Читать книгу Long Long Ago - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 12

Of a contemporary young noble-

man who fought for this fair coun-

try several years before it knew

enough to fight for itself.

Friends and Neighbors: VI

A SOLDIER OF THE KING

Table of Contents

Oh, Lord Jeffrey Amherst was a soldier of the king

And he came from across the sea.

To the Frenchmen and the Indians, he didn’t do a thing

In the wilds of this wild countree

In the wilds of this wild countree.

HE tune of these words, fondly known to anyone who has ever lived within earshot of a glee-club, was running in my head as I drove through the Berkshires in the October sunshine. My objective was the small and mellowed college named after the doughty Englishman who led our forces in one of the early wars when Britain and America fought side by side rather than, as later on two occasions, face to face.

I was scheduled to lecture that evening in the Amherst chapel and wondered what interest, if any, the undergraduates felt in the fact that overseas and far away the German army was happily mopping up Poland. Except for an occasional vague announcement that it’s a small world after all, they certainly had heard nothing from their elders to help them foresee that three years later they themselves, or anyway the vast majority of them, would be in uniform. Suddenly it occurred to me that, before quitting the platform that evening, I ought to tell them a little something about Mr. Holmesdale.

Holmesdale was a fair-haired, youngish Englishman, of unguessable age on the staff of the New York World and I first met him in 1926 when he was casually transferred to the dramatic department of which I had recently become the head. At a play I am always annoyed by a stageful of unexplained characters and in life I like to know something about the person banging away at the next typewriter. So, when Holmesdale swam into my ken, I put some questions about him to another assistant in the department whom I had sometimes seen racketing around Times Square in his company. Who was Holmesdale anyway? Where did he come from? My fair consultant (only fair, as it turned out) was Alison Smith (Mrs. Russel Crouse, to you).

“Oh, you know what Englishmen are,” she said wearily, as one who had vainly beaten her wings against dozens of them, “they never tell you anything about themselves.”

“That, my dear,” I replied, “is because you are a lousy reporter,” and knocked her into a large scrap-basket which we kept in the dramatic department for the purpose.

Then it befell that a few nights later, Holmesdale and I, having quitted the office at the same time, stopped off at Billy the Oysterman’s on our way uptown and fell upon a side of beef with intent to annihilate it. Here was an occasion to limber up my rusted equipment as a reporter. Had he been old enough to serve in what, in those days, we all naïvely referred to as the Great War? (Oh, yes.) Thereafter the conversation ran something like this:

“What was your rank?”

“When?”

“Well, when you enlisted.”

“Private.”

“And at the time of the Armistice?”

“Battalion-Adjutant.”

“What outfit?”

“The Coldstream Guards.”

I chewed awhile on that fact and the beef before resuming the attack.

“Did you get to the front at all?”

“Yes.”

“There long?”

“Three and a half years.”

“Wounded?”

“Only two blighties.”

Twenty-five years ago “blighty” was a familiar word for any wound serious enough to get a Tommy back from France to England. I asked if they had been nice, long blighties. Well, not long in hospital. After that, of course, there would be a stretch of light duty. Interesting? Not particularly.

“Oh,” he said, recalling one minor interlude which had slipped his mind, “I did have charge of Sir Roger Casement in the Tower.”

Well, he had not precisely unpacked his heart but I had learned something. Later, in London, I heard that at the front his best friend had been blown to bits beside him. Afterwards portions of his entrails had to be scraped out of Holmesdale’s hair and nostrils. Of course Holmesdale himself never mentioned that trifling incident to me yet I make bold to doubt that he had forgotten it.

No one with so little passion for communication ever really belonged in newspaper work but he did enjoy Broadway and was immensely regretful the day he had to petition me for an indefinite leave of absence. His father was ill and he felt he must go back to England. Several weeks after his departure, I chanced on an Associated Press dispatch reporting the death in London of the fourth Earl Amherst and the succession of his elder son, the Viscount Holmesdale, who, it seems, had been engaged in literary work in New York.

In no time the fifth Earl was back on the job, the office routine disturbed only by the fact that all the theatrical press-agents when telephoning in their tidbits of news insisted on addressing him as Your Grace.

It was, if memory serves, the only time I ever had a belted earl as an assistant. I was the older and the abler journalist but when I remembered what he had been through I was sometimes minded to say:

Though they’ve belted you and flayed you

By the living Gawd that made you

You’re a better man than I am

Gunga Din.

Not long thereafter I left The World behind and Jeff returned to England where he took up flying as rather more to his taste than dramatic criticism. The outbreak of the war in September 1939 found him managing the airdrome at Brighton. A week before my lecture at Amherst, I received word that he was back in the service and off to the Mediterranean. When, at the close of my lecture, I told his story I was a guileful enough showman to withhold his identity until the end. When the name did come, there was a satisfying intake of many undergraduate breaths but the roof of the chapel did not blow off until the final sentence: “So once more Lord Jeffrey Amherst is a soldier of the King.”

Some months ago I had a letter from his Lordship who had become a Wing Commander in the R.A.F. He had been moved to break a two-year silence by a twinge of nostalgia for the old days on the Rialto. This was induced, I think, by his having discovered in Alexandria, mysteriously offered for sale in a music store, an old, old copy of Variety.