Read the book: «Seeing Things at Night», page 8
A Robe for the King
Hans Christian Andersen once wrote a story about the tailors who made a suit for a King out of a magic cloth. The quality of the cloth was such, so the tailors said, that it could be seen by nobody who was not worthy of the position he held. And so all the people at court declared that they could see the cloth and admired it greatly, but when the King went out to walk a little boy cried: "Why, he hasn't got anything on." Then everybody took up the cry, and the King rushed back to his palace, and the two tailors were banished in disgrace. Information has recently been discovered which casts new light on the story. According to this information there was only one tailor, and his adventure with the King was about as follows:
AN IMPERIAL FOOTMAN – There's a man at the gate who says he's a tailor and that he wants to see your majesty.
THE KING – Explain our constitution to him. Tell him that all bills for revenue originate in the lower House, and point out that on account of a vicious bipartisan alliance of all the traitors in the kingdom I'm kept so short of money that I can't possibly afford any new clothes.
THE IMPERIAL FOOTMAN – He didn't say anything about money, your majesty.
THE KING – Well, I won't give him a bealo down and a bealo a week either. Tell him to wait until I've got a clear title to the pianola.
THE IMPERIAL FOOTMAN – What he said was that he had a valuable gift for the most enlightened ruler in the world.
THE KING – Well, why didn't you say so in the first place? What was the use of keeping me waiting? Send him up right away. (Exit the Footman.)
THE KING (speaking in the general direction of the Leading Republican) – Fortunately, my fame rises above petty slanders. The common people, they know me and they love me.
THE LEADING REPUBLICAN – They love your simplicity, your majesty, your lack of ostentation, your tractability. (Enter the Tailor.)
THE TAILOR – I have come a far journey to see your majesty.
THE KING – I am honored.
THE TAILOR – For a long time I have been journeying to find an enlightened sovereign, a sovereign who was fitted in all respects for his high office. I stopped in Ruritania; he was not there. He was not in Pannonia or in Gamar. You are my hope, majesty.
THE KING – I trust this may indeed be the end of your journey. I think I may say that Marma is a model kingdom. As you doubtless know, the capital city is Grenoble, with a population of 145,000, according to the last census. We have modern waterworks, a library with more than 10,000 volumes, an art museum, a tannery, three cathedrals, two opera houses and numerous moving picture theaters. The principal industries, as you may recall, are salt fish, woolen blankets, pottery, dried raisins and shrapnel.
THE TAILOR – Your majesty will pardon me if I say that I don't give a fig for your raisins or your dried fish or the cathedrals, or even the library with the 10,000 volumes. What I am seeking is a man with eyes to see.
THE KING – No one has better eyes than myself, I'm sure. I have shot as many as a hundred pheasants in an afternoon, and, if you will pardon the allegorical allusion, I can see loyalty and virtue though they reside in the breast of the most distant and humble subject in my kingdom.
THE TAILOR – Perhaps, then, you can see my cloth. It is a marvelous cloth. It was one of the gifts the wise men brought to the Child. It lay across his feet in the manger. But in order that its richness should not attract the attention of Herod, the wise men decreed that the cloth should be invisible to every one who was not worthy of his station in the world. See, your majesty, and judge for yourself. (He puts his hand into the bag and brings it forth, apparently empty, although he seems to be holding up something for the King and the courtiers to admire.) Is it not a brave and gallant robe, gentlemen?
(All look intently at the hand of the tailor. There is a long silence, in which many sly glances are cast from one to another to ascertain if it is possible that somebody else sees this thing which is invisible to him. The King looks slowly to the right and slowly to the left to scan the faces of his subjects, and then he gazes straight at the Tailor in high perplexity. Of a sudden the Leading Republican pulls himself together and speaks in an assured and certain tone.)
THE LEADING REPUBLICAN – It is a magnificent robe. It is a robe for a King. It is so fine a robe that no king should wear it but our beloved monarch, Timothy the Third.
THE LEADING DEMOCRAT (very hastily) – Oh, I say, that is nice. So shiny and bright, and good serviceable stuff, too. That would make a mighty good raincoat. (Briskly) Say, now, Mr. Tailor, how would you like to form the Wonder Cloth Limited Company? You'd be president, of course, and hold thirty-three and one-third per cent of the stock, the same amount for the King, and the rest to be divided equally among my friends of the opposition here and myself.
THE TAILOR – There will never be any more of the cloth. Only a little is left. Much has been lost. It lies in lonely places, in forests, at the bottom of the sea, in city streets. I have searched the world for this cloth, and I have found no more than I could carry in this bag, a robe for the King (he holds his hand up), this square piece you see, and this long twisted piece that might be a rope. Yes, it might be a rope, for it is stronger than hemp.
THE LEADING DEMOCRAT – That robe there, as near as I can judge, should be pretty much of a fit for his majesty. He might wear it for his regular afternoon walk through the city to-day.
THE KING – Oh, I don't think I'll take my exercise to-day. There's rather a nasty bite to the air.
THE LEADING DEMOCRAT – Don't forget, you're a constitutional monarch.
THE TAILOR – If the King will wear my robe to-day I can go on with my journey to find the cloth the world has lost. Already I have found a King who can see, and it only remains to discover whether there is vision in his people, too.
THE KING (musing) – Hum! If the people can see it, hey? That's a bit of a risk now, isn't it? When I wear that robe of your magic cloth it might be a good idea to have something warm and substantial underneath. It wouldn't do to have any mistakes, you know. After all, I don't want a lot of stupid louts thinking I'm parading around in my B. V. D.'s.
THE LEADING DEMOCRAT – Does your majesty mean to suggest that the common people of Marma, from whom he derives all his just powers, are not to be trusted?
THE KING – You know I didn't mean that. Of course I trust the people. I realize perfectly well that they'd die for me and all that, but, after all, you can't be sure of everybody in a big crowd. There'll be fishwives, you know, and Socialists and highwaymen and plumbers and reporters and everything.
THE LEADING DEMOCRAT – It all gets down to this, your majesty: do you trust the people, or don't you?
THE KING – I trust them as much as you do, but I don't go to excess. I don't see any good reason why I shouldn't wear an ordinary business suit under this magic royal robe. A King can't take chances, you know. He must play it safe.
THE TAILOR – Don't say that, your majesty. You're a King, your majesty. Think of that. You mustn't tap in front of you, like a blind man with a stick. You mustn't fear to bump your head. If you hold it high, you know, there'd be nothing to fear but the stars.
THE KING – You are eloquent, O stranger from a far country, and what do you mean?
THE TAILOR – Only this: if you wear my robe you must cast off compromise and expediency.
THE KING – Oh, that's all right. I was only thinking about trousers.
THE TAILOR – They were a compromise of Adam's, your majesty.
THE KING – Quite true, but I hope you wouldn't go so far as to object to essentials. It's mesh stuff, you know, and very thin. Practically nothing at all. Just one piece. Somehow or other I don't believe I'd feel easy without it. Sort of a habit with me.
THE TAILOR – If you wear my robe you must put aside every other garment.
THE KING – But this is December.
THE TAILOR – Your majesty, the man who wears this cloth will never fear cold.
THE LEADING DEMOCRAT – It seems to me that the only question is, Does his majesty trust the people fully and completely?
THE KING – Of course I trust the people.
THE LEADING DEMOCRAT – Then why are you afraid to show yourself before them in this magnificent new robe? Is there any reason to believe that they who are the real rulers of Marma cannot see this cloth which the Tailor sees, which I see and admire so much and (pointedly) which your majesty, Timothy the Third, cannot conceivably fail to see? It would be unfortunate if it became a matter of news that your majesty did not believe in the capabilities and worthiness of the people.
THE KING – Oh, I believe all right.
THE LEADING DEMOCRAT – Then why are you afraid?
THE KING – Give me the robe. I am not afraid. (The Tailor stoops and seems to take something out of a bag. He extends the invisible object to the King, who clumsily pretends to hang it over his arm.)
THE TAILOR – Oh, not that way, your majesty. It will wrinkle. (Painstakingly he smooths out a little air and returns it to the astonished monarch.)
THE KING (to the Leading Republican, the Leading Democrat and the two Courtiers) – You will meet me at the great gate of the palace in three minutes and accompany me on my promenade through the city. (Exit the King. The Leading Republican draws close to the first Courtier.)
LEADING REPUBLICAN – Wonderful fabric that, was it not?
FIRST COURTIER – Much the finest I have ever seen.
LEADING REPUBLICAN – Now, what shade should you say it was? It's hard to tell shades in this light, isn't it?
FIRST COURTIER – I had no trouble, sir. The robe is a bright scarlet.
LEADING REPUBLICAN – Scarlet, eh? (He moves over close to the second Courtier.)
LEADING REPUBLICAN – Wonderful fabric that we saw just now, wasn't it?
SECOND COURTIER – It was like a lake under the moonlight.
LEADING REPUBLICAN – Moonlight?
SECOND COURTIER – Yes, it was easy to see that it was a miraculous fabric. Man could never have achieved that silver green.
LEADING REPUBLICAN – Yes, it was a mighty fine color. (Raising his voice.) I think we had better join his majesty now, gentlemen, and I believe we shall have an interesting promenade. Good-by until later, Mr. Tailor.
ALL – Good-by, Mr. Tailor!
(The Tailor moves to a great window at the back of the stage and opens it. He leans out. He bows low to some one who is passing by underneath. The rattle of wagons may be heard distinctly, and the rumble of cars, with occasionally the honk of an automobile horn. Suddenly there is a noise much louder and shriller than any of these. It is the voice of a child, and it cries: "He hasn't got anything on!" Voice after voice takes up the shout. Seemingly thousands of people are shouting, "He hasn't got anything on!" Finally the shouting loses all coherence; it is just a great, ugly, angry noise. A shot breaks the glass of the window just above the Tailor's head. Quickly he protects himself from further attack in that direction by swinging two iron shutters together and fastening them. Then he locks the great door through which the King and the Courtiers have just passed.)
THE TAILOR (in sorrow and anger) – More blind men. (He moves to his bag and, dipping his hands in, raises them again to fondle an invisible something. As he is so engaged a little door at the right opens and a meanly dressed girl of about eighteen enters.)
THE TAILOR – Keep your distance. I won't be taken alive. Not until I can find some one to care for my cloth.
THE GIRL FROM THE KITCHEN – Oh, please, don't hurt me, mister. I just ran up here because there were soldiers down in the garden, and shooting and things.
THE TAILOR – Who are you?
THE GIRL FROM THE KITCHEN – I'm the sixth assistant helper of the cook.
THE TAILOR – The sixth?
THE GIRL FROM THE KITCHEN – Yes, I clean the butter plates.
THE TAILOR – And that's all you do? Just clean butter plates? How terrible!
THE GIRL FROM THE KITCHEN – But it isn't. The cook says I'm the best butter dish cleaner in the world. I like butter. I like to touch it. There's no color in the world so beautiful. It's like that bit of cloth you have in your hands.
THE TAILOR – You see the cloth?
THE GIRL FROM THE KITCHEN – Of course I see it. Why, it's right there in your hands. And it's yellow like the butter.
THE TAILOR – Or gold. (He reaches into the bag again.) And what's this? (He holds his right hand high above his head.)
THE GIRL FROM THE KITCHEN – Why, it's a yellow rope.
THE TAILOR – Yes, that's it, a rope. I'm going to give you the other piece of cloth now, and later the rope, too. You must guard it as carefully, as carefully as you would watch one of your butter dishes. Do you understand?
THE GIRL – I wouldn't lose it. It's pretty.
THE TAILOR – Yes, it's pretty and the world mustn't lose it. You will find that most people can't see. I know only two, you and I, but there must be others. That's your task now, finding people who can see the cloth and cleaning butter plates, of course. (There is a loud pounding on the great door and a shout of "Open, in the King's name!" The knocking increases in violence and the command is repeated. Then men begin to swing against the door with heavy bars and hatchets.)
THE TAILOR – Here (he makes a gesture toward the girl), take the cloth. Go quickly to the kitchen. Then come back in a moment and save the rope, too.
THE GIRL FROM THE KITCHEN – But what do they want?
THE TAILOR – They want to kill me.
THE GIRL FROM THE KITCHEN – They mustn't.
THE TAILOR – They won't if you get out and leave me alone. Here, hurry. (He half pushes her out the little door. Then he returns to the bag and seems to pull out something. He looks to the ceiling and finds a hook fairly in the middle of it. He moves his hand upward as if tossing something, and goes through the motions of tying a knot around his neck. Then the Tailor takes a chair and moves it to the center of the room. He stands upon it. The violent assault upon the door begins with renewed vigor. Some of the axes bite through the wood. The Tailor steps off the chair and dangles in the air. He floats in space, like a man in a magic trick, but one or two in the audience, dramatic critics, perhaps, or scullery maids, may see that round his neck and fastened to the hook in the ceiling is a yellow rope.)
(Curtain.)
Turning Thirty
"Margaret Fuller's father was thirty-two when she was born," writes Katharine Anthony in her biography of the great feminist. "A self-made man, he had been obliged to postpone marriage and family life to a comparatively advanced age."
The paragraph came to us like a blow in the face. For years and years we had been going along buoyed up by the comments of readers who wrote in from time to time to say: "Of course, you are still a young man. You will learn better as you grow older." And now we find that we have grown older. We have reached a comparatively advanced age, and the problem of whether or not we have learned better is present and persistent. It can no longer be put off as something which will work out all right in time.
"Some day," says the young man to himself, "I'm going to sit down and write a novel, or the great American drama, or an epic poem." Then some day comes and the young man finds that his joints are stiff and he can't sit down.
However, we are not quite prepared to admit that thirty-two is the deadline. It seemed old age to us for a long time. When we were reporting baseball the players used to call Roy Hartzell, over on third base, "the old man," because he was all of twenty-nine, and veterans of thirty were constantly dropping out because of advancing age and the pressure of recruits of nineteen and twenty. Yes, thirty-two was a comparatively advanced age at that time. But then we got on to plays and books, and Bernard Shaw was doing all the timely hitting in the pinches, and, to mix the metaphor, breaking loose and running the length of the field, putting a straight arm into the faces of all who would tackle him. De Morgan started to blaze at the age of fifty, and James Huneker was the keenest of all the critics to hail anything in any art which was new and hitherto unclassified. And he, too, wrote his first novel, Painted Veils, long after fifty. It was a novel which we did not like very much, but all its faults were those of youth. Some of it actually sophomoric. It was more like the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald than any living author. We felt that it was a first novel by a "promising" man, and thirty and twenty-nine and all those ages seemed to us mere verdant days in the hatchery.
We remember a sweet girl reporter going to Major General Sibert, commander of the First Division in its early days in France, and asking: "General, don't you think this is a young man's war?" Sibert grinned behind his gray mustache, and said: "When I was in West Point I used to bear in mind that Napoleon won some of his greatest victories while he was in his thirties, but now I find my attention turning more and more to the fact that Hindenburg is seventy-two and Joffre is seventy."
Time, we know, is fleeting, but there is always a little more left for the man who can look senility and destruction and all that sort of business straight in the eye and remark calmly, "I'm too busy this afternoon; drop around to-morrow." Thirty-two isn't a comparatively advanced age. Some day we are going to write that epic poem, and the novel, and the great American drama.
Turning to The Art of Lawn Tennis, by William Tilden, 2nd, we find the comforting information that "William A. Larned won the singles at past forty. Men of sixty are seen daily on the clubs' courts of England and America enjoying their game as keenly as any boy. It is to this game, in great measure, that they owe the physical fitness which enables them to play at their advanced age."
Yet after all this is not quite so comforting. We know one or two of these iron athletes who have outlived their generation and they are among the bores of the world. After one of them has captured the third set by dashing to the net and volleying your shot off at a sharp angle he invariably rubs it in by asking you to guess how old you think he is. We always answer, "Ninety-six," but there is no discouraging him or stopping him before he has gone on to tell you about breaking the ice in the tub for his morning plunge.
There is an unearthly air about these men whom God has forgotten. They are like those Prussian soldiers of Frederick who continued to stand after swords and bullets had gone through them and required the services of some one to go about the field and push them over so that they might be decently buried. There were men like that in one of the lands which Gulliver visited. They never died and probably they played a sharp game of tennis and later in the clubhouse they were accustomed to sit around and say how much better the actors used to be fifty years ago. Everybody hated them and stayed away from their company in droves.
No, we set no store of hope on being a sixty-year-old prodigy at lawn tennis. We dodder about the court already. We had just as soon be gray and bald and all the rest of it if only we can ever grow young enough to write a bold and slashing novel and be suppressed by Mr. Sumner.
Margaret Fuller
Katharine Anthony's Margaret Fuller is biography in new and fascinating form. "A psychological biography," Miss Anthony calls it, and she takes advantage of the theories of Freud and Jung to reveal new facts about the life of a woman long dead, by the process of submitting well known material to the psychoanalytic test. This is an engrossing game. There is something about it quite suggestive of the contrast between Sherlock Holmes and the more dull-witted detectives of Scotland Yard. Holmes, you remember, could come into a room after all the members of the force had pawed the evidence and interpret something new from the cigar ash on the table which had been to them just cigar ash, but was to Holmes convincing evidence that the crime had been committed by a red-haired man, six feet in height, born in Kentucky and an enrolled member of the Democratic Party. Other biographers were content to record the fact that Margaret Fuller was a nervous child who received all her early education at home from her father. There they paused, and it is just here that Miss Anthony leaps in to explain the exact emotional relation between father and daughter which simmered about in Margaret's subconsciousness and contributed to the convulsions of her early schooldays.
It is fascinating to watch the skilled biographer reveal all sorts of facts about Margaret Fuller of which she herself had not the ghost of a notion. We can't say that the theory of the biographer is always convincing, although we must admit that her case is full and logical at every turn. To us it is just a little too logical. There is so much proof that we are rather inclined to believe that the theory is not altogether so. It is only fair to admit that Margaret seems to have been a Freudian herself long before there was a Freud. Again and again her own observations, quick, intuitive leaps, coincide almost exactly with theories worked out later by much more difficult and rational processes. Nathaniel Hawthorne, also, seems to have had some conception of the unconscious quite consistent with the most modern theorists, for he records a conversation between himself and Margaret Fuller in which they talked about "the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has passed away."
Margaret Fuller, laboratory specimen, is an interesting study; Margaret Fuller, feminist, an inspiring figure in American history; but most of all our interest is captured by that portion of the book which deals with Margaret Fuller, literary critic of The New York Tribune. She wrote three critical articles a week, which appeared on the first page of the paper, and since her day newspaper reviewing has gone back in other respects than the mere process of burying itself more deeply within the paper. Opinions about books seem to have been more exciting and provocative in the days of Margaret Fuller and Horace Greeley. At any rate, one or the other wrote an article in The Tribune which inspired a libel suit by James Fenimore Cooper in which he won a verdict of $200. Nothing like that happens to-day. Once we managed to incite an actor into a lawsuit, but the only sign of recognition which we ever obtain from belaboring an author is a telephone message or a letter saying that our adverse notice has amused him very much and greatly contributed to the sale of his little book and would we come around and have lunch.
Miss Fuller managed to cut deeper. James Russell Lowell never recovered from the shock of her poor opinion of him, and was forever lampooning her in public life and private. She seems to have been singularly free from awe for the great literary figures of her day. In an age when not liking Longfellow was almost as much a mark of national treason as urging a reduction in the German indemnity would be to-day Miss Fuller wrote of Longfellow in exactly the spirit in which he is regarded by the later critics who looked at him dispassionately.
"When we see a person of moderate powers," she wrote, "receive honors which should be reserved for the highest, we feel somewhat like assailing him and taking from him the crown which should be reserved for grander brows. And yet this is, perhaps, ungenerous… He (Longfellow) has no style of his own, growing out of his experiences and observations of nature. Nature with him, whether human or external, is always seen through the windows of literature… This want of the free breath of nature, this perpetual borrowing of imagery, this excessive, because superficial, culture which he has derived from an acquaintance with the elegant literature of many nations and men, out of proportion to the experience of life within himself, prevent Mr. Longfellow's verses from ever being a true refreshment to ourselves."
Ralph Waldo Emerson was her close friend, and yet she could see him clearly enough from a critical point of view to write: "We doubt this friend raised himself too early to the perpendicular, and did not lie along the ground long enough to hear the whispers of our parent life. We would wish he might be thrown by conflicts on the lap of Mother Earth, to see if he would not rise again with added powers."
The feminism of Margaret Fuller is passionate and far reaching. It does not stop merely with the plea for the vote, but includes a newer and freer ideal of marriage. There is inspiration in this, and yet something a little disturbing in the article which she wrote about the London Reform Club, in which she said: "I was not sorry, however, to see men predominant in the cooking department, as I hope to see that and washing transferred to their care in the progress of things, since they are 'the stronger sex.'"
