Tea with Bianca

SYLVIA LYON

I was waiting in the Ritz for Bianca. She had telephoned to me at my office shortly after lunch time to say that she wanted to see me urgently: she was furious at something. Bianca is always furious at something, and one day I am sure that she will have something truly disagreeable to tell me.

A girl's shape whirled rather forcefully through the Vendôme-side doors and I recognized Bianca's smile, that smile of hers, before I could identify her features. She was wearing I know not what; to describe the way Bianca dresses would be sacrilegious, like undertaking the chemical analysis of a perfect day. But her smile floated downwards off her face, leaving traces only around her mouth.

"You do look a little worried," I admitted, greeting her, "let us find our table quickly."

"Don't say 'worried,'" she pleaded wearily, "say 'weltschmerz.' Be accurate, angel-face."

"Tea, of course?" I queried* while her candid young eyes swept in a lazy regard around the Ritz, missing not a thing.

"Yes, tea," she smiled up at the waiter, "no lemon, no milk, no toast, just a little cyanide of potassium." The waiter went off, weaving choppily between the tables. "Dear little waiter," mused Bianca, glancing in approval at her freshly-done nails, "so Swiss." She paused, and the shadows under her eyes deepened. "Do you know Rufus Branch?" she asked bitingly, as she fiercely struck her briquet.

I did not know Rufus Branch.

"It's just as well," she said, puffing hard at her cigarette. "He is so attractive that you would say 'pansy', with your eyebrows, and then we would have an argument. Well,, do you know what he has been saying about me? You can't imagine? My goodness, but you are limited today. Within four hours after his return to Paris, Rufus Branch told one of my most intimate enemies, who immediately telephoned to me, 'Bianca, I hear, says she is broke, but she goes on living in an expensive hotel.' I do not at all like that says, but."

"I was about to tell you the same thing," I began.

"Now don't start in giving me advice, William," warned Bianca. "Give me instead a piece of your toast; it is fattening but less annoying. Don't I talk like an old-fashioned comedy? If you tell me once more that I should write a novel I will slap your face and all these people, even Lady Abdy over there, ('how do you do Lady Abdy'), will think that you are making indecent proposals to me, such as marriage. No, William, you write the novel and I will only charge you for the inspiration-rights. ... Oh yes, about Rufus Branch. I like him very much and I know he is very fond of me, as fond as he can be, being an interior decorator. But it really makes me furious to learn that he said 'Bianca says, but . . .' When he left Paris I was living in a French family and you know how economical that is: if I left my room for one hour by the time I returned half a bottle of Bois des Iles had disappeared. I do admit that now and then I am hard up, but that is because my mother is cutting down on my spending money. I send my dress bills to her, but she doesn't believe in loose cash. I suppose she thinks that if I had fifty francs left over at the end of the month, a Frenchman would want to marry me for my money. Anyhow, it's none of Rufus Branch's business."

"Then why are you angry with him?" I asked, then added, "what do you care what an interior decorator says about you? Not that I have anything against interior decorators, some of them are my best friends."

"William," gasped Bianca, "such a thing for a man like you to say! I am not so angry at Rufus as at the Miklaziell's smug interference. Perhaps," she mused, "they would like me to move out of my hotel and take a room at some hard-up Russian friends of theirs. God help me then."

Bianca grew intense.

"Calm yourself, do calm yourself," I urged gently, "you have been drinking too much tea of late."

"Not so loud, please," she said coldly, "or people will think that you are running down British trade."

"Now Bianca, don't knock the table over or Mrs. Ritz won't allow you to come into her hotel, either. She will keep you locked up in the lavabo, like my dog."

"Your dog?" Bianco asked, leaning forward with great interest. "Have you a dog?"

"You know very well that I have a dog," I replied offendedly, "and Falco is his name."

"Oh, is that a dog?" she asked innocently.

"It certainly is," I said tartly, "a very fine policier"

"For Heaven's sake," Bianca gasped, "I thought he was a little donkey."

"Keep to your subject," I said shortly.

"Now don't chide me, you big bully," she retorted. "You might be a little more sympathetic. I really cannot imagine who could have told Rufus that I am broke, which I am not, and thank you for the offer in your eye. The only people who could have said such a thing are the Miklaziell."

"Who are the ..." I began, a little jealously, for I am absent from Paris at frequent intervals, and during these short periods Bianca always springs into violent intimacy with new people. She has a chain of friends, and has a way of dropping links with a special system of replacements.

"Who are the, who are the? . . ." she exclaimed. "Don't you ever read the Gotha? I read it every morning with a sigh and a tear while I am resting after my bath; then I take a little aspirin. I acquired the virus this winter when I was spending the holidays with some noblesse de province (Cannes)." Bianca at times eases parentheses into her voice. "There was no reading matter in the house except some copies of the Revue Beige, 1921. So I was reduced to the Gotha. I absorbed all the Croy, then skipped to the Ligne." Her adapted translation of the French plural is admirable. "I cheat sometimes, flying from Bibesco to Czartoriski. The Gotha is a real boon to humanity. I once stopped Nancy Hoyt talking by handing her a copy, and later when I made her an evidently permanent loan of a Gotha (German, 1880) she was so enthralled that an operation for appendicitis was avoided. But the Gotha lacks one yawning detail: it does not indicate which members of what families do not speak. It is all very well if one is averti like myself, but even I have made errors. In one of my more naive moments, thinking that I was being perfectly adorable, I said to a Roumanian here in Paris, 'I have just returned from Roumania, charming country.' 'Why it's perfectly ghastly,' he said, smiling with all his charme Slave. (I insist it's charme Slave.) So then to be more local, I added, 'I admire very much your cousin, Prince Stirbi, charming man.' 'Yes he is charming,' agreed my fellow-guest enthusiastically, 'and I would like to see him hanged.' ... I haven't interrupted you, have I, William?"

"No, you haven't interrupted me," I said, "but I would like to know what nationality the Miklaziell are, and why should they talk about you?"

"They are League of Nations, but never ask me why. It's a word I loathe," Bianca informed me. "They have League of Nations' passports. The Miklaziell are frightfully rich, frightfully stingy and have enough Russian blood to entitle them to League of Nations' passports."

"But where does their money come from?" I asked.

"They were living on their property in Bessarabia under the delusion that they were Russian, when Roumania took the province away from Russia, and what a damn fool thing that was for Roumania to do. Two of their children had been born there, and Constantine had signed over the estate to them."

"Have they many children?" I asked.

"I never saw so many children," she said, "except on a Sunday. They keep on having them, so as not to waste anything, I suppose. Two were born on their place in Poland, the eldest has opte for France, and so forth. Natalie you see is half Polish and half Roumanian, and Constantine is half Russian and half-crazy. They both dress so badly thatno country would claim them as citizens, not even Germany. They pretend to be povertystricken, of course.

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"I first met them at a dinner where I was so impressed by their aggressive lack of brilliance that I became friendly with them in order that I might learn something about the League of Nations. Am I not becoming habile? I must know something about it, because it is so difficult to go out and not meet the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld. And now I am punished. They have talked against me to Rufus. . . . Oh I know they didn't say anything destructive but I am furious just the same. I loathe economic advice from rich people who are tight. Goodness knows I do live beyond my means, but never would I ask the Miklaziell, of all people, to put me back. I should hate to see them run. She looks like a half-baked Alaska, and he is so out of condition. The last time he ran was during the years when he was scuttling from one country to another to avoid doing the war. I don't see why he is afraid of war, if he were wounded he wouldn't be able to feel it: where there is no sense there's no feeling. I cannot imagine what good he could even do the League of Nations, unless he were used as a blotter."

Bianca was lighting a fresh cigarette. "You haven't answered the second part of my question: why should the Miklaziell gossip about you?" I asked.

Bianca glanced up from the briquet's flame and gave me a look that chilled my what is known as marrow. "Do you think it very nice," she said severely, "for a couple who have settled down like a dying souffle to put doubts as to my chastity or honesty into the head of a man like Rufus Branch who never heard of such a thing? As for you, William, are you asking because you doubt the profound virtue of American womanhood yourself? Oh William, don't look so sad. I like you a lot, like I love Paris. Oh," Bianca careened slightly to one side and gave my arm a violent pinch. "That's how I like you. Have I hurt you? Now we are even."

She was silent for an instant, her eyes looking into space, as if such a thing as space at teatime in the Ritz could possibly exist. Suddenly she brightened. "That's the Duchesse de Guise over there," she exclaimed.

"What has the Duchesse de Guise to do with the situation?" I asked.

"Oh nothing at all," she said with a careless tone to emphasize my lack of understanding, "but I should adore being involved in a perfectly elegant monarchist plot. But as I cannot, but hope to one day, I will practice complication by a plot of personal revenge: I shall have my revenge on the Miklaziell and it will be so sweet that I will gain two pounds!"

Bianca gave a final sigh and subsided: then she had to laugh at herself.

"Feel better now?" I asked. "You should, in such a costume. Chanel?"

"Such a darling," said Bianca. "I mean Chanel herself."

I happened to meet Bianca the next day at a lunch-party. She was serene, she was charming in that American simplicity that is so dangerous after having been exposed to Paris for six youthful years.

"I am so well today," she announced, "that one would think that I have been living on apples. I have done something dreadful." Her long eyes swept in a lateral glance to me. "I have done something awful."

She giggled—no, Bianca does not giggle: she chuckles and shakes. She chuckles and shakes, she says, because she was born during an earthquake, a very lucky earthquake for her, as it opened a vein of gold, a small vein, but nevertheless a vein, on her parent's California ranch.

"I have done something perfectly horrible," she repeated happily. "Have I a sly faunal look about me today? I have? Darling! I feel like the chief of a vendetta, a gang, a mountain clan after a particularly successful tournee. I feel just gorgeous. I went to the dentist this morning."

I was somewhat alarmed.

'I have gotten even with the Miklaziell, I have." Bianca chuckled like a bad child who has been ringing strange door-bells. "You see, we have the same American dentist, and this morning I told him how really rich they are!"