Chapter II: Part 2

Heartbroken, Sarah left the room and rushed out of Whitehall as fast as her legs could carry her, heeding not the jeers of the crowd. She made for Tower Hill, from the summit of which she delivered her world-famous political speech, ending with the stirring words, "Sift your corn through sieves!"

How that speech sends a throb to one's heart--the defiance of it, the subtlety of it, and yet the intense womanliness of it! The people cheered her back to the palace. She went straight to the King's room--he was feeding his dogs.

"I've saved England!" cried Sarah exultantly.

"Lud!" replied the King, and handed her some cat's-meat. No wonder women loved him!

Incidents like these went to make up the multi-coloured mosaic of Sarah, Lady Tunnell-Penge's life. Her children were many--Arthur, later on Lord Crumpingfax; Muriel, later the Duchess of Dripp; and various others.

She died at the age of seventy-nine,[14] thus outliving her Royal paramour. A beautiful life, a noble life, a gentle life--yet was there something missing? Sometimes I gaze at her portrait and wonder.

JABEZ PUFFWATER

Jabez Puffwater might have been so much physically, mentally and publicly and has been so little any way that a tattered moral must hang sadly upon the gaunt tree of his career.

He might have been many things--he might have been a successful theatrical manager, or only an artistic one--he might have been a naval commander, or a psychoanalyst, or a Christian Science healer--he might have imparted to the United States Senate that infinitesimal something which would probably have proved to be the greatest comfort, especially in the cold weather.

If Mr. Belasco had not preferred Mr. David Warfield, Jabez Puffwater might have made an enormous success in "The Return of Peter Grimm"--had he but possessed an aptitude for histrionic achievement. He might have sung at the Metropolitan year after year without ceasing if Miss Geraldine Farrar had not taken an instantaneous dislike to him at sight--and had he but possessed a flamboyant temperament and an elementary knowledge of Puccini. In fact there is almost nothing he couldn't have been if only Fate had but weaned him at the breast of opportunity instead of ordaining his life drama to be played out in lonely dignity in the drab but intensely political village of Oggsville, Ken.

Oggsville, Ken. has been for many years a hotbed of occasionally seditious, but always subtle intrigue, the constructive and progressive policy of the upper part of the town, near the railway bridge, being in direct opposition to the destructive statesmanship and constitutional conventionality of the lower residential quarter embracing the timber-yard, Elijah Square, and Aunt Martha's Soda Fountain. Naturally Jabez Puffwater, whose modest store stood figuratively and literally at the crossing of the ways, was always in a somewhat uncertain state of mind as to which side he should ultimately pin his colours. Perhaps on a Tuesday St. John Eddle, a staunch upholder of the C. and P.P., would enter Jabez's store and hit him in the face because he'd sent a tin of sardines to the Furdlehoe Mansion on the other side of the River. And maybe on a Friday Moses Whortleberry, a leading light of the D. S. and C. C. would belabour him with one of his own hams for daring to acquaint old Hiram Holdit, the station master, with the result of the cocoa coupon competition.

One thing stood out firmly amid the turmoil of Jabez's environment--and that was his idealistic and almost fanatical admiration of the exploits of Buffalo Bill as depicted on the screen and retailed in small paper-bound books. Indeed so struck was he by the verve and virility of this astounding man that he took to attiring his lower limbs--which seldom showed above the counter--in the breeches, leggings, belt and pistol so well known to all lovers of the limitless prairie. The infinite pathos of Jabez Puffwater's blind devotion to one whom he had never seen will not fail to strike home to the stoniest heart. The tragedy of this man whose dauntless spirit so far outgrew his physical appearance--being compelled to sell cheeses, hams, molasses, etc, in order to live, is far more pitiful to me than the stern virginity of Queen Elizabeth, or even the nose of Cyrano de Bergerac.

It was when Jabez Puffwater had just reached his forty-third birthday that he first became seriously implicated in that political bombshell, the Goodge-Keewee Treaty made out with masterful cunning by Albert Goodge and Nicholas Keewee, with the sole motive of undermining the transcontinental railroad system to a devastating degree. The various reasons both for and against this daring policy are so excellently and clearly put forward in Vernon Treeby's "When Southern Blood is Dripping" that I will not attempt to go into it here. Enough that it caused an unparalleled sensation in Oggsville, Ken. and was indirectly the means of introducing into the heart of Jabez Puffwater the secret fear which was destined to grow ever larger and larger until eventually its black wings beat his battered soul into eternity. "The fear of a Black Rising!" Jabez was undoubtedly a man of more than average courage but after reading the Goodge-Keewee Treaty he went back to his store a harassed man. What did it all mean? Nobody knew. Ah, God! If only Jabez Puffwater had possessed the inspiring rhetoric of a Bernard Proon, or the imposing presence of a Freddie Hooter, what a lot he could have done. As it was he just went home--aching--yet withal as yet subconsciously--for the ability to be of use in some way, the opportunity of distinguishing himself and saving his beloved home town from the awful effects of the fear that was fated from now onward to be with him always--the dreaded Black Rising.

For many years after that fateful conference Jabez was to be seen every evening seated outside his store with a horse pistol in his hand ever pointed in the direction of the wooded hills to the Southward. Little boys on their way home from school would throw mud at him, but he never heeded them; little girls would make rude noises quite near him with their rubber overshoes, but he ignored them utterly. I often wonder on looking back what Douglas Bogtoe would have been had he but possessed one half of Puffwater's concentrated repose. That celebrated appeal for the Louisiana Canal installation would have been worded very differently and as for his world-famed piscatorial argument with Olaf Campbell in the Brooke Club--that would have probably been approached from an entirely opposite angle.

To analyse and compare Bogtoe's electrical psychology with the phlegmatic determination and boyish zeal of Puffwater would take, alas, too long; so I will not seek to say more than that had the two widely differentiated spirits but been combined within the same material tissues--that a quainter nor a more peculiar juxtaposition of entities it would have been hard to find, search where you may.

I try occasionally to picture to myself the lonely horror-stricken nights Jabez Puffwater must have endured with that appalling fear always crouching within him, egging him on towards the culminating tragedy of his sad career.

There had been talk of a lynching in New Orleans and of a shooting in Old Virginia and there were even whispers of a slapping in Alabama.

Jabez was priming his pistol one morning while he hastily scanned the elevating disclosures--social and otherwise--of the New York American, when a breathless woman rode up to the store on a tricycle. She delivered a note to Jabez and waited while he read it.

"Come at once--am exceedingly ill--Aunt Topsy."

Jabez thought for a moment--then crushing down his rising apprehensions he mounted his mare Buffalo Babs and made for the hills.

Ten miles there and ten miles back, and the fear always with him--the fear of the Black Rising.

Many psychoanalysts have endeavoured to discover the exact motive for Jabez Puffwater's sudden and unexpected slaying of his old Aunt Topsy--whose coal-black arms had fondled him as a baby. Many theories have been put forward, but none of them--with the exception, perhaps, of Herman Pipper--possess the ring of truth. Pipper's deduction of the circumstantial evidence is that it was all the outcome of a naughty practical joke played by little Michael Drisher who appeared suddenly during Jabez's interview with his Aunt and burst the awful news upon them that there had been a fearful Black Rising in Oggsville, Ken. and that debauch--murder--and worse were going on all over the globe.

"With a great cry," Pipper tells us, "Jabez smote his brow. 'At last!' he moaned in deep anguish. 'At last it has come!' Then he turned, and seizing a large milk bottle he battered the head of Aunt Topsy, crying the while in the voice of a fanatic, 'For my home town! For my home town! This is a just reprisal!!!' Then with a last look at the havoc he had wrought he went out of the house and into the wilderness--"

Pipper's imaginative description ends too abruptly to be really satisfactory; but one fact about the life of Jabez Puffwater will remain emblazoned on America's history for time immemorial--that if he had only possessed the rhetoric of a Proon--the presence of a Hooter--the education of a Floop--the racial understanding of a Bogtoe and the mentality of a Snurge--he would not only have proved himself invaluable to the home constituency of Oggsville, Ken. but have been an entirely different man altogether.

FURSTIN LIEBERWURST ZU SCHWEINEN-KALBER

_From the famous etching by Grobmeyer_]

How strange it seems that she of whom we write is dust and less than dust below the fertile soil of her so beloved Prussia--Furstin Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber! Can you not rise from the grave once more to charm us with the magic of your voice? Are those deep, mellowed tones, so sonorous and appealing, never to be heard again? Ah, me! Why, indeed, should such divinity be so short lived? Who could play Juliet as she could? Nobody! Her enemies laughed and said that her chronic adenoids utterly destroyed all the beauty of the part. Jealousy! Vile jealousy! Genius always has that to contend with. Every one has failings. Gretchen Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber made of Juliet a woman--a pulsating, human woman, with failings like the rest of us, the chief of which happened to be adenoids.[15]

To trace this soul-stirring actress to her obscure birth has indeed been a labour--but withal, a labour of love! For who could help experiencing exquisite joy at unearthing trinkets and miniatures and broken memories of such a radiant being?

Nuremburg, red-roofed and gleaming in the sunlight, was the place wherein she first saw the light of day. Her father, Peter Schmidt, was by trade a sausage-moulder, for in those far-off days there was not the vast machinery of civilisation to wield the good meat into the requisite shape. Gretchen, when a girl, often used to watch her father as he plied his trade and recite to him verses she had learnt at her dame school--fragments from the Teutonic masterpieces of the time--"Kruschen Kruschen," and--

"Baby white and baby red,
Like a moon convulsive
Rolling up and down the bed,
Utterly repulsive!"--

a beautiful little lullaby of Herman Veigel's. Gretchen used to recite it with the tears pouring down her cheeks, so poignantly affected was she by the sensitive beauty of it. Her father also used to weep hopelessly--also her mother, if she happened to be near; and Heinrich, the cat, invariably retreated under the sofa, unutterably moved.

Life dragged on with some monotony for Gretchen. She often used to help her mother in the kitchen--and occasionally in the sitting-room. One day she became a woman! Every one noticed it. Neighbours used to meet her mother in the _strasse_ and say, "Frau Schmidt, your Gretchen is a woman." Frau Schmidt would nod proudly and reply, "Yes, we have seen that; my Peter and I--we are very happy." Thus Gretchen left her girlhood behind her. It was her habit, so Grundelheim tells us, to walk out in the forest with one Hans Breitel, an actor at the municipal theatre. He used to teach her to talk to the birds, and when she besought him ardently to tell her stories of the theatre, he would relate to her the parts he had nearly played. Gretchen's heart thrilled--oh to be an actress, an actress! On her twenty-fourth birthday von Bottiburgen[16] tells us, Gretchen left home, and went to Berlin. She wanted to get an interview with Goethe. One day, after she had been in Berlin a little while, she found him. Brampenrich describes the scene for us, so beautifully and with such truly exquisite rotundity of style:--

"The Great Goethe ate at his lunch. What was that noise? He swiftly put down his knife: the door bursts open; Gretchen Schmidt enters, her lovely hair awry, her cheeks flushed. 'I will act!' she cries in bell-like tones. '_Ach, ach!_' cries Goethe. Then Gretchen, with a superb gesture, hangs her hat on the door handle, and recites to the amazed man his beloved 'Faust,' word for word, syllable for syllable!"

Thus Brampenrich shows us, with his supreme word imagery, what really happened.

Gretchen never saw Goethe again; he left Berlin almost immediately for the Black Forest. Gretchen, alone in the great capital, alone and a woman, what could she do? Grundelheim, in his celebrated "Toilers who have Toiled," relates how desperately hard she worked with her mangle in the Konigstrasse. Then one day, when things seemed at their blackest, Romance, with its multi-coloured finger, poked a hole in the bubble of her existence. The King of Prussia drove along the Konigstrasse, bowing to right and left. Gretchen stepped lightly over her mangle and dropped a curtsey. The King was immediately captivated, and a few hours later the happy girl found herself in the Royal Palace. After that events moved rapidly. At the lax German Court Gretchen soon forgot her austere upbringing, and entered into the round games and charades with untold abandon! Alas! the fickle heart of the King was soon turned from her. Realising this Gretchen seized upon a noble much enamoured of her, Furst Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber, and married him one spring morning in the Chapel Royal. For three months they lived together in the Austrian Tyrol; then Gretchen, heeding at last the persistent call of her art, left him, and fled back to Berlin, where she obtained an engagement to play Juliet. It was from that moment that her real passion for her part developed. It grew to be an obsession--she was feted, lauded, mentioned in several public speeches. For sixty-five years she played it all over Germany, never tiring, never weakening. People gibbered over her; then came her tragic death at the age of ninety-two in the balcony scene. She stumbled forward, Grundelheim says, then backward, then forward, then backward again, and then forward for the last time. The balcony gave way, and she fell at Romeo's feet (it was the great Fritz Schnotter, with whom she had been playing for two years: in private life he was, of course, her lover--she always insisted on that).

History tells us that he caught her in his arms--Bottiburgen contests that he caught her in the middle of his chest; anyhow, the house is said to have risen and cheered, thinking it was a new scene suddenly interpolated. Then the curtain slowly fell, and they realised the truth--they would never see their idolised Gretchen again.

In passing, it would perhaps be as well to mention some of the famous Romeos who played opposite this bewitcher of all sexes. There was Reginald Bug, a young Englishman, who loved her passionately for a few years; then the renowned Pierre Dentifrice from the Comedie Francaise; then Angelo Carlini, and Basto Caballero (founder of the Shakespearean Theatre in Barcelona); then Dimitri Chuggski, a very temperamental, highly strung Russian (it is in Volume VIII. of Edgar Sheepmeadow's "Beds and their Inmates" that he relates the story of Chuggski's desertion of Gretchen; he contends that he left her because she always slept with her mouth open).

Her last and most famous lover on and off the stage was the aforementioned Fritz Schnotter; he is treated lavishly in three volumes of Bottiburgen.

Her portrait on page 100 is a reproduction of Grobmeyer's etching. The original could formerly be viewed, I believe, by applying to the Kaiser for permission and paying 18,000 marks.

JAKE D'ANNUNZIO SPOUT

Why is it that to some are vouchsafed such supreme gifts while other have perforce to drag out their lives in the hideous monotony of offices and banks and the like?

Jake D'Annunzio Spout--even he, Jake the glorious--Spout the 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

_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.

Thus did the strategy of a simple Highland lassie defeat the aims of generals whose hearts and souls had been steeped from birth in the sanguinary ways of war. Of her journey home with the Prince you all know; and what her white-haired father said when she arrived you've heard hundreds of times. There has been a lot of argument as to the exact form the Prince's gratitude took. Some say he unwrapped her plaidie and went away with it; others write that he cut a lock of his braw red hair and gave it to her with his usual merry smile; but the authentic version of that moving scene is that of the burnt scone. Maggie had baked a scone and handed it to him; then, after he had bitten it, he handed it back.

"Nay, lassie, nay," he is said to have remarked. "My purse is empty but my heart is full. Take this scone imprinted by my royal teeth, and treasure it."

Then with a debonair bow and a ready laugh, a mocking shout and whimsical wink, he went out into dreary Galway--a homeless wanderer.

Of Maggie's death very little is known. Some say she died of hay-fever; others say it was nasal catarrh; but only her old mother, with a woman's unerring instinct, guessed the truth: in reality she died of a broken heart and a burnt scone.

THE EDUCATION OF RUPERT PLINGE

Under the blue-grey shadow of the Didcot Bowles bungalow, with beech trees and pussy willows fringing the banks of the river Sippe which runs, or ran before it was dammed, down past old Caesar Earwhacker's bicycle shed, three miles from the village of Sagrada, Conn., to the West and eight miles from Roosefelt under the hill to the North leaving the South free for a Black Rising and the East for the Civil War;--there in the seventeenth cottage, with green shutters, below the bridge--with the pine cones occasionally tap-tapping against the pantry window--owing to a strange combination of circumstances Rupert Plinge's elder sister first saw the light of day. Rupert himself being born ten months later at Guffle Hoe.

Had he been born on the lower reaches of the Yukon and baptised by a remittance man in a Wesleyan Chapel, he would probably not have suffered so acutely from the cold as he did at Guffle Hoe, nor could he have been more persistently victimised and handicapped in after life by bronchial asthma and pyorrhoea of the gums.

Though coldness for a baby was unpleasant in 1870 it was infinitely more tiresome in 1592 and perfectly devastating in 1306. But Guffle Hoe--try to reflect if possible the troglodytic fun of being born within earshot and eyeshot of people such as Granville Boo, General Udby, Ex-President Sumplethock, Senator Mills-Tweeper and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and places such as Mount Knitting, Mudlake West, Pigeon Park and Appleblossom Villa. These influential factors combined were undoubtedly the foundations of the enormous mathematical ability which became apparent long before the boy attained the age of three, but unfortunately for the level development of his mentality, the repulsive plainness of Senator Mills-Tweeper coupled with the innate idiocy of General Udby, completely overshadowed the girlish charm of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Had Rupert been consulted would he have liked playing the game at all--holding the cards in the wrong hand as he did from the very start without the slightest conception of what the game really was and why they were playing it? But it is quite obvious now to anyone looking back over the years that had the cards of his life been shuffled by his Auntie Gracie before her elopement to the Klondyke with Ex-Senator Fortescue, the ultimate stakes would have been immeasurably dissimilar. At this time the harsh political spirit of Guffle Hoe was morally if not physically and perhaps mentally inflamed by the appearance of several tramp steamers in the mouth of the Sippe, a new hay-cart at Oozeworthy Farm, and the flashing of the electrifying news across the newly erected telegraph wires that Peter Rotepillar and Henry Plugg had, apart from their dramatic refusal to enter themselves as candidates for the Presidency, declined to take any further interest in politics at all and had set up a flourishing bee nursery in Bokewood, Mass. This was on a Friday. Rupert was two months old and naturally sensitive--living and sometimes breathing in such a political atmosphere--to the far-reaching effects of such a shattering blow to the constituency. Of all this that was being performed to complicate his education he became suddenly conscious of an innate sense of the roundness of the whole universe. He began to find himself continually oppressed by the protuberant nearness and corresponding magnitude of his mother's face, which grafted itself upon his infant psychology by looming with maddening regularity over his cot and consciousness. The peculiar rotundity of this good woman's countenance seemed to illustrate to the rising sun of his genius the ethics of that science at which--had he but lived seventy years later--he might have become so famous:--Geography.

On September 9th, 1871, he developed croup, which in due course promoted him to one of the first steps of artistic education--Colour.

For several days he hung between life and death, turning an exquisite shade of purple and black as each new coughing fit seized him. This not unusual phenomenon impressed its vivid seal upon the plastic wax of his unfledged memories with extraordinary precision. In after life, for a long while, he was quite unable to gaze at an ordinary muscat grape or a coal-scuttle without either biting his comforter right through or being extremely sick. Naturally this disability coupled with the physical weakness and sense of impotence that he invariably experienced when in the company of his older companions occasioned him much unhappiness; in fact, many of the intense sorrows of his childhood were caused by the thoughtless mockery of his sister Leah Clara, aged nineteen months.

To the uninitiated spectator it would appear when gazing casually at young Rupert Plinge that the psychologically educational environment surrounding him was deeply impregnated with the spirit of political reformation which, though neither Elizabethan in tone nor strictly Cromwellian in atmosphere, was strongly suggestive to the lay mind of the Second Empire. The subconscious force of this abstract influence went far toward moulding the delicate shoots of his rapidly developing mentality into a brilliant knowledge of weights and measures, decimals, and the native population of Borneo.

Whether Rupert was enjoying his rubber comforter on the cool green grass, or on the slightly painful gravel, or on the fiercely hot asphalt, summer was to him a season of unsurpassed sensuality, flooding his character with rich productive thought and a passionate adoration for his great-aunt Maud, who was wont to beguile the long sun-stained hours by lying amid cushions among the foliage, humming "The Star-Spangled Banner," while she removed with the point of her nail-scissors caramels and other adhesive morsels from the gutta-percha plate of her new false teeth which lay in her lap.

With an amazing clarity of perception which, though generally supposed to be inherited from his great-uncle Miles, for fifty-four years Unitarian minister in the Red Lamp district of Honolulu, would undoubtedly in the searching light of twentieth century vision be mainly attributed to prenatal influences and astronomical premonitions, he realised that the atmosphere was exceedingly chilly in the winter.

Later biographists have exposed with somewhat malicious emphasis the one weak point in an otherwise magnificently constructed intelligence--to wit, the peculiar inability to recognise the inner psychology and spiritual determination of his great-grandfather--Bobbie Plinge--who as all the world knows met a tragic death at the hands of Great Brown Spratt, the last but _one_ of the Mohicans, some fifteen years before the birth of Rupert himself. This deficiency in one of the greatest of all American characters was in a measure remedied by his excessive appreciation of his grandfather O'Callaghan Soddle's luxurious house in Boob Street, later on when the abode of stupendous intellect had been completely gutted by fire and soaked in water. The boy Rupert, then aged two years and a fortnight, exercised a fiercely dominant influence upon the ground charts, plans, etc., for the new palatial residence which was soon to rear its mighty pillars and porticos not so very far from the ivy-grown cottage which in the past had on several occasions sheltered the wistful personality of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The inherent passion for beauty thus crystallized in the mellowing virility of the boy's finely wrought temperament went far toward satisfying his deep-rooted and well-nigh insatiable yearning for city splendour.

In the strange juxtaposition to his unequalled comprehension of national political problems was a surprising streak of frank insouciance and happy-hearted boyishness, which frequently expressed itself in the open defiance of authority in the shape of his great-aunt Maud, his slightly dropsical mother (nee Sheila Soddle) and his two resident cousins, Alexander Chaffinch and Dorothy Bonk, who at moments were entirely unable even to bend the finely tempered steel of his inflexible will, therefore on the one occasion when his decisive plans were unexpectedly frustrated an impression was photographed with extraordinary bas-relief upon his mind of the omnipotence of his quite infirm Grandfather Soddle--and of power as a concrete argument. The incident being the removal of a half-sucked tin soldier from his hand by the subtle device of striking his knuckles sharply with the fire tongs. Then and always the boy insisted that this method of reprimand justified his apparent submission; the emptiness of his hand and the smarting of his knuckles indubitably marking probably the only occasion in his life when all his strategical points abruptly turned inward. Contrary to the suppositions of impartial psychologists, far from breeding the slightest resentment against old Mr. Soddle, this occurrence inspired an active dislike to great-aunt Maud who had indulged in her ever-irritating laugh at his expense. He expressed his natural anger by filling her handkerchief-case with bacon fat, and other boyish revenges of a like nature.

A child whose soaring entity had been nourished and over tended in such an exotic forcing house of accumulated endeavour and democratic emancipation must indubitably have been the first to realise that the austerity of his massive intellect was within measurable distance of completing that predestined cycle of universal knowledge and aspiring ultimately to the glorious pinnacle of political achievement.

Rupert Plinge's fourth birthday had scarce dawned across the hills of time when the long drawn out shadow of earthly obscurity completely enveloped the brightest flower of nineteenth century America. The almost morbid cultivation of his superluminary brain reached its devastating climax while committing to memory the anatomy of the common grub in order to demonstrate to the Eastern constituency the fundamental principles of fiscal autonomy. Lying in his cot, his large pale eyes fixed grimly on a visionary goal, he realised with an intuitive pang that the hour of dismissal was at hand. Calling his mother to him he asked his last illuminating question, his mind groping still in search of truth's flaming beacon:

"Mother, why am I dying?"

Mrs. Plinge leant over him and whispered impressively, "You are dying of dropsy caused by over-education!" And turning on her heel she went slowly out of the room.

Delirium entered the darkening nursery. Rupert, clasping his hot-water bottle raptly, murmured dreamily as he merged into the Great Unknown, the crystallisation of the subconscious influence which had permeated his whole career--

"Dropsy, Dropsy,
Topsy, Topsy--
Harriet Beecher Stowe."

ANNA PODD

_From a very old Russian oleograph_]