Mayfair Mama, Turn Your Damper Down

The second-­class-­passenger complement of the S. S. Leviathan, eastbound for Cherbourg in June, 1927, included some rare birds. There was an opulent Frenchwoman of a certain age on whom Toulouse-­Lautrec had reputedly squandered his patrimony, a Belgian bicycle team fresh from the six-­day races at the Garden, an elderly dandy of the era of Berry Wall who claimed to have had more than a waltzing acquaintance with the Jersey Lily, and a Greek gem dealer with a black monocle and a Malacca stick containing a handful of uncut diamonds. At least, he said they were diamonds, and I, dizzied by my first trip abroad and saturated with Maurice Dekobra’s The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, joyously accepted his confidence. I doubt whether anyone else so rabid for adventure has ever embarked on a maiden voyage to Europe. I was ready for every contingency—international cardsharps, dacoits, and, particularly, veiled charmers with mocking mouths who might entice me to Salonika. Folded at the bottom of my suitcase, where they could be easily stolen, were blueprints of a mitrailleuse I had cooked up, together with a trench coat suitable for tracking the culprits through the purlieus of Stambul. I sat in the smoking lounge of the ocean greyhound expelling thin jets of Turkish from my nostrils until my head rang like a burglar alarm. I cultivated a hooded, watchful gaze.

Contrary to the hopes inspired by Dekobra’s novel, almost nothing happened to me on the crossing, and when it did, it was of a completely unexpected nature. The second day out, a gusty, obstreperous party named Lightfoot was moved into my cabin. He was a man of shattering vitality, a combination of Olsen and Johnson, with an explosive guffaw that set the lifeboats quivering in their davits. A compulsive talker in the great tradition, Lightfoot instantly peppered me with his history and aspirations, downing a hogshead of bourbon meanwhile. He had been a World War ace, he told me, and was currently en route to Le Bourget, from which he proposed to fly the Atlantic solo. He predicted that this would overshadow Lindy’s feat, and I agreed unequivocally, since he made no mention of using an airplane for the hop.

Time has mercifully dimmed the memory of our association during the next five days, but one episode remains untarnished. Lightfoot and I occupied a table in the dining saloon with a mousy schoolteacher from South Braintree—a Miss Purvis—and a fattish, mealy androgyne called Rossiter, who was going to the Hook of Holland to study counterpoint. Lightfoot promptly dedicated himself to making Rossiter’s life a burden. He lay awake nights contriving practical jokes to play on the musician, each more barbarous than the last. They reached their climax one noon when Rossiter was late for luncheon. Adjuring us to secrecy, Lightfoot produced a baking-­powder biscuit of sponge rubber, one of those realistic facsimiles sold in magic-­supply shops. I presume it was part of his traveling kit, for, well equipped as the Leviathan was, it carried no gear of that kind. He then smothered it in sauce, dabbed sauce on our three plates for authenticity, and gleefully awaited Rossiter. The latter, his appetite sharpened by a turn around the deck, sat down and addressed the hors-­d’œuvre with relish. As his fork pressed into the biscuit, it discharged a mournful squeal that short-­circuited conversation all over the room. People half rose, craning their necks and peering spellbound at Rossiter. Apparently unable to credit his ears, he again cut into the biscuit, and again the hidden mechanism responded. In the attendant wave of mirth, cued by Lightfoot’s bellow, Rossiter stood up with simple dignity and, I am glad to report, flung the delicacy into his tormentor’s face.

The acquisitive instinct dies hard. Pawing over the detritus in my bookshelf latterly, I was confronted after two decades with the very copy of The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars that had set me roving. Unlike its owner, its spine was still erect and soldierly and its jacket free of mildew. The temptation to see what sort of tinsel had captivated me at twenty-­three, as well as to spend a couple of hours on my shoulder blades, was irresistible. Before you could say Maurice Dekobra, I was in the horizontal, drinking in the stuff in great, thirsty gulps.

The tale M. Dekobra told so artfully that it tore through five editions like a sickle-­bar mower was, between ourselves, no trail blazer. The formula of high life and low loins, to borrow Aldous Huxley’s apposite phrase, had long been employed by E. Phillips Oppenheim, Paul Morand, and other writers of that genre. Dekobra merely souped it up, adding a high-­octane element few novelists had taken advantage of until then—Soviet Russia. There may have been earlier variations on the theme of the Beauty and the Bolshevik, but I venture that there had been none more foolish.

The title of The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars prefigures its exotic and shifting locale; the narrative, related by a singular coxcomb named Prince Séliman, veers from London to Berlin, from Vienna to the Caucasus, and from Monaco to Loch Lomond with a breathlessness unmatched outside a Vogue fashion forecast. The Prince, a Frenchman whose patent to nobility is never made quite clear, is at the outset footloose in London, recently separated from his wealthy American wife. An advertisement in the personal column of the Times secures him a position as private secretary to a lovely gadabout widow called Lady Diana Wynham. “In Paris,” observes Dekobra as he proceeds to describe her high cheekbones, sensual lips, and limpid eyes, “there is a saying that when an Englishwoman is beautiful she is very beautiful.” Trust the French to coin a nifty like that; no wonder they produced Voltaire. At any rate, the comely peeress has earned an international reputation for audacity and chic. She shyly confesses that “there is not a customs officer in any country who doesn’t recognize the perfume of my valises, and who doesn’t know the most sacred details of my lingerie.” Having spent the better part of two million pounds since her husband’s death, she feels she needs a cool head to counsel her, and offers Prince Séliman five hundred pounds a month to do so. He takes the post but spurns the money, declaring he wishes only relief from boredom: “I don’t rent my services, I give them.” At twenty-­three, I understood his motives perfectly; I had done the same kind of thing on innumerable occasions. Today, I incline to sleep on it.

One of the Prince’s first assignments is to conduct Lady Diana to a session with a celebrated psychologist, Professor Siegfried Traurig, to have a dream of hers interpreted. The reader gets a foretaste here of Dekobra’s love of the salty simile, a passion that is to boil over later, when he speaks of “those European clinics where they dig up the soul with the shovel of introspection and where they slice apart the elements of the will with the chisel of psychopathic analysis.” Equally poetic figures are evoked, farther on, by a description of a caviar binge (“As the lemon wept acid tears on the delicacy, etc.”) and by Lady Diana’s treatment of a lover (“I . . . put my guest under the cold shower-­bath of refusal and then on the burning flame of hope”). Subsequently, in a petulant mood, she excoriates the Prince for his horrid logic, “which inevitably throws the wild horses of imagination with its lasso.” It is significant that once the steeds start bucking, Dekobra himself conveniently mislays that old riata.

To continue: Professor Traurig elicits the details of Lady Diana’s dream, orders the Prince to kiss her, and photographs what is represented to be a spectral analysis of her reactions—standard psychoanalytical technique, as any fool knows. The basic test reveals that she has a perfection neurosis, which one presumes will yield to a little snake oil, and our heroine blithely goes her way. The plot now starts bubbling in the percolator. Rumor spreads that Sumatra-­rubber stocks, her ladyship’s chief investment, are shaky, and tradespeople begin to dun her. Seeking to divert their attention momentarily, Lady Diana causes a scandal, by executing a shocking dance at a charity matinée. Her costume will be helpful to those in a tight financial spot. It consists of “a cache-­sexe no bigger than the hand of a sacristan and held in place by an almost invisible garland of bindweed, two buskins with silver ribbons, and a veil of white mousseline which hung down to her elbows.” Of course, if you live in an area where sacristans and bindweed are unobtainable, you will simply have to improvise, but anybody with an ounce of initiative can make do.

The chandeliers have hardly ceased rocking before Lady Diana has another brainstorm. Fifteen thousand acres of oil lands near Telav, on the Black Sea, formerly owned by her hubby, have been nationalized by the Bolsheviks. However, she has information that the Soviet delegate to Berlin, Leonid Varichkine, can be bribed into allowing her to exploit them. Prince Séliman departs forthwith to brace him. At the Walhalla Restaurant, in Bellevuestrasse, he and Varichkine, a smooth apple in Bond Street clothes, get together over half a dozen 1911 Heidsieck Monopole. The Russian knows what he wants, and it isn’t petroleum: “I’ll countersign the papers for her concession when the rising sun surprises her in my arms.” In the higher echelons, obviously, proposals of the sort are a commonplace; Séliman, unruffled, wires his principal, and she arrives to look Varichkine over. In the meantime, another, and sinister, character has entered the wings—Mme. Irina Mouravieff, the delegate’s mistress and herself a power with the Politburo. She tacks up a “No Poaching” sign, accompanied by dire threats. Everybody, naturally, ignores her caveat; and understandably, because otherwise the chlorophyll would drain out of the story. Varichkine, in fact, is so smitten with Lady Diana that he offers his hand, and she, attracted by the uproar the marriage would excite in Berkeley Square, accepts it. The round ends with Mme. Mouravieff darkly promising the Prince, who she feels is in some way culpable, that he will rue the day. He counters with an epigram, shaped like a cheese blintz, to the effect that “a man who is warned is worth two ordinary men.” As events prove, he would have done better to stow the bravado and tighten up his accident policy.

Reduced to essentials, the rest of the yarn treats of Mme. Mouravieff’s revenge. She lures the Prince to Nikolaïa, in the Caucasus, to inspect the oil lands, by trailing before him a cuddly Mädchen named Klara, with a mutinous nose and a mole on her cheekbone. Séliman and Klara flirt their way into the swansdown in Vienna, and in Constantinople, weakened by raisins, she acknowledges being a Russian agent and warns him to turn back. He takes ship for Batum nevertheless, and at Trebizond encounters another obstacle—his wife, Griselda, cruising aboard her yacht with friends. They exchange sighs over bygone ecstasies, seem about to become reconciled, and then hearken to the plot, which beckons the Prince on to Muscovy. Shortly after he reaches Nikolaïa, the trap is sprung, and he lands in an underground cell operated by the Cheka.

The idiom thereafter, up to the time the Prince escapes on his wife’s yacht, has been made tolerably familiar by such savants as Eugene Lyons and George Sokolsky. I shall not queer their pitch beyond saying that Dekobra, too, is a pretty deft man with a Red atrocity. Mme. Mouravieff is, of course, on hand at all hours to chivy and gloat, but the Prince finally slips his leash. Off the Riviera, he and his wife adjust their differences, a minor climax preceding a whirlwind finish at Castle Glensloy, in Scotland. Here the jealous Russky hunts down Lady Diana (“Two tigresses facing one another. The daughter of the Mongols against the daughter of the Celts. Two races. Two worlds. . . . Above all, two women”), draws a heater on her rival, and is pistoled by Varichkine. The curtain rings down on Milady bidding adieu to her devoted secretary at the Gare de l’Est as the Orient Express snorts impatiently in the background. She has brushed off Varichkine and is faring forth in quest of someone “who will cater to my whims and ripen in my safe-­deposit box some golden apples from the garden of Hesperides.” Which, let us fervently hope, she will pare with the platinum fruit knife of restraint.

No doubt my senses were sharpened razor-­keen by contact with the world of intrigue and counterplot, because just as I closed The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars I detected a soft footfall outside my room and the sound of the doorknob being tried gently. In a flash, I realized that it was my family, come to spy on my movements. Quick as a cat, I popped the book into my jumper, removed my teeth, and pretended to be deep in slumber when they entered. It was a close shave, for had they caught me, I would have had short shrift. This way, I have not only long shrift but Dekobra—and, baby, that’s enough to make anybody’s cup run over.