Father, farthest away and soundest sleeper of all, had by this time been awakened by the battering on the attic door. He decided that the house was on fire. “I’m coming, I’m coming!” he wailed in a slow, sleepy voice—it took him many minutes to regain full consciousness. My mother, still believing he was caught under the bed, detected in his “I’m coming!” the mournful, resigned note of one who is preparing to meet his Maker. “He’s dying!” she shouted.
“I’m all right!” Briggs yelled, to reassure her. “I’m all right!” He still believed that it was his own closeness to death that was worrying mother. I found at last the light switch in my room, unlocked the door, and Briggs and I joined the others at the attic door. The dog, who never did like Briggs, jumped for him—assuming that he was the culprit in whatever was going on—and Roy had to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear father crawling out of bed upstairs. Roy pulled the attic door open, with a mighty jerk, and father came down the stairs, sleepy and irritable but safe and sound. My mother began to weep when she saw him. Rex began to howl. “What in the name of God is going on here?” asked father.
The situation was finally put together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Father caught a cold from prowling around in his bare feet but there were no other bad results. “I’m glad,” said mother, who always looked on the bright side of things, “that your grandfather wasn’t here.”
1933
WOLCOTT GIBBS
THE HUNTRESS
EVEN now, in the comparative security of a city of seven million people, I sit dreaming of Miss Sellers, the most dangerous woman in the world. For three years Miss Sellers was, in a sense, my employee, although she kept me in a steady panic, and I had neither dignity nor grace in her presence.
At that time, I was the editor of a New England weekly newspaper, dedicated to the social activities of the community, which were repetitious, and the interests of the Republican party, which were corrupt beyond belief. Miss Sellers was my reporter, a heritage from my predecessor, and certainly the most successful practical joke of his negligible career. She was a native New Englander, which, next to being a Jukes, is of course this world’s surest guarantee of great peculiarity. She weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, and as a rule she wore a rusty red garment, shapeless and without sleeves, like an old-fashioned nightgown. Her face was large and gray and sparsely bearded, and it glistened continually with perspiration. Her eyes protruded and never winked. Her hair was arranged, Japanese fashion, in a tower of diminishing black buns, which sometimes contained an exhausted flower. On the whole, it is impossible to describe her more graphically than to say that she resembled the late William Jennings Bryan, unkindly made up to play Madame Butterfly.
It was Miss Sellers’ simple duty to report to me, in pencil on ruled sheets of yellow paper, the weddings, births, deaths, and other minutiæ of a community of three thousand people. She did this, I am obliged to admit, acceptably enough, being particularly eloquent in her obituaries, which were written more or less from the triumphant point of view of the earthworm. Unsolicited, Miss Sellers also contributed other articles, largely of an editorial nature and directed principally against the Catholic Church, of which she disapproved. These, however, were somewhat controversial in tone, having to do with vast papal conspiracies to take over the county government, and they were not printed. She also contributed poetry, and, country newspapers being what they are, some of this was printed. It, too, was dark and menacing, and, being largely incomprehensible, gained the paper a considerable reputation for profundity among the simple lobstermen. I have lost what copies I ever had of these compositions, but one at least persists in my memory. It was called “Sardak Y Noval,” which Miss Sellers, being pinned down, condescended to explain was the name of a “mythical pool.” It began:
Down through the depths of the depthless,
Narrow and sombre and cool,
Down in the heart of the heartless,
Oh, where is the soul of the pool?
Oh, silence is golden, while silver is sound
As the motto proverbial saith,
But the silence of Sardak, that stillness profound,
The silence of Noval is … DEATH!
I can still remember it all, but this, I think, is enough to convey the essence of Miss Sellers’ gloomy gift.
NONE of these extra activities, of course, had the slightest bearing on Miss Sellers’ value to me as a journalist. It also happened, however, that she was the victim of a series of delusions which made my contacts with her matters of the greatest anxiety and embarrassment. Her paramount idea was that almost all men, not too near the cradle or the grave, had carnal designs upon her person. This is certainly not a novel fixation, and I suppose it has its pathos, but Miss Sellers’ precautions against unavenged rape were so bizarre and elaborate that they deserve to be noted. In the first place, she had procured (in an interview which must have mystified the village doctor) a “certificate of chastity,” stating that Edith Sellers had been examined and found to be a virgin; in the second, she had picked up, God knows where, an enormous old revolver, minus both hammer and ammunition, with which to threaten any wretch too passionate or abandoned to be disarmed by the certificate. Both these articles were kept in the side pocket of her Ford runabout, and both figured freely and forbiddingly in her conversation.
This, too, would have been harmless enough from my point of view, except that, of all men, Miss Sellers was most inclined to suspect the editors who employed her, apparently expecting them to demand a sort of journalistic droit du seigneur in exchange for her salary. The certificate and the revolver, indeed, became commonplaces in our interviews, and I was threatened with them daily, though never directly.
“Just let any of them try their dirty monkey tricks on me,” Miss Sellers would say, staring at me with unmistakable menace.
I learned from the villagers, who were largely exempt from Miss Sellers’ suspicions and therefore inclined to find her diverting, that one previous editor had become so unnerved by these persistent innuendoes that he had resigned and, in his anxiety to get as far as possible from Miss Sellers, had bought a candy store in Austin, Texas.
Eventually it became clear, even to Miss Sellers, that I was unlikely to attack her, and our relationship entered an even more embarrassing phase. She decided that a great, but purely platonic, love had sprung up between us. This spiritual kinship involved the writing (on her part) of a sequence of poems, not primarily designed for publication, and many references, ingeniously but much too thinly disguised, to the dear new bond between us. It was Miss Sellers’ hideous fancy to pretend that she was writing a book, in which the principal characters were designated simply as “the boy” and “the girl.” To make it even easier, “the boy” was the editor of a newspaper, while “the girl,” a poetess of considerable power, worked for him as a reporter. On the slightest provocation, or none, and certainly in any company, Miss Sellers would outline the latest chapter in this work. Once, I remember, “the boy” was dying of pneumonia (almost all the chapters contained a satisfactory amount of sickness and catastrophe) and “the girl” brought him around with a sonnet. As a roman à clef, it had an enormous vogue among the happy villagers.
Our love also involved telepathy. Occasionally, in the newspaper office, I would answer the phone, to hear that unmistakable voice—Miss Sellers always spoke in the tone generally reserved by elderly ladies for children or small animals.
“Hello,” it would say.
“Hello, Miss Sellers.”
“You knew!” There would be a sound which I could picture only as Miss Sellers blowing hard into the mouthpiece. “Isn’t it marvellous!”
“Oh, I ought to know your voice by this time, Miss Sellers.”
“Oh, no!” More blowing. “Oh, it’s much more than that!”
The final confirmation of our psychic tie-up, however, came one evening when I was working late at the office. There was a frosted-glass panel in the door, and a strong ligh
t in the hall, so that anybody standing outside cast a sharp shadow on the pane. Looking up suddenly, I saw an outline that, from the triple bun on top to the gigantic waist, could have belonged to only one person in the world.
“Come in, Miss Sellers,” I said hopelessly.
Miss Sellers came in, pale with some delicious blending of fright and rapture.
“It’s uncanny! It frightens me,” she cried. “Why, you felt me out there!”
I looked at the lighted panel, and at Miss Sellers, but I knew it was no use.
“Yes,” I said, “it frightens me too.”
A little after that, I resigned from the paper myself, partly because of Miss Sellers, and partly because I had no real interest in misleading the taxpayers. I left quietly, almost furtively, and I didn’t see Miss Sellers. A few months ago, however, I got a letter from her. Our romance, it appears, has left no scars. Indeed, she didn’t even mention it, being too preoccupied with news. There was a new editor after I left, an extremely disagreeable man, who had tried to take away her pistol and cause her “other troubles.” Miss Sellers didn’t specify just what these “other troubles” were, but I gathered that he’d tried to have her committed. He hadn’t succeeded. In fact, the victory was magnificently with Miss Sellers. The editor had been driving along in a storm when a branch was blown down on his skull, fracturing it. He wasn’t dead, but he was in the hospital, and nobody believed he’d ever be the same. Miss Sellers said that this was obviously the hand of God, and seemed to be somewhat alarmed at her own powers. In the meantime, there is a new editor—“a rather delicate boy.” She hopes that he’s stronger than he looks. So do I.
1935
PETER DE VRIES
ONE
MY first impression of Trenkle was the same as my last, and both were identical with all those that lay changelessly between: that of a man bent on talking in epigrams. He had a nickname he was completely oblivious of. Among ourselves, we who knew him never called him Trenkle, or Philip, either, which was his first name; we called him One, after the indefinite pronoun he constantly used—“One should always look at El Grecos on an empty stomach,” and “Life is a carnival at which one should throw the balls at the prizes,” and “There are types of innocence of which one should not be guilty,” and so on. This “one” device seems more naturally suited to Englishmen than to Americans. The homes where he and I met, some years ago, were largely in and around Westport, immediately beyond which, one (to borrow the locution) is, after all, on one’s way to Bridgeport. Conversation may be, as One believed, a lost art, but it probably never did prosper on the aphoristic plane on which he strove to twinkle.
I remember the first time I saw One, at a cocktail party for a couple who had just announced their engagement. In the course of some standard persiflage about matrimony, somebody asked One, then thirty-four and espaliered against the mantel, when he was going to take the step. One reached for his Manhattan, which was on a nearby table. “Getting married is like sitting down on garden furniture,” he said. “One does it cautiously.”
A young advertising man I was sitting next to—a chap in his late twenties named Dick Fillmore—looked at me and murmured, “Judas Priest!” But within the month he was to find One at his own dinner table.
Dick and his wife, Madge, had just settled in a house in Darien, and in the process of striking social roots Madge was inviting people wholesale. This time she had practically everybody in the group I went around with. An excellent cook had prepared a capital dinner topped off with Nesselrode pudding. Having finished his, One set his napkin down and turned to Madge with a gleam in his eye.
“Stendhal,” said One, who frequently built his effects on those of the masters, “Stendhal is reported to have said, on first eating ice cream, ‘What a pity it isn’t a sin!’ ” He gestured toward his dessert dish. “This is a sin.”
“Tell Dodie,” Madge said, with a wave toward the cook, who was just then emerging from the kitchen. Dick scraped his chair back with a jittery motion and said, “Let’s have our coffee in the living room.”
In there, One got off an epigram somewhat better than his usual. The subject was, fittingly enough, epigrams themselves, and after the coffee, when we were sitting around drinking highballs, One quoted liberally from Wilde, Shaw, and Voltaire. “Epigrams,” he said, at length, “what are they?”
There was a silence. One picked up his drink, sipped slowly, and set it down again. “Epigrams,” he said, “are canes with which we swagger in our youth but on which in old age we must lean.”
Virginia Woolf, in her Orlando, describes the effect of actual wit on an eighteenth-century reception room where wit is delusively held by the frequenters of the salon to be a nightly staple. The poet Pope is announced. He steps inside and delivers three mots in rapid succession. People sit in dead silence for twenty minutes. Then they turn in consternation and slink, one by one, from the room.
This at the Fillmores’ was by no means a salon; this was just a bunch of us. But we were similarly immobilized; if not for twenty minutes, perhaps because we had so much less to lose—about as much less, I suppose, as One had to offer than Pope. People on the fringe turned away, muttering resentfully; somebody snickered and looked at his feet; arms reaching for highball glasses converged like the spokes of a wheel on the large central coffee table. “Ju—das—” Dick began, but before he could get to “Priest” Madge’s bright voice cried restoratively, “Who’s for Ping-Pong?”
THE person who remains in my memory as most able to take One in his stride was a man of markedly earthier grain even than Dick. Into a small cluster of listeners to whom, at the opening of an exhibition at a country art gallery, One was expounding Surrealism as inverted Romanticism hove a short, portly figure in a double-breasted suit. He was the owner of a rope-and-twine business. His name was Wentworth, and his wife was on the arrangements committee and had a watercolor in the show.
“The symbol of Romanticism was a swan,” One said. “That of Surrealism, half a swan.”
“I’ll buy that,” Wentworth said from the periphery, looking around and nodding.
Wentworth haunted the brisker conversation all evening, buying heavily. Among his purchases were these generalizations of One’s:
“Polo is merely the cavalry of croquet.”
“Nothing resembles reverence so much as intense profanity. It is the soul on one knee.”
“Strict chastity is itself a kind of promiscuity. It lacks the principle of selection.”
“You can say that again!” Wentworth responded to the last, as he had to the first and second, respectively, with “And how!” and “Check!”
One moved off in search of less robust approval.
I HAVE an almost total recall of One’s aphorisms, partly because he used them again and again but also, it must be confessed, because they exerted a fascination over me, especially when the gulf between the frequently debatable content and the always impeccably classic form was arresting enough to make me think of a hot dog under a glass bell.
Here are a few more of One’s apothegms and paradoxes, as they occur to me:
“No sculpture is successful that does not inspire in us the desire to feel it—and leave us sheepish when we have done so.”
“There is such a thing as smiling uproariously. I have done so once or twice in my life.”
“The American principle: God helps those that help themselves. The Russian: God help those that help themselves. Only, the Russians do not believe in Him!”
“Eggnog is absurd.”
“One reason I cannot order hash in a restaurant is the necessity of telling the waiter to omit the poached egg. One should not have to edit what one eats.”
“Attacking the foibles of the human race is a good deal like swatting mosquitoes—one cannot do it without slapping oneself.”
“I do not know whether the retaliation is intentional or not, but the food in museums is about on a par with the murals in restaurants.”
“Time goes in one year and out the other.”
“There is truly no such thing as a little garlic. Ideally, it should be rubbed on the cook.”
“Conscience is like the emergency brake on an automobile. It is never used in an emergency, only when one is morally parked.”
“Nature abhors a vacuum cleaner.”
IT’S possible that One fancied himself another La Rochefoucauld, who would be quoted by the grandchildren of those out of whom, in life, he got no rise. The only response I ever heard that “worked” with him was the familiar “I know exactly what you mean!” One evening, he said to a group of us, “The music of Delius resembles nothing so much as pink stucco—if you know what I mean.”
“Well—” I began, but was overridden by a woman wearing leather jewelry, who bobbed her head brightly and said, “I know exactly what you mean”—a signal of kinship that sent One happily into amplification.
“Not, you understand, that weathered pink of old missions fifty miles south of Los Angeles,” he continued, “and not, you understand, the pink of the houses in Los Angeles, either, but, you see, the pink of the ice-cream stands on the outskirts of it.”
Gassed into near-insensibility by this flow of subtlety, I laughed along with the woman, but whereas hers was a laugh of head-nodding appreciation, mine was a laugh of gentle, addled despair, the helpless laugh of someone trying to pick up quicksilver with his fingers.
But splitting the atom of meaning with One wasn’t always a harmless pastime, and there was one occasion in particular when I got embroiled in the exegesis myself.
I was having dinner with One and another companion in the garden of a restaurant on the banks of the Saugatuck, near Westport. Travel on the Continent was discussed, and at last One, turning on the lathe of inference the sum of notes compared and anecdotes exchanged, said, “There are, usually, people and people. There are Frenchmen and Frenchmen. There are Englishmen and Englishmen. There are Irishmen and Irishmen, and there are, of course, Germans and Germans. But there are,” he concluded, reaching for his coffee cup, “only Swedes.”
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