History of a Pleasure Seeker (17 page)

If she chose to disappear in this vast country of adventurers, she was sure she could. “I shall return tomorrow,” she told the tail-suited salesman, deceitfully. “Keep the ring and those two bracelets aside for me.”

She left the shop trembling. It was almost six o’clock. She walked back towards the Metropole, wondering if there was a God and, if so, what He would do to her if she did what she was contemplating. (If He existed, she was sure He was a “He.”) Agneta had sat through hundreds of church services but could never decide if she truly believed. As she reached the hotel she set the Deity a test: she would enter like a guest and ride the lift in her finery. If she was seen and apprehended she would face the consequences. If not, she would claim her reward for the years she had spent anticipating other people’s whims.

The doorman bowed low to her. So did the elevator attendant. Neither Maarten nor Jacobina was in the lobby, and she gained her own room without incident. Once in it she undressed quickly, put on a dress of her own, packed the peacock-blue satin in her valise with all the underwear she possessed, placed the sapphire choker and pearls between its folds, called a bellboy and instructed him to take the case downstairs and to order a cab for her. Next she went to the Vermeulen-Sickerts’ suite, which the hotel’s manager had just left, and expressed the greatest outrage that someone should have profited by her absence to steal from her beloved mistress.

She helped Jacobina undress and advised her to lie down before dinner. She ordered some bouillon for Maarten, whose ashen face irritated her. How easily he could bear the loss of a few precious stones! She left him trying to place a telephone call to Philadelphia and went into his wife’s dressing room. There she selected five gowns, two cloaks, seven pairs of shoes and a muff and packed them in a trunk, into which she also placed the contents of Jacobina’s jewel box and a quantity of cash. She put on a double-breasted traveling dress with a velvet collar and a chic hat. The dressing room had its own door to the corridor and she summoned a footman to take her luggage downstairs.

Again the elevator attendant bowed to her. As the doorman lifted her into her hired carriage, she pressed a dollar bill into his hand. It was all the spending money Jacobina had given her and it gave her pleasure to leave it behind. “Grand Central Station,” she told the driver; and when they had turned the corner and no one had run after her, she began to cry with happiness.

T
he revelation of Agneta Hemels’ perfidy shook Maarten profoundly and contributed to his conviction that old certainties were crumbling. He discovered that the maid had bolted when she failed to wake them the next morning, and the trauma of the missing jewels delayed him so long that by the time he reached the Knickerbocker Trust Company, the line to its door stretched halfway round the block.

The rumor was that J. P. Morgan and his associates were prepared to let the Knickerbocker fail. Many in line—men and women—were fighting back tears. Others were angry. Maarten took his place burdened by an awful resignation. He knew he had lost his money.

It was the will of God.

And so it proved. Soon after midday, the great bronze doors were closed to screams of protest. In three hours that morning, more than $8 million had been paid out in cash—$500,000 of it was Maarten’s own and lost for good. He could hardly believe it and yet, now that the disaster had occurred, he saw that he had been expecting it.

He went to other banks but he knew it was hopeless and it was. The call money rate on the New York Stock Exchange was nearing 100 percent and no one was lending. “We must go home, my dear,” he told Jacobina. “I can barely pay the hotel bill as it is.” And that evening they took the midnight sailing to Liverpool and for the first time since her girlhood Jacobina packed her own clothes.

The ship’s extravagance reproached Maarten and he spent the first three days of the voyage in bed. On the morning of the fourth he woke early and crept from their darkened cabin to a stretch of isolated deck and thought. It was no use trying to save himself if God was against him. Nothing he attempted would work; the Almighty had made that clear by bringing the entire banking system of the United States to its knees, merely to punish him. Before he took any practical steps it was vital to regain the affections of his Creator—unless, of course, he was predestined to damnation, in which case … He knelt heavily, not caring that a steward had appeared to lay out the deck chairs, and threw himself on the mercy of his Maker. He was used to dreading the flames of hell, but earthly success had so far shielded him from more immediate manifestations of divine disfavor. He prayed until the steward asked him if he would care for some coffee; and this interruption broke his concentration, leaving him answerless and afraid.

N
aomi de Leeuw received the telegram announcing her employer’s unexpected return and sent Hilde Wilken to the schoolroom to convey the good news to Egbert. Opening the door in the dining room wall, the maid was confronted by an odd tableau: Piet Barol was balancing precariously on one leg in the middle of the entrance hall while his pupil watched him, shivering. She curtsied. “If you please, Master Egbert, your parents will be home tomorrow.”

Piet had counted on having weeks more to defeat Egbert’s foes. “Thank you, Hilde,” he said sharply, and once she had gone, with a greater sense of urgency, “Call again, old fellow.”

“Black.”

Piet swung his left foot away from his body in a balletic movement and very slowly brought it down on a white tile. “Call again.”

“White.”

Now Piet lifted his right leg and placed it very gently over the intersection of four tiles. He waited. The room was silent. He could hear the boy’s rough breathing and the gurgle of a filling radiator. “Call again,” he said, but Egbert did not speak.

T
he Vermeulen-Sickerts arrived the next morning, after spending an anxious night in a hotel at Liverpool. Mr. Blok was extremely annoyed to see that Agneta Hemels was not of the party. He assumed she had been let go in New York and regretted the lost opportunity to dismiss her himself. He enjoyed such scenes, which Mrs. de Leeuw’s stable management of the household rarely afforded him.

The news of her protégée’s wickedness shocked the housekeeper to her core. Informed of it by Jacobina, she took the unprecedented step of sitting down in her mistress’ presence, and the first thing she said was: “We must keep this from the lower servants.”

“I quite agree,” said Mr. Blok. “It would set a most unfortunate example.”

And so the fiction that Agneta Hemels had met a man in America, and been proposed to, and departed for Chicago with her employers’ blessing was devised; and when Hilde heard it she went up to the attic and sobbed among the boxes and old trunks and descended in a mood as black as Maarten’s.

S
ince his unsatisfactory plea for guidance and compassion on the deck of the
Lusitania
, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts had resorted to extreme self-denial. He had consumed nothing but coffee and bread for the remainder of the voyage, which meant that he endured this interview with his butler and housekeeper in a state of detached despair. It was Monday, October 28th, and the newspapers contained apocalyptic news: on both the previous Thursday and Friday, the New York Stock Exchange had barely made it to the closing bell and call money rates were at 150 percent.

Constance saw at once that something very serious was wrong. She kissed her father tenderly, resolving not to pry, but her curiosity did not long go unsatisfied. Before lunch she and Louisa were summoned to the study.

In his bath it had come to Maarten that only total humiliation, consciously self-inflicted, might cleanse the sin of overreaching. It was necessary to tell his family of their changed situation without subterfuge or excuse, and he did not delay. He did not invite Egbert to the conference, though he wished he could include his tutor—because a man of Piet Barol’s merits might have shared the burden of masculine responsibility. But this was impossible. Methodically, in a voice calmed by hunger, he told his wife and daughters what had happened—the snake-tongued Mr. Dermont and his vision of a potentate’s hotel; his own quiescence in the architect’s sinful grandeur; the disappearance of his partner at the crucial hour; his attempts to struggle on; and the Lord’s final, incontrovertible sanction: the loss of half a million dollars and the abrupt expiry of his credit. “I have asked my friends to come after dinner and will throw myself on their mercy,” he said, bleakly. “Without their help, I will go under.”

Listening to him, Louisa longed to shake her father free of his superstitions and was appalled by the totality of his subjection to them. The protective instincts of which Constance was the usual focus surged within her. How she wished she were a man! She would sail to America; track down this Lionel Dermont in Philadelphia; speak to Mr. J. P. Morgan himself, if necessary; demand and secure the restoration of her family’s money. But all she said was, “We’ll manage, Papa. Of course we will,” and hoped that the interview would end before the delivery of her morning’s purchases. It did not. While the family sat in bewildered silence, Hilde Wilken knocked on the door and staggered into the room beneath a bale of oyster cashmere, the card on which read
Urgent Delivery—Paid In Full.
Louisa had intended to have matching habits made for herself and her sister, but now the idea embarrassed her. “You may take it upstairs, Hilde,” she said. And to her father, once the maid had left them: “I will return it, Papa. It’s the least I can do.”

Maarten was touched by this offer, but it underlined how little experience his daughters had of the real world and how poorly they would navigate it without his money to protect them. “Keep it, my dear,” he replied forlornly. “It will not be the making or the breaking of us.”

P
iet had a hint of the crisis that night, leaning out of Didier Loubat’s window, but the young men could not make sense of what they heard.

The girls were engaged in collecting their disposable assets. “I suppose you did always want to open a shop,” said Constance doubtfully, surveying the pile of clothes Louisa had decided they could do without.

“I won’t let you starve, darling. You can be my chief vendeuse.” Once the shock of her father’s news had subsided, Louisa had seen possibilities in her family’s sudden misfortune. “Poor girls go out to work.” She opened her jewel case and removed the ruby bracelet her godmother had left her. “Haven’t you always rather envied them?”

“No.”

“That’s because you lack imagination, my dear.” Louisa sat on the bed. “Think of having a little shop on the Kalverstraat. Very chic, of course, inside. Mirrors and good lighting and soft carpets. All our friends would buy from us.”

“And take pleasure in our downfall.” Constance spoke bitterly. She was thinking of Myrthe Janssen, whose engagement to Frederik van Sigelen had just been announced. Perhaps she had been unwise not to marry when she could. “Do you think anyone will have us now?” she asked, contemplating her reflection in the mirror and deriving some comfort from it.

“What a silly question. Think of the love letters in your desk.”

“They were written to a girl who had a dowry.”

“No, Constance, they were written to you.”

There was silence. Louisa began taking shoes from her closet.

“I wouldn’t marry for money in any case,” said Constance at last, following her own train of thought.

“If you worked with me, you wouldn’t have to.”

“You’re not serious, Louisa.”

“Why ever not?” Until an hour before, Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts had not been at all serious about opening a shop. She had been content to daydream about what never could be. Now it seemed that her father’s right to oppose her had dwindled dramatically, and her sister’s skepticism provoked a rush of conviction. “If we sold our jewels, we could rent a place and hire Mevrouw Wunder and Babette to work for us. Babette’s an excellent cutter. You could be the model. I’ll design everything and make sure people don’t swindle us.”

“Don’t look so happy about all of this.”

“I’m not.” Louisa adjusted her expression. “But one of us has to be practical.”

“Not tonight, darling.” And Constance went to the window and closed it, because she felt afraid of the future and did not wish her sister to see cowardice in her face.

T
he servants’ ignorance was shattered the next afternoon by a raspy-voiced newspaper boy hawking a special edition of
De Amsterdamsche Lantaren
, a scandal sheet whose front page proclaimed likely ruin of leading burgher. Piet was drawn to the schoolroom’s window in time to see Mrs. de Leeuw buy up the entire edition. He set Egbert an exercise in geometry and went into the kitchen, which was in a state of uproar.

Monsieur la Chaume had abandoned his sauce on the stove and snatched a copy from the housekeeper before she could incinerate her haul. The article mentioned no names, but its hints were broad, and in the leaking of the story its horrors had expanded. “Several millions of dollars” had been lost by one of the “city’s first citizens.” His “extensive collection of
objets d’art
” was “likely to be sold at conducive rates.”

It was true that Maarten had been closeted in his study with various grave-faced gentlemen ever since his return from America. Hilde reported that the conversation had ceased whenever she appeared, which was not at all the usual manner of the house.

“I had better take this libelous publication upstairs,” said Mr. Blok.

M
aarten Vermeulen-Sickerts, like Piet Barol, inspired instinctive jealousy in a significant proportion of other men. As he contemplated the newspaper ten minutes later, he understood that one of the friends in whom he had trusted everything had betrayed him. He did his best to manufacture a becoming Christian forgiveness. He failed and flung his Venetian-glass paperweight to the floor. Beside him, on the table it always occupied, was the silver miniature of the man on a tightrope—balancing so precariously, yet permanently preserved from disaster.