard.

MY WIFE is a very unpunctual woman, so when, having arranged to lunch with her at Claridge’s, I arrived there ten minutes late and did not find her I was not surprised. I ordered a cocktail. It was the height of the season and there were but two or three vacant tables in the lounge. Some of the people after an early meal were drinking their coffee, others like myself were toying with a dry Martini; the women in their summer frocks looked gay and charming and the men debonair; but I could see no one whose appearance sufficiently interested me to occupy the quarter of an hour I was expecting to wait. They were slim and pleasant to look upon, well dressed and carelessly at ease, but they were for the most part of a pattern and I observed them with tolerance rather than with curiosity. But it was two o’clock and I felt hungry. My wife tells me that she can wear neither a turquoise nor a watch, for the turquoise turns green and the watch stops; and this she attributes to the malignity of fate. I have nothing to say about the turquoise, but I sometimes think the watch might go if she wound it. I was engaged with these reflections when an attendant came up and with that hushed significance that hotel attendants affect (as though their message held a more sinister meaning than their words suggested) told me that a lady had just telephoned to say that she had been detained and could not lunch with me.

I hesitated. It is not very amusing to eat in a crowded restaurant by oneself, but it was late to go to a club and I decided that I had better stay where I was. I strolled into the dining-room. It has never given me any particular satisfaction (as it appears to do to so many elegant persons) to be known by name to the head waiters of fashionable restaurants, but on this occasion I should certainly have been glad to be greeted by less stony an eye. The maître d’hôtel with a set and hostile face told me that every table was occupied.