She would get the other lady’s name out of me easily enough, when the brandy began to ebb in the bottle, and being Marian Forrester, for whom jealousy was as simple as a reflex, she would be jealous of the imaginary relations of a man she could not place, with a woman she had never heard of. I would then confess my love for Madame de Vionnet, the lady of the lilacs, of Gloriani’s bright Sunday garden, of the stately house in the Boulevard Malsherbes, with its cool parlor and dark medallions. I would rise no doubt to the seedy grandiloquence of which I am capable when the cognac is flowing, and I could hear her pitiless comment. “One of those women who have something to give, for heaven’s sake!” she would say. “One of those women who save men, a female whose abandon might possibly tiptoe to the point of tousling her lover’s hair, a woman who at the first alarm of a true embrace would telephone the gendarmes.” “Stop it!” I heard myself shout there in the rain. “I beg you to remember it was once said of Madame de Vionnet that when she touched a thing the ugliness, God knows how, went out of it.” “How sweet!” I could hear Mrs. Forrester go on. “And yet, according to you, she lost her lover, for all her charm, and to a snippet of an applecheek from New England. Did the ugliness go out of that? And if it did, what did the poor lady do with all the prettiness?”
As I stood there in the darkening afternoon, getting soaked, I realized sharply that in my fantasy I had actually been handing Marian Forrester stones to throw at the house in Paris, and the confusion in my viewpoint of the two ladies, if up to that moment I had had a viewpoint, overwhelmed me. I figured what would happen as the shadows deepened in the Forrester house, and we drank what was left of the brandy out of ordinary tumblers—the ballons of the great days would long since have been shattered. Banter would take on the sharp edge of wrangling, and in the end she would stand above me, maintaining a reedy balance, and denounce the lady of the lilacs in the flat terms she had overheard gentlemen use so long ago over their cigars and coffee in the library. I would set my glass down on the sticky arm of the chair and get up and stalk out into the hall. But though she had the last word, she would not let me have the last silence, the gesture in conclusion. She would follow me to the door. In her house, by an ancient rule, Marian Forrester always had the final moment—standing on the threshold, her face lifted, her eyes shining, her hand raised to wave good-bye. Yes, she would follow me to the door, and in the hall—I could see it so clearly I shivered there on the bridge—something wonderful would happen. With the faintest of smiles and the slightest of murmurs I would bow to my hostess, open the door and walk, not out into the rain, but into that damn closet, with its junk and clutter, smashing the Easter egg with my shoe, becoming tangled in the table tennis net, and holding in my hand, when I regained my balance, that comic parasol. Madame de Vionnet would ignore such a calamity, she would pretend not to see it, on the ground that a hostess is blind—a convention that can leave a man sitting at table with an omelet in his lap, unable to mention it, forced to go on with the conversation. But Marian would laugh, the lost laugh of the bright occasions, of the day of her shameless passion in the snow, and it would light the house like candles, reducing the sounds upstairs, in some miraculous way, to what they really were, the innocent creaking of the old floor boards. “What’s all this about saving men?” I would cry. “Look who’s talking!” And, still holding the parasol, I would kiss her on the cheek, mumble something about coming back some day, and leave, this time by the right door, finding, as I went to rejoin myself at the bridge, a poker chip in the cuff of my trousers.
It seems like a long time ago, my call on Mrs. Forrester. I have never been back. I didn’t even send her a Valentine last February. But I did send a pretty book of impeccable verses to Madame de Vionnet, writing in the inscription something polite and nostalgic about “ta voix dans le Bois de Boulogne.” I did this, I suppose, out of some obscure guilt sense—these things are never very clear to any man, if the truth were told. I think the mental process goes like this, though. Drinking brandy out of a water glass in the amiable company of a lady who uses spirits for anodyne and not amenity, a timid gentleman promises his subconscious to make up for it later on by taking a single malaga before déjeuner à midi with a fastidious lady, toying with aspic, discussing Thornton Wilder, praising the silver point in the hall on the way out, and going home to lie down, exhausted but somehow purified.
I will carry lilacs, one of these summers, to the house in the Boulevard Malesherbes, and take Madame de Vionnet to a matinee of “Louise,” have a white port with her at one of the little terraces at the quietest corner of the Parc Monceau, and drop her at her door well before the bold moon has begun to wink at the modest twilight. Since, in the best Henry James tradition, I will get nothing out of this for myself, it ought to make up for something. I could do worse than spend my last summers serenely, sipping wine, clop-clopping around town, listening to good music, kissing a lady’s hand at her door, going to bed early and getting a good night’s sleep. A man’s a fool who walks in the rain, drinks too much brandy, risks his neck floundering around in an untidy closet. Besides, if you miss the 6:15, the eastbound Burlington that has a rendezvous with dusk in Sweet Water every day except Sundays and holidays, you have to wait till midnight for the next train east. A man could catch his death, dozing there in that cold and lonesome station.
A New Natural History
A Trochee (left) encountering a Spondee.
CREATURES OF THE MEADOW
Left, the Aspic on a stalk of Visiting Fireman. Center, the Throttle. Right, a Ticket in a patch of Marry-in-Haste. Below, a 99-year lease working slowly toward the surface through the years.
A pair of Martinets.
The Hoodwink on a spray of Ragamuffin.
The Bodkin (left) and the Chintz.
A GROUP OF RARE BLOSSOMS AND BUTTERFLIES
Flowers (left to right): Baker’s Dozen, Shepherd’s Pie, Sailor’s Hornpipe, Stepmother’s Kiss.
Butterflies (left to right): The Admirable Crichton, the Great Gatsby, The Magnificent Ambersons (male and female), the Beloved Vagabond.
The White-faced Rage (left) and the Blind Rage.
A GROUP OF MORE OR LESS PLEASANT BIRDS
Left to right: the Apothecary, the Night Watchman, the Scoutmaster, and the Barred Barrister.
The Goad.
The male Wedlock (left) cautiously approaching a clump of Devil-May-Care; at right, the female.
A female Shriek (right) rising out of the Verbiage to attack a female Swoon.
The Lapidary in a clump of Merry-Go-Round.
A Garble with an Utter in its claws.
The Dudgeon.
Two widely distributed rodents: the Barefaced Lie (left) and the White Lie.
The female Snarl (left) and the male Sulk.
An Upstart rising from a clump of Johnny-Come-Lately. The small rodent (right) is a Spouse.
A GROUP OF BIRDS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
(Left to right) The Whited Sepulchre; the Misfit; the American Playboy, or Spendthrift, also sometimes called (southern U. S. A.) the Common Blackguard; a Stuffed Shirt; and (above) a Termagant.
The Femur (left) and the Metatarsal.
A GROUP OF SEMI-EDIBLE VEGETABLES
Top: Quench (left) and Arpeggio. Bottom: Therapy (left) and Scabbard.
The Living, or Spitting, Image (left) and a Dead Ringer.
A female Volt with all her Ergs in one Gasket.
The male and female Tryst.
The Early and the Late Riser.
A TRIO OF PREHISTORIC CREATURES
Left to right: the Thesaurus, the Stereopticon, and the Hexameter. The tree is a Sacroiliac.
A Scone (left) and a Crumpet, peering out of the Tiffin.
The Tantamount.
A Serenade (left) about to engage in combat with a Victual.
THREE FRESH-WATER CREATURES
The Qualm The Glib The Moot
FOUR PLANTS OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE
Left
to right: Single Standard, False Witness, Double Jeopardy, Heartburn.
The Huff.
A Gloat near a patch of I-Told-You-So.
A Grope approaching, unaware, a Clinch in hiding.
The Peeve (or Pet Peeve).
The Troth, Plighted (right) and Unplighted.
The Common Carrier.
A GROUP OF DESTRUCTIVE INSECTS
The Coal Bin
The Door Latch
The Clock Tick (or Stop Watch)
The Tire Tool
The Window Ledge
The Ball Bat
THE 13 CLOCKS
I
ONCE upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. He was six feet four, and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was. One eye wore a velvet patch; the other glittered through a monocle, which made half his body seem closer to you than the other half. He had lost one eye when he was twelve, for he was fond of peering into nests and lairs in search of birds and animals to maul. One afternoon, a mother shrike had mauled him first. His nights were spent in evil dreams, and his days were given to wicked schemes.
Wickedly scheming, he would limp and cackle through the cold corridors of the castle, planning new impossible feats for the suitors of Saralinda to perform. He did not wish to give her hand in marriage, since her hand was the only warm hand in the castle. Even the hands of his watch and the hands of all the thirteen clocks were frozen. They had all frozen at the same time, on a snowy night, seven years before, and after that it was always ten minutes to five in the castle. Travelers and mariners would look up at the gloomy castle on the lonely hill and say, “Time lies frozen there. It’s always Then. It’s never Now.”
The cold Duke was afraid of Now, for Now has warmth and urgency, and Then is dead and buried. Now might bring a certain knight of gay and shining courage—“But, no!” the cold Duke muttered. “The Prince will break himself against a new and awful labor: a place too high to reach, a thing too far to find, a burden too heavy to lift.” The Duke was afraid of Now, but he tampered with the clocks to see if they would go, out of a strange perversity, praying that they wouldn’t. Tinkers and tinkerers and a few wizards who happened by tried to start the clocks with tools or magic words, or by shaking them and cursing, but nothing whirred or ticked. The clocks were dead, and in the end, brooding on it, the Duke decided he had murdered time, slain it with his sword, and wiped his bloody blade upon its beard and left it lying there, bleeding hours and minutes, its springs uncoiled and sprawling, its pendulum disintegrating.
The Duke limped because his legs were of different lengths. The right one had outgrown the left because, when he was young, he had spent his mornings place-kicking pups and punting kittens. He would say to a suitor, “What is the difference in the length of my legs?” and if the youth replied, “Why, one is shorter than the other,” the Duke would run him through with the sword he carried in his swordcane and feed him to the geese. The suitor was supposed to say, “Why, one is longer than the other.” Many a prince had been run through for naming the wrong difference. Others had been slain for offenses equally trivial: trampling the Duke’s camellias, failing to praise his wines, staring too long at his gloves, gazing too long at his niece. Those who survived his scorn and sword were given incredible labors to perform in order to win his niece’s hand, the only warm hand in the castle, where time had frozen to death at ten minutes to five one snowy night. They were told to cut a slice of moon, or change the ocean into wine. They were set to finding things that never were, and building things that could not be. They came and tried and failed and disappeared and never came again. And some, as I have said, were slain, for using names that start with X, or dropping spoons, or wearing rings, or speaking disrespectfully of sin.
The castle and the Duke grew colder, and Saralinda, as a princess will, even in a place where time lies frozen, became a little older, but only a little older. She was nearly twenty-one the day a prince, disguised as a minstrel, came singing to the town that lay below the castle. He called himself Xingu, which was not his name, and dangerous, since the name began with X—and still does. He was, quite properly, a thing of shreds and patches, a ragged minstrel, singing for pennies and the love of singing. Xingu, as he so rashly called himself, was the youngest son of a powerful king, but he had grown weary of rich attire and banquets and tournaments and the available princesses of his own realm, and yearned to find in a far land the maiden of his dreams, singing as he went, learning the life of the lowly, and possibly slaying a dragon here and there.
At the sign of the Silver Swan, in the town below the castle, where taverners, travelers, tale-tellers, tosspots, troublemakers, and other townspeople were gathered, he heard of Saralinda, loveliest princess on all the thousand islands of the ocean seas. “If you can turn the rain to silver, she is yours,” a taverner leered.
“If you can slay the thorny Boar of Borythorn, she is yours,” grinned a traveler. “But there is no thorny Boar of Borythorn, which makes it hard.”
“What makes it even harder is her uncle’s scorn and sword,” sneered a tale-teller. “He will slit you from your guggle to your zatch.”
“The Duke is seven feet, nine inches tall, and only twenty-eight years old, or in his prime,” a tosspot gurgled. “His hand is cold enough to stop a clock, and strong enough to choke a bull, and swift enough to catch the wind. He breaks up minstrels in his soup, like crackers.”
“Our minstrel here will warm the old man’s heart with song, dazzle him with jewels and gold,” a troublemaker simpered. “He’ll trample on the Duke’s camellias, spill his wine, and blunt his sword, and say his name begins with X, and in the end the Duke will say, ‘Take Saralinda, with my blessing, O lordly Prince of Rags and Tags, O rider of the sun!’ ”
The troublemaker weighed eighteen stone, but the minstrel picked him up and tossed him in the air and caught him and set him down again. Then he paid his due and left the Swan.
“I’ve seen that youth before,” the traveler mused, staring after Xingu, “but he was neither ragamuffin then, nor minstrel. Now let me see, where was it?”
“In his soup,” the tosspot said, “like crackers.”
II
Outside the tavern the night was lighted by a rocking yellow moon that held a white star in its horn. In the gloomy castle on the hill a lantern gleamed and darkened, came and went, as if the gaunt Duke stalked from room to room, stabbing bats and spiders, killing mice. “Dazzle the Duke with jewels,” the minstrel said aloud. “There’s something in it somewhere, but what it is and where, I cannot think.” He wondered if the Duke would order him to cause a fall of purple snow, or make a table out of sawdust, or merely slit him from his guggle to his zatch, and say to Saralinda, “There he lies, your latest fool, a nameless minstrel. I’ll have my varlets feed him to the geese.” The minstrel shuddered in the moonlight, wondering where his zatch and guggle were. He wondered how and why and when he could invade the castle. A duke was never known to ask a ragged minstrel to his table, or set a task for him to do, or let him meet a princess. “I’ll think of some way,” thought the Prince. “I’ll think of something.”