A Miscellany (Revised) Page 4

  Snobbishly speaking, the year 1913 was a series of quite unparalleled social triumphs, among which the fête champêtre of the Baroness Zabaglione and the Orage-Delamorde wedding protrude with particular brilliance; but, of all the thrilling spectacles of fashionable frivolity which occurred that year, we believe the debut of Gladys Vanderdecker rankled deepliest in the souls of those unhappy many upon whom no invitation had seen fit to alight.

  Possibly never in the annals of New York society did beauty, wealth and prestige conspire among themselves to create so sumptuous, so throbbing, and so perfect an occasion.

  The great ballroom of the Ritz literally disappeared in an overwhelming deluge of flora, through which, here and there, the fortunate guests floated like bright bits of spray in a monster wave. Thither and hither—along corridors whose carefully subdued lights yielded a subtle and luxurious almost-darkness, occasionally violated by the crashing radiance of a tiara—glided skilfully the rich and radiant debutantes of 1913.

  Nebulae of confetti from time to time descended slowly through the atmosphere, bedewing with a billion trivial and flickering petals the gesturing flesh, the exquisite arms, hinting shoulders and bodies voluptuously yearning to the rhythms of an ever-splashier jazz, which squirted from the simultaneously burbling saxophones of eleven gorgeously apparelled Negroes, each slenderer than an ebony Apollo.

  When morning brought an end to these unparalleled festivities, she in whose honour all these splendours had occurred bade her proud parents good night, and wearily betook herself to her canopied couch, there to snatch a brief slumber before facing the arduous social duties of the day. If—as the little figure paused a moment, framed in the doorjamb—there glimmered in the long-lashed eyes a strange sadness, it is certain that no one noticed it. Not even her queenly mother, far less her rubicund father, could have guessed what disillusionments filled the mind of Gladys upon the occasion of her official entry into social life.

  And when, a few hours later, the awakened debutante allowed herself to be dressed and motored to the Colony Restaurant for luncheon with the dashing Count Unamuno, no one remarked that a new expression dwelt at the edges of her slim lips. The young nobleman himself may have thought that she was more charming than usual, but he might never guess the secret of this increased attraction. Only we, who are privileged spirits, may look into the very soul of Gladys Vanderdecker, where we shall find strange and most disturbing things.

  I say that we are privileged—and I mean it. Did the present writer possess a mere dollar for each time that a reporter, an editor, an owner of a newspaper, vainly climbed the five flights of partially demolished stairs leading to the snug little pair of rooms where Mrs. Bullinski (nee Gladys Vanderdecker), her children and her husband now live, he would be as rich, or richer than father Vanderdecker himself. Since he has not any of those dollars, he must be content with a triumph which, after all, outranks any mere monetary success—and which, albeit due quite as much to good fortune as to sagacity, contributes a new and startling chapter to the history of human ingenuity. I refer to the fact that, where better men than myself have failed, I have succeeded: and by “succeeded” I mean that a great and difficult task undertaken in behalf of the readers of Vanity Fair has been definitely accomplished: that now, for the first time, the entire, palpitating, intimate heart-story of Gladys Vanderdecker (now Mrs. Frank Bullinski) is unfolded before the eyes of a breathless public!

  How did we accomplish this miracle?

  To begin at the beginning—we took precautions. And justly so; for the last story-hunter at the Frank Bullinskis’ home had received, from the toe of Mr. Frank Bullinski (Gladys’ lovemate) a kick which, according to the testimony of competent witnesses, was of sufficient force to propel the recipient down the five flights of stairs and out of the door into the middle of the street, where he had the misfortune to be run over by a taxicab and instantly killed. We desired no such fate, and accordingly took pains to sound the immediate neighbours of this redoubtable defender of his hearthstone on the topic of the strong man’s hobbies. For weeks, months even, no information could be obtained; then one day—subsequent to the bestowing of a five dollar bill upon James Reilly, garbage man, it developed that Gladys’ terrible husband had no passions at all, save a possibly singular but nevertheless authentic passion for his wife and little ones. Instantly we began our campaign, constructed for ourselves a slight disguise, and boldly essayed the tumble-down stairs at number 104 Patchin Place, New York.

  A knock—and the decayed door opened abruptly.

  In the doorway stood a decidedly matronly figure of massive proportions, more or less completely attired in batik pyjamas. The figure surveyed us with frank distrust. “Who instructed you to come here?” she asked severely. We replied that we sought an interview.

  As we had suspected, the once Gladys Vanderdecker possessed, for all her gilded upbringing, a simple heart. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, with downcast eyes, “but my husband is unfortunately absent. Were it otherwise, I am certain that he would thank you for calling on us.”—At which very moment a terrible voice, larger and deeper than a cannon-shot, pronounced from below-stairs the horrifying monosyllable “WOT?” and the tramp of enormous feet was distinctly heard ascending the quaking stairs. Our heart sank.

  “Oh, there he is,” the pyjama-clad lady emitted gaily.

  The next we knew, a hand whose grip resembled that of Dempsey himself, had seized, by the collar, ourselves and was dangling them in mid-air. Realizing, at this awful moment, the utter futility of resistance, we relaxed, and closing our eyes, began to recite our favourite passage from Ward McAllister’s “Society as I Have Found It.”

  “WOTZ DISS?” the cannon-like voice thundered, directly behind us.

  “A poor workman who admires you, Frank, and seeks an interview,” Mrs. Bullinski stated, simultaneously answering her husband’s question and explaining the presence of ourselves.

  Mr. Bullinski opened his hand, and we fell in a heap at the feet of his spouse. “Is dat so?” he growled hugely. He stooped, and as he did so, we saw him for the first time: a truly picturesque figure, made entirely of muscle, dressed in a waiter’s false shirt front, Paris garters, and B. V. D.’s, his feet (which, under the circumstances, we particularly noticed) being ensconced in a pair of colossal wooden sabots, and his smallish head adorned with a collapsible opera hat.

  This was our moment—we rose and bowed. “Mrs. Bullinski,” we said, in perfect English, “to interview your husband and yourself were all too great a pleasure.”

  As, rising, we turned, Mr. Bullinski came forward gently, almost timidly, and without a word extended his enormous hand, which, with all our strength, we managed to shake slightly. His wife followed, weeping with happiness, and throwing her pyjamed self upon our rags and tatters, kissed us effusively in any number of places. “So you’re not an insurance agent, after all, you clever thing!” she sobbed.

  Covered with caresses, we allowed ourselves to be placed in the seat of honour, an aged rocker, from which point of vantage ourselves were surveying an interior remarkably dirty, as well as incredibly cluttered with semi-artistic junk (not excepting a mammoth reproduction of Washington Crossing the Delaware) when we noticed—no—impossible—our heart stopped beating for an instant—in one corner, upon a little table, which stood all by itself and which bore no other burden, a copy of the refined periodical for which we had undertaken this very interview.

  Absoutely unable to accredit our eyes, we stared and stared.

  “Duh wif’s favourite readin’,” Mr. Bullinski volunteered affably.

  His helpmeet nodded, smiling through her tears. “Frank likes the pictures,” she added whimsically.

  Choking down an involuntary sob, we turned to the former heiress of the Vanderdecker millions. “Madame,” we stated, “the public has long worshipped you and I ardently desire to furnish the intelligentsia of five nations and seven seas with the burning story of your romantic marriage: and now, after prof
ound meditation on the part of my editor, he has irrevocably decided to send to your door a gifted author whose loftiest mission is to record your every word and gesture for the benefit of a spellbound public which is panting with expectancy.” We bowed, to indicate that the messenger was ourselves.

  “Youse?” was the potent monosyllable which leaked from Mr. Bullinski’s ample vocal orifice.

  Turning to him, we again bowed.

  “If Frank doesn’t mind,” Mrs. Bullinski murmured, radiantly.

  “Go to it, goylie,” the husband counselled heartily.

  We produced a notebook and a fountain pen. Mr. Bullinski, stretching considerably less than all of himself upon a mutilated bed near the door, fell immediately into a resounding slumber. The once Gladys Vanderdecker tiptoed to a cupboard, extracted therefrom a sheet of flypaper, moved noiselessly to her husband’s side, laid the flypaper, sticky side up, over his gigantic face, and returned to us. Seeing no other, we offered our chair, which she refused in a whisper, at the same time gracefully sitting down on the floor with her back against the wall. Then, with half-shut eyes, she spoke: softly, musically, reminiscently . . .

  “As you probably know, I was brought up to be a social butterfly, fluttering my tiny wings for a single day, without thought of the morrow.” Ok-k-k-k (this from the supine and dormant Mr. Bullinski: fortissimo). “My coming out ball at the Ritz Hotel was the gossip of everyone, everywhere, for months. Even a whole year after it had occurred, it was still talked about here and there. We—papa and all of us—had a darling house at Aiken, a horrid big one at Newport, a really comfy one near the Piping Rock Club (you know the kind I mean—seventy-two rooms), besides daddy’s home in New York which Stanford White had once designed. But you really should have seen our hôtel in Paris, it was the smartest thing: do you know, I simply adore Paris. Of course we used to go abroad every year and it was such fun. Rome, and London, and everything. Well, daddy simply kept on making money: I never saw anything so perfectly stupid. He tried and tried, but he just couldn’t stop making money. It had become a habit or something, I guess. Anyway, we had our box at the opera, you know, and awful dinners at home with ever so many people, and of course millions of luncheons, and bridge parties and all that kind of thing. You can’t imagine how boring it all was. And never being able to take a step without having a chauffeur wave you into a motor, and being dressed and undressed like a doll, and everything—my dear, it was really terrible. I can’t begin to tell you how I hated it all.

  “Well, I knew I should go mad, or something, unless something happened. And something did. We were forbidden to read vulgar magazines, but I bribed Cholmondley—that was daddy’s first chauffeur—to bring me a copy of the Illustrated News. My dear, I lay in bed all day reading it: I can’t tell you how thrilled I was by all those wonderful murders and poisonings and everything. I decided really to live. It was awfully exciting. I jumped out of bed and dressed in my oldest clothes. I packed a bag and told Mortimer—my own chauffeur—to drive me to the Grand Central Station, and he was too scared to refuse.

  “At the station I hopped out and ran in and took a subway. Meantime I’d decided to become a working girl, desert my family and forgo the rigmarole of society. I got out somewhere and walked a long distance and found myself at the river front. I walked into the queerest looking house and hired a furnished room for a month. Then I felt hungry. So I went out and wandered along till I came to an Automat restaurant, and as I walked in through the door, I saw . . . sitting there” . . . the speaker’s voice trailed off, her eyes drooped: a lovely flush gradually suffused her brow, her cheeks, her neck—then, in a slightly trembling tone, she resumed: “him . . .”

  Something, instinct perhaps, told us that by “him” Gladys Vanderdecker Bullinski referred to the sonorous figure on the bed, whose vocal detonations were, by this time, shaking the whole house to its none-too-secure foundations. A furtive glance—deliciously shy—which she directed toward the flypaper-covered face, confirmed our suspicions. We leaned forward, putting our hand to our ear, resolved not to miss a syllable of what should follow.

  “He beckoned me to a . . . seat beside him in the Automat,” the former pampered pet of society blushfully continued. “He was eating ham and spinach. He caught my eye and recommended to me the ragout of which he had just consumed two portions. There was something . . . I mean . . .”—she paused, deeply, entirely, moved. We felt our own throat strangling with a strange and overwhelming emotion: it was as if, through some lucky accident, the gates of a great and enthralling romance had swung wide, permitting our dazzled eyes to feast upon the intrinsic flames of virginal passion.

  “And then . . . that night . . . he took me to a . . . burlesque show,” she murmured. “It was on Fourteenth Street. The play was called . . . The Kissing Kuties, and was enacted by the Girls de Looks. Between the act he—proposed.”

  A perfect thunder surged from the bed. “Yes?” we interrogated breathlessly, at the top of our voice.

  “Of course I—accepted him. It turned out that he was a chauffeur. He drove a motor truck for the Berelzheimer Brewery with headquarters in St. Louis. Well, we were married at City Hall, by a nice old man. Then we walked up to Fifth Avenue, because I’d insisted on having a bus ride for a honeymoon. At Washington Square we were just getting on a beautiful big bus, when father and a lot of detectives jumped out of father’s Rolls Royce and made for Frank. My dear, I was never so thrilled. Frank simply murdered father: he took him by the throat and father’s eyes stood out inches, like balloons or something, because of course he couldn’t breathe. Then Frank hit father twice between the eyes, but father is very strong. He got away and gave Frank a nasty kick in the shins. At the same time, one of the detectives jumped on Frank and bit him in the ear. Two others were between his legs, trying to trip him up, but they couldn’t. Frank was wonderful. He then hit father so hard that father went through a plate glass window right into the lap of a saleslady in Schwartz’s toy shop, carrying all sorts of toys along with him. You can’t imagine how funny father looked, with tin battleships all over him, and tiny steam engines, and automobiles, and dolls, and canaries, and everything!”

  Mrs. Bullinski paused and, throwing back her head, laughed melodiously. Then a sudden kindliness crept into the hazel eyes; around the mouth, lines of pity formed themselves: “I was almost sorry for father,” she murmured.

  “Then what happened?” we shouted, above the din of her sleeping hero.

  “Why, we left them there,” she answered: “father in Schwartz’s, being taken care of by a lot of people because he was pretty well shaken up, and the four detectives lying on the sidewalk, gagged with their own caps, and tied, hand and foot to one another, with shoelaces which Frank had bought from an old blind man who came along just then. Frank signalled to a taxi, and we got into it all right, but a policeman asked Frank, through the window, who he was, and of course that made Frank terribly angry because he thought the policeman was trying to insult him. So he asked me for my umbrella, and of course I gave it to him, and Frank poked it into the policeman’s mouth which happened to be open, and we drove away. Since that day, I’ve never once stopped being awfully proud of my husband,” the pyjamad narratrix, casting in the direction of the bed a glance of prettily mingled enthusiasm and adoration, concluded softly.

  “May I ask . . . the public always wants to know . . . if there are any little ones?” I hazarded timidly.

  As the innocuous epithet “little ones” left my lips, a titanic snore (by comparison with which all previous specimens were as whispers) issued from the nose of Mr. Bullinski—followed by a complete silence: then—as, somewhat alarmed, I turned—“ARE der!” boomed a gigantic voice: the sleeper had awakened.—“ARE der!” the mammoth larynx repeated as, rising to its full height, the colossal equivalent of several average human beings cautiously removed from its microscopic head the collapsible opera hat which, until that moment, that head had unflinchingly worn—“ARE der!” it reiterated, with
one vast paw extracting from his pocket a huge key . . . “I’ll say der are!”—and, while Washington Crossing the Delaware shuddered with the vibration of the final Are der; while the china rattled, while a light novel—dislodged from a bookcase—fell to the floor with a heavy thud, Mr. Bullinski—reaching at one stride the wall opposite ourselves—inserted, in that portion of it which constituted a hitherto unnoticed means of egress or ingress, the key: then, as ourselves stared, trembling hysterically, not knowing what to expect from so extraordinary a procedure, a door flew inward—and our eyes beheld a vision of such extreme loveliness as would baffle description by the most inspired pen which ever touched paper: a spectacle at once so gripping and so peaceful that the least tribute to its unbelievable beauty were no better than a profanation.

  For the benefit of our subscribers, we have investigated the entire vocabulary of the English language with the idea of finding one phrase, one group of words, one idiom which should express, perfectly and for all time, the precise aroma of that unforgettable instant when the wall unexpectedly opened; and revealed the transcendent contents of that inner room of the Bullinski household. Our search for words seemed futile, hopeless.

  But mysterious are the ways of fate! After some months’ intensive study, while we were lying in the endopsychic ward of a prominent local hospital, suffering from a combination of shingles and acute anemia, we were overtaken by a delirium in the course of which we confided our most cherished aims to O-la-la, the Chinese night nurse at the hospital, who immediately quoted what—even in our somewhat exceptional mental state—we recognized as a justly celebrated passage from the Calendar of Happy Hours by Tsa-Tsi, the Chinese poet and philosopher (4th Century, B.C.). With a cry of sheer pleasure, we sprang from the bed, and, fleeing through the backdoor, reached the street, where, attired only in a paper napkin, we hailed a taxi. Three minutes later, we were seated before an astonished stenographer in the offices of Vanity Fair, dictating from memory the elegant, but at the same time literal, translation of the Chinese epic by Mrs. Gertrude Waters, which runs: