From the moment of entering Lorry Spear’s studio Mrs. Glaisher dominated it. Vance was not the only guest conscious of her prepotency. She was one of the powerful social engines he had caught a glimpse of in the brief months of his literary success in New York, three years earlier; but at that moment his life had been so packed with anxieties and emotions that he could hardly take separate note of the figures whirling past him.
The only woman he had known who vied in wealth and worldly importance with Mrs. Glaisher was the lady who had invited him to her huge museum-like house, shown him her pictures and tapestries, and failed, at the last moment, to give him the short-story prize on which all his hopes depended. But Mrs. Pulsifer was a shadowy figure compared with Mrs. Glaisher, a mere bundle of uncertainties and inhibitions. Mrs. Glaisher was of more robust material. She was as massive as her furniture and as inexhaustible as her bank~account. Mrs. Pulsifer’s scruples and contradictions would have been unintelligible to a woman who, for forty years, had hewed her way toward a goal she had never even faintly made out.
After a long life devoted to the standardized entertaining of the wealthy, Mrs. Glaisher had suddenly discovered that Grand Opera, paté de foie gras, terrapin and Rolls–Royces were no longer the crowning attributes of her class; and undismayed and unperplexed she had begun to buy Picassos and Modiglianis, to invite her friends to hear Stravinsky and Darius Milhaud, to patronize exotic dancers, and labour privately (it was the hardest part of her task) over the pages of “Ulysses”.
As Vance watched her arrival he guessed in how many strange places that unblenching satin slipper had been set, and read, in the fixity of her smile, and the steady gaze of her small inquisitive eyes, her resolve to meet without wavering any shock that might await her. He thought of Halo’s suggestion for his next novel, and was amused at the idea of depicting this determined woman who, during an indefatigable life-time, had seen almost everything and understood nothing.
Lorry’s studio had been hastily tidied up, as Jane Meggs and her friend understood the job; but Vance saw Mrs. Glaisher’s recoil from the dusty floor and blotched walls, and the intensity of her resolve to behave as if Mimi Pinson’s garret were her normal dwelling. Electric lamps dangling in uncertain garlands lit up a dinner-table contrived out of drawing-boards and trestles, and the end of the room was masked by a tall clothes’-horse hung with a Cubist rug, from behind which peeped the competent face of the restaurateur charged with the material side of the entertainment; for Lorry had seen to it that, whatever else lacked, wine and food should be up to the Park Avenue standard.
With Mrs. Glaisher was a small sharp-elbowed lady, whose lavishly exposed anatomy showed the most expensive Lido glaze. Her quick movements and perpetual sidelong observance of her friend reminded Vance of a very intelligent little dog watching, without interfering with, the advance of a determined blind man. “Oh, don’t you know? That’s Lady Pevensey — the one they all call ‘Imp’,” Jane Meggs explained to Vance as Lorry led him toward Mrs. Glaisher. The others all seemed to know Lady Pevensey, and she distributed handshakes, “darlings”, and “I haven’t seen you in several ages”, with such impartial intimateness that Vance was surprised when Savignac, to whom she had just cried out: “Tiens, mon vieux, comme tu es en beauté ce soir!” enquired in a whisper who she was.
The party consisted of Lorry’s trump cards — the new composer, Andros Nevsky, who, as soon as he could be persuaded to buckle down to writing the music of “Factories”, was to reduce Stravinsky and “The Six” to back numbers; the poet, Yves Tourment, who, after an adolescence of over twenty years, still hung on the verge of success; Sady Lenz, the Berlin ballerina, who was to create the chief part in Lorry’s spectacle; Hedstrom, the new Norse novelist, and Brank Heff, the coming American sculptor, whom the knowing were selling their Mestrovics to collect; and, to put a little fluency and sparkle into this knot of international celebrities, such easy comrades and good talkers as Tolby, Savignac, and others of their group.
Vance was so much amused and interested that he had forgotten his own part in the show, and was surprised when Lorry called him up to be introduced to Mrs. Glaisher, and he heard that lady declare: “I told Mr. Spear I wouldn’t dine with him unless he invited you, not even to meet all the other celebrities in Paris.”
“Ah, no: Nosie’s so headstrong we couldn’t do anything with her,” Lady Pevensey intervened, startling Vance by putting her arm through his, and almost as much by revealing that Mrs. Glaisher was known to her intimates as “Nosie”. “Nosie’s been simply screaming to everybody: ‘I MUST have the man who wrote “The Puritan”’, and when Lorry found you’d disappeared without leaving an address Nosie couldn’t be pacified till she heard that you’d turned up. Lorry, darling, you’ve put Vance next to her at table, haven’t you? Oh, Jane, love, tell him he MUST! I know she idolizes Nevsky, and she’s been dying for years to meet darling Yves — but she won’t be able to speak a word of French to them, much less Norwegian to Hedstrom,” (this in a tragic whisper to Lorry) “so for God’s sake pacify the Polar Lions somehow, and let Nosie have her Puritan.”
But with foreigners as his guests Lorry protested that he could hardly seat his young compatriot next to the chief guest of the evening, and Vance was put opposite to Mrs. Glaisher, who sat between Lorry and the silent and bewildered Norse novelist. Vance was amused to see that Lorry had chosen the most inarticulate man in the room as Mrs. Glaisher’s neighbour. In this way he kept her to himself, while Lady Pevensey, on his right, was fully engaged between Yves Tourment and Savignac’s sallies from across the table.
Lorry had done his job well. The food was excellent, the champagne irreproachable; he had dressed up in the gay rags of Bohemia an entertainment based on the most solid gastronomic traditions, and Mrs. Glaisher, eating truffled poularde and langouste à l’Américaine, was convinced that she was sharing the daily fare of a band of impecunious artists.
Down the table, Nevsky, in fluent Russian French, was expounding to Jane Meggs his theory of the effect of the new music on glandular secretions in both sexes, and Brank Heff, the American sculptor, stimulated by numerous preliminary cocktails, broke his usual heavy silence to discuss with Fr?ulein Sady Lenz her merits as a possible subject for his chisel. “What I want is a woman with big biceps and limp breasts. I guess you’d do first rate . . . How about your calves, though? They as ugly as your arms? I guess you haven’t danced enough yet to develop the particular deformity I’m after. . .”
When the conversation flagged Jane Meggs started it up again with a bilingual scream; and above the polyglot confusion rose Lorry’s masterful voice, proclaiming to Mrs. Glaisher: “What we want is to break the old moulds, to demolish the old landmarks . . . When Clémenceau pulled down the Colonne Vend?me the fools thought he was doing it for political reasons . . . the Commune, or some such drivel. Pure rot, of course! He was merely obeying the old human instinct of destruction . . . the artist’s instinct: destroying to renew. Why, didn’t Christ Himself say: ‘I will make all things new’? Quite so — and so would I, if I could afford to buy an axe. Just picture to yourself the lack of imagination there is in putting up with the old things — things made to please somebody else, long before we were born, to please people who would have bored us to death if we’d known them. Who ever consulted you and me when the Pyramids were built — or Versailles? Why should we be saddled with all that old dead masonry? Ruins are what we want — more ruins! Look what an asset ruins are to the steamship companies and the tourist agencies. The more ruins we provide them with the bigger their dividends will be. And so with the other arts — isn’t every antiquary simply running a Cook’s tour through the dead débris of the past? The more old houses and furniture and pictures we scrap, the more valuable what’s left will be, and the happier we’ll make the collectors . . . If only the lucky people who have the means to pull down and build up again had the imagination to do it. . .”
“Ah, that’s it: we MUST have imagination,” Mrs. Glaisher announced in the same decisive tone in which, thirty years ago, she might have declared: “We MUST have central heating.”
“If you say so, dear lady, we shall have it — we shall have it already!” cried Lorry in an inspired tone, lifting his champagne glass to Mrs. Glaisher’s; while Yves Tourment shrilled in his piercing falsetto: “Vive Saint Hérode, roi des iconoclastes!”
Mrs. Glaisher, who had paled a little at her host’s Scriptural allusion, recovered when she saw that th............