The Devourers Part 39

Nancy laughed and said: "My mother was Italian. My father was English. I was born in Davos, in Switzerland." For some unaccountable reason the German lady flushed deeply. She did not speak again until the sago pudding had gone round twice and the fruit once--very quickly.

"You speak German?" she said.

"I had a German governess," said Nancy.

Again the German lady's smooth cheeks flushed. Then every one rose and went into the drawing-room, and Nancy went to her room and wrote to the Unknown.

"You ask me to talk about myself. Nothing pleases me better; for I am selfish and subjective.

"I am a gambler. I went to Monte Carlo some time ago. Oh, golden-voiced, green-eyed Roulette! I gambled away all my money and all the money of everyone else that I could lay hands on. I laid hands on a good deal. I have rather pretty hands.

"I am a dreamer. I have wandered out in deserted country roads dreaming of you, my unknown hero, and of Uhland's mysterious forests, and of Maeterlinck's lost princesses, until I could feel the warmth welling up at the back of my eyes, which is the nearest approach to tears that is vouchsafed me.

"I am a heathen. I have a hot, unruly wors.h.i.+p for everything beautiful, man, woman, or thing. I believe in Joy; I trust in Happiness; I adore Pleasure.

"I am a savage--an overcivilized, hypercultivated savage with some of the growls and the hankerings after feathers still left in him. I adore jewels. I have some diamonds--diamonds with blue eyes and white smiles--as large as my heart. No, no! larger! I wear them at all seasons and everywhere; round my throat, my arms, my ankles, all over me! I like men to wear jewels. If ever I fall in love with you, I shall insist upon your wearing rings up to your finger-tips. Do not protest, or I will _not_ fall in love with you.

"I am feminine; over- and ultra-feminine. I wear nothing but fluffinesses--trailing, lacey, blow-away fluffinesses, floppy hats on my soft hair, and flimsy scarves on my small shoulders. I have no views. I belong to no clubs. I drink no c.o.c.ktails--or, when I do, I make delicious little grimaces over them, and say they burn. They _do_ burn!

I smoke Russian cigarettes scented with white heliotrope, because surely no man would dream of doing such a sickening thing.

"I am careless; I am extravagant; I am lazy--oh, exceedingly lazy. I envy La Belle au Bois dormant, who slept a hundred years. Until Prince Charming....

"Good-bye, Prince Charming.

"EVE."

XI

The next day at luncheon the German lady stared again, and looked away quickly.

Anne-Marie asked her mother: "What is Irish stew when he is alive?"

Nancy smiled and dimpled. Then the German lady, who had seen the dimple and the smile, said in a sudden, loud voice, over which she had no control: "Is your name Nancy?"

Nancy looked up with a start. "Yes!" she said. And everyone was silent.

"My name is Fraulein Muller," said the German lady, taking a pink-edged handkerchief from her pocket and making ready for tears.

"Fraulein Muller! Fraulein Muller!" said Nancy dreamily. "You read Uhland to me, and Lenau, and ... 's.h.i.+ne out little head sunning over with curls.'"

Then Fraulein Muller wept in her handkerchief, and Nancy rose from her seat and went round and kissed her. Then it was Fraulein Muller's turn to get up and go round and kiss Anne-Marie; whereupon the sulphur-haired lady remarked how small the world was; and the witty man said they would next discover that he and she were brother and sister, and had she not a strawberry mark on her left shoulder?

After lunch Fraulein Muller asked Nancy to her room, and she held Anne-Marie on her lap, and had to say the baby rhyme, "Da hast du 'nen Thaler, geh' auf den Markt" about fifty times, with the accompanying play on Anne-Marie's pink, outstretched palm, before she was allowed to talk to Nancy. Then she told them all about the years she had pa.s.sed in an American family after leaving the Grey House, and about the little house she had just rented on Staten Island--a tiny little house in a garden, where she was going to live for the rest of her life. She was furnis.h.i.+ng it now, and it would be ready next week.

"You must come to see it. You must stay with me there," said Fraulein Muller, looking for a dry spot on the sodden handkerchief. "Oh, meine kleine Nancy! My little Genius! Und was ist mit der Poesie?"

The following week Fraulein Muller left Lexington Avenue for her "Gartenhaus," as she called it, and three days later Nancy and Anne-Marie went to stay with her for a fortnight.

"What for an education has the child?" inquired the old governess, when Anne-Marie had been put to bed after a day of wonders. What?

Strawberries grew on plants? Anne-Marie had always thought they came in baskets.

"She seems to know nothing," said Fraulein Muller. "I tried her with a little arithmetic. Did she know the metric system? Oh yes, she said she did, and wanted to speak about something else. But I kept her to it,"

said Fraulein sternly, "and asked her: 'What are millimetres?' Do you know what the child said? She said that she supposed they were relations of the centipedes!"

Nancy laughed, and told Fraulein Muller about the Sixth Avenue School.

Fraulein clasped horrified hands.

"I will educate her myself. I suppose she is also a genius."

"No, I am afraid not," said Nancy, shaking her head regretfully. "I wish she were!"

The two women were silent; and from the little bedroom upstairs, through the open window, came Anne-Marie's voice, like tinkling water.

"She is singing," said Fraulein Muller.

"Oh yes; she always sings herself to sleep. She likes music." And Nancy told her about the violin.

"We shall buy her a violin to-morrow," said Fraulein Muller.

And so she did. The violin was new and bright and brown; it was labelled "Guarnerius," and cost three dollars. Anne-Marie pushed the bow up and down on it with great pleasure for a short time. Then she became very impatient, and took it out into the garden, and looked for a large stone.

"... It made ugly voices at me," she said, standing small and unrepentant by the broken brown pieces, while Fraulein Muller and Nancy shook grieved heads at her.

"I do not think that music is her vocation after all," said Fraulein Muller. "But we shall see."

XII

"Good-morning, my tenebrious Unknown. I am in the country, perched up on a stone wall with nothing in sight but vague, distant hills and sleepy fields. Queer insects buzz in the sun, and make me feel pale. I dread buzzing insects with a great s.h.i.+very dread.

"Why are you not here? I am wearing a large straw hat with blue ribbons, and a white dress and a blue sash, like the _ingenue_ in a drawing-room comedy. And there is no one to see me. And the fields are full of flowers, and I pick them, and have no one to give them to. Surely it is the time in all good story-books when the heroine in a white dress and blue sash is sitting on a wall for Prince Charming to pa.s.s and see her, and stop suddenly.... But life is a badly constructed novel; uninteresting people walk in and walk out, and all is at contra-tempo, like a Brahms Hungarian Dance.

"Prince Charming, why have you gone three thousand miles away?"

"Good-morning again.

"This is a divine day--cool winds and curtseying gra.s.ses.

"I am still here, living on herbs and sunsets and memories of things that have not been. You are a thing that has not been. Perhaps that is why you are so much in my thoughts. I have many friends whom I seldom think of. I have a few lovers whom I never think of. And I have you who are nothing, and whom I always think of. It is absurd and wonderful.