magnificent--commenced his career behind the counter of a delicatessen
on Ninth Avenue--and now--his name and glory have waved across America
like a pennon of victory. I do not intend as others have done to
describe every small detail of his early life[17]--I merely wish with a
few brief and decided strokes of the pen to expose to the public his
mastery of psychology, his exquisite grace of style and above all his
amazing supremacy of grammar. No writer since Steve Montespan Pligger
has achieved such stupendous feats of literature and even
he--Pligger--failed over his well-remembered attack on an English
Duchess, "The Fall of a Bloated Aristocrat." According to contemporary
criticisms it appears that through lack of familiarity with his subject
he was unable to make her bloated enough--which was a pity as the main
bulk of the book was intensely interesting, but Pligger, great as he
undoubtedly was, could never aspire to the heights of Spout. Many people
on reading Spout's first volume of poems in prose "Autumn in my Garden"
were heard to say with a shake of the head, "Pligger's sun has set, we
are at the Dawn of a new Era--the Spout Era!" Perhaps the greatest
factor in Spout's greatness is his amazing versatility. No one reading
"Marie of Chinatown" for the first time would believe the author capable
of "Across the Sound for a Wife"! The realistic sordidity of the former
balanced against the breathless adventure of the latter, combine in
stamping Spout as a genius of the highest order.
The three books he wrote while still working in the delicatessen store
are indelibly stamped with the pathos of his environment--"Thoughts in
Vinegar," a bitter satire on bohemianism--"Three Little Pickles," an
autobiography of the Barrymores as children and "The lonely Anchovy," a
whimsical fantasy which if we are to believe Town Topics made Sir James
Barrie quite furious.
The story of the sudden recognition of Jake D'Annunzio Spout's genius by
the more advanced literary coterie of New York City, etc., is widely
known but too charming to leave unmentioned. He was, so we are told,
seated on an upturned wooden box behind a pile of cheeses, sunk in a
reverie, when suddenly the door opened and three men came into the
store.
"We wish to see Jake D'Annunzio Spout," said the foremost with a rich
Harvard accent.
Jake rose shyly, knocking a Camembert to the ground in his
embarrassment. "I am he," he said blushing.
A grey-haired man sniffed and waved his hand comprehensively. "You must
leave these sordid surroundings," he said in a beautifully modulated
voice in which a bad cold and a Yale intonation struggled for
precedence, "and come with us."
"Where to?" cried Jake clutching a salami sausage with boyish
excitement.
All three men doffed their hats.
"To the Coffee House," they said reverently.
"At this point," says Earl Hank in his exquisite study, 'Spout Through
and Through,' tears of ecstasy gushed down the boy's cheeks. 'At last,'
he cried in a choked voice and swooned.
The three men gathered him up tenderly and carried him out towards the
Elevated--"
Of course the salient feature of Hank's study of Spout is the deep love
and affection for his subject which permeates every page. Nobody but a
true enthusiast and lover of beauty could ever have been so inspired. It
was not until reaching the intellectually austere atmosphere of the
Coffee House that Spout regained consciousness: he opened his eyes
wearily, but the light of dazzled amazement replaced fatigue when he
beheld the company that surrounded him--every man's face seemed to be
stamped indelibly with the ineffaceable mark of artistic achievement.
Spout rose in happy, awed wonderment.
Hands were stretched forth to him in welcome and friendship--one of the
younger members gave vent to a furtive cheer but was instantly
suppressed. Lunch, we are told, was to the newly-discovered poet a long
dream of ecstasy, with the exception of one incident which, though
somewhat painful, it is necessary to retail in order to illustrate what
havoc habit can work on even the brightest psychologies. Earl Bowles (a
descendant of Senator Didcot Bowles--beloved by all) in his rather wordy
dissertation on "Intellects of the Hour" presents to us perhaps the most
vivid picture of the scene.
"Harvey Pricklebott, for several years editor of 'Art in the Home,'
leant forward to the dazed Spout and requested him to pass a plate of
cold tongue which was lying near. With businesslike alacrity Spout did
so--and then before anyone could prevent it--detached from his belt a
delicatessen payment check for 25 cents and pushed it across the table."
"There was a dreadful silence--Spout realising his appalling error
endeavoured to pass it off by humming the Jewel Song from Faust. For a
moment his nonchalance amazed everyone then as though a veil had been
suddenly snatched from their eyes they gave a great cry: 'This is Spout!
What Humour! What Roguery! Spout the Brilliant!'"
After this serio-comic contretemps every remark Spout made was hailed by
all as a gem of superlative wit.
From the moment of his entrance into the Coffee House, Spout's career
was assured--encouraged by his amazing success in a milieu to which many
aspired but few attained, he at once wrote about it, probably his most
world-famed novel, "The Continuous Fall of Harriet Ramsbotham." To say
that this daring attack upon existing social conditions caused a
sensation is to put the case mildly--it was a positive literary _tour de
force_. Take for example the extraordinarily vital passage in volume
two--when Harriet is insulted by Donald at a soda fountain, or the
sordidly realistic moment in volume three when she is horsewhipped by
Frederick on Long Beach--and above all perhaps those few tense seconds
in volume one when Norman having lured her to Childs' for supper brands
her left thigh with a flat-iron. Immediately upon publication of this
masterpiece Spout received five hundred and ninety-four letters from
anxious mothers, eight hundred and two requests for sexual advice from
oppressed governesses and several threatening telegrams from the police.
The ordinary everyday novelist would at once have become bombastic and
conceited at being the cause of such a universal upheaval--not so Spout.
He retired quite quietly to his cosy kitchenette apartment in Harlem and
wrote that charming and winsome essay in sentiment "Mollie's
Holiday"--which in due course he followed with his celebrated treatise
on reincarnation "A Drop of Blood" and "To Horse, to Horse" a stirring
romance of the Civil War.
I will not seek with convincing falsehoods and unscrupulous sophistry to
hide the fact that Jake D'Annunzio Spout was never quite a gentleman.
Others have endeavoured to do this and to my mind it is not only
degrading but quite unworthy of the man's genius to dwell on such paltry
failings as bad table manners, slight personal uncleanliness and the
like. Many of the greatest men in the world have bitten their nails, and
if we are to believe contemporary biographers, even the gloriously
verbose Carlyle was known to expectorate frequently and with the utmost
abandon while writing his world-famed fantasy "The French Revolution."
Jake Spout was perhaps twenty-six when he met H. Mackenzie Kump the
philanthropic millionaire whose intimate study "Spout, as I Knew Him"
met with such a brilliant success last year. Kump it was who cajoled and
eventually almost by force persuaded Jake to make a tour of the world.
Kump it was who nursed him devotedly through malaria in Mombasa,
dysentery in Delhi, hernia in Hong Kong, cramp in Cape Town and acute
earache in Edinburgh, and who soothed his bedside with almost womanly
tenderness during his fearful outbreak of varicose veins in Vancouver.
The work Spout accomplished in spite of slightly adverse circumstances
while abroad was quite stupendous and had it not been for his tragic
marriage would doubtless have been published with alacrity and read by
millions. It was presumably the will of an unkind fate that he should be
pursued and eventually captured by Esme Chaddle--a woman not only
without scruples of any description but possessing a revoltingly ugly
face and the temper of a fiend. It was on their honeymoon that she
became suddenly cross at breakfast and burnt all the unpublished MSS.
that she could find in the back yard, thereby destroying heartlessly the
luscious fruits of untold labour while abroad. Spout with the
contradictory stubbornness characteristic of so many geniuses
continued--though very hurt--to adore his vixenish wife with the blind
concentrated passion which for so many years had impregnated his work
and now, alas, was running to waste on such an unyielding desert. His
literary friends and admirers one and all shook their heads sadly,
perceiving reluctantly that the end was in sight. For two years Spout
wrote nothing but three short articles,[18] then as though some
premonition of impending disaster touched with flaming wings the
sleeping carcase of his talent he sat down and wrote his soul-searching
national appeal "Hist." This he completed on his thirty-first birthday.
For a true and sincere description of that last tragic night we must
turn to Richard Floop--whose love for Spout has lent his pen so much
glamour and poetry.
"Dusk was falling when Jake stole softly out through the scullery door
and clambered on the char-a-banc for Coney Island. On arrival at that
home of gaiety and irresponsibility he forgot his troubles--his sordid
domestic upheavals--even his talent he suppressed and merged himself
like an ordinary human being into the mad spirit of carnival. With
boyish shouts he rolled on the joy-wheel; with childish gurgles he
bestrode strange and jolting painted horses and waved his hat daringly
when the merry-go-round was at its fastest. His excitement on the
helter-skelter knew no bounds--while his delighted screams in the river
caves called forth many appreciative raspberries from the friendly
crowds. With no presentiment that this evening of unadulterated ecstasy
was to be the culminating and final sensation in his eventful life he
stepped into that fatal compartment on the big wheel--from which a
quarter of an hour later he hurtled when at an enormous height from the
ground!"
There ends Floop's beautiful and heart-breaking picture of the death of
a great and wonderful man. Some say it was suicide--others that he was
merely leaning out too far in admiration of the view. Who knows what
really inspired that sudden fierce rush to death? But whatever the cause
there is one fact that remains--shining like a star above the squalid
wreck of his latter years--he died happy. The indisputable proof of this
can be obtained from perusal of the first line of a poem which was
discovered in his breast pocket:
"All Hail to Fun and Merriment--"
The less widely-known works of Jake D'Annunzio Spout are as follows:
"Sun-dappled Dreams," a book of poems.
"Through Bavaria with a Note-book."
"The Sin of Pharoah Bubster."
and:
"With Lincoln in Calcutta," a Fantasy.
Fountain-pen pieces and ever-sharp pencil in collection of H. Mackenzie
Kump.
DONNA ISABELLA ANGELICA Y BANANAS
[Illustration: DONNA ISABELLA ANGELICA Y BANANAS
_From the portrait by Baloona (early Spanish)_]
Spain has ever been the home of romance and beauty and fiery passion,
but never in its whole history has it bred such a tremulously beautiful
love story as that of Donna Isabella Angelica y Bananas. A romance of
two passionate hearts in such a vivid setting cannot but fail to make
the eye kindle and the pulses throb. Compared to it, Lancelot and Elaine
become cardboard puppets, Dante and Beatrice figures of clay utterly
devoid of life, while Paolo and Francesca appear merely idiotic.
Picture to yourself, if you will, the Spain of the Middle Ages; if you
can't, it doesn't matter. Isabella Angelica was born at Seville in 1582,
the daughter of Don Juan de Cabarajal and Maria his wife. Don Juan owned
the Castello del Hurtado, having been left it by his infamous but regal
uncle, Don Lopez a Basastos.
The Castello lay surrounded in the foreground by turrets and moats, in
the middle distance by orange groves and extraordinarily verdant
meadows; while in the background the majestic Pyrenees, rearing their
snowy peaks in serried ranks of symmetrical splendour, imparted to the
whole thing the semblance of rugged grandeur which is the birthright of
every true Spaniard. Isabella Angelica's childhood dawned and waned in
these exquisite surroundings: she would play with her tutors various
games, some of them traditional, such as "catch orange" and
"_raralara_,"[19] and now and then frolics of her own invention, for
history tells us she was ever a merry little trickster. It was not until
she was seventeen that the true radiance of her beauty became apparent.
Her mother had been wiser to guard the child more closely than she did,
for do we not read in Dr. Polata's "From Girl to Woman" that between the
ages of nineteen and twenty she was constantly seen mounting the
Pyrenees in a daring fashion and entirely unattended? But still,
doubtless owing to her charming nature, which was a sweet composition
of mischief and kindliness, she remained unspoilt by this undesirable
contact with a rude world which should, until her marriage, have been
outside her girlish ken.
When she reached the age of twenty--"the very threshold of womanhood,"
as Fernando Lope so beautifully puts it--she was betrothed to Pedro y
Bananas, a noble fresh from the vice and debauchery of the Court at
Valladolid. Knowing naught of love or passion, she consented without
hesitation, being but a tool in the hands of her parents, and a few
months later the wedding took place with enormous pomp in the Cathedral
at Seville.
After the ceremony the bride and bridegroom repaired to the Palazza
Bananas, the country seat of Pedro, who, though poor himself, had had
many costly estates handed down to him.
Here, so report tells us, after subjecting Isabella Angelica for three
years to the vilest insults and utmost cruelty, Pedro left her
temporarily and returned to the Court, now at Castille. Poor Isabella
Angelica! This was the gay world she had dreamed of--the ecstatic life
she had hoped and fully expected to live!
Then suddenly with the departure of her husband, she found peace--peace
in the rocky solitudes, in the scented gardens and rolling foothills;
and here this poor, lonely woman found fulfilment of all her maiden
dreams--"Love!"
No one knows the authentic story of her first meeting with Enrique
Baloona. Some say he was fishing for _bolawallas_[20] and she came
graciously up and asked him the time; others aver that he was passing
beneath her lattice and she dropped a fluted hair-tidy at his feet. But
anyhow, from the time they first met they never parted until it was
absolutely necessary. They pursued the course of their love through the
long, tranquil summer days and nights--every word they uttered one to
the other was sheer poetry. Enrique, who was a fully qualified
academician, painted the portrait reproduced on page 124. It is alas!
the only one in existence, all the others having been destroyed by the
Inquisition.
But alack! as is the way with all beauty, it is but short-lived. The end
of their peaceful passion came with the announcement of Pedro's return
from the Court, now at Aragon. Isabella Angelica, history relates, was
beside herself with misery. Enrique also was considerably upset.
Together the doomed couple arranged a plan of escape. They flew together
to the Villa Morla, a notorious abode of illicit lovers. It was here
that the enraged Pedro caught up with them and killed Enrique with a
look. Isabella Angelica was then taken against her will to join the
Court. At last at Madrid. For two years, Dr. Polata tells us, her heart
was numb with anguish; then gradually the life at Court, still at
Madrid, began to take effect on her malleable character. She became
intensely vicious: much of the sweetness portrayed in Enrique's portrait
vanished, leaving her expression cross and occasionally even sullen. All
the world knows of her meeting with the Infanta, so we will not dwell
upon it. One day her husband died unexpectedly. Cruel-minded courtiers
suspected Isabella Angelica, but she was so obviously crushed that their
suspicions were allayed. Her heart exulted--she had killed him with a
poisoned pen-wiper. No one knew. Poor Isabella Angelica! Her tragic love
affair had indeed transformed her from the appealing girl of yesterday
to the recklessly unhappy woman of to-day, forced on to the path of
cruelty and vice by unlooked-for circumstances. She performed this deed
and that with almost mechanical diabolicism; some say she knew not one
day from another. In 1597 she was offered an exceedingly good position
by the Inquisition, which she immediately accepted. It was, she felt,
her only chance of happiness--to have the opportunity of inventing a few
good tortures would comfort her; and why not? People of to-day, narrow
and unsympathetic, may censure her as being spiteful and unkind, but in
those days things were--oh, so different!
She sent for her little brother and had him burnt; this eased the pain
at her heart a little. Then her aunt was conveyed to her from Majorca,
and on arrival was pierced by several bodkins and ultimately buried in
hot tar. Isabella Angelica almost gave vent to a wan smile.
She supervised her father's death, the actual work being performed by
her colleagues of the Inquisition. He was cut in moderate-sized snippets
and toasted on one side only.
It says much for Isabella Angelica's charm and personality that the
populace, in spite of their knowledge of her deeds, one and all adored
her--to the end of her life the unstinting love and adulation of all who
came in contact with her was hers irretrievably.
It was during the personal mutilation of her third cousin that she
caught the influenza cold which cost her her life. Poor, doomed Isabella
Angelica: her death-bed was surrounded by heart-broken mourners who had
flocked from all parts of sunny Spain to pay tribute to the dying
beauty; the Inquisition issued an edict that no eyes were to be put out
for a whole week in honour of her.
She died peacefully, clasping an ivory rosary and a faded miniature on
elephant's hide, portraying a handsome, debonair young man. Could it
have been Enrique Baloona?
Thus lived and died one of Spain's most entrancing specimens of feminine
beauty.
MAGGIE McWHISTLE
Born in an obscure Scotch manse of Jacobite parents, Maggie McWhistle
goes down to immortality as perhaps the greatest heroine of Scottish
history; and perhaps not. We read of her austere Gallic beauty in every
record and tome of the period--one of the noble women whose paths were
lit for them from birth by Destiny's relentless lamp. What did Maggie
know of the part she was to play in the history of her country? Nothing.
She lived through her girlhood unheeding; she helped her mother with the
baps and her father with the haggis; occasionally she would be given a
new plaidie--she who might have had baps, haggis, and plaidies ten
thousandfold for the asking. A word must be said of her parents. Her
father, Jaimie, known all along Deeside as Handsome Jaimie--how the
light-hearted village girls mourned when he turned minister: he was
high, high above them. Of his meeting with Janey McToddle, the Pride of
Bonny Donside, very little is written. Some say that they met in a
snowstorm on Ben Lomond, where she was tending her kine; others say that
they met on the high road to Aberdeen and his collie Jeannie bit her
collie Jock--thus cementing a friendship that was later on to ripen into
more and more--and even Maggie. Some years later they were wed, and
Jaimie led his girl-bride to the little manse which was destined to be
the birthplace of one of Scotland's saviours. History tells us little of
Maggie McWhistle's childhood: she apparently lived and breathed like any
more ordinary girl--her griddle cakes were famous adown the length and
breadth of Aberdeen. Gradually a little path came to be worn between the
manse and the kirk, seven miles away, where Maggie's feet so often trod
their way to their devotions. She was intensely religious.
One day a stranger came to Aberdeen. He had braw, braw red knees and
bonnie, bonnie red hair. History tells us that on first seeing Maggie
in her plaidie he smiled, and that the second time he saw her he
guffawed, so light-hearted was he.
One day he called at the manse, chucked Maggie under the chin, and ate
one of her baps. Eight years later he came again, and, after tweaking
her nose, ate a little haggis. By then something seemed to have told her
that he was her hero.
One dark night, so the story runs, there came a hammering on the door.
Maggie leapt out of her truckle, and wrapping the plaidie round her, for
she was a modest girl, she ran to the window.
"Wha is there?" she cried in Scotch.
The answer came back through the darkness, thrilling her to the marrow:
"Bonnie Prince Charlie!"
Maggie gave a cry, and, running down-stairs, opened the door and let him
in. She looked at him in the light shed by her homely candle. His brow
was amuck with sweat: he was trembling in every limb; his ears were
scarlet.
"What has happened?"
"I am pursued," he replied, hoarse with exertion and weariness. "Hide
me, bonnie lassie, hide me, hide me!"
Quick as thought, Maggie hid him behind the door, and not a moment too
soon. Then she displayed that strength of will and courage which was to
stamp her as a heroine for all time. There came a fresh hammering on the
door. Maggie opened it defiantly, and never flinched at the sight of so
many brawny men; she only wrapped her plaidie more tightly round her.
"We want Bonnie Prince Charlie," said the leader, in Scotch.
Then came Maggie's well-known answer, also in Scotch.
"Know you not that this is a manse?"
History has it that the man fell back as though struck, and one by one,
awed by the still purity of the white-faced girl, the legions departed
into the night whence they had come. Thus Maggie McWhistle proved
herself the saviour of Bonnie Prince Charlie for the first time.
There were many occasions after that in which she was able to prove
herself a heroine for his sake. She would conceal him up the chimney or
in the oven at the slightest provocation. Soon there were no trees for
thirty miles round in which she had not hidden him at some period or
another.[21]
Poor Maggie--perchance she is finding in heaven the peaceful rest which
was so lacking in her life on earth. For legend hath it that she never
had two consecutive nights' sleep for fifteen years, so busy was she
saving Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Then came that great deed which even now finds an exultant echo in the
heart of every true Scotsman--that deed which none but a bonnie, hardy
Highland lassie could have got away with.... You all know of the massing
of James' troops at Carlisle, and later at Glasgow, and later still at
Aberdeen. Poor Prince Charlie--so sonsie and braw, a fugitive in his own
land--he fled to Loch Morich, followed by Maggie McWhistle in her
plaidie, carrying some haggis and baps to comfort him in his exile.
History is rather hazy as to exactly what happened; but anyhow, Maggie,
with the tattered banner of her country fast unfurling in her heart,
decided to save her hero for the last time; and it was well she did not
tarry longer, for he was sore pressed. History relates that two tears
fell from his eyes on to the shore.[22] Then Maggie, with a brave smile,
handed him a bap.
"Eat," she said in Scotch; "you are probably very hungry."
These simple words, spoken straight from her heart, had the effect, so
chroniclers inform us, of pulling him together a bit.
"Where can I hide?" he asked.
Maggie looked at him fearlessly for a moment.
"You shall hide in a tree," she cried, with sudden inspiration.
Bonnie Prince Charlie fell on his braw red knees.
"Please," he cried pleadingly, "could it be an elm? I'm so tired of
gnarled oaks."
"Yes!" cried the courageous girl exultantly. "Quick, we will trick them
yet."
Then came the supreme moment--the act of sheer devotion that was to
brand that simple soul through the ages as a noble martyr in, alas! a
lost cause. Shading her eyes with her hand, she perceived a legion of
the enemy encamped on the one island of which the lonely Gallic loch
boasted. Her woman's wit had devised a plan. Flinging baps and haggis to
the winds, she leapt into a boat and began to row--you all know the
story of that fateful row. Round and round the island she went for three
weeks,[23] never heeding her tired arms and weary hands; blisters came
and went, but she felt them not; her hat flew off, but the lion-hearted
woman never stopped;[24] and all to convince the troops on the island
that it was a fleet approaching under the command of Bonnie Prince
Charlie. Completely routed, every officer and man swam to the mainland
and beat a retreat, and not until the last of them had gone did Maggie
relinquish her hold on the creaking oars.