Unclouded Summer Page 4

  “With what kind of a drink can I refresh you?” Sir Henry was inquiring.

  In the shadow of the wall was a two-decked table trolley: it held a number of bottles, large and small, two cocktail shakers and a bowl of ice. Lady Ambrose laughed as she saw him hesitate.

  “After Prohibition America I expect that poor Mr. Oliver is overwhelmed by the sight of all those bottles. I should give him a Tom Collins, Henry. Mine is perfect.”

  She spoke in a slow high-pitched drawl that was both effective and attractive.

  “Wasn’t I right?” she said, a minute later.

  He nodded. Yes. She was very right. It was cold and strong and palatable. Sweet at first with a refreshingly bitter aftertaste.

  “Tell me,” Madame Renan asked, “how long do you think this Prohibition of yours will last? “

  “There’s no sign of its stopping yet.”

  “But surely many of your people have become indignant? So many abuses after all, those gangsters and those bootleggers and those shootings up.”

  “I don’t know that we worry much. It doesn’t concern us personally. It’s like a war that’s going on in another country.”

  “But it is not going on in another country, it is in your own streets, your own Chicago.”

  At that point Lord Ambrose intervened.

  “I have no right, I know, to dogmatize about a country that I have barely visited. But it did occur to me during my last stay that you have got, well I would not say a less strongly, shall I say, a differently developed civic sense from ours. I would put it this way if I may.” The English, he argued, considered that everything that happened in England was their personal concern. “If we don’t approve we write letters to The Times.” But America, he said, had been populated by emigrants who crossed the Atlantic either because they were tired of having their consciences interfered with in politics or religion, or because they couldn’t earn a living in their own country, by people anyhow who wanted to lead their own lives, follow their own interest, who didn’t want to be interfered with themselves and were quite ready to accord their neighbors the same freedom. “Don’t you think that in a way explains it?”

  He spoke in a firm self-confident tone, but he expressed his opinions in a conciliatory manner as though he were chiefly concerned with what the other man was thinking, and was quite ready to modify or alter his own opinions if he were given sound cause for doing so. Francis had never heard of him before that morning; he had no idea what his interests or occupation were, but he could imagine that his manner would be highly effective on committees. He was talking, too, Francis could appreciate, a great deal of sense.

  “I’ve never thought of it in quite that way,” he said, “but I expect you’re right. We are all pretty busy, and as long as we can get as much drink as we want, we don’t very much worry how we get it.”

  “But surely,” Madame Renan interjected, “you must worry about the quality of your drinks. I hear such terrible accounts of your wood alcohol; of people going blind.”

  Francis smiled. “I think that’s largely propaganda put out by the Prohibitionists. I’ve never heard of anyone going blind. Have you?” he added, turning to Rex Allan.

  Allan laughed. “I haven’t heard of anyone going blind, but I’ve heard of quite a number of people getting stomach ulcers.”

  It was the first time that Francis had heard him speak. It was an agreeably virile voice with a Western accent. It had been strange to see someone whom he had associated with costume dramas sitting quietly on a wicker chair in flannels. It was even stranger to hear actual words emerging from lips that until now he had only seen mouthing in dumb crambo on the screen. It had the same effect upon Madame Renan.

  “Every time I hear you speak, I give a little gasp,” she said. “I remember how often I have thought watching you from the stalls ‘if only I could hear him speak!’ I’ve wondered so often what actors and actresses are really saying as I sit watching their lips move.”

  Allan guffawed.

  “You’d have a shock sometimes if you could hear what they really said.”

  There was a general laugh at that but Madame Renan shook her head. “I cannot believe that at the big moments you do not speak words that are in tune with the emotions that you portray. Oh to hear Garbo speak.”

  Allan guffawed again.

  “The Garbo would be all right. But you’d get a shock if you could hear some of the others’ voices.”

  “What’ll happen if they manage to have these talking films that they keep on prophesying?” asked Lady Ambrose.

  “There’ll be a good many crumbling pedestals, I’m afraid.”

  At that moment Judy, who had been absent for the last few minutes, reappeared. “Lunch,” she announced, “at last.”

  They moved from the verandah, to a stone-flagged terrace on the west side of the house, in the shadow of a grove of olive trees. From where he sat Francis could see the gray line of the coast curving towards Italy. Never had the Mediterranean seemed more blue.

  It was a light meal, appropriate to the climate – cold soup and langouste with white wine standing in beaded ice buckets along the table; a light and simple meal. But the soup had a flavor of sherry in it, and the salad – jellied eggs on a bed of asparagus tips and tomatoes – was cool without being iced, and, the wine though it was presented casually in carafes, was dry and rich upon the tongue. The linen napkins were monogrammed and the silver crested; the wine glasses were paper-thin, and down the length of the starched damask tablecloth, was a design of small leaves and flowers, simple hedge flowers for the most part, with just so many tuberoses as might scent, without overpowering the air. An aged and silent butler in a white high-buttoned jacket moved behind the chairs. There was an air, not of opulence, but of ease and elegance.

  Sir Henry sat in the center of the table, a vantage point from Which he could control the conversation better. Francis sat between Allan and Madame Renan. The moment they sat down, Allan turned to him.

  “I am most happy to have an opportunity of meeting you,” he began. “I want to ask your advice. I have just built myself a house, in Hollywood. I need six pictures for my dining room. They must be the right pictures. You know what reporters are. They are so anxious to make fun of film stars, particularly of our homes. I am resolved that they shall not make fun of mine. Whenever I meet anyone Whose opinion I can trust, I ask him to give me a list of the six best modern painters, the painters who would be as you might say, the opposite numbers to John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Constance Talmadge, myself, Alice Terry. Then when I have say twenty lists, I will see which names appear most often and I will buy a picture by each one of them.”

  “But the pictures might be of such different styles that they would clash.”

  Allan shook his head.

  “That would not matter. It is the names that count. I am thinking of the gossip writers. I want to have them say ‘The most artistic dining room in Hollywood is, of course, Rex Allan’s. On his walls you will see …’ And then will follow a list of the six best modern painters. If you will give me your list of the six best modern painters, I will add it to the fifteen other lists that I already have. Now who would you put on your list?”

  “The artists must be living now?”

  “Of course yes, as I said, the opposite numbers of myself and Gilbert.”

  “Well, I’d have John and Picasso and Dufy and Matisse…”

  Before he could complete his list, however, a general discussion at the table had begun to make conversation à deux difficult.

  When Francis and Judy had arrived, the party had been discussing the general strike which had threatened earlier in the year to overthrow constitutional government in England. They returned to the subject now. The whole thing had been settled, Ambrose was explaining, at a lunch party that Lord Wimborne gave.

  “It was really very cleverly arranged,” he said. “The negotiators on both sides had to be got together. They had to meet on a neutral g
round. Ivor was probably the one person who could have organized it and he chose exactly the right people. He made it an informal party. He asked people like Siegfried Sassoon and Osbert Sitwell who could make good neutral conversation to begin with, and set the right friendly atmosphere. I saw Jimmy Thomas the next day. He told me the lunch party didn’t break up till six o’clock and by then the strike was settled.”

  It was talk of a quite new kind for Francis. At his father’s table he had heard the politics of the day discussed, but he had heard them discussed as history was; as something that happened somewhere else. He had never before mixed with people to whom politics and the general ordering of the world were a part of their own lives, were the stage on which their own lives were acted, for whom the protagonists in these successive dramas were men and women whom they were encountering in the ordinary conduct of their existence. He had discussed public events as they were reported in the papers not as they were actually lived over lunch tables, in committee rooms and week-end house parties.

  ‘I saw Poincaré as I came through Park,” Sir Henry said. “It was the day the franc touched 240. He said an interesting thing. ‘This is our equivalent to your general strike,’ he said. ‘You are a country that depends on the maintenance of your social structure. We are a country that depends on the maintenance of our domestic economics. If the franc were to collapse the basis of our family life would follow it. Exactly as your way of life would have been destroyed if a section of the community had been able to dictate to the majority. We’ve both got the same issue at the same time in a different way. Baldwin broke the strike, it’s up to me to save the franc.’” Sir Henry paused, then turned to Francis. “I don’t think you in your country have had any equivalent for those two situations.”

  Francis had been too interested in what was being said to interject any opinions of his own, but he was flattered at having his opinion asked.

  “We had a small slump just after the war,” he said. “But then I think every country had, it was a question of readjustment; war shortages had been made good and we were overproducing. Now that we’ve got our supply adjusted to our demand, everything seems to be moving smoothly. After all,” he hesitated, he did not want to boast, “the war didn’t affect us in the way that it affected Europe; we weren’t involved in it to the same extent. We were naturally able to get into our stride more quickly afterwards.”

  He looked towards Lord Ambrose as he spoke. Lord Ambrose nodded.

  “I know you were, but I’m not at all certain that you won’t find in the long run that the war hasn’t had every bit as dynamic an effect on you as it has on us and France. The war converted you in a very short time from being one of the creditor nations of the world into being the creditor nation of the world. It gave you a position of unchallenged supremacy fifty years earlier than you would ordinarily have earned it.”

  “Does that matter much?”

  “It’s always dangerous when power comes to anyone before he’s completely ready for it.”

  “Do you think we’re going to misuse it then?”

  It was not said contentiously, but Sir Henry clearly considered it prudent to intervene. He amplified Francis’ previous question. “You’d surely say, wouldn’t you, that at the moment the barometer stands set fair for the world in general; the franc stabilized, the general strike settled, the Germans meeting us amicably at conferences.”

  But again Ambrose shook his head. “I don’t like victories that are too complete. They leave resentment on the other side. The British Trade Unionists were humiliated, so was Germany. It’s dangerous to leave a heritage of rancor.”

  That was a point which Francis was in a position to confirm. He had been in Berlin during the general strike. Most of the young painters whom he had seen there had been advanced left-wing. They had gloated over the news from England. This was what Trotsky had prophesied. The start of the world revolution. When, however, the news of the strike’s failure had come through, their disappointment had been occasioned less by the immediate failure of Trotsky’s prophecy than by the spectacle of the continued supremacy of a detested rival.

  Sir Henry nodded When Francis told him that. “We’ve handled the Germans the wrong way. We should either have crushed them utterly as the French wanted or we should have treated them as friends at once, bolstering up their pride by telling them that they had not really lost the war at all, welcoming them on equal terms. We didn’t do either. It was a big mistake.”

  “But surely you don’t think there’s any danger of another war.”

  Sir Henry shook his head. “No, I don’t think there is. The world must have learned its lesson. I don’t believe that any government could induce its citizens to go to war. But I certainly think that we’re going to have trouble with Germany again, more trouble than we need have had.”

  “The trouble about the Germans,” said Ambrose, “is that though they’ve been causing trouble in Europe for the last two hundred years, they’re the only Europeans we English and Americans can unite in liking. They’re clean and practical and hard-working. They’re straight in business. They’ve the same ideas that we have, about Christmas, about family life. They’re generous and sentimental. The French and English don’t really like each other, nor do the English and the Americans, but both English and Americans like the Germans. Although the Germans with their absurd chip on their shoulder have been upsetting the peace of Europe for two hundred years, in between wars we can’t help liking them.”

  “They’re so good-looking too,” said Madame Renan.

  “Good-looking, what do you mean? Square heads, fat jowls.” It was her husband who interjected that. It was the first time that he had spoken since the party had sat down. Like so many writers, he preferred to listen and collect impressions. He spoke now testily. “How can you say that they’re good-looking? It’s because they’re so unattractive-looking that they have this chip upon their shoulders.”

  But his wife would not agree with him.

  “Now chéri, how can you say that? You are thinking of the Prussians. Prussia is only a small part of Germany. Think of the South Germans, so strong and straight, with their hair like corn and their eyes like cornflowers, think of the Bavarians.”

  “And when may I ask have you visited Bavaria?”

  “It is not necessary to visit a country to form an impression of its nationals. You have never been to America, but in your last play …”

  Renan cut her short with a quick impatient laugh that was practically a snort. “How like a woman. You base a whole philosophy of politics on your personal reaction towards one, I repeat towards one, your personal reaction towards one I admit reasonably handsome gigolo that you meet at two o’clock in the morning in a boîte. Because this particular gigolo …”

  “But chéri, he was not a gigolo, on the contrary…”

  Their voices were upon a danger note. It was very clear to Francis that one of the family rows of which Judy had spoken was about to be enacted. He saw Sir Henry and Judy flash a quick glance across the table at one another, a glance of corroborative interrogation, then Judy nodded. With raised voice she intervened.

  “That’s a most interesting point you raise, Monsieur Renan, about the Germans having a chip upon their shoulder because they are unattractive-looking. It’s rather curious, Henry, but do you remember the German Ambassador in Madrid saying exactly the same thing about the Japanese. He said the Japanese have sufficient aesthetic sense to realize that they are squat and hideous and they resent it. Do you remember how Aleck laughed? I wonder if Mr. Oliver knows him, by the way, Aleck Moore, he was your ambassador there then.”

  She turned to Francis as she said that. It was his cue to direct the conversation out of dangerous waters. He took it quickly.

  “I don’t know Aleck Moore personally but of course I know quite a bit about him.” As any American would. Aleck Moore was a public figure, a newspaper proprietor, who had become a diplomat; he had been the husband and was now the
widower of Lillian Russell.

  “I suppose you saw Lillian on the stage,” Sir Henry said.

  Judy laughed at that.

  “Darling, he’s much too young.”

  “Oh no, I’m not.”

  Sixteen years ago, his father had taken him to see her for his tenth birthday present. “When one’s very young,” his father had said, “one should always make a point of seeing public figures who are at the end of their career. It’ll mean something to you when you’ve grown up to say that you saw Lillian Russell.”

  They had gone to a matinée. They had lunched at Delmonico’s. They had had seats in the fifth row of the orchestra. It was the first musical that he had seen. He was drowsy with a surfeit of éclairs and chicken patties. He had been dazed by the noise and color. He had no idea what the story was about; but he could remember vividly over sixteen years Lillian’s trailing skirts and great wide feathered hats and her full clear voice.

  “Did you see much of Aleck Moore?” he asked.

  Sir Henry nodded. They had been in Madrid the year before. Aleck Moore had become a great friend of theirs, particularly of Judy’s.

  “How’s he taking Lillian’s death?” Lady Ambrose asked. “I’d always heard that he adored her.”