Читать книгу Long Long Ago - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 8

The weight of eighty-five winters

has so slowed this valiant runner

that now the striplings can almost

keep up with him.

Friends and Neighbors: III

REQUIRED READING FOR MEATLESS DAYS

Table of Contents

1942

HERE are certain scattered and miscellaneous experiences which I shall remember as long as I remember anything and one of these is the last glimpse I had of Bernard Shaw. It was at dusk on a chill November day one year ago and the place was his house at Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire. He had just set me on my road to London—or tried his conscientious best to—and was on his way back up the curving drive to his own front door. For me the occasion had the bittersweet flavor inseparable from last times. It seemed so improbable that I would ever see him again. After all, he was eighty-five and I myself wasn’t feeling any too indestructible. Wherefore, as my car drew away, I twisted around so that through its rear window I might have a farewell sight of him walking up his drive. But that’s not what I found him doing. He wasn’t walking. He was running.

Unfortunately, the summons to Ayot St. Lawrence had come some weeks after my arrival in Britain. Perhaps I should explain that I had gone over aboard a British battleship which meant that, for once in these times, here was an American eastward bound across the Atlantic with no oppressive restrictions on the amount of luggage he might take with him. Small wonder I was laden with gifts (a box of chocolate-drops from Justice Frankfurter for Lady Astor, for example, and a box of cigars for the Master of Wadham at Oxford) and enough other groceries to stock a small crossroads store. There were dozens of silk stockings entrusted to me by Lynn Fontanne as gifts for anyone I might run into, to say nothing of three dozen lip-sticks which I took along much as explorers in darkest Africa used to take glass-beads wherewith to propitiate the more alarming natives.

If, at last, I managed to scramble aboard H.M.S. Resolution at Philadelphia with no more than seven pieces of hand-luggage it was only because most of my neighbors did not know I was going. They thought I had already gone. You see, three days before I was scheduled to sail a mechanically multiplied chatterbox named Winchell announced, inaccurately but helpfully, that I had departed the night before on a bomber.

Well, once that much relieved battleship dropped me over the side into a launch in the Firth of Clyde, this Santa Claus pouch was so promptly and enthusiastically looted by everyone I encountered, that by the time Shaw asked me out to tea and I dipped into my duffel to see what treasure I might take along, there were only two items left—each, as it malignantly happened, a gift he would have received with the utmost scorn. Could I present a packet of razor blades to one of the most famous and luxuriant beards in all Christendom? The other item was a jar of bacon. This was a priceless rarity in England but nothing to lay at the feet of one who would shudder at the mere thought of soiling his lips with its contents. It is not true that Shaw has never eaten meat. He has eaten meat. But not since 1881. It was then he came to the conclusion that meat-eating was cannibalism with the heroic dish omitted. As long ago as 1895 (when I was a nasty, sweet-faced boy of ten) Shaw’s friends were predicting that this abstinence would be the death of him and he was retorting, from a bed of pain, that at least his coffin could be followed through the streets of London by a procession of all the animals he had never eaten, a boast which wrung from the vast G. K. Chesterton the protest that many a human would volunteer for that cortege and that he himself would be glad to replace one of the elephants. It was years later, but still long ago, that the lovely Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in a moment of exasperation at a rehearsal of Pygmalion, was heard to cry out: “Shaw, some day you’ll eat a pork-chop and then God help all the women!” Since then more than a quarter of a century has passed and that dark prophecy remains still unfulfilled.

So here was I, off to pay my respects to a dietary ascetic who is bearded like a pard and I had nothing to offer him save a packet of razor-blades and a jar of bacon—nothing, that is, save a kind of roaring reverence for one of the most provocative teachers of this or any other age—gay, generous, honorable and stimulating—one in whose measureless classroom I have sat for forty years, wriggling and squirming and laughing like many another, and, like many another, often realizing ten years after the lecture how right Teacher had been all along.

His invitation to tea was accompanied by a painstaking roadmap but even with such guidance it is difficult for the most skillful driver to find his way through wartime England, where every road-sign has been taken down lest it prove helpful to some tourist arriving by parachute, and every other man you stop to consult in a village street turns out to be an evacuee who is a stranger there himself. But with only a few wrong turns that cost us no more than fifteen minutes, the driver of my hired Daimler delivered me on time at the right gate at Ayot St. Lawrence.

When he called for me again at five, I had been sitting at Shaw’s feet for an hour, listening to him on every subject from Katharine Cornell to the Red Army and I was still marveling at his inextinguishable vitality. His invitation had scarcely prepared me for it.

“The two persons you met at Antibes,” he had written, “no longer exist. They are represented today by two old characters—no, crocks—whose united ages amount to one hundred and seventy years; deaf, decrepit, doting and having one foot sufficiently deep in the grave to make you wish they would tumble in.”

Yet I could not see that he had changed a bit in thirteen years. Perhaps his mind was not as good as it used to be. It was still better than anybody else’s. Thus my thoughts ran as we stood together on his doorstep. An eager and a nipping wind was tossing the tree-tops and there was the feel of snow in the air. On such a night, most men over fifty would not venture forth without an ulster, tippet, mittens and a hot water bottle. But here was Shaw in his snuff-colored knickerbockers, striding hatless and coatless down the drive at a pace that had me winded.

At once the chauffeur started to retrace his twisting path to London or would have done so had not Shaw leaped in front of the headlights, waved his arms and whiskers like a semaphore and then patiently undertaken my driver’s instructions as to the really intelligent and economical short-cut to London. I could tell from the mulish hunch of the listening shoulders in front of me that the driver planned to hear these instructions out and then disregard them, intending, in his greater wisdom, to go back the way he knew. We were getting nowhere and after all Shaw was not the only author in England. There was H. G. Wells, for instance. Remembering that I had a dinner engagement with him for that very evening, I ventured to interrupt. “Master,” I said, “this is your life in a nutshell.” It was, at that. So he laughed, washed his hands of us, waved a farewell with them and scampered off in the twilight. “Almost thou persuadest me,” I thought, “to be a vegetarian.” I said as much to Mr. Wells at dinner.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t like to peach on a pal, but Shaw cheats.”

“Cheats!” Vainly I tried to imagine the author of Candida and St. Joan giving way to beefsteaks as a solitary vice.

“Yes,” said Wells. “He takes liver extract and calls it ‘those chemicals.’ ”