_The Great Pan Jandrum_
A beautiful tolerance of the various actions of all other people is
perhaps the most comprehensive statement of the virtue we admired in
him so zealously. An ingenuously boastful boy of twelve would find
in him a ready admirer of his most cherished deeds, and he appeared
to really appreciate the condescension of the youth of eighteen who
saw fit to confide in him, and to take their opinionated selves with
decent ceremony where others among their elders would have been merely
annoyed or else distressingly amused. People you had always regarded
as obviously undesirable, you found him praising--not in the manner of
one who champions the weaker side on principle, but because he actually
found strange things to like about them. But he was not one of the
quiet, gentle, charitable type whose humanity seems the result almost
of a want of character, and as such a questionable asset: he relished
things with the eager tastes of a performer rather than an onlooker,
being blessed also with a watchful and sometimes bursting sense of
humor which was as his religion, making him deal with events in the
guise of a priestly buffoon and people with a surgery as incisive as it
was good-natured.
He was a connoisseur of people--a connoisseur of the happier type who
does not simply make a few things his own and damn the unfortunate
rest, but who finds that all food for the soul is good food, after all.
Thus he used to pick up all sorts of people and become tremendously
fond of them overnight. Any genuine person--whether a self-centered
young man or a despicable old one, or his gardener’s wife--was of the
greatest importance in his eyes. A trace of sentiment or pomposity in
one of the subjects of his observations was to him an intellectual
emetic as regards that person, but practically all other forms of
human failing delighted him quite as much, if not more than the most
inspiring strength. You felt that he, for one, had attained to a
perfect freedom from himself, so that he could sit back, unlike the
rest of us, and be entertained by the diverse abnormalities of his
companions: that he found his own passions wholly in the understanding
perusal of those of other people.
An Irish servant once said of him: “Sure, now, he does like to see
the young people have a good time!” and it expressed brilliantly his
attitude. For to his mind, apparently all people were young people
whom he was watching at their diversions. In fact, if it had not been
for his hilarious sharing of our pleasures, he would have been to us
rather like a god: for he seemed older than we, as though he had known
of old the great lives upon Olympus and were down here to gratify some
fatherly instinct of sympathy for us. And when he sometimes left us,
one sensed the withdrawal of considerably more than a presence. We were
accustomed to him as one of the most active figures on the scene, but
still, when he went away, it was as if a harmonious background had also
been removed. In appearance he was fat. His head was large and his face
grave, in repose, like that of a serious child.
There were stories, I was once shocked on finding out, about the Great
Pan Jandrum’s youth--stories of a vagueness that implied things about
him quite incongruous to the people who knew him now. Did he then
have a common youth, with all its attendant distortions?--it seemed
impossible. Evidently it had not been a romantic theatrical youth
either, in spite of its present shaded character. One lady simply
said he had been “nasty” and let it go at that. He seems to have been
a commonplace person then--aggressively commonplace, with all the
nauseating poses of his age strong in him, like diseases. Alcohol had
played a part, it seems; and he was not one of those who were made
genial or attractive by its use. One could have the heresy to make
a decent guess, after all this, as to one origin of his widespread
tolerance.
But the placidity of his middle years had been of an amplitude to
swallow and almost entirely submerge these indefinite and hushed
enormities. So if any dignity in him had given it a chance, the
community, which was not large, would have looked upon him as a
benevolent influence. At a feast, without his contagious humor, he
would still have been a sort of golden aura to the occasion; to meet
him was to come away eased of the life-long burden of yourself, having
heard him laugh; and he had a gift for rendering people unable to look
seriously in the face of a calamity. You were always trying, in spite
of yourself, to worship him, he was so grand, and so you would have,
except that he was too dynamic for a pedestal.
It almost made him, as a person, not ring true. His rôle was too exact.
Occasionally one would find one’s-self looking intently at his serious,
childish face--and wondering if there were not something behind it
besides a fund of geniality. He was too much of a cheerful background;
too understanding of the weaknesses of his neighbors; and in his humor
far too thorough not to be sometimes suspected to unreality. But it
was a passing doubt at best, and quite conceivably the product of our
imaginations as we looked backward from a later date. At any rate, he
was enjoyed and respected as a very rare personage indeed: a friend of
everyone alike, though no one in particular. You might have described
him to a perfect stranger as “a very amusing person”, but if he was
mentioned you really did not feel that way yourself. You did not think
of him as a person at all, in fact, but as the thing he was, or stood
for, as though he were the representative of something.
But it seems that fate had written that the Pan Jandrum--the wise and
genial Pan Jandrum--the Great Pan Jandrum himself, was riding, all this
time, for a fall.
Fortunately, I was away when it happened, as I should not like to have
seen it. For it is certain I should have shared the curiously intense
feeling of revulsion--or rather simply depression that settled upon
the community afterward. Several things contributed to the effect of
the event, chief of which was, of course, its publicity. Had he not
chosen the particular evening he did to cast aside every vestige of
self-control, no one might have known. But Mrs. Joe-Billy happened, on
that winter night, to be giving a dinner at her big house up on the
hill to which the Great Pan Jandrum had been invited, and from which he
stayed, for a time, conspicuously and unaccountably absent.
Whether he was accidentally started by some inadvertent friend, or
whether he deliberately wished to enjoy himself, I do not know. Perhaps
he was just tired of his heroic rôle: that is, of our ridiculous yet
touching attitude toward him.
Those who saw him during the earlier part of the evening, at the club,
never could be made to see the tragic side of the whole affair. Upon
them he apparently made an ineffaceable impression and from what we
others heard, it must have been a performance in the genuine grand
manner. It was, in a way, the glorious apex of his unreal career
among us. People who did not see him there were always very pitiless
about the way he acted, pity not being reserved, I suppose, for the
unpardonable failure of something as great as the Pan Jandrum. But I
have seen no one who did see him there who could tell of any part of
it without putting it on a lofty epic scale--even the saturnine barber
whose pride in his control of the imagination was like a perpetual
flower in his buttonhole. The quantity he had to drink was grown, by
the time it reached my ears, to an heroic figure. The picture was of
him seated in his shirt sleeves alone at a small table, immersed in
bottles. The smoke-filled grill room was thronged with young men and
dignitaries tip-toe on tables and chairs and chairs on tables in order
to hear him and see his stupendous gestures. Nobody could ever remember
anything, he said, but it was so impressive as to need but a day for
it to acquire a legendary character. I know for a fact that one of the
twelve old women of the village who lived a whole block away sent to
find the cause of the noise, and that old Mr. Galhoolie roared with
the best until it was too much for him and he was sick--in the English
sense--all down his patriarchal white beard. I have found myself
wishing I had been there, as I wish I had been at Camelot or at one of
the receptions given the Greek of many devices on his wanderings.
But I do not wish I had been up on the hill that night, though that
was the dramatic part of the show. It came after he was known to have
escaped from the club alone, after a lengthy disappearance. Up there,
they had naturally supposed that he failed to fill his place on account
of some trivial domestic tragedy, or the advent of friends; or that
something had at last got into his solid old liver which during so many
years of good living had been besieged in vain. But when they heard
he was coming up there in all his magnificence they were horrified. A
morbid curiosity chained them there, but they awaited him in silent,
breathless apprehension, imagining him drawing slowly toward them like
an evil fate over the snowy intervening mile of road. Their reticence
was curious, and explained only by the unbelievableness of the Great
Pan Jandrum’s being uncontrolled--hilarious, crude, outlandish--they
didn’t know what. And they appreciated the occasion at once. It was no
ordinary man about to be foolish, disheartening as that would be under
the circumstances, but they realized that it would touch each one of us
inasmuch as we had put a certain rare type of faith in what he was.
If only it had been hilarity, or crudity, or wildness that greeted
them! Their wait had been long enough and tense, with them talking
in low voices--asking each other hesitating little questions about
what they thought might happen. Suddenly some one started back with a
gasp, and they all turned to find his serious child’s face outside the
window, intently peering at them.
There is no need to describe his actions subsequent to his entering
the house. He was not outlandish. He was merely quiet in voice and
manner with an appalling drunkard’s dignity, and he was fully dressed.
The cheer had all gone out of him. He talked for an hour without
pause, first to one, then to another, entirely about himself and with
horrible seriousness. Sententiousness and pomposity from the Great Pan
Jandrum! His tone was threatening; almost challenging all the while,
and there was that in his face which prevented any thought of stopping
him. Intimate, personal, half-finished thoughts issued from him like
loathsome abortions. He took the beautiful Mrs. Galhoolie’s hand in
his and told her he reverenced and respected her so much that he could
not ever love her as the others did. Everyone was left knowing in
excessively sentimental terms just what he thought of them. Everything
he uttered was an indecent exposure; every sentence tore away another
portion of the disguise--as it looked--that he had been so long
building. He was operating on himself in their presence, exposing the
nauseating entrails of his mind--so comfortable from the outside--and
forcing upon them the knowledge that he was as sordid and commonplace
as they in their very worst moments. When they brought him home and
left him they could hear him sobbing--great, deep-voiced, mountainous
sobs that shook his bed.
But for me, the story of the evening gave the key to the man and made
him interesting. You may admire a point of view and you may even bask
in it, but you cannot make it your friend. It sounded precisely as
though a pent-up flood of gnawing sentiment and egoism had been let
loose in him. He must have had incurably Byronic tendencies which had
at some time or other offended his critical sense, and you saw him now
as a man despairingly and acutely aware of his vulgar heritage of ego
who had with his almost passionate interest in the fortunes of other
people built up the most powerful defense against himself that he could
think of. And there always was, too, I reflected, something of the
fanatic about his rôle of humorist.
I should have been disturbed on our first meeting soon after the
performance, had it not come as a surprise. I was in Paris, and as I
was leaving my hotel one night for some kind of a festivity he popped
out of the darkness and shook me by the hand. We parted hastily, I
having time for little greeting. “Have a good time, now!” he said as
I left, and that old characteristic phrase of his rang in my ears as
I walked off down the street. He had said it with his usual cheerful,
interested smile and I looked in vain for a found-out expression I had
expected to notice in his face. I wondered if he realized what his
one false step had meant to our imaginations. For, as I afterwards
observed, it was not a question of his brazening it out: he evidently
had consigned it to the limbo of to-be-expected mistakes with a shrug
of the shoulders and took it for granted that we had done the same.
But, however this may be, I saw that he had already begun to build
another structure of worship in my esteem at any rate. Already my
newly discovered man was disappearing, engulfed as in a very splendid
costume which he had removed for a minute. And when next I saw him at
home I had again the ancient feeling of being bathed in a warm electric
light--that unaccountably had sparks, as well.