Читать книгу While Rome Burns - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 19
ОглавлениеAN enemy alien spies upon the
centennial revelries held by the
brotherhood of the Star and Cres-
cent.
FOR ALPHA DELTA PHI
In these random notes on contemporary American life, the conviction has been not infrequently expressed that banquets are bores, that he who arranges one (especially in warm weather) is at least a semi-public-nuisance, and that those who attend them are defectives. Yet on Labor Day in 1932 your apostate correspondent drove a hundred and fifty miles across the mountains through the holiday traffic and wedged himself panting into a dinner coat, merely to be present at such a function, whereat many speeches were made, including one by himself. The banquet, with Bruce Barton in the chair, was the wind-up of the Alpha Delta Phi Centenary convention, for it was just one hundred years since this most distinguished of the Greek Letter societies had been founded on the lovely hilltop of my own college. Before you are lost in wonder at the heroic lengths to which a sentimental old grad will go in behalf of his beloved fraternity, perhaps I should explain that Alpha Delta Phi is not my fraternity at all, beloved or otherwise. I was there as spokesman for the other Greek Letter societies. I was immensely set up by the assignment until it occurred to me, too late, that, after all, it was not they but the Alpha Delts who had appointed me, with the notion, perhaps, that, as a specimen of the kind of man whom the other crowds took in, I would add a relish to their dinner.
It is an eerie experience on an evening of song and fond recollection to be the only Bœotian present. I knew then how George S. Kaufman’s famous ancestor, Sir Roderick Kaufman, must have felt. He was the one, you may remember, who went on the crusades—as a spy. I had an uneasy feeling that some aged and myopic alumnus would give me the grip. The Alpha Delt salute is, I believe, no such complicated and embarrassing stranglehold as that with which the brethren of Sigma Phi assault each other on meeting. Still, I thought it best to run up my colors at once. Wherefore I explained to the famous banker on my left that I was a Theta Delt. “Thank God,” he exclaimed, in the manner of one already fed up, “I don’t have to call you brother.” I was not quite sure how I should take this, but he went on in a kindly way to suggest that I might have a reunion of my own with the waiters. “From your Tuskegee chapter,” he explained. Later, when some speaker recalled how an early and valorous Alpha Delt had once climbed to one of the high peaks of the world to carve the star and crescent in the everlasting rock, I took pleasure in reminiscing to my neighbor, the banker, about the night in college when some of us had been at great pains to etch that same insignia in the snowbank outside the Alpha Delt hall.
Some of my best friends are Alpha Delts. To two members of that society from the Hamilton College chapter I owe much. It was Samuel Hopkins Adams of the Class of 1891 who, when I came out of college, persuaded the New York Times, against its better judgment, to take me on as a reporter. But already Walter Scott Kimball of the Class of ’51 had come to my aid at a time of even greater need. Dr. Kimball was a general practitioner in Little Silver, New Jersey. On a bleak day in 1887, he drove seven miles to our house through the snow, and on his way home was able to spread the news throughout the countryside that it was another boy at the Woollcotts’. Dr. Kimball’s daughter drove the cutter on that momentous occasion, and often spoke afterward of how bitter cold it was and what an unconscionable time I spent on the mere business of being born. Even so, it seems to have put ideas into her head. For (of course, after the proper legal and biological formalities) she went my mother one better and gave birth to Edmund Wilson.
Kimball, ’51, and Adams, ’91—I felt no little satisfaction in acknowledging my debt to these men. But I think I most savored the dinner as a reminder of, and a sequel to, the September afternoon in my college days when I was thrown off the veranda of the Alpha Delt hall. The word “thrown” is an insufficient description. I was picked up and carried off as to an incinerator. It happened during the rushing season in my senior year—that feverish period when the different fraternities must seduce incoming freshmen with an air of conferring a favor upon them, must pursue yet seem pursued. It is no work for men. The comedy of such a time has been immortalized by George Fitch (olav hasholem!) in his memoirs of dear old Siwash. The anguish, as far as I know, is yet to be written. It was a season in the college year when I felt myself peculiarly inadequate. Then, if ever, I knew I was not the type. My own brothers in Theta Delta Chi were clearly of the same opinion. Not by words so much as by manner, they suggested that, whereas, once a freshman had been pledged, he would begin to discover I had a heart of gold and would come in time (years, perhaps) to be proud of knowing me, I might, at first glance, be frightening to a callow observer. I was, they intimated, an acquired taste. They were struggling to express an idea which the late Mrs. Janis was later to put into words when I overheard her explain to someone that I was like a fine old olive. More bluntly, they said that if I would persist in wearing those old corduroys, that paint-daubed turtle-neck sweater, and that red fez, it might be best for the future of Theta Delta Chi if the freshman class were not to see me at all. Well, I could take a hint. It was clear that I must vanish for a time from the temple of friendship. Where to go? That was the only question. After some thought, I hit on a rather good answer. I cut all my classes for the day, drew Anna Karenina from the college library, stole some apples, went up to the Alpha Delt hall, and sat on the veranda, prepared to spend the day. As speculative knots of freshmen drifted by, I would look up from my book, lean over the rail, leer at them seductively, and cry out: “Don’t you want to join our frat?” Some Alpha Delt seniors, returning from classes late in the day, caught me in the act. The aforesaid ejection took place in due course. But it was too late. They had a hard time getting a delegation that year. It was almost the end of the chapter.
Dear me, that had been four-and-twenty years before, and here was I, forgiven at last and breaking bread with them in convention assembled. Through the smoke-haze of the dining-room, I could see one of the plug-uglies who performed that memorable act of dispossession—he and a couple of other fellows. Today it would take the whole fraternity.
