Terribly Intimate Portraits Part 5

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 Konigstra.s.se. 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 Konigstra.s.se, 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sing, it would perhaps be as well to mention some of the famous Romeos who played opposite this bewitcher of all s.e.xes. There was Reginald Bug, a young Englishman, who loved her pa.s.sionately 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

[Ill.u.s.tration: JAKE D'ANNUNZIO SPOUT, WORLD-FAMED WRITER]

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 d.u.c.h.ess, "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 embarra.s.sment. "I am he," he said blus.h.i.+ng.

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. n.o.body 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 friends.h.i.+p--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 ill.u.s.trate 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 p.r.i.c.klebott, for several years editor of 'Art in the Home,'

leant forward to the dazed Spout and requested him to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s it off by humming the Jewel Song from Faust. For a moment his nonchalance amazed everyone then as though a veil had been suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 a.s.sured--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 pa.s.sage 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 s.e.xual 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 k.u.mp the philanthropic millionaire whose intimate study "Spout, as I Knew Him"

met with such a brilliant success last year. k.u.mp it was who cajoled and eventually almost by force persuaded Jake to make a tour of the world.

k.u.mp 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sion 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--s.h.i.+ning 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 k.u.mp.