Читать книгу While Rome Burns - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 8
ОглавлениеTHE true story of crackpot
Marigold to whom, when it be-
fell that all men turned from her,
a consoling and eventful lover
came out of the blue.
A PLOT FOR MR. DREISER
This is an account of my neighbor, Marigold Jones. It is an unfinished story. When first I came to New York, she was a most lovely sight to see, not unlike Miss Justine Johnstone in her fair beauty, we all thought, but taller and graver and more serene. She had that sweet composure of the spirit which made it an effortless thing for her to sit hour after hour on the model-stand till the afternoon light faded from the studio. Then, in the twilight, she would make us some tea before she had to leave to meet her sweetheart on the corner. In those, her untroubled years, all artists clamored for Marigold. If anyone needed a goddess for coin or poster, Marigold would oblige. Or she would sit with an ermine wrap flung back from her white shoulders, her long, gloved arm resting on the rail of an improvised opera-box, while on the easel there took form a picture of Our Lady of the Diamond Horseshoe, which, if cunningly used as an advertisement for some frippery, would incite to the point of purchasing it a myriad girls even humbler and poorer than Marigold herself.
Well, all that was long ago. Today, in her early forties, she is a scarred and haggard creature with frightened eyes. She gets a chance to pose at all only when some artist remembers her with a pang, and lets her sit for old times’ sake while he draws a sleeve, a shoulder, the back of a head. They cannot draw her face any more. They cannot even look at it. Wherefore, I have been thinking that this story could end only with some such fond cry as was wrung from Sylvia Warner in her moment of parting forever with the manuscript of her beloved Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. My poor Marigold, good-by. I do not know what will become of you! But she herself does not share my apprehensions.
It was during the war that the peace first went out of Marigold’s eyes. She lost her lover then and was herself as dreadfully wounded as any casualty that was carried on a stretcher from a battlefield in France. This lover of hers was an Irish boy who drove a freebooting taxi, and when he was drafted, she took all her savings and bought him a wrist-watch, with two hearts engraved on it, and their initials intertwined. The week before his outfit sailed, she went down to Spartanburg to say good-by to him. It would be some hours before he could come in from camp to meet her. While she waited on a bench in the park, she fell to talking, as sister to sister, with a tart who was doing a thriving trade in the national emergency. Some of those soldier boys, it seems, were real crazy about her. For instance, there was one dizzy guy from New York who, only the night before, had given her his wrist-watch. See! Pretty, ain’t it? It was Marigold’s watch.
Then some years after the war came that automobile collision which flung a taxi onto the sidewalk where our Marigold was mooning along. The surgeons had to do a good deal of guessing as they worked on the jig-saw puzzle of her face. The damage awarded scarcely paid the hospital bills. I suppose the jury was unimpressed with the long line of famous painters who took the stand to tell how fair a sight this pale, trembling ruin once had been. What of it? She could still scrub floors, couldn’t she?
I have said her eyes were frightened. But not always. At times now, quite suddenly, they grow large and dark and fill up with wonder. Once this strange and visible change took place while I was present. For a moment she sat like one who hears distant music. Then she jumped from the model-stand and ran to the window. “He’s come! He’s come!” she cried, looking up into the sky. “Don’t you hear him?” And with a pretty flurry of apology, she caught up her hat and coat and rushed out of the studio.
It seems that, for some months past, Marigold has been happy in the devotion of an aviator. It is no violation of confidence to tell you so, for she herself unpacks her singing heart in the sight of everyone—the news-dealer at the corner, the boy who runs the elevator, the girl at the switchboard. Marigold gets the sweetest notes from him. He writes them in the sky and she reads them as she walks in Central Park. At first she affected to be displeased by this correspondence writ large that the whole world could read it. She vowed he was a nuisance. It was downright embarrassing to have him fly over the park like that, writing in characters of smoke “I love you, Marigold.” Just that, penciled in black on the limitless blue. “I love you, Marigold. I love you, Marigold.”
When she remembers, she is in terror lest he come too close and see the ravage of her face. In this mood one night she locked herself in her room and lay till dawn with her shamed cheeks hidden in her pillow, the while the wings of his plane brushed the glass of her window in night-long quest of her. But mostly she is happy with him. One day in July she begged the oldest of her artists to give her some of the ragged finery he uses for his models. Ah, there, Marigold, going to the ball? But she only laughed and went off in triumph with a sleazy chiffon scarf, a fan of weatherbeaten ostrich plumes that had been dyed an emerald green, and a lace gown that had seen better days—but not recently. If they were damaged goods, you would not have known it had you seen her on the roof of her tenement at midnight, dancing in the moonlight for her lover.
The good people with whom she finds lodging are worried about her—especially when that flier of hers writes a message in the sky, bidding her meet him at such and such a street corner. Once she waited in the rain from dusk to dawn, and when the agony of that disappointment had been eased by a little time, they tried to reason with her, arguing that she ought not pin her hopes on one so faithless. She smiled at them pityingly. Why, he had explained that one defection. You see, he had had to go to the moon that day and it took him longer than he expected.
Well, that is the story of Marigold. I have no title for it because the one that fits has already been used by Theodore Dreiser. He used it for the heading of a clinical case he reported in the Mercury some years ago. It was the case of an ugly and unsought virgin who bewildered her family by taking, late in life, to paint and gaudy raiment, suspecting every man she passed—every visitor to the house, even the bishop—of dishonorable intentions, and generally living in a festive delusion that she was a femme fatale of devastating allure. It made a pathetic story. Dreiser called it “The Mercy of God.”
