Читать книгу While Rome Burns - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 14
ОглавлениеBEING the brief history of
an illiterate but golden-hearted
clown, much admired by all who
enjoy the inestimable boon of his
acquaintance.
MY FRIEND HARPO
Once in a moment of special disaffection caused by some troubling paragraph I had contributed to the public prints, John Barrymore predicted that an autopsy would reveal these old veins as flowing, not with blood at all, but with printer’s ink. Some years later, my erstwhile colleague, Charles Brackett, expressed a cognate thought when he said that I never really liked anyone whose life story would not make a good magazine article. I would have to admit that, on several occasions, I have caught myself in the very act of thinking, even as I was gossiping across the fence with some neighbor whom I profoundly admired, that it would be a pleasure to write his obituary. On such occasions the happily unconscious subject would be somewhat disconcerted were he able to read my faintly vulturine thoughts. But he would be even more disconcerted if he could ever read the piece I might write about him when once I got warmed up. Nil nisi bonum? Why, only of the dead can one say one’s hearty say unchecked by fear of causing embarrassment, uninhibited by the dreary diffidences of human relations.
If, therefore, I consider myself free to set down here some small part of the affection and enthusiastic regard I feel for my friend Harpo, if I put it in black and white that there is no creature on earth whose company I find more entertaining and none in the warmth of whose generous heart I place more implicit trust, I do so only because I know that the printed word never bothers him. For among his many accomplishments—born of generations of showfolks, he is, for instance, not only a skillful pantomimist and an infallible comedian, but he is good at games too, and if you could see him in aquatic sports you would know he simply was not human—among his many accomplishments, I started to say, it so happens that the much over-rated art of reading is not included.
That circumstance, which has the effect of turning this into a confidential communication, lets me mention that my enthusiasm for Harpo is, I know, reciprocated. Indeed, when I go to the ends of the earth and come back again, there is no welcome which I can count on quite so surely as I can on his, for then his loving-kindness invents a score of ways to warm the foolish cockles of my heart. Furthermore, he carries his approval of me to the mad length of thinking I have a kind of beauty. Many a time and oft have I read as much in the melting glance of his topaz eyes when he has been sitting with his head on my knee, the while I stroked his tousled foretop and tweaked his roguish ears. There is even some evidence that he thinks I smell delightful.
I owe my friendship with him to Booth Tarkington. I owe it to my first encounter in the matchless book called Gentle Julia with his chronicle of Gamin, the French poodle which stormed the citadel of that aged and peculiar man, the father of Julia Atwater; the poodle which, seemingly turned out by some frenzied topiarian, had a bang like a black chrysanthemum, eyes like winking garnets, and a clown’s heart so golden that he sometimes reminded Mr. Tarkington of the Jongleur of Notre-Dame. When I first read the story of Gamin, I made a secret resolve some day, somewhere, somehow, to get me a French poodle of my own. Wherefore, when a great lady of my acquaintance who has bred these dogs for some time past announced that there was a born clown in the new litter at her kennels, I spoke up for him. He was not black like Gamin but brown—or plum-colored, rather—and because of the ruddy tinge to his curly head, she had named him Harpo. The celebrated Harpo Marx, though he has “walked with kings” and rolled on the floor, they say, with princesses, was never more honored than when this enchanting dog was named after him.
I could write here endlessly of the younger Harpo’s engaging ways. I could tell you of his ingenuity in the matter of opening windows, bolted doors, and ice-boxes. Quite annoying, sometimes, that last accomplishment. I could tell you of the splendor of the leap with which he clears a six-foot fence. The trajectory is motion become lyric and sets one to remembering Nijinski. Or I could enlarge upon his morbid passion for landscape gardening, which involves a good deal of trench-work and some little moving of stones and even bowlders. I could describe his manners, which are of a fastidious perfection in spite of the fact—or perhaps because of the fact—that he was born in a manger. Then I wish I had words to report the tacit rebuke his patient dignity conveys when, as sometimes happens, his piquant appearance provokes people into behaving in an excessively whimsical manner toward him. He is so deeply embarrassed—for them, of course. It upsets his idealism to see homo sapiens being silly.
But I mean to speak only of the puzzling enthusiasm for our species which these French poodles have manifested since time out of mind. When Harpo and I shared a cottage at Locust Valley one winter, he was neighborly enough with all the dogs living in the big house up the hill. He was gracious, for instance, toward Erich Maria Remarque, a dachshund who fitted under him like a nesting table. He was perhaps a thought too intimate with a Scotty light-o’-love named Margaret Ogilvy, although on one occasion the widely voiced suspicion that he would have to make an honest woman of her was proved baseless when subsequent developments all too clearly implicated a nitwit Cocker spaniel living down the road.
But Harpo would leave all the wondering dogs flat for the chance of watching a good croquet game, and at such desertion I think they looked upon him with vague irritation as a kind of handshaking teacher’s pet. Certainly they behaved like resentful hoodlums when he would come back from his coiffeur’s, fancily clipped and mighty elegant. On these occasions they would offend him by hooting and jeering in their oafish ignorance of the fact that such poodles have worn their hair that way since Augustus ruled in Rome. But I meant to suggest only that Gamin and Harpo clearly regarded themselves as having a special relation to the human species—a bond traceable, I suppose, to the fact that for a thousand years their forbears traveled with the French circuses, and in all that time had no fixed point in their lives except a person, no home at all save the foot of the boss’s bed wherever it might be.
Strictly speaking, I belonged to Harpo for only a year. Then my pitiably urban habits, complicated by an incurable vagrancy, made it seem best—to him, too, I hope—that he should adopt someone else. He therefore matriculated at Hamilton College, where he has much lovely woodland to investigate, acres of greensward to race over, and a houseful of children to look after and check in at night. His present master—I use the term conventionally, for everyone concerned realizes that the delicate balance of ownership inclines, if anything, the other way—is a member of the faculty and all through Freshman year, Harpo’s emotional dependence led him to sit on the campus and moan a good deal during the lectures from which he was excluded. Now he goes right into the classroom where his deportment is beyond criticism, unless you count the windy yawn he emits when he feels the lecture is running just a little too long. When, as sometimes happens, I visit his part of the country, he first conveys to the professor, with the nicest tact imaginable, that here is just an old friendship which need not worry him at all. Then, in my honor, he has the churchbells rung and orders dancing in the streets. Immensely flattered, I go on my way, deciding anew that New York, with the opera and the theaters and such, is all very well, but that there is only one word to describe a community in which there is no place for the likes of my friend Harpo. The word is “uninhabitable.”
