Читать книгу Exit Laughing - Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury - Страница 3
ОглавлениеPLEA FOR THE DEFENSE
Once upon a time I was returning, by the not-so-roundabout way of Western Europe from South America, where I had been to collect material on a series of articles for the Cosmopolitan magazine. My traveling companion was the most perfect of all possible traveling companions and that would be Will Hogg, eldest son of the greatest governor the state of Texas ever had, and in his own right a great man.
So there we were, aboard an Italian liner bound from Brazil to Spain, a lengthy slantwise cruise of the Atlantic. There were only a few other English-speaking passengers and we had to depend rather heavily upon ourselves for company. Even so, the voyage was for me not a lonesome or a tedious voyage. You see, Will was there.
A day or two out from Rio we met an Argentino, a mannerly, middle-aged and very melancholy individual. I’ve rarely seen a sadder-looking man; he was a model for professional pallbearers everywhere. He had a limited English vocabulary. Will and I had a store of the bastardized Spanish a fellow picks up on the Mexican border. But we all three had hands to gesture with and eyebrows to shrug with and shoulders to lift; and since to the Latin a language is almost as much a calisthenic as it is a spoken tongue, we got along, after a fashion.
He said he was quite alone. He said he had been copiously indisposed, which was obvious. He said he disliked the sea and practically everything about the sea. This was his first extended sea voyage and, God willing, ’twould be his last one. He had been in his stateroom since quitting the land; this was his initial appearance on deck and now, if we would excuse him, he would go below. In his ceremonious South American way he ventured to hope we might meet again and become better acquainted. An unexpected gulp spoiled the stately splendor of his farewell and with speed he skidded down the nearermost companionway. The purser, who was a finished linguist, ranged up and told us the fleeing one was a former member of the Argentine cabinet and a former senator and generally a person of consequence in his own country.
After the ocean swells ironed themselves out, he came up again for air and we did become better acquainted. Vaguely we felt sorry for him—he seemed so weighed down by some private grief. It couldn’t altogether be the squeamishness of seasickness which affected him; there must be something else, a mysterious cankering distress. Eventually, when his formal attitude had softened, he took us into his confidence and the unhappy secret came out.
An associate of his, though by no means an intimate associate, had died recently in Buenos Aires. On his deathbed the lately departed had desired that his body be cremated and the ashes be entrusted to this unfortunate confrere of his with instructions to take the ashes and take ship and at the moment of crossing the equator, strew the ashes upon the face of the waters.
With a dignified pathos, the ex-Senator went on to say that so far as might be ascertained, the decedent was not particularly nautical-minded nor would it appear that he’d ever had any romantic attachment for the equator itself. Apparently it was a moribund ambition which had made him put this burden upon a compatriot. But the obligation was not one to be disregarded. So laying aside his business and leaving his family, this poor forlorn gentleman packed up those ashes and quit his pleasant villa and traveled on one coastwise ship from Buenos Aires to Montevideo in Uruguay and thence on a second coaster from Montevideo to Santos and from there had ridden the railroad up to São Paulo and on another railroad line had descended to Rio and at Rio had caught this Italian liner which would carry him clear over to Cadiz in Spain where he must stay until the ship turned around and headed back. Including the return trip, with its various ramifications and delays, at least two months must elapse, and probably it would be nearer three months, from the time he set out on this difficult and most uncongenial mission until he reached home again—and he was already most miserable and was sure would continue to be miserable until the finish of it all.
We extended our joint sympathy which was gratefully accepted. It then developed that he craved a service at our hands. Would we, out of charity, be so good as to join in a special rite, which, by co-operation with the ship’s captain, had been arranged to take place at the moment of crossing the equator? That moment, it next developed, would be shortly after four o’clock on tomorrow morning. We couldn’t very well get out of it, so we consented and left a call for 3:45 a.m.
It was a small and a subdued and somehow an uneasy and embarrassed company which gathered on the boat deck, well forward, that next morning. An inflammatory tropic dawn should have been painting the east, but there was plenty of fog, and a depressing humidity, like a sort of patina of invisible gloom, lay over everything. The deck-planks were damp and slippery as though the ship suffered from night-sweats; and a wettish heat enveloped us—and we’d had no breakfast. The chief mourner looked his dismal part. He wore the tall hat and frock coat of high occasions, and there was a tremendous broad band of crape on the left sleeve of the coat and a funereal black streamer draped about the hat. To his bosom, with both his gloved hands, he clutched a small bronze canister or urn. The captain was there, wearing a uniform tunic over his pajamas and the ship’s chaplain, a small, shy Italian priest, also was present. A sleepy musician with a bugle and a couple of bored sailors stood by. I couldn’t help thinking that the group suggested so many bewildered ghosts who had answered the Resurrection trump expecting a large attendance, only to find themselves the first ones up for Judgment Day.
On the minute, as the steamer’s bow met the invisible bellyband of the earth, a signal was given and speed fell off to a crawl. The bugler sounded taps. The sailors came to attention. The priest made the Sign of the Cross and said a brief prayer, and our friend, who had stepped to the guards and stood waiting, now unscrewed the lid of the container, and there sifted forth from it and instantly was whisked away, oversides, a scanty grayish powder. It didn’t seem possible that an adult body, when reduced to dust, should produce so puny and inconsequential a yield. You would have said any sizable cat ought to render down into a better crop of ashes than that, let alone a grown man.
That was all there was to the matter, or substantially all. As the engines picked up speed, we covered our bared heads. After fumbling the emptied can as though perplexed to know what to do with it, our friend reached a decision and, with almost a suggestion of relief, heaved it outboard. Yawning from emptiness and perhaps other emotions, all hands went below and had coffee and then went back to bed, or at least Will and I did, and tried to catch up on our beauty sleep.
Afterward, reviewing the experience, we marveled at the vanity of a man who, for his own selfish dying ends, would impose so altogether futile and distasteful a task upon another on whom he had no valid claim. And we marveled that only too often, at the end of a life, does the human who reluctantly is surrendering that life devise some such extravagant and outrageous program in a morbid effort to project his personality across the grave, desperately denying to himself even in that supreme final moment the truth of the mighty fact poetically summed up in what was said once about the little dog whose name was Rover, to wit, that while he lived he may have lived in clover but when he died, he died all over.
Yet this gross and exaggerated egotism, this expiring clutch at the intangible when the substance almost is gone, seems to abide with so lamentably many of us. By binding the hands of his posterity to a certain given course one man craves to perpetuate still his mortal works, nearly always with disastrous consequences for the heirs at law and for the institution he left behind. Example: Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Another man puts his dependency for future remembrance upon some elaborate burial mummery or perhaps provides for a lofty costly monument reciting in graven lines the tally of his puny achievements upon this earth. Yet what is a funeral eulogy, spoken into the cold unresponsive ears of the dead, but a belated plea for the defense uttered after the evidence is all in and the verdict recorded, just as an epitaph is merely an advertisement for a line of goods which permanently has been discontinued? For the matter of that, what is an unfilled grave but an open question eternally unanswered and unanswerable?
Yet other men, facing that unrelenting enemy of the species which is called old age, express their reluctance against being forgotten by turning to the unfamiliar channels of autobiographical works or by hiring ghost writers to do these personal recitals for them. What he has done or seen or said or thought becomes so tremendously important to the poor deluded creature who is faced with the dread prospect that presently he must forevermore quit doing or saying or seeing or thinking. Or rather it acquires importance because he, the belated narrator, was on the spot.
Being naturally prejudiced on the side of the patient it is hardly to be expected that I, myself, should be competent fairly to diagnose my own case but since, for all my life, writing has been my trade, I make so bold as to profess that it is not altogether a yearning to keep on living after I’ve quit doing so but possibly, in some degree, is merely obedience to an ingrained impulse which prompts me to set myself to the undertaking at hand.
What I mean to write will in no proper sense be cast in the accepted stylistic form—at least I hope not, and at this moment think it will not be. My purpose is to set down, more or less at random, certain memoirs of events and certain likenesses of individuals that have impressed me as being picturesque or fantastic or glamorous, which means that without too much regard for chronological order I shall range back and forth from the recollections of childhood, which are still so vivid, to happenings of comparatively recent occurrence, which last I’d probably forget altogether did I wait many more years before putting them down.
For further excuse I might add that as a reporter, as a war correspondent, as a recorder after one fashion or another of the daily scene for forty-odd years, I’ve been where interesting things were taking place. I aim to try to tell about some of them and about some trivial things, too.
Anyhow, as Ted Cook said lately when somebody asked him what had become of all the hero-worshipers: “They’re writing autobiographies.”
