Читать книгу While Rome Burns - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 12

On a Saturday in January, in pursuance of a promise recklessly made long ago to my firm, young goddaughter, I engaged a hansom and in it escorted her, cloppety-clop, to the theater where Alice in Wonderland was playing. This innocent excursion was attended by rather more publicity than had been foreseen, and was viewed from the sidewalks with just such a jaundiced eye as I myself would have turned upon it had I been on the outside looking in. Here, I would have said, is someone pretty grim in his resolution to be quaint. Here, perhaps, is even someone seeking public attention in the manner of Mae Murray when, in the presence of photographers, that whimsical creature went down to the Grand Central and kissed the Twentieth Century—kissed it, as a great poet said at the time, with a hey nonny nonny and a mae murray murray.

Well, it was this way. It seems that, like every chronic winner of second prizes, I have three godchildren. Three times a godfather and never a father. To be sure, one of the three was christened while I was in the trenches (old soldier’s slang for war service in Paris) and another, thanks to the heathenish habits of her parents, has not yet been officially called to God’s attention. But one of these wards I actually sponsored. When, at a certain point in the service, these old arms opened to receive her minute person, she dissented with such a shriek of frank distaste that, as one who can take a hint, I avoided her thereafter for several years. It was when she was very six that my latent interest in her was renewed. Two overheard remarks of hers provoked this grudging attention. One was on a sunlit day when her mother was hell-bent on teaching her to dive. Finally, she took the child by the neck and ankles and swished her through the water to give her a foretaste of what a header might be like. “There, dear,” said this aquatic Madonna with that dreadful false gusto which nurses employ in a doomed effort to convince their charges how simply delicious spinach is, “there, dear, wasn’t that fun!” To which my goddaughter, shaking the water out of her eyes, replied coldly, “Not for me.” Then we heard she was going to school and could actually spell. It seemed improbable, but one day, in the presence of skeptical guests, her over-confident mother put an arm around the small shoulders and asked seductively, “Joan, dear, what is c-a-t?” After some thought, Joan replied, “Thirty-four.” I have revered her from that moment.

Then one July, when I realized she was going on eight, I proposed taking her to a matinée some day in the winter and escorting her there in a hansom cab. It is so easy to promise anything six months ahead, especially in an age when all one’s really intellectual neighbors give daily assurance that the clock of the world will have run down by three weeks from the following Tuesday. As for the vehicular detail with which the promise was complicated, perhaps I should confess an old weakness for all archaic means of transportation. They are not much on speed, but, after all, I am in no hurry. My favorite is a rickshaw, and next to that the victoria combines the greatest comfort with the best view. Unfortunately, the view works both ways and the lolling occupant of a victoria does sometimes have a sense of being uncomfortably conspicuous. I remember one occasion when, in jogging up Fifth Avenue through the midsummer twilight, we were caught and embedded, as a raisin in a cake, in the herd of angry pedestrians swarming from curb to curb. The nightmare unreality of that moment was heightened when my companion—could it have been Dorothy Parker?—rose and blew kisses to the crowd, calling out, “And I promise to come back and sing Carmen again for you some time.”

Hansoms have the advantage of semi-privacy, and what their drivers lack in chic they make up in saltiness. I recall an evening when it was my privilege to escort the most fascinating American actress to the stage door of her theater. As there was time to spare, we hailed a hansom in front of the Plaza and were soon ensconced, with the whip cracking and the horse dashing off in great style. It took some time for me to attract the driver’s attention by beating on the ceiling with my stick. Once he had drawn rein and opened up his peep hole, I inquired bitingly, “Wouldn’t you like to know where we want to go?” “Oh, no,” he replied cheerfully, and, closing his trap, dashed off into the Park. Yes, I do think hansom rides are likely to be rewarding experiences. Besides, there is something in my goddaughter which makes a vintage vehicle seem an appropriate conveyance for her. She has an undeniable 1840 air. In her character I detect an alarming admixture of some such rough ferriferous substance as Molly Pitcher, but the substratum is straight from Haworth Parsonage. Emily Brontë at eight must have been very like her.

Anyway, it was a hansom that had been promised, and at the last moment I was discovering with dismay that none was parked somnolently in front of the Plaza in January. After some negotiation, I persuaded an aged charioteer named Ben Solomon to take his out of winter quarters. It was not precisely new, he admitted, but it did have red wheels. Meanwhile, rumbles from afar assured me that my guest was getting ready, and with such effective protests about having nothing to wear that, by the appointed hour, she had wangled a new pair of shoes and a new red dress, and had acquired for the occasion, from a gentleman-friend named Connelly, a pair of opera glasses. A promise had been lightly made in a dead-and-gone July, and here we were bowling down Eighth Avenue.

I was not long in discovering that some anxiety was weighing on my guest. She confessed at last a fear that the horse would not know where to go. As this was obviously preying on her mind, I pointed to the vanishing reins and explained that somewhere out of sight the driver had hold of them and thus controlled the situation. It was clear from her polite smile that she regarded this as just some more of the dreary nonsense with which grown-ups insult and fatigue the intelligence of the young. “But,” she persisted, “does the horse know what play we want to see?” I realized with a shudder that city-bred children of the machine age are no more familiar with the technique of the bit and rein than I am with the mechanics of a trireme. I was just about to assure her that our steed was one of the original guarantors of the Civic Repertory who had since had to go to work, when fortunately there arose at that moment the question of the horse’s name. I had thoughtlessly neglected to ask, and after some meditation (about six blocks) she decided to name it Fluff. Then at last, miraculously, we were drawing up at the right curb—good old Fluff had known the way after all—and pretty soon the curtain was up and we were both, I think, enthralled. With an infallible and gracious gesture, Miss Le Gallienne had summoned from immortal pages a lovely cavalcade and, with this achievement, surely all lingering doubts about her must vanish. I might say—and have said—many things about her. One thing I must say. She is—if there be one in our time—a great woman.

In all her enchanting pageant, my goddaughter and I detected only one flaw. In telling about the children who lived at the bottom of the treacle well, the dormouse did speak of them as Elsie, Lucy, and Tillie, when of course it should be Lacie, not Lucy. Lucy, indeed! Good God! We pounced on this error with punditical pleasure, and scowled and tossed our arms about in What-is-the-world-coming-to gestures and were pretty indignant. Afterwards, there was a delightful visit to the turbulent regions backstage, a meeting with Miss Le Gallienne and with Alice herself and with the incredibly small pickaninny who plays the littlest rabbit. There was even a moment when we were allowed to try on the White Queen’s crown. Then began the ride home through the gathering dusk. My guest seemed lost in thought as one entranced. What dreams! What sweet saunterings through a looking-glass world of her own! Ah, to be young enough again to share so perfect an illusion! Made gross by the debauching years, I feared, by so much as a word, to crash through the gossamer of her fancies. Finally, she herself broke the silence. “I don’t think,” she said, “that that lady keeps her theater very clean.”

This hansom took me further than I had anticipated. Through strange byways, it led me into the alarming company of my goddaughter’s contemporaries. It introduced me to one formidable Miss Osland-Hill.

After brooding for many weeks upon Nora Waln’s The House of Exile, I gave voice to some accumulated misgivings. Under the caption “A Doll’s House for Nora,” I tried to make the point that this young Quaker woman, by picturing Chinese life with all the dirt, smell, neglect, and dissolution left out, had achieved an effect so pretty as to leave one wondering whether her book quite deserved the high honor of being enrolled in the best-seller lists as non-fiction. This mutinous mutter of dissent elicited from a stern young reader a reprimand which—perhaps because of its eventually mitigated severity—I am willing to quote in full. Here it is:

Dear Mr. Woollcott,

I am Nora Waln’s daughter. Mummy is not just a pacifist by inheritance. She is one by conviction also. No matter what any one does to her, she will not take any action. I am not a birthright Quaker. Both parents have to be one or the child is not. My father is a member of the Church of England but does not go to Church. I will probably not be a pacifist. Anyhow I am not one yet. I think that you ought to be written to and I am doing it.

I have read your article. I was born in China and lived nearly all my life there. I have read Mummy’s book carefully and I do not find any untruth in it. Certainly she does not put everything down. Mummy never mentions nasty things in her conversation. I do not think she concentrates on them in her mind. She may see them but I do not think she could write them. Filth makes her vomit. When she has to pass anything horrid she goes quickly and does not look. If anyone mentions anything not nice, such as blood on the meat platter as my cousin Brenda did at lunch, Mummy is sick right then. Uncle Jim says she has always been like that. I feel that it is naughty of you to write that she shouldn’t notice only beauty. Why shouldn’t she? If you want something else written then can’t you write it yourself?

But if you write anything bad about China I shall not like it. China is the best country in the world. I am young but I have been twice around the world. I have not seen any other place to compare with my birthland. Mai-da’s life is told correctly.

Besides having read your article about Mummy, I have read your article about taking a little girl to the theater in February, and I have seen your picture in the Cosmopolitan. My conclusion is that you are not a bad man but a too hasty one.

Yours sincerely,

Marie Osland-Hill.

The foregoing missive, which my executor will eventually find among my papers, is hereby gratefully acknowledged. It is my guess that the writer is the Small Girl referred to in this letter which Shunko wrote to Nora Wain from the House of Exile on the last day of the Kindly Moon in 1923:

Uncle Keng-lin has trained a bird-of-one-thousand-bells to sing for thy Small Girl. En route to Shanghai Camel-back will bring the bird to thee with instructions how to feed and exercise it. The one-thousand-bells has a lovely plumage and a wonderful repertoire of trills. His red cage is pagoda-shaped. It was made to Uncle’s own design in the birdcage shop on the Street-of-the-Sound-of-Thunder-on-the-Ground.

Later we see Small Girl borne supine on a sedan-chair cushion through the streets of Canton, watch her rescue from the murderous rage of Chang, the house steward, and accompany her through sundry later alarums and excursions of China in revolution.

Little I thought I would one day get a letter from Small Girl. I could wish she were not so far away that it is impractical at present for me to call a hansom and pay my respects in person. I should do so in the hope and belief that we would get along famously. To be sure, the prospect of such harmony would be brighter if there could be tactful provision made for my getting off in a corner from time to time for a good, rough, gory talk with Cousin Brenda, who is, I suspect, more my style. But to Marie Osland-Hill I must ever be grateful for the best epitaph I seem likely to get. Indeed, arrangements are now being made at Woodlawn for a simple headstone engraved with the legend “Too Hasty, But Not a Bad Man.”

Once in my hebdomadal musings I raised the question whether nowadays there were any children who, after a petit déjeuner of Bekus Puddy or Lishus, really liked to run off and romp in the Tot Lot. My own spasmodic encounters with the members of the youngest generation had tended to suggest they were made of sterner stuff. My own goddaughter, I said, more closely resembled Lady Macbeth (or the glorious Florence Atwater) than she did the vacuous Dora Copperfield. To this chance and passing remark I owe the incalculable boon of an introduction to a young woman whom I shall call Sally because that is her name.

Sally lives in a New England town and her years on this earth have been seven. Sally has an aunt who (fortunately for you and me) is good at shorthand; a four-year-old brother Wallie, who, like myself, regards her with awe; and, living just down the street, a little girl, slightly older and taller than herself, whom she looks upon as her mortal enemy and in whose shoes I most decidedly would not care to be.

The other day the mortal enemy could be descried through the window, mincing offensively past Sally’s house, with, I suspect, such a flirt of her skirts as served only to fan the ever-smoldering embers of Sally’s animosity. Anyway, beyond ear-shot of this noxious neighbor, Sally began to croon a war song.

“There she comes! Isn’t she dirty! Shoot her, Wallie.”

Wallie responded with a dutiful “Bang! Bang!”

“There!” cried Sally. “You shot her right through the little hole in her stomach and she is dead. Oh”—this is a spurious tone of concern—“somebody stepped on her! See the foot mark? Her brains will run out. And her insides. The chickens will eat them and we will give her bones to the cat to chew on. We will skin her in the old-fashioned way and I will make a little, sleeveless dress—a tan dress—out of her skin. To match my tan shoes.”

Wallie was getting into the spirit of the thing. “To wear on Sunday?” he suggested, respectfully.

“Yes,” said Sally, “and we will take out her brains and all the blood will run into a bowl. We will cut the freckles out of her skin so that it will be a plain tan dress. We will put her on the ground and let snakes crawl on her. Now she is dying, and when she has gone to Heaven,” Sally said, with what I have no doubt was a clairvoyant glimpse of the spectacle best calculated to perturb the spirit of her enemy, “and when she has gone to Heaven, her little sister will wear all her dresses.”

The war song was over. It had been a solace and a luxury, but Sally is one who can see the moon in her daydreams and still not overlook the sixpence at her feet. There were more limited objectives that could interest her, faute de mieux.

“When I see her tomorrow,” she concluded, lapsing moodily into the practical, “I will poke her with a stick and trip her up when she is skating.”

Well, there you have Sally, in a nutshell. I am at work now on a suitable bedtime story for her. To her mind, I am afraid, the aforesaid Lady Macbeth would seem indistinguishable from Elsie Dinsmore. She might be mildly interested in Brunehaut and Fredegonde, those rival queens of Frankish Gaul who, in their squabbles, killed off most of each other’s children and grandchildren. Fredegonde was the better of the two and, full of years, died peacefully in bed. Somewhat like the late Miss Borden of Fall River, she was buried by the side of her husband, whose violent death she had personally negotiated. But I think Sally would relish more the death of Brunehaut. They caught the old girl at last, accused her of the death of ten kings, and for three days set her on a camel for the army to mock at. Then they tied her to the tail of a horse and lashed the creature to fury. “Soon,” says the chronicle, “all that remained of the proud queen was a shapeless mass of carrion.” Of course they were simple fellows, and never thought of making her into a little sleeveless dress.