"i-CUv THE TATTOOED COUNTESS CARL VAN VECHTEN: A BIBLIOGRAPHY WHY AND WHAT (aN ADVERTISING PAMPHLET, SIGNED ATLAS; 19^4) MUSIC AFTER THE GREAT WAR (IQIS) MUSIC AND BAD MANNERS (I9l6) Out of print INTERPRETERS AND INTERPRETATIONS (19I7) Out of print THE MERRY-GO-ROUND (iQI^) Out tf print THE MUSIC OF SPAIN (1918) * Out tf print IN THE GARRET (192O) MARGUERITE D'ALVAREZ: A BROADSHEET ( I920) INTERPRETERS ( I920) THE TIGER IN THE HOUSE (1920)* PETER WHIFFLE: HIS LIFE AND WORKS (1922)* THE BLIND BOW-BOY ( I923) * THE TATTOOED COUNTESS ( I924) Mr. Van Vethten hat writttn prifacet for the following books: SOPHIE, BY PHILIP MOELLER (l9I9) A LETTER WRITTEN IN 1837 BY MORGAN LEWIS FITCH (IQIQ) Privatily printed LORDS OP THE HOUSETOPS (I92l) KITTENS, BY SVEND FLEURON (1922) IN A WINTER CITY, BV OUIDA (tHE MODERN LIBRARY; 1923) MY MUSICAL LIFE, BY N. A. RIMSK Y-KO RS AKOFF (1923) PRANCING NIGGER, BV RONALD FIRBANK (1924) THE LORD OP THE SEA, BY M. P. SHIEL (1924) Tht folio-wing hoots contain papers by Mr. Van Vechten: THE BORZOI: 1920 WHEN WINTER COMES TO MAIN STREET, BY GRANT OVERTON (I922) Mr. Van Vechten it the composer of: FIVE OLD ENGLISH DITTIES ( I9O4) * Published also in England The Tattooed Countess A romantic novel with a happy ending Carl Van Vechten New York Alfred • A • Knopf MCMXXIV COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. • PUBLISHED, AUGUST, 1924- SET UP AND ELEC- TROTYPED BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC... BINGHAMTON, N. Y. • PRINTED AND BOUND BY THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NORWOOD, MASS. • PAPER FURNISHED BY W. F. ETHERINGTON & CO. NEW YORK. • The first edition of THE TATTOOED COUNTESS consists of seventy-six hundred and sixty copies as follows : ten [not for sale^ on Borzoi all rag paper signed by the author and num- bered A to J; one hundred and fifty copies on Borzoi all rag paper signed by the author and numbered i to 150; and seventy- five hundred copies on English Featherweight paper. First and second printings before publication Published. August, 1Q24 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR HUGH WALPOLE "Nous travaillons a tout moment a donner sa fortne a notre vie, mats en copiant malgre nous comme un dessin les traits de la personne que nous sommes et non de celle qu'il nous serait agreable d'etre." MARCEL PROUST. THE TATTOOED COUNTESS Chapter I On Thursday, June 17, 1897, in the women's toilet-room at one end of a parlour-car on the Overland Limited, speeding westward from Chi- cago, a lady sat smoking a cigarette. It was a sultry day and she did not appear to be very com- fortable; obviously no one but a confirmed smoker would have resorted to this only means, in the cir- cumstances, of evading the custom of the country. The Countess Ella Nattatorrini was a well- preserved, fashionably dressed woman of fifty. Little lines were beginning to gather around her grey eyes. Her golden-red hair, parted and waved, quite evidently owed its hue to the art of the hair- dresser. Her slightly sagging chin was supported by the stiff bones in her high lace collar. She was at that dangerous and fascinating age just before de- cay sets in. Nevertheless, although at the moment an expression of melancholy lurked, shadowlike, about her countenance, her face offered at once the impression of an alert intelligence and an abounding vitality, an impression accentuated by her somewhat saucy nose which tilted slightly upwards, a mouth which, aided by artifice, formed a perfect Cupid's bow, and by her small, well-formed, rosy ears, her [I] The Tattooed Countess best feature. There was something agreeable about her figure, too, despite the undeniable fact that she was a trifle stout. Had she been a milk- maid, one might have described her as buxom, and she would have been hard put to appear to advan- tage in the styles of 1923. The mode of 1897, however, exactly suited her. Her hips and breasts and buttocks were round and pleasing, and she set off smartly her black taffeta dress and her toque of black coquilles, piled with yellow roses, feathers, and ribbons. On the curve of her breast sparkled a life-sized, gold dragon-fly, the wings of which were encrusted with rubies and sapphires, and from the tail of which depended a diamond-studded watch. Her low shoes were of a French design and her black stockings were sheer. Her mutton- legged sleeves, which, bulging at the shoulder, fitted the arm tightly below, terminated in rufiles of ivory lace, fashioned to fall across her hands, but, owing to the excessive heat, she had turned these back, exposing a curious emblem which had been tattooed on her left arm just above the wrist: a skull, pricked in black, on which a blue butterfly perched, while a fluttering phylactery beneath bore the motto: Que sais-je? Her cigarette—her tenth since she had left Chi- cago—finished, the Countess discarded the stump and opened the window to permit the smoke to es- cape so that no evidence should remain of her volun- tary turpitude. Then she returned to her green [2] The Tattooed Countess plush chair in the parlour-car. Beside her reposed a black leather travelling-bag and a new novel by Paul Bourget in a yellow paper cover. Propped up against the wall near the window stood a black lace parasol with a carved ivory handle. The car was not crowded and the places opposite, as it happened, remained unoccupied. With a somewhat uncon- ventional, considering her environment, but entirely unself-conscious impulse she placed her little feet with their trim ankles on this seat. Then she made an entirely unsuccessful attempt to read a few more pages in Bourget's novel. Her effort to arouse her Interest in literature proving abortive, she per- mitted her gaze to fall on the landscape outside, where a lambent sun lit up the rolling country, splendid with its vast fields of corn, the half-grown stalks, with their green leaves and tasselled cobs, waving in the slight breeze as far as the eye could reach, so that the train seemed to be passing through the midst of some great inland sea. Occasionally these fields were interrupted by stretches of charm- ing wooded country, by meadows, stocked with cattle, by straggling, nondescript villages, by farm- houses and yards, by brooks, and by rivers which seemed only a trifle larger than the brooks. These scenes were no more successful than the Bourget novel in capturing the roving attention of the Countess, although her gaze seemed to be focused upon them. Presently, indeed, tears welled to her eyes, and she sought her handkerchief to [3] The Tattooed Countess wipe them away. The melancholy, however, which shadowed her face was not precisely a tragic melan- choly. Her emotion, even to an indifferent ob- server, would have appeared to be petty. It had in it that ephemeral quality which is distinguishable in the eyes of a young girl who has just been re- fused permission to go out to a party. What was the Countess thinking of, what sou- venirs had disturbed her, to cause her these mo- ments of self-pity? As, it is said, happens to a drowning man, twenty years had rushed pell-mell into her consciousness. In this mental process there was no chronology, no arrangement, even, sometimes, no clarity. She recalled the fields of France, sprinkled with scarlet and saffron poppies and bright blue corn-flowers; an Opera bal, which she had attended in the guise of Froufrou, obsessed her memory, and she began to hum la Valse des roses; a dinner at Tortoni's with the Due de Val- lombrosa, the Vicomte de Sarcus, Monsieur and Madame de Beschevet; a box of bonbons from Boissier, with an unforgettable card. She re- membered how she had met her husband at a Charity Ball in Chicago—how long ago?—twenty or twenty-five years? She could not be certain. Then, a few years later, his sudden death in Venice, his entombment in the mausoleum at Ravenna, the picturesque mourning garments which Worth had created, for her. Quite abruptly other pictures dis- placed these: moments at the Paris Exposition of [4] The Tattooed Countess 1889, Sybil Sanderson in Esclarmonde, a dinner on the platform of the Tour Eiffel, a breakfast at the Pavilion Henri IV at St. Germain. Again, she con- sidered her pink and gold salon in Paris, with its countless, miniature, beflowered, white porcelain figures of Saxe and Sevres, mounted on gold or enamelled bases. For this room Bouguereau had painted one of his prettiest, most waxy Italian peasants, and on another wall hung her own por- trait by Carolus-Duran, in which she was repre- sented wearing a gown with successive flounces of yellow lace, a full-blown, red rose in her belt, stand- ing before a background of marble terraces and clipped limes. But always at the root of her mind stirred the thought of Tony, and always, despite her protracted effort to drive it away, this memory rose to inspire the tears in her eyes. She had encountered Tony, a blond French boy of surpassing handsomeness and twenty-two years, ten months ago in the Quinconces at Bordeaux. From the very beginning she had been vaguely aware that he was stupid, what the French call bete, that he dressed like a cabot, and that he had the habits and manners of a maquereau. Nevertheless, from the moment that she first saw him she felt that she be- longed to him completely.