“Unless you keep on helping me take things off, and put things on, and pry things loose, and make things tighter,” she told the dismayed collector of broken hearts, “I will tell my mate about your improper advances and your dishonorable intentions.” Don Penguin knew that the clever penguin’s mate was the strongest male in the community, and also had the shortest temper and the least patience. There wasn’t going to be any Hide-in-the-Dark or Guess Who This Is? or Webfooty-Webfooty. And so he spent the rest of his days working for the virtuous and guileful lady of his desire, moving sofas, taking things off and putting things on, loosening this and tightening that, and performing whatever other tasks his fair captor demanded of him. His bow tie became untied, his dinner jacket lost its buttons, his trousers lost their crease, and his eyes lost their dream. He babbled of clocks, and of keys caught in locks, and everybody closed her door when he came waddling down the street except the penguin who had taken him in with a beauty as unattainable as the stars, and a shy look, and a faint blush as phony as a parrot’s laugh. One day her mate, returning early from the sea, caught a glimpse of Don leaving the house, and said, “What did old Droop Feather want?”
“Oh, he washes the windows and waxes the floors and sweeps the chimney,” the female replied. “I believe he had an unhappy love affair.”
MORAL: One man’s mate may sometimes be another man’s prison.
The Peacelike Mongoose
IN COBRA country a mongoose was born one day who didn’t want to fight cobras or anything else. The word spread from mongoose to mongoose that there was a mongoose who didn’t want to fight cobras. If he didn’t want to fight anything else, it was his own business, but it was the duty of every mongoose to kill cobras or be killed by cobras.
“Why?” asked the peacelike mongoose, and the word went around that the strange new mongoose was not only pro-cobra and anti-mongoose but intellectually curious and against the ideals and traditions of mongoosism.
“He is crazy,” cried the young mongoose’s father.
“He is sick,” said his mother.
“He is a coward,” shouted his brothers.
“He is a mongoosexual,” whispered his sisters.
Strangers who had never laid eyes on the peacelike mongoose remembered that they had seen him crawling on his stomach, or trying on cobra hoods, or plotting the violent overthrow of Mongoosia.
“I am trying to use reason and intelligence,” said the strange new mongoose.
“Reason is six-sevenths of treason,” said one of his neighbors.
“Intelligence is what the enemy uses,” said another.
Finally, the rumor spread that the mongoose had venom in his sting, like a cobra, and he was tried, convicted by a show of paws, and condemned to banishment.
MORAL: Ashes to ashes, and clay to clay, if the enemy doesn’t get you your own folks may.
The Trial of the Old Watchdog
AN OLD experienced collie, who had been a faithful country watchdog for many years, was arrested one summer’s day and accused of the first-degree murder of a lamb. Actually, the lamb had been slain by a notorious red fox who had planted the still-warm body of his victim in the collie’s kennel.
The trial was held in a kangaroo court presided over by Judge Wallaby. The jury consisted of foxes, and all the spectators were foxes. A fox named Reynard was prosecuting attorney. “Morning, Judge,” he said.
“God bless you, boy, and good luck,” replied Judge Wallaby jovially.
A poodle named Beau, an old friend and neighbor of the collie, represented the accused watchdog. “Good morning, Judge,” said the poodle.
“Now I don’t want you to be too clever,” the Judge warned him. “Cleverness should be confined to the weaker side. That’s only fair.”
A blind woodchuck was the first creature to take the stand, and she testified that she saw the collie kill the lamb.
“The witness is blind!” protested the poodle.
“No personalities, please,” said the Judge severely. “Perhaps the witness saw the murder in a dream or a vision. This would give her testimony the authority of revelation.”
“I wish to call a character witness,” said the poodle.
“We have no character witnesses,” said Reynard smoothly, “but we have some charming character assassins.”
One of these, a fox named Burrows, was called to the stand. “I didn’t actually see this lamb killer kill this lamb,” said Burrows, “but I almost did.”
“That’s close enough,” said Judge Wallaby.
“Objection,” barked the poodle.
“Objection overruled,” said the Judge. “It’s getting late. Has the jury reached a verdict?”
The forefox of the jury stood up. “We find the defendant guilty,” he said, “but we think it would be better to acquit him, nonetheless. If we hang the defendant, his punishment will be over. But if we acquit him of such dark crimes as murder, concealing the body, and associating with poodles and defense attorneys, nobody will ever trust him again, and he will be suspect all the days of his life. Hanging is too good for him, and much too quick.”
“Guilt by exoneration!” Reynard cried. “What a lovely way to end his usefulness!”
And so the case was dismissed and court was adjourned, and everybody went home to tell about it.
MORAL: Thou shalt not blindfold justice by pulling the wool over her eyes.
FROM
ALARMS AND DIVERSIONS
The First Time I Saw Paris
WHAT I SAW first of all was one outflung hand of France as cold and limp as a dead man’s. This was the seacoast town of Saint-Nazaire, a long while ago. I know now that French towns don’t die, that France has the durability of history itself, but I was only twenty-three then, and seasick, and I had never been so far from Ohio before. It was the dank, morose dawn of the 13th of November, 1918, and I had this first dismal glimpse of France la Doulce from the deck of the U.S. Transport Orizaba, which had come from the wintry sea like a ship out of Coleridge, a painted ship in an unreal harbor. The moist, harsh light of breaking day gave the faces of the silent staring gobs on deck a weird look, but the unreality was shattered soon enough by the raucous voice of a boatswain bawling orders. I had first heard this voice, strong enough to outshout a storm, snarling commands at “abandon ship” drill: “Now, light all lanterns!” and “Now, lower all lifeboats!” I had been assigned to a life raft that was rusted to the deck and couldn’t be budged. “Now, what’s the matter with Life Raft Number Six?” the boatswain had roared. A sailor next to me said, “She’s stuck to the deck, sir.” The boatswain had to have the last word and he had it. “Now, leave her lay there!” he loudly decreed.
The Orizaba had taken a dozen days zigzagging across the North Atlantic, to elude the last submarines of the war, one of which we had sighted two days before, and Corcoran and I felt strange and uncertain on what seemed anything but solid land for a time. We were code clerks in the State Department, on our way to the Paris Embassy. Saint-Nazaire was, of course, neither dead nor dying, but I can still feel in my bones the gloom and tiredness of the old port after its four years of war. The first living things we saw were desolate men, a detachment of German prisoners being marched along a street, in mechanical step, without expression in their eyes, like men coming from no past and moving toward no future. Corcoran and I walked around the town to keep warm until the bistros opened. Then we had the first cognac of our lives, quite a lot of it, and the day brightened, and there was a sense of beginning as well as of ending, in the chilling weather. A young pink-cheeked French army officer got off his bicycle in front of a house and knocked on the door. It was opened by a young woman whose garb and greeting, even to our inexperienced eyes and ears, marked her as one of those females once described by a professor of the Harvard Law School as “the professionally indiscreet.” Corcoran stared and then glanced at his wristwatch. “Good God!” he said. “It isn’t even nine o’clock yet.”
The train trip down to P
aris was a night to remember. We shared a sleeping compartment with a thin, gloved, talkative Frenchman who said he was writing the history of the world and who covered his subject spasmodically through the night in English as snarled as a fisherman’s net, waking us once to explain that Hannibal’s elephants were not real, but merely fearful figments of Roman hallucination. I lay awake a long time thinking of the only Paris I knew, the tranquil, almost somnolent city of Henry James’s turn-of-the-century novels, in which there was no hint of war, past or approaching, except that of the sexes.
Paris, when we finally got there, seemed to our depressed spirits like the veritable capital city of Beginning. Her heart was warm and gay, all right, but there was hysteria in its beat, and the kind of compulsive elation psychiatrists strive to cure. Girls snatched overseas caps and tunic buttons from American soldiers, paying for them in hugs and kisses, and even warmer coin. A frightened Negro doughboy from Alabama said, “If this happened to me back home, they’d hang me.” The Folies Bergères and the Casino de Paris, we found a few nights later, were headquarters of the New Elation, filled with generous ladies of joy, some offering their charms free to drinking, laughing and brawling Americans in what was left of their uniforms. At the Folies a quickly composed song called “Finie la Guerre” drew a dozen encores. Only the American MP’s were grim, as they moved among the crowds looking for men who were AWOL, telling roistering captains and majors to dress up their uniforms. Doughboy French, that wonderful hybrid, bloomed everywhere. “Restez ici a minute,” one private said to his French girl. “Je returny après cet guy partirs.” Cet guy was, of course, a big-jawed military policeman set on putting a stop to non-regulation hilarity.
“I do not understand the American,” a Casino girl told me. “They fight at night with each other, they break mirrors, they become bloody, they say goddamn everybody, and the next day what do you think? They are in the Parc Monceau on all fours giving little French children a ride on their backs. They are marvelous. I love them.”
The Americans have never been so loved in France, or anywhere else abroad, as they were in those weeks of merriment and wild abandon. When, late in 1919, most of our soldiers had sailed back home, La Vie Parisienne had a full-page color drawing of an American officer over whose full-length figure dozens of lovely miniature French girls were rapturously climbing, and the caption ruefully observed: “The hearts of our young ladies have gone home with the Americans.”
My trunk had stayed on the Orizaba. Corcoran and I had been the only two civilians on board, and transports were not used to unloading non-military baggage. All I had was the clothes I wore—my hat had been claimed as a souvenir—and I set about the considerable task of buying a wardrobe, paying what amounted to five dollars for B.V.D.’s at the Galeries Lafayette. A suit I bought at a shop deceptively called “Jack, American Tailor” is packed away in the modest files of secret memory. It might have been made by the American Can Company. I tried on hats for an hour in a shop on the Avenue de l’Opera, upon whose civilian stock the dust of four years of war had settled. There were narrow-brimmed hats, each with a feather stuck on one side, that made me look like Larry Semon, movie comic of the silent days, and some that would have delighted that great connoisseur of funny hats, Mr. Ed Wynn. They were all placed on my head with an excited “Voilà!” by the eager salesman, and they were all too small, as well as grotesque. In one of the famous black, broad-brimmed hats, long and lovingly associated with the painters and poets of Bohemian Paris, I looked like a baleful figure attending the funeral of Art. I nearly broke the salesman’s heart when I turned down a ten-gallon white Stetson he had dug up out of the cellar. So I went through that cold, dank Paris winter without a hat.
I had bought a cane, which in Columbus would have identified me as a lounge lizard of dubious morals, and I acquired enough boulevard French to say, “Où est la Place de la Concorde?” and to reply to “Voulez-vous une petite caresse?” My tout ensemble was strange, but not strange enough to deceive doughboys and gobs wandering along the Champs Elysées, homesick and disconsolate after the elation died down. I helped them decipher the small red-and-black French-English dictionaries they carried and told them that, contrary to their invariable conviction, they would not be stuck in “this godforsaken city” forever. Once I translated, for a puzzled demoiselle, a mysterious note she had got through the mails from a doughboy who had returned to her one day before cet guy had partired. It began, “I am in a place I cannot leave.” I managed to explain to her that her boy had been jailed for being absent without leave. I gathered that he had been, when on the loose, a great lover, fighter and piggy-back rider, like the others. “I wish to cry on your shirt,” his girl friend told me, and she cried on my shirt. That astonished shirt, stained with Lacrimae Puellae 1919, must have cost a lot, but all I remember is that the amazing French shirttail reached to my knees.
When I got to France, the franc was worth almost a quarter, but pretty soon you could get fourteen francs for your dollar, and since prices didn’t rise as rapidly as the franc fell, the $2,000 annual salary of a code clerk began to mean something. One amateur speculator among us, certain that the franc would come back with all the resilience of Paris, bought up francs and was wiped out when la chute continued. In my nearly forty years off and on in France I have seen this coin of a thousand values vary from 5.30 to 350. “It will be as worthless as dandelions,” a dour concierge predicted in 1919, but she was wrong.
“Ah, ces américains,” sighed a Folies girl one evening. “Quels hommes! They are such good bad boys. They wish to spend the night, even the weekend.” She went on to explain how this complicated the economic structure of one in her profession. She was used, in the case of other foreigners, to a nightly transference of paid affections as neatly maneuvered as the changing of partners in a square dance. “These Americans are men born to marry,” my informant went on. Many of them—thousands, I believe—did marry French girls and took them home to an astonished Brooklyn, a disapproving Middle West, and occasionally more amiable regions. I read somewhere in 1928 that about 75 per cent of these wartime marriages had ended in the return of the brides to France. One of those who stayed wrote me a letter a quarter of a century ago in which she said, dolorously, “There is not the life in Detroit. It is not Paris. Can you send me some books in French?” She had married a great big good bad American Army lieutenant. I sent her, among other books in French, the poems of Mallarmé and the book Clemenceau wrote after the war. I often wonder what finally became of another girl who married a sailor and went to live in Iowa, and what they thought of her English out there. She had learned it all from the plays of Shakespeare and it was quaint and wonderful to hear, but definitely not for Iowa. “How goes the night?” she asked me once, straight out of Macbeth, to which I was proudly able to reply, “The moon is down. I have not heard the clock.” This Gallic Elizabethan had given up working for a few francs a week in a garment factory for a more lucrative and less monotonous career. Once I met her by appointment, and in pursuit of my sociological studies, on the terrace of the Café de la Paix, where, over vermouth cassis, she explained that she was going to meet, in half an hour, an American captain whom she had comforted one night long ago when he didn’t have a sou. It seems he had promised to meet her at the café and pay his debt of gratitude, and he had written her from somewhere and fixed an hour. “He will be here,” she said confidently, and she was right. A quiet, almost shy good bad boy, he slipped her a sealed envelope while I studied the passing throng in which, true prophecy has it, you will see everybody you know if you sit at your table long enough. I still remember that what he ordered was chocolate ice cream.
The City of Light, during most of 1919, was costumed like a wide-screen Technicolor operetta, the uniforms of a score of nations forming a kind of restless, out-of-step finale. The first Bastille Day celebration after the war was a carnival that dazzled the eye and lifted the heart. Chairs at windows of buildings along the route of march cost as much as fif
ty dollars, and stepladders on the crowded sidewalks could be rented for fifteen dollars. At night, in a thousand “tin bars,” as our men called bistros, and in more elaborate boîtes de nuit, the Americans often changed the prewar pattern of Paris night life by fighting among themselves, or singly, in pairs, or in groups, the Anzacs, the waiters, the management, the gendarmerie, or whoever was looking for action. Chairs and bottles were thrown, and mirrors cracked from side to side. There was a conviction among Americans, more often false than true, that they were always overcharged, and this was the chief provocation for trouble, but high spirits, the irritating factor of unfamiliarity, triple sec, and a profound American inability to pick up foreign languages easily, often led to roughhouse. A civilian I knew who hailed from New Jersey, and constantly and profanely wished he were back there, asked me one morning how to say in French, “I demand the release of these Americans.” It turned out that no Americans he knew were in durance anywhere. My unilingual companion simply planned to go out on the town that night with some compatriots and wanted to be prepared, in case his detachment was overwhelmed by the authorities in some bar. Like me, he worked at the Embassy, then on the Rue de Chaillot, and he had a code-room pass which he proposed to wave while shouting his command. I told him the French were always aroused, never intimidated, by civilians shouting orders, especially if they flaunted mysterious and doubtful official credentials. He would be taken, I told him, for that most despised of creatures, the mouchard, or police spy. Not the next morning, but a few days later, he showed up with bruised knuckles and a swollen jaw. “You were right,” he admitted meekly.
Writings and Drawings Page 55