Читать книгу While Rome Burns - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 6

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Astray on a spring evening in the old library of William and Mary at Williamsburg in Virginia and admonished to silence by the grim female in charge, who kept warning me at the top of her lungs that all about me the young were at their studies, I took down from a shelf the fat volumes of Brand Whitlock’s Belgium and renewed an old acquaintance with the stirring story he had to tell. From this reunion, I came away with fresh enthusiasm for one character in that story, a great gentleman from Spain whose odd, stiff little figure moved jerkily across the stage of the World War and seems to me now, through the dust and smoke still hanging in the air, as near to a hero as walked the earth in that time.

He was the Marquis of Villalobar. As Spanish Ambassador to Belgium when the rest of the world took up arms, he shared with Whitlock the extra burdens which the war deposited on the doorsteps of the two great neutral embassies in the cockpit of Europe. Fastidious, sensitive, chivalrous, proud, witty, sardonic, the little Marquis, in his huge English car with his chauffeur brave in a livery of red and green, moves like a thread of relieving color through the somber fabric of Whitlock’s story. But not once in the two volumes is there so much as a hint of the dreadful and magnificent truth about Villalobar which must have filled Whitlock with wonder and pity and awe every time he saw him, every time he thought of him.

When, still at his post in Brussels, Villalobar died in the summer of 1926 and the news was cabled to America, the obituary in the New York Times next day told all the routine facts about him—his ministry to Washington, his services in the great war—but left untold that single salient fact which still shapes the lingering legend about the man and puts up on the wall of every chancellery in the world a portrait done in whispers. Now surely the full story can be told. Now, while in Tokyo and Constantinople and Berlin, in Washington and Brussels and Madrid, there still be men who might bear witness; above all, while I, myself, am still here to read that story, I hope it will be told.

For the little Marquis had been born, they say, with a greater blight laid upon him than was the portion even of Sir Richard Calmady. An aging few must still recall Lucas Malet’s extraordinary novel of that unhappy baronet who, in obedience to a curse laid upon his line in olden days, was born into the world with the head and torso of a young god, but with feet that came above where his knees should have been—a grotesquely truncated figure that stumbled and scrambled across the world while the heartless laughed and the pitiful turned away. Well, according to the legend I still hope to see filled out and documented, that very curse had been laid also upon the Villalobar line, and this heir to the great house, who was born in 1866, came into the world misshapen in the selfsame fashion. They say there were even heavier odds against him. For his head was hairless and he had only one hand he could let anyone see. The other he carried, whenever possible, thrust into the bosom of his coat. It was, they say, a kind of cloven claw.

I do not know by what heavy and intricate contrivance Villalobar raised himself to the stature of other men and managed a kind of locomotion. It was serviceable enough, however, to carry him to the ends of the earth, and his will lent him seven-league boots. Furthermore, it was so deceptive to one who did not see him move that when first he appeared at court in Madrid, a fledgling diplomat already booked for some minor post in Washington, a great lady—some say the Queen Mother, but I do not believe that part of the legend—turned quickly when she heard his name and told him how as a girl she had visited in his part of Spain and how she had always wondered whatever became of the Villalobar monster. It seems she had heard curious countryside tales of a monster born to the Villalobar line, just such a one as shadowed Glamis Castle in those days and shadows it today. Such a fascinating story, my dear Marquis. Quite gave one the creeps. One heard it everywhere. Had the creature died? Or been killed? Or what?

“Madame,” said young Villalobar, with a malicious smile twisting the rich curve of his lips, “I am that monster,” and, bowing low, he shuffled away, leaving her to wish she had never been born.

Whitlock has a hundred anecdotes of the Marquis in his prime—tales of his exquisite tact, of his generous rages, of his devotion to the exiled Eugénie, who had been kind to him when he was a little boy, of his vain, scornful, passionate, night-long fight to save Edith Cavell from a German firing squad. Whitlock tells about a time when a roaring Prussian martinet bellowed at Villalobar only to have the little Marquis, who, of course, spoke German fluently, turn on him and say with glacial calm:

“Pardon, Monsieur, je ne vous comprends pas. Parlez lentement, poliment—et en français.”

And about the time when he was halted in his rounds of Brussels by another Prussian, who asked him brusquely what he was doing there. Villalobar, with the accent of history and doom, made answer:

“Sir, what are you doing here?” and stumped off about the business of his king.

Whitlock tells all about the spotless, delicately perfumed, and beautiful embassy in the Rue Archimède, filled with the loot of Villalobar’s life, gifts from kings and queens, portraits, family silver, even his grandmother’s sedan chair. The American Ambassador could not imagine his own workaday forbears associated with a vehicle so elegant. The Italian Ambassador had no such difficulty. “Mine,” he said, “were here.” And he stepped between the shafts.

Whitlock envied Villalobar the lovely Louis XVI table which served as a desk, with the row of silver dispatch boxes standing like sentinels on its gleaming surface. The Marquis said he had picked it up in a second-hand shop in Toledo. Whitlock sighed and murmured something about the luxury of rummaging in these old European cities. Villalobar interrupted him with a chuckle.

“Oh, it wasn’t in my Toledo in Spain,” he said; “it was in your Toledo in Ohio. That time I was there, you remember, for the carnival; I was going down that street—what’s it’s name? ...”

Whitlock reports that on that desk and in that embassy, no paper was ever, by any chance, out of place. But he says nothing about the despotism, at once comical and terrifying, whereby that order was maintained. Nor does he tell with what bated breath the Marquis was always served. Nor how each thread of the embassy life, however trivial, had to lead to Villalobar’s one available hand. Even when finally the vast concerns of America and England were added to the French and Spanish business, Villalobar would have only one telephone in the embassy. You see, he wanted to hear each message. It might be only the market calling up about the cauliflower. No matter. The Marquis would take the message. It might be a light-o’-love calling up the young third secretary. The Marquis would take that, too. If a picture postcard came for the cook, the Marquis saw it before the cook did.

It was an embassy ruled by a crotchety bachelor. Once Whitlock told Villalobar that had he been born in an unfeathered American nest, he might, with his many and varied talents, have been anything he chose: lawyer, journalist, politician, artist, financier, and certainly as guileful a stage manager as Irving or David Belasco. If Whitlock wondered privately whether, had he so chosen, Villalobar might also have been a husband, he could scarcely have given voice to that inevitable speculation. Yet when he was approaching sixty, Villalobar did marry. He married a cousin whom he had wooed in vain when she was a young girl, and who came to the shelter of his name and power when the long years had played strange tricks on both of them.

But that is another story. What Whitlock saw was an embassy run by a bachelor, and one thing all its staff knew was that the chief would tolerate no physical assistance while anyone was looking. If, as sometimes happened, he fell, the secretary who ventured to help him or even to notice the mishap would go unthanked and soon be mysteriously recalled to Madrid for transfer to some other capital. Not everyone knew this. It is part of the legend that on the night of a wartime Christmas party at the British Embassy in Madrid, in a scuffle under the mistletoe which hung from the chandelier, the Marquis came down with a crash. The lights were put out lest anyone see him getting to his pins. But in Brussels, the consciousness of him was so acute that once when he was mounting the grand stairway at a tremendous postwar reception and slipped as he was nearing the top, a kind of catalepsy seized the whole sumptuous assemblage as over and over, over and over, over and over, that little figure rolled with a tremendous clatter to the foot of the stairs. In the distance an oblivious orchestra was fiddling away for dear life, but among the actual onlookers no one dared breathe. And that agonized paralysis lasted while he righted himself somehow, and, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, began again—and finished—the difficult ascent.

There is a photograph of him in the lovely Spanish Embassy at Washington—taken, I suppose, at the time of his first assignment to this country. Whitlock speaks of him as handsome and here you see why. He is dressed as a Maestrante Knight of Zaragoza, and something in the white cape, the beplumed helmet, and the amused, contemptuous curve of the sensuous lips makes you think of him as having just come from some torchlit conspiratorial gathering in Zenda or Graustark. At the embassy, too, you can find in the files the list of his honors:

Grand Cross of Charles the Third. Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic. Gold Medal of the Sieges of Zaragoza. Grand Cross of St. Gregory the Great of the Holy See. Grand Cross of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus of Italy. Grand Cross of the Rising Sun of Japan. Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor of France. Knight Commander of the Order of Christ and of Villaviciosa of Portugal. Lord of the Bedchamber of His Majesty. Maestrante Knight of Zaragoza. Burgess of Brussels. Burgess of Ghent. Burgess of Lille.

Thus interminably. A little it recalls the list of titles which Thornton Wilder, with wide-open eyes and elegiac voice, read out over the dead princeling in The Cabala. The list ceased to be a mere string of words and became a roll of drums.

Not in that embassy, however, nor in any other, but only in far cafés in moments of unleashed confidences will those who worked under him tell the tales that make up the living legend of Villalobar. They still talk in whispers as if a little afraid to this day that he might reach out and punish them. I have heard in Berlin at second-hand—and only so does one even begin to know how great a man their little Marquis was—the experience of one minor secretary who remembers still, and will, I think, remember while he lives, a wartime night in Brussels when he was homing at three in the morning from some clandestine mischief. Silk-hatted and caped resplendent, he was passing through the guarded dark of the Rue Archimède when, as he passed the embassy, he remembered with a panic clutch of fear that he had gone off that afternoon and left an indiscreet paper in full sight on his desk. If only he could let himself into the chancellery wing and retrieve it, there might even yet be a chance that the chief had not seen it.

When, on this slightly burglarious enterprise, the secretary reached his desk in the office, he found the paper gone. But whether the Marquis had seen it and taken it away the young man never really knew. For next morning he was recalled to Madrid with no chance to bid his chief good-by. But that night, just as he realized his mission was fruitless, he saw there was a light in the hallway at this unaccountable hour and heard a puzzling noise there as of some animal scuttling across the floor. Alarmed, he tiptoed through the intervening rooms, reached the lighted doorway, and on the threshold stood transfixed. He swears he stopped breathing altogether. There on the rug, crouched as if for a spring, was a small, unrecognizable creature clad in some kind of white night-shift. It had a human head. Its burning eyes met his. The witness says that before he could move or force a sound through his paralyzed lips, the creature turned, scampered to the foot of the stairs, and then—a streak of white in the dusk of the stair-well—whisked up and along the gallery and out of sight.