Prejudices

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

I wish I had space enough in which to recall some of the servants I have known best, beginning, at a very early age, with one German and three French governesses, continuing with dear Mrs. Chester, who took care of my rooms when I was in college, and about whom I have written minutely and affectionately elsewhere; of Miss Shedd, the washwoman, to whom I left in my will the photograph of a Madonna she greatly admired, but who happened to die before I did, recounting, it gave me pleasure to be told, my various virtues in her last delirium; of the Madrassi servant I had in India, who, for no particular reason, used to burst into tears once a week, and declare that I was his “father and mother”; of the Jap, who looked down on me because he was a “Master,” whereas I was only a “Bachelor,” of Arts; of Aunt Nancy, who died last winter, after continuous, unbroken service in our family for seventy-seven years (the last fifteen or twenty years, I confess, did not include occupation other than keeping alive on rye whisky and pipefuls of cut plug tobacco); of the marvelous servant in a popular Paris restaurant, whose only function was “to pacify the guests.” Although dressed as a waiter, he never actually waited. He, instead, drifted about from table to table engaging one in conversation, soothing the complainers, lulling the impatient. He was tall and thin with a long, intelligent nose. Balzac would have immortalized him. He had a genius for tiding over the irritation of red-faced men in a hurry. When he saw that one had almost reached the point of explosion, he would saunter up to the table and begin to talk. In a few seconds the impatient, red-faced man would be proclaiming his opinion on some burning question of the day, and before he had finished, his belated order would be served.

Like everyone else, I have ideas for some five hundred books and fifty plays. One of the books will be called “Servants.”

MRS. WHITE’S

THIS morning I read in the paper of the death of Mrs. White, and the short, inadequate paragraph startled me, not exactly because Mrs. White was dead, but rather because until yesterday afternoon she was alive. I had assumed that the good lady (how I wish I could remember just when I left off hating her and began to think of her as a good lady!) had died years ago and there was something grotesque and uncanny in her suddenly up and dying again out of a blue sky, so to speak. It was very much as if someone should pop out of an old tomb in a cemetery, take a hasty look around and then pop in again. If I had not long ago ceased to feel bitterly about her, I should have told myself that it was just like Mrs. White, that she was not a sincere woman, that she had never inspired me with confidence. But water has been flowing under the bridge for thirty-two years since my tears used to flow at Mrs. White’s, and it so long ago eroded my bitterness that I now cannot recall when it was I last had any. Had I been asked yesterday how old Mrs. White would be by this time, I should have answered very conservatively for fear of seeming to exaggerate, “About a hundred and ninety-six,” and the paper tells me she “passed away” in her seventy-first year. Good heavens—then when I knew her and regarded her as a senile monster with a gizzard of granite, she must really have been a nice-looking young woman of thirty-eight. How very strange.

Whenever I begin to think of Mrs. White’s I have an unusually uncontrollable desire to write my memoirs. I’m sure I don’t know why I have always so longed to write my memoirs. Perhaps it is because I know that memoirs, however inane, are the only form of literature that is absolutely sure of getting itself read. Then, too, they must be so easy to produce. They don’t have to be by anybody in particular, and they present no technical difficulties whatever. They have to begin somewhere, but one need never be bothered by wondering how they ought to end. They don’t end, they merely stop. Very often indeed they refuse to do even that. Madame de Genlis, for instance, after minutely covering the ground in her “Souvenirs,” trimmed a new pen and, without pausing to separate herself into chapters or to take breath, dashed off eight obese volumes of “Mémoires.” Like all works of this nature, they are “perfectly fascinating” and are still read, but there is no reason whatever why I shouldn’t produce eight volumes just as twaddlesome. For beyond writing materials and a tireless forearm there are in the manufacture of memoirs only two essentials: one must live during an interesting period of the world’s history and one must from time to time meet, or at the very least see, a variety of well-known persons. These conditions are extremely difficult to avoid. They arise quite naturally after one has taken the first costly and fatally easy step of being born at all. Seventy years afterward every period of the world’s history is intensely interesting and nowadays it is quite impossible for the modest, the retiring, the obscure, to evade the overtures of the celebrated. The manner in which they lie in wait for us unknown ones, hunt us down, in fact, is pathetic but brazen. They infest otherwise restful and pleasant clubs, they pervade dinners, they hang on the edge of evening parties, demanding to be met and talked to when one would rather dance or look on. They are always cropping out or “butting in” to the interruption of one’s satisfactory routine, just as the marvels of the Yellowstone Park impose upon the placid, smiling face of nature. When they happen to be royal, they ruin health-resorts, make good hotels uninhabitable, render null and void the printed schedules of railways. One summer in Paris I spent most of five weeks in vainly endeavoring to dodge the Shah of Persia. I hardly ever went anywhere that he and his gentlemen in waiting didn’t arrive a few minutes later and upset my plans for the day. On account of him a brutal and licentious soldiery has driven me from the Louvre, the Luxembourg and the Pantheon with drawn swords, and shoved me around and around the foyers of most of the music halls, but later on I shall, no doubt, refer to him thus: “When not long afterward I was greatly shocked by the news of this pleasure-loving but beneficent ruler’s assassination, I recalled his vivacious, oriental, if at times somewhat drowsy personality with genuine regret.” (Sunlight and Shadows of My Long Life, Vol. VI, p. 982.) And a year ago in South America, where I naïvely supposed that I should certainly be safe, I had scarcely set foot within the city limits of Buenos Aires before I was, metaphorically speaking, drugged, sandbagged and introduced to Mr. William Jennings Bryan. In his pseudo-presidential frock coat and square-toed kid shoes he looked precisely like a portrait of himself on the front page of Puck after it has been fingered for a week in a barber shop.

“‘Yes,’ he replied with the virile hand grasp that has changed the vote of millions, ‘yes,’ he heartily agreed, ‘the days are hot in South America but the nights are cool, and I always maintain that cool nights are more than half the battle.’ Except for the sorcery of his voice and the poignant pleasure he took in making my acquaintance, I think it was this recurrent note of the man’s wholesome optimism that most profoundly impressed me.” (Shadows and Sunlight of My Short Life, Vol. IX, p. 1024.) I left Buenos Aires at once and went to Montevideo, but literally in less than fifteen minutes after I disembarked and strolled up to the principal Plaza I absent-mindedly followed two fat gentlemen in evening dress (it was three o’clock of a fine afternoon) into a public building of some kind, and immediately found myself eating candied pineapple and drinking Pan-American toasts in warm, sweet champagne, with the President of Uruguay. The distinguished, the celebrated, the notorious, the great—from one’s earliest years it is impossible to elude them.

Presidents! I shall devote sixty-five printed pages to them, beginning with the summer evening when on an errand of mercy (a friend of mine had robbed the till of a grocery store and had sent for me from the police station) I became submerged in a sea of human faces that were waiting for the President and Mrs. Cleveland, and lost in about five minutes a new four-dollar straw hat, a scarf pin, the left sleeve of my coat (an intoxicated patriot pulled it out by the roots and waved it) and nearly, my eager, useful life. For a middle-aged woman clinging to a window below which I was helplessly imbedded suddenly fainted and fell on me. The crowd was so solidly packed that we were unable, for an eternity, to stuff her into an interstice—to restore her right side up to the perpendicular, and all the time we were doing our best to control her arms and legs, and she was kicking noses off with her heels and gouging eyes out with her thumbs, the people in the window were throwing, first glassfuls, then pitcherfuls, and finally pailfuls of water on us, and beseeching with paroxysms of mirth, “Won’t somebody please bring a little water; a lady has fainted.” As for writers, opera-singers, bishops, actors, diplomatists, Napoleons of finance and members of the nobility, they are always scuttling about nowadays. “It were a sorrow to count them.” I shall make them say some of the most surprising things, but in the case of persons who have died I shall write my memoirs conscientiously throughout and record only the remarks they would have enjoyed making but were unable to think of at the time.

My audience at the age of eight with His Holiness Pope Leo XIII, I have always thought would open volume the first most auspiciously. One could draw such a charming little picture of the ivory-white, ethereal old man laying his hand for a moment on my shock of yellow hair and smiling affectionately at my wondering, upturned face. I remember I held the ends of his fingers and was beginning to examine his ring when someone prodded me in the back and in a hoarse, agitated whisper, reminded me to kiss it. I’m sure I could do all sorts of pleasant things with that unearthly smile and tremulous blessing and sunny hair and upturned face, but chronologically Mrs. White’s takes precedence, although even Mrs. White’s is not the incident in my intellectual development that I first remember. Sometime before then the detached, austere figure of a beautiful woman became part of my consciousness and recollection and has marvelously remained so ever since. She was at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 whither I was taken almost in the arms of a fond, and in that instance foolish, grandmother. Gone, gone is the exhibition; I recall nothing of it except a broad, hot walk in a park, bordered by gorgeous flowers. But at the other end of it, no doubt in “Agricultural Hall,” alone on a platform and surrounded by the ingenuous Americans of that day, stood the woman. Jets of ice water played gently upon her soft and gracefully molded limbs, for they were of butter and far from acclimated to the debilitating atmosphere of Philadelphia in July. I loved that oleomarginal morgue and screamed to be taken back to it whenever I was, as I had to be from time to time, forcibly removed. I can’t now remember the appearance at that time of anything or anybody else, even of the grandmother who chaperoned us, but I should instantly recognize the dear, long since melted work of art in any creamery of the world.