Delphi complete works of.., p.667
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 667
It’s a pity in a way that we are thus compelled to drop whiskers out of literature. I wish that before it is too late a movement might be started for the restoration of whiskers as an adjunct to literature. I do not wish to say too much about it, as I am to deliver an address on the subject at one of our greatest universities, presenting the whiskers in return for an honorary degree. But a word or two may be dropped here in anticipation. Think what whiskers once meant in our poetry. You recall Gray’s Welsh Bard, standing up on a rock to curse at King Edward: Loose his beard, his hoary hair streamed like a meteor to the troubled wind! Can’t you just see the sparks flying off him! Or take Longfellow’s Evangeline with its matchless description of the great hemlocks covered with snow-like beards that rest on their bosom. This (he says) is the forest primeval. He’s right. It is.
Or take if you like the peculiar psychology that goes with a beard. I’ll give you an example. There was a forgotten writer called Louise de la Ramée, who signed her stories as ‘Ouida.’ The stories were all laid in the aristocratic class. No one under a baronet got in. And there was always a Duke, the Duke of Strath-something. And the Duke of Strath always had what was called a ‘luxuriant beard.’ What for? Why, to think with. Here’s how he did it. The Duke remained burled in thought, his hands idly passing through his luxuriant beard.
Now if the Duke didn’t have that beard it would read:
The Duke remained buried in thought, his hands waving idly in the air about eighteen inches from his face.
Or consider what opportunities whiskers afforded to the illustrators of books. Those of you who remember the old-fashioned stories will recall pictures of the heroine seated at the piano, and her lover bending over her to turn the music while his long side-weepers swept right down to the page. Long before he would dare touch her with his hand he could feel her out with his whiskers.
It’s a great loss. But I mustn’t linger on it. I turn to the description of the woman.
She is always said to be ‘beautifully groomed.’ Who these grooms are that do it, and how you get a job at it, I don’t know. It is peculiar about the woman that she never seems to wear a dress — always a ‘gown.’ Why this is, I cannot tell. In the good old stories that I used to read, when I could still read for the pleasure of it, the heroines — that was what they used to be called — always wore dresses. But now there is no heroine, only a woman in a gown. I wear a gown myself — at night. It is made of flannel and reaches to my feet, and, when I take my candle and go out to the balcony where I sleep, the effect of it on the whole is not bad. But as to its ‘revealing every line of my figure’ — as the woman’s gown is always said to — and as to its ‘suggesting even more than it reveals’ — well, it simply does not. So when I talk of ‘gowns’ I speak of something that I know all about.
Yet, whatever the woman does, her ‘gown’ is said to ‘cling’ to her. Whether in the street or in a cabaret or in the drawing-room, it ‘clings.’ If by any happy chance she throws a lace wrap about her, then it clings: and if she lifts her gown — as she is apt to — it shows, not what I should have expected, but a jupon, and even that clings. What a jupon is I don’t know. With my gown, I never wear one.
So now, when these two characters are fully developed like that, all we have to do is to bring them suddenly and unexpectedly together, and the story will make itself. And look how easy and natural the construction is, once we have a proper beginning. Here is the woman, sitting in the hotel trying to think — and the man in a cabaret a few blocks away, trying not to think. But the point is that he is staying at the same hotel, too, only she doesn’t know that he is there and he doesn’t know that she is there, so neither of them knows that both of them are there. Do you see it? Or shall I say it again? All right, I won’t. Well, now we simply have to get the man back to the hotel and the thing is done. All good stories, you know, write themselves. Plot is nothing, character is everything. As far as plot goes, the life of each of us, of any of us, is plot enough, if you can put it over. Once make the characters stand out in vital reality, and whatever they do is plot.
So in this case:
He rose unsteadily from where he sat (start him always from there) and staggered forth into the night air (he staggered forth; don’t think it means that three other fellows had staggered first) — the fumes of what he had drunk still in his brain. (Some magazines hate all reference to liquor, so if you like you can avoid it by not giving him any fumes and saying, The orange phosphate still gurgling within him.)
But whichever it is, fumes or phosphates, he comes staggering along the street and staggers in the hotel, and up and along the corridor, and, opening a door by mistake (the wrong door, I mean), he comes upon the woman seated there — and he stands there fronting her full! That doesn’t mean that he was full when he fronted her, it only means that he was full in front of her. That doesn’t seem to get it either, but you see what I mean.
Now, of course, in real life a mistake of this sort is nothing. Any person of proper savoir-faire, and sufficient pâté de foie, would meet it with a polite apology and retire. As a matter of fact this very thing happened to me in a hotel only the other day. I walked right into a lady’s room and there she was seated in front of the looking-glass. But I merely bowed and said: ‘Oh, pardon me. I see your room is 541 and mine 543. Excuse me.’ And when she didn’t answer, I said: ‘They certainly make these figures in a very indistinct way. In fact, hotels are pretty queer places anyway.’ And the woman said, without turning round, ‘If you don’t get out of this room, I’ll ring for the porter.’ So the affair ended with complete understanding.
But the people in the passion story can’t do this. If they could, there’d be no story. Look what happens to the man:
He stood there, rooted to the threshold.
You notice that, as soon as the situation gets exciting, he starts to root.
His veins simply surged. His brain beat against his face and his breath came in quick, short pants.
Notice those quick, short pants; one might perhaps say ‘shorts.’
And the woman:
Noiseless as his step had been, she seemed to sense his presence. A wave seemed to sweep over her — she turned and rose, fronting him full.
This doesn’t mean that she was full when she fronted him. Her gown — but we know about that already.
‘It was a coward’s trick,’ she panted.
Notice now the dialogue that ensues at this climax of a passion story. It almost takes a special kind of language to put it over. Observe particularly the sort of verbs that have to be used.
‘Helene,’ he croaked, reaching out his arms — his voice tensed with the infinity of his desire.
‘Back!’ she iced. And then, ‘Why have you come here?’ she hoarsed. ‘What business have you here?’
‘None,’ he glooped, ‘none. I have no business.’ They stood sensing one another.
‘I thought you were in Philadelphia,’ she said — her gown clinging to every fibre of her as she spoke.
‘I was,’ he wheezed.
‘And you left it?’ she sharped, her voice tense.
‘I left it,’ he said, his voice glumping as he spoke. ‘Need I tell you why?’ He had come nearer to her. She could hear his pants as he moved.
‘No, no’ she gurgled. ‘You left it . . . it is enough. I can understand’ — she looked bravely up at him— ‘I can understand any man leaving it.’
Then as he moved still nearer her, there was the sound of a sudden swift step in the corridor. The door opened and there stood before them The Other Man, the husband of The Woman.
This, of course, is the grand climax, when the author gets all three of them — The Man, The Woman, and The Woman’s Husband — in an hotel room at night. But notice what happens.
He stood in the opening of the doorway, his arms half folded, across half his chest, and a half smile playing across half his face.
Now that’s very hard to do, that half smile. Try it — on either side of your face that you like — and you’ll see how hard it is.
‘Well?’ he said. Then he entered the room and stood for a moment quietly looking into the man’s face.
‘So?’ he said, ‘it was you.’
The man hung his head. He found no answer.
You see he can’t answer. He doesn’t know whether to say, ‘It was I,’ or ‘It was me.’ Of course he could say, ‘I was it,’ and no doubt he is it. But just now he says nothing and the other man goes on moving around the room just quietly, not doing anything in particular.
He walked into the room and laid the light coat that he had been carrying over his arm upon the table. He drew a cigar-case from his waistcoat pocket.
‘Try one of these Havanas,’ he said.
Observe the calm of it. This is what the reader loves — no rage, no blustering — calmness, cynicism.
He walked over towards the mantelpiece and laid his hat upon it. He set his boot upon the fender.
‘It was cold this evening,’ he said. He walked over to the window and stood looking for a moment into the darkness without.
Without what, I don’t know. Anyway, he hadn’t got any, or couldn’t buy it in the hotel.
He picked up again the light overcoat that he had thrown on the table. ‘I bought this coat in St. Louis,’ he said, ‘the year that we were married.’
Ah, there, for the first time you get a note of something like emotion— ‘The year that we were married — —’ His voice trembles in his nose as he says it. You see what it means! He loves this woman still. Else why did he keep the coat ten years?
And then, just when the reader fancies it’s all going to end quietly, then the shooting begins. All these people, of course, are armed, and they begin shooting one another up. It doesn’t matter much which shoots first, or whether they shoot in rounds, or in volleys. It’s done in all sorts of ways. Sometimes The Woman shoots The Man, or shoots The Other Man — or misses both of them.
But what they really ought to do is for one of them to open the window (they are ten stories up) and say to the others, ‘Let’s all jump out and rid fiction of some of the silliest stuff that ever got into it.’
So that’s that, and that is just about an outline of the typical novel of passion, laid indoors in sumptuous surroundings. But at the same time you can’t quite abolish the idea of the open spaces and the open sky, and so there has to be another type of passion story. Here the scene has to be laid in some place that utterly isolates the hero and heroine from all the world — turns them back again to nature, to the storm, the desert and the sea, to fight again the primitive fight for life, and find love, fierce and primitive as life itself, springing out of it. . . .
For such a scene as this, for such combinations of strenuous endeavour and passionate love, there is nothing like a desert island. Shipwreck a man and a woman on a desert island and the thing is done.
I have here with me a little specimen story of this sort called Broken Barriers; or Red Love on a Blue Island, of which I will outline for you the opening part. The man and the woman are to be shipwrecked. How do we do it? Quite simple. We start with the hero, Mr. Harold Borus, and let him tell the story. Then he can blow about himself just like the open-air man on the pampas that we talked about before.
Off he goes to a good start:
Little did I think as I stepped on board of the Megalomania at Southampton on a bright August afternoon that within two weeks I should be wrecked on one of the Dry Tortugas. Still less did I think ——
And the reader says: ‘No, you poor nut, you can’t think. Cut it out.’
But Mr. Borus goes on saying all the things he didn’t think.
‘I distinctly recall (he continues) remarking to the captain that I had never in all my numerous seafarings seen the sea of a more limpid blue. He agreed with me so completely that he didn’t even trouble to answer.’
The next thing is to start a storm and shipwreck Mr. Borus. In the old-time sea stories of Fenimore Cooper and Clark Russell, a storm at sea was carried out with a range of technical terms that rattled like loose blocks in the wind. This way:
The gale had now reached its height. The fore-top-royal had carried away into the lee-scuppers where all attempts to lash it with gaskets to the taffrail had proved unavailing. The jib-boom was gone. The jolly-boat was in splinters. The bosun’s mate was overboard, and the captain, whose speaking-trumpet still dominated the howling of the gale, called for all hands to cat the anchor and splice the mainbrace.
But that’s not in the least the way the shipwreck of Mr. Borus is carried out. Here is his:
We had hardly entered the waters of the Caribbean when a storm of unprecedented violence broke upon us. Even the captain had never, so he said, seen anything to compare with it. For two days and nights we encountered and endured the full fury of the sea. Our soup plates were secured with racks, and covered with lids. In the smoking-room our glasses had to be set in brackets, and, as our steward came and went, we were from moment to moment in imminent danger of seeing him washed overboard.
It’s all right to wash a steward overboard, or to wash the steerage passengers overboard or any other way — but not first-class passengers.
On the third morning just after daybreak the ship collided with something, probably either a floating rock or one of the Dry Tortugas. She blew out her four funnels, the bowsprit dropped out of its place, the propeller came right off and the bar floated away on the sea. The captain, after a brief consultation, decided to abandon her. The boats were lowered, and, the sea being now quite calm, the passengers were emptied into them.
By what accident I was left behind I cannot tell. I had been talking to the second mate and telling him of a rather similar experience of mine in the China Sea, and holding him by the coat as I did so, when quite suddenly he took me by the shoulders, and, rushing me into the deserted smoking-room, said, ‘Sit there, Mr. Borus, till I come back for you.’ The fellow spoke in such a menacing way that I thought it wiser to comply.
When I came out they were all gone. Realizing that the ship must soon founder, I hastily made a raft out of a few steel beams that lay on the deck. Hurriedly loading it with such supplies as came to hand, I launched it and leaped upon it. The Megalomania sank just the moment of my leap.
On the second morning on my raft (continues Mr. Borus), I was sitting quietly polishing my boots and talking to myself when I became aware of an object floating upon the sea. I drew it towards me with a hook. Judge my surprise when it proved to be the inanimate body of a girl floating upon the waters of the Caribbean Sea.
He needn’t have been surprised, not if he was up to date in fiction. The Caribbean Sea is full of inanimate girls. You can hook them in anywhere.
Mr. Borus drags the girl on to the raft and removes her boots so as to rub her feet. His idea was, at least partly, to restore her circulation.
I was just considering what to remove next, when the girl opened her eyes. ‘Stop rubbing my feet,’ she said.
‘Miss Croyden.’ I said (he had read her name on her garter), ‘you mistake me.’
I rose with a sense of pique . . .
Pique is apparently the thing they get in these circumstances; just what it is I don’t know; anyway, Mr. Borus got it.
. . . with a sense of pique which I did not trouble to conceal, and walked to the other end of the raft. I turned my back upon the girl and stood looking out upon the leaden waters of the Caribbean Sea.
You know the way the Caribbean Sea heaves up and down under you when you stand on the end of a raft. It almost makes you seasick just to read of it.
The ocean was now calm. There was nothing in sight.
I was still searching the horizon when I heard a soft footstep on the raft behind me, and a light hand was laid upon my shoulder. ‘Forgive me,’ said the girl’s voice.
I turned about. Miss Croyden was standing behind me. She had, so I argued, removed her stockings and was standing in her bare feet.
In all these stories there is supposed to be something about a woman in her bare feet, flip-flopping about a raft, that drives men crazy.
The girl had twined a piece of seaweed about her hair.
That’s another touch! Seaweed! Wrap a little of that around a girl and a man turns into a caveman at the sight of her.
‘Miss Croyden!’ I said, ‘there is nothing to forgive.’
‘How chivalrous you are!’ she exclaimed.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It comes natural to me.’
So there they are alone on the raft; now is the time for Mr. Borus to show what a man of resource he is. With the aid of a bent pin on a long stick he finds out their longitude. With the help of a long line he lowers himself deep down into the sea to find his latitude.
When I came up the rope again the girl was waiting for me.
‘Oh, I am so glad you have come back,’ she exclaimed, clasping her hands.
‘It was nothing,’ I said, wiping the water from my ears as melodiously as I could.
‘Have you found our whereabouts?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Our latitude is normal, but our longitude is, I fear, three degrees out of the plumb. I am afraid, Miss Croyden,’ I added, speaking as mournfully as I knew how, ‘that you must reconcile your mind to spending a few days with me on this raft.’
All day Mr. Borus multiplies his attention for the comfort of Miss Croyden, and always with the greatest chivalry. All day, yes — but wait, eh?
With the approach of night (he says) —
Ha! Ha! that’s what the readers have been waiting for — the approach of night. What about that, Mr. Borus?
With the approach of night I realized that it was necessary to make arrangements for the girl’s comfort. With the aid of a couple of upright poles I stretched a grey blanket across the raft so as to make a complete partition.
