Young People"s Pride.
by Stephen Vincent Benet.
TO ROSEMARY
If I were sly, I"d steal for you that cobbled hill, Montmartre, Josephine"s embroidered shoes, St. Louis" oriflamme, The river on grey evenings and the bluebell-gla.s.s of Chartres, And four sarcastic gargoyles from the roof of Notre Dame.
That wouldn"t be enough, though, enough nor half a part; There"d be sh.e.l.ls because they"re sorrowful, and pansies since they"re wise, The smell of rain on lilac-bloom, less fragrant than your heart, And that small blossom of your name, as steadfast as your eyes.
Sapphires, pirates, sandalwood, porcelains, sonnets, pearls, Sunsets gay as Joseph"s coat and seas like milky jade, Dancing at your birthday like a mermaid"s dancing curls --If my father"d only brought me up to half a decent trade!
Nothing I can give you--nothing but the rhymes-- Nothing but the empty speech, the idle words and few, The mind made sick with irony you helped so many times, The strengthless water of the soul your truthfulness kept true.
Take the little withered things and neither laugh nor cry --Gifts to make a sick man glad he"s going out like sand-- They and I are yours, you know, as long as there"s an I.
Take them for the ages. Then they may not shame your hand.
"... For there groweth in great abundance in this land a small flower, much blown about by winds, named "Young People"s Pride"..."
DYCER"S _Herbal_
YOUNG PEOPLES PRIDE
I
It is one of Johnny Chipman"s parties at the Harlequin Club, and as usual the people the other people have been asked to meet are late and as usual Johnny is looking hesitatingly around at those already collected with the nervous kindliness of an absent-minded menagerie-trainer who is trying to make a happy family out of a wombat, a porcupine, and two small Scotch terriers because they are all very nice and he likes them all and he can"t quite remember at the moment just where he got hold of any of them. This evening he has been making an omelet of youngest. K. Ricky French, the youngest Harvard playwright to learn the tricks of C43, a Boston exquisite, impeccably correct from his club tie to the small gold animal on his watch-chain, is almost coming to blows with Slade Wilson, the youngest San Francisco cartoonist to be tempted East by a big paper and still so new to New York that no matter where he tries to take the subway, he always finds himself buried under Times Square, over a question as to whether La Perouse or Foyot"s has the best _hors-d"oeuvres_ in Paris.
The conflict is taking place across Johnny"s knees, both of which are being used for emphasis by the disputants till he is nearly mashed like a sandwich-filling between two argumentative slices of bread, but he is quite content. Peter Piper, the youngest rare-book collector in the country, who, if left to himself, would have gravitated naturally toward French and a devastating conversation in monosyllables on the pretty failings of prominent debutantes, is gradually warming Clark Stovall, the youngest star of the Provincetown Players out of a p.r.i.c.kly silence, employed in supercilious blinks at all the large pictures of celebrated Harlequins by discreet, intelligent questions as to the probable future of Eugene O"Neill.
Stovall has just about decided to throw Greenwich Village omniscience overboard and admit privately to himself that people like Peter can be both human and interesting even if they do live in the East Sixties instead of Macdougal Alley when a page comes in discreetly for Johnny Chipman. Johnny rises like an agitated blond robin who has just spied the very two worms he was keeping room for to top off breakfast. "Well"
he says to the world at large. "They"re only fifteen minutes late apiece this time."
He darts out into the hall and reappears in a moment, a worm on either side. Both worms will fit in easily with the youthful a.s.sortment already gathered--neither can be more than twenty-five.
Oliver Crowe is nearly six feet, vividly dark, a little stooping, dressed like anybody else in the Yale Club from hair parted in the middle to low heavyish brown shoes, though the punctured patterns on the latter are a year or so out of date. There is very little that is remarkable about his appearance except the round, rather large head that shows writer or pugilist indifferently, brilliant eyes, black as black warm marble under heavy tortoise-sh.e.l.l gla.s.ses and a mouth that is not weak in the least but somehow burdened by a pressure upon it like a pressure of wings, the pressure of that kind of dream which will not release the flesh it inhabits always and agonizes often until it is given perfect body and so does not release it until such flesh has ceased. At present he is not the youngest anything, except, according to himself "the youngest failure in advertising," but a book of nakedly youthful love-poetry, which in gloomy moments he wishes had never been written, although the _San Francisco Warbler_ called it as "tensely vital as the Shropshire Lad," brought him several column reviews and very nearly forty dollars in cash at twenty-one and since then many people of his own age and one or two editors have considered him "worth watching."
Ted Billett is dark too, but it is a ruddy darkness with high clear color of skin. He could pa.s.s anywhere as a College Senior and though his clothes seem to have been put on anyhow with no regard for pressing or tailoring they will always raise a doubt in the minds of the uninstructed as to whether it is not the higher carelessness that has dictated them rather than ordinary poverty--a doubt that, in many cases, has proved innocently fortunate for Ted. His hands are a curious mixture of square executive ability and imaginative sensitiveness and his surface manners have often been described as "too snotty" by delicate souls toward whom Ted was entirely unconscious of having acted with anything but the most disinterested politeness. On the other hand a certain even-tempered recklessness and capacity for putting himself in the other fellow"s place made him one of the few popularly lenient officers to be obeyed with discipline in his outfit during the war. As regards anything Arty or Crafty his att.i.tude is merely appreciative--he is finishing up his last year of law at Columbia.
Johnny introduces Oliver and Ted to everybody but Peter--the three were cla.s.smates--shepherds his flock with a few disarmingly personal insults to prevent stiffness closing down again over the four that have already got to talking at the arrival of the two newcomers, and marshals them out to the terrace where they are to have dinner. Without seeming to try, he seats them so that Ted, Peter and Oliver will not form an offensive-defensive alliance against the three who are strangers to them by retailing New Haven anecdotes to each other for the puzzlement of the rest and starts the ball rolling with a neat provocative attack on romanticism in general and Cabell in particular.
II
"Johnny"s strong for realism, aren"t you, Johnny?"
"Well, yes, Ted, I am. I think "Main Street" and "Three Soldiers" are two of the best things that ever happened to America. You can say it"s propaganda--maybe it is, but at any rate it"s real. Honestly, I"ve gotten so tired, we all have, of all this stuff about the small Middle Western Town being the backbone of the country--"
"Backbone? Last vertebra!"
"As for "Main Street," it"s--"
"It"s the hardest book to read through without fallin" asleep where you sit, though, that I"ve struck since the time I had to repeat Geology."
Peter smiles. "But, there, Johnny, I guess I"m the bone-head part of the readin" public--"
"That"s why you"re just the kind of person that ought to read books like that, Peter. The reading public in general likes candy laxatives, I"ll admit--Old Nest stuff--but you--"
""n.o.body else will ever have to write the description of a small Middle Western Town"" quotes Oliver, discontentedly. "Well, who ever wanted to write the description of a small Middle Western Town?" and from Ricky French, selecting his words like flowers for a _boutonniere_.
"The trouble with "Main Street" is not that it isn"t the truth but that it isn"t nearly the whole truth. Now Sherwood Anderson--"
"Tennyson. Who _was_ Tennyson? He died young."
"Well, if _that_ is Clara Stratton"s idea of how to play a woman who did."
The two sentences seem to come from no one and arrive nowhere. They are batted out of the conversation like toy balloons.
"Bunny Andrews sailed for Paris Thursday," says Ted Billett longingly.
"Two years at the Beaux Arts," and for an instant the splintering of lances stops, like the hush in a tournament when the marshal throws down the warder, at the shine of that single word.
"All the same, New York is the best place to be right now if you"re going to do anything big," says Johnny uncomfortably, too much as if he felt he just had to believe in it, but the rest are silent, seeing the Seine wind under its bridges, cool as satin, grey-blue with evening, or the sawdust of a restaurant near the quais where one can eat Rabelaisiantly for six francs with wine and talk about anything at all without having to pose or explain or be defensive, or the chimneypots of La Cite branch-black against winter sky that is pallor of crimson when the smell of roast chestnuts drifts idly as a student along Boulevard St. Germain, or none of these, or all, but for each one nostalgic aspect of the city where good Americans go when they die and bad ones while they live--to Montmartre.
"New York _is_ twice as romantic, really," says Johnny firmly.
"If you can"t get out of it," adds Oliver with a twisted grin.
Ted Billett turns to Ricky French as if each had no other friend in the world.
"You were over, weren"t you?" he says, a little diffidently, but his voice is that of Rachel weeping for her children.
"Well, there was a little cafe on the Rue Bonaparte--I suppose you wouldn"t know--"
III
The party has adjourned to Stovall"s dog-kennel-sized apartment on West Eleventh Street with oranges and ice, Peter Piper having suddenly remembered a little place he knows where what gin is to be bought is neither diluted Croton water nor h.e.l.l-fire. The long drinks gather pleasantly on the table, are consumed by all but Johnny, gather again.
The talk grows more fluid, franker.
"Phil Sellaby?---oh, the great Phil"s just had a child--I mean his wife has, but Phil"s been having a book all winter and it"s hard not to get "em mixed up. Know the girl he married?"
"Ran Waldo had a necking acquaintance with her at one time or another, I believe. But now she"s turned serious, I hear--_tres serieuse--tres bonne femme_--"
"I bet his book"ll be a cuckoo, then. Trouble with women. Can"t do any art and be married if you"re in love with your wife. Instink--instinct of creation--same thing in both cases--use it one way, not enough left for other--unless, of course, like Goethe, you--" "Rats! Look at Rossetti--Browning---Augustus John--William Morris--"