Terribly Intimate Portraits Part 7

"Yes!" cried the courageous girl exultantly. "Quick, we will trick them yet."

Then came the supreme moment--the act of sheer devotion that was to brand that simple soul through the ages as a n.o.ble martyr in, alas! a lost cause. Shading her eyes with her hand, she perceived a legion of the enemy encamped on the one island of which the lonely Gallic loch boasted. Her woman's wit had devised a plan. Flinging baps and haggis to the winds, she leapt into a boat and began to row--you all know the story of that fateful row. Round and round the island she went for three weeks,[23] never heeding her tired arms and weary hands; blisters came and went, but she felt them not; her hat flew off, but the lion-hearted woman never stopped;[24] and all to convince the troops on the island that it was a fleet approaching under the command of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Completely routed, every officer and man swam to the mainland and beat a retreat, and not until the last of them had gone did Maggie relinquish her hold on the creaking oars.

Thus did the strategy of a simple Highland la.s.sie defeat the aims of generals whose hearts and souls had been steeped from birth in the sanguinary ways of war. Of her journey home with the Prince you all know; and what her white-haired father said when she arrived you've heard hundreds of times. There has been a lot of argument as to the exact form the Prince's grat.i.tude took. Some say he unwrapped her plaidie and went away with it; others write that he cut a lock of his braw red hair and gave it to her with his usual merry smile; but the authentic version of that moving scene is that of the burnt scone.

Maggie had baked a scone and handed it to him; then, after he had bitten it, he handed it back.

"Nay, la.s.sie, nay," he is said to have remarked. "My purse is empty but my heart is full. Take this scone imprinted by my royal teeth, and treasure it."

Then with a debonair bow and a ready laugh, a mocking shout and whimsical wink, he went out into dreary Galway--a homeless wanderer.

Of Maggie's death very little is known. Some say she died of hay-fever; others say it was nasal catarrh; but only her old mother, with a woman's unerring instinct, guessed the truth: in reality she died of a broken heart and a burnt scone.

THE EDUCATION OF RUPERT PLINGE

[Ill.u.s.tration: RUPERT PLINGE, AGED 9 MONTHS AND 4 YEARS, RESPECTIVELY]

Under the blue-grey shadow of the Didcot Bowles bungalow, with beech trees and p.u.s.s.y willows fringing the banks of the river Sippe which runs, or ran before it was dammed, down past old Caesar Earwhacker's bicycle shed, three miles from the village of Sagrada, Conn., to the West and eight miles from Roosefelt under the hill to the North leaving the South free for a Black Rising and the East for the Civil War;--there in the seventeenth cottage, with green shutters, below the bridge--with the pine cones occasionally tap-tapping against the pantry window--owing to a strange combination of circ.u.mstances Rupert Plinge's elder sister first saw the light of day. Rupert himself being born ten months later at Guffle Hoe.

Had he been born on the lower reaches of the Yukon and baptised by a remittance man in a Wesleyan Chapel, he would probably not have suffered so acutely from the cold as he did at Guffle Hoe, nor could he have been more persistently victimised and handicapped in after life by bronchial asthma and pyorrhoea of the gums.

Though coldness for a baby was unpleasant in 1870 it was infinitely more tiresome in 1592 and perfectly devastating in 1306. But Guffle Hoe--try to reflect if possible the troglodytic fun of being born within earshot and eyeshot of people such as Granville Boo, General Udby, Ex-President Sumplethock, Senator Mills-Tweeper and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and places such as Mount Knitting, Mudlake West, Pigeon Park and Appleblossom Villa. These influential factors combined were undoubtedly the foundations of the enormous mathematical ability which became apparent long before the boy attained the age of three, but unfortunately for the level development of his mentality, the repulsive plainness of Senator Mills-Tweeper coupled with the innate idiocy of General Udby, completely overshadowed the girlish charm of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Had Rupert been consulted would he have liked playing the game at all--holding the cards in the wrong hand as he did from the very start without the slightest conception of what the game really was and why they were playing it? But it is quite obvious now to anyone looking back over the years that had the cards of his life been shuffled by his Auntie Gracie before her elopement to the Klond.y.k.e with Ex-Senator Fortescue, the ultimate stakes would have been immeasurably dissimilar. At this time the harsh political spirit of Guffle Hoe was morally if not physically and perhaps mentally inflamed by the appearance of several tramp steamers in the mouth of the Sippe, a new hay-cart at Oozeworthy Farm, and the flas.h.i.+ng of the electrifying news across the newly erected telegraph wires that Peter Rotepillar and Henry Plugg had, apart from their dramatic refusal to enter themselves as candidates for the Presidency, declined to take any further interest in politics at all and had set up a flouris.h.i.+ng bee nursery in Bokewood, Ma.s.s. This was on a Friday. Rupert was two months old and naturally sensitive--living and sometimes breathing in such a political atmosphere--to the far-reaching effects of such a shattering blow to the const.i.tuency. Of all this that was being performed to complicate his education he became suddenly conscious of an innate sense of the roundness of the whole universe. He began to find himself continually oppressed by the protuberant nearness and corresponding magnitude of his mother's face, which grafted itself upon his infant psychology by looming with maddening regularity over his cot and consciousness. The peculiar rotundity of this good woman's countenance seemed to ill.u.s.trate to the rising sun of his genius the ethics of that science at which--had he but lived seventy years later--he might have become so famous:--Geography.

On September 9th, 1871, he developed croup, which in due course promoted him to one of the first steps of artistic education--Colour.

For several days he hung between life and death, turning an exquisite shade of purple and black as each new coughing fit seized him. This not unusual phenomenon impressed its vivid seal upon the plastic wax of his unfledged memories with extraordinary precision. In after life, for a long while, he was quite unable to gaze at an ordinary muscat grape or a coal-scuttle without either biting his comforter right through or being extremely sick. Naturally this disability coupled with the physical weakness and sense of impotence that he invariably experienced when in the company of his older companions occasioned him much unhappiness; in fact, many of the intense sorrows of his childhood were caused by the thoughtless mockery of his sister Leah Clara, aged nineteen months.

To the uninitiated spectator it would appear when gazing casually at young Rupert Plinge that the psychologically educational environment surrounding him was deeply impregnated with the spirit of political reformation which, though neither Elizabethan in tone nor strictly Cromwellian in atmosphere, was strongly suggestive to the lay mind of the Second Empire. The subconscious force of this abstract influence went far toward moulding the delicate shoots of his rapidly developing mentality into a brilliant knowledge of weights and measures, decimals, and the native population of Borneo.

Whether Rupert was enjoying his rubber comforter on the cool green gra.s.s, or on the slightly painful gravel, or on the fiercely hot asphalt, summer was to him a season of unsurpa.s.sed sensuality, flooding his character with rich productive thought and a pa.s.sionate adoration for his great-aunt Maud, who was wont to beguile the long sun-stained hours by lying amid cus.h.i.+ons among the foliage, humming "The Star-Spangled Banner," while she removed with the point of her nail-scissors caramels and other adhesive morsels from the gutta-percha plate of her new false teeth which lay in her lap.

With an amazing clarity of perception which, though generally supposed to be inherited from his great-uncle Miles, for fifty-four years Unitarian minister in the Red Lamp district of Honolulu, would undoubtedly in the searching light of twentieth century vision be mainly attributed to prenatal influences and astronomical premonitions, he realised that the atmosphere was exceedingly chilly in the winter.

Later biographists have exposed with somewhat malicious emphasis the one weak point in an otherwise magnificently constructed intelligence--to wit, the peculiar inability to recognise the inner psychology and spiritual determination of his great-grandfather--Bobbie Plinge--who as all the world knows met a tragic death at the hands of Great Brown Spratt, the last but _one_ of the Mohicans, some fifteen years before the birth of Rupert himself. This deficiency in one of the greatest of all American characters was in a measure remedied by his excessive appreciation of his grandfather O'Callaghan Soddle's luxurious house in b.o.o.b Street, later on when the abode of stupendous intellect had been completely gutted by fire and soaked in water. The boy Rupert, then aged two years and a fortnight, exercised a fiercely dominant influence upon the ground charts, plans, etc., for the new palatial residence which was soon to rear its mighty pillars and porticos not so very far from the ivy-grown cottage which in the past had on several occasions sheltered the wistful personality of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The inherent pa.s.sion for beauty thus crystallized in the mellowing virility of the boy's finely wrought temperament went far toward satisfying his deep-rooted and well-nigh insatiable yearning for city splendour.

In the strange juxtaposition to his unequalled comprehension of national political problems was a surprising streak of frank insouciance and happy-hearted boyishness, which frequently expressed itself in the open defiance of authority in the shape of his great-aunt Maud, his slightly dropsical mother (nee Sheila Soddle) and his two resident cousins, Alexander Chaffinch and Dorothy Bonk, who at moments were entirely unable even to bend the finely tempered steel of his inflexible will, therefore on the one occasion when his decisive plans were unexpectedly frustrated an impression was photographed with extraordinary bas-relief upon his mind of the omnipotence of his quite infirm Grandfather Soddle--and of power as a concrete argument. The incident being the removal of a half-sucked tin soldier from his hand by the subtle device of striking his knuckles sharply with the fire tongs. Then and always the boy insisted that this method of reprimand justified his apparent submission; the emptiness of his hand and the smarting of his knuckles indubitably marking probably the only occasion in his life when all his strategical points abruptly turned inward. Contrary to the suppositions of impartial psychologists, far from breeding the slightest resentment against old Mr. Soddle, this occurrence inspired an active dislike to great-aunt Maud who had indulged in her ever-irritating laugh at his expense. He expressed his natural anger by filling her handkerchief-case with bacon fat, and other boyish revenges of a like nature.

A child whose soaring ent.i.ty had been nourished and over tended in such an exotic forcing house of acc.u.mulated endeavour and democratic emanc.i.p.ation must indubitably have been the first to realise that the austerity of his ma.s.sive intellect was within measurable distance of completing that predestined cycle of universal knowledge and aspiring ultimately to the glorious pinnacle of political achievement.

Rupert Plinge's fourth birthday had scarce dawned across the hills of time when the long drawn out shadow of earthly obscurity completely enveloped the brightest flower of nineteenth century America. The almost morbid cultivation of his superluminary brain reached its devastating climax while committing to memory the anatomy of the common grub in order to demonstrate to the Eastern const.i.tuency the fundamental principles of fiscal autonomy. Lying in his cot, his large pale eyes fixed grimly on a visionary goal, he realised with an intuitive pang that the hour of dismissal was at hand. Calling his mother to him he asked his last illuminating question, his mind groping still in search of truth's flaming beacon:

"Mother, why am I dying?"

Mrs. Plinge leant over him and whispered impressively, "You are dying of dropsy caused by over-education!" And turning on her heel she went slowly out of the room.

Delirium entered the darkening nursery. Rupert, clasping his hot-water bottle raptly, murmured dreamily as he merged into the Great Unknown, the crystallisation of the subconscious influence which had permeated his whole career--

"Dropsy, Dropsy, Topsy, Topsy-- Harriet Beecher Stowe."

ANNA PODD

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANNA PODD

_From a very old Russian oleograph_]

Though of humble origin, though poor and unblessed with any of life's luxuries, Anna Podd made her way in the world with unfaltering determination. The tragedy of her life was perhaps her ambition, but who could blame her for wis.h.i.+ng to better herself? She had nothing--nothing but her beauty. What a woman's beauty can do for herself and her country is amply portrayed in the kaleidoscopic pageant of Anna Podd's life. The only existing picture of her (here reproduced) was discovered in Moscow after Ivan b.u.minoff's well-remembered siege, lasting seventeen years.

Poor Anna! Destiny seemed ruthlessly determined to lead her so far and no further. A Tsar loved her, which is more than falls to the lot of some women, yet fate's unrelenting finger was forever placed upon the pulse of her career.

Of her parents nothing is known. We first hear of her in a low cabaret in St. Petersburg West. All night, so Serge Tadski tells us in "Russian Realism," it was her sordid duty to flaunt that exquisite loveliness which Heaven had bestowed upon her before the devouring eyes of every sort and description of Russian man. She was wont to sway rhythmically and sinuously to the crazy band which played for her; now and then, with pain in her heart and a merry laugh on her lips, she would leap onto the tables and snap her fingers indiscriminately.

Often it was her duty to drink off gla.s.s after gla.s.s of champagne; but she never became inebriated.[25] Her purpose in life was too set--she meant to break away. In Nicholas Klick's "Life of Anna Podd" he states that she met the Tsar at a ball, whence she was hired professionally.

This statement is entirely untrue; and I am more than surprised that such a talented man as Klick should have made such a grievous error.

It has been absolutely impossible to unearth the true story of her meeting with the Tsar.

It was after their meeting that the real progress of her career commenced. Her Royal master established her in the palace as serving-maid to the ailing Tsarina, a generous but somewhat tactless act on his part. Somehow or other, history whispers, Anna fell foul of the Tsarina--they simply hated one another. Occasionally the Tsarina would throw hot water over Anna for sheer spite. Poor Anna, her beauty was alike her joy and her terror. The Tsarina, Klick informs us, was somewhat plain, and knew it--hence her distaste for the dazzling Anna.

One day, the Tsarina died--no one knew why. Anna, guileless and innocent enough, was at once suspected by all as having poisoned her, except the Tsar, who, to avert further suspicion, promptly created her d.u.c.h.ess of Poddoff. This mark of royal esteem had the effect of quieting the people for a while at least. Life went on much as usual at the Royal Palace.

Anna was kept in close seclusion for safety's sake. The Tsar loved her with a steady, burning devotion which caused him to have all his children by the Tsarina rechristened "Anna," indiscriminately of s.e.x.

One day a messenger arrived in blue and yellow uniform[26] to bid the Tsar gird himself for war. When the luckless Anna heard the news, she was with her women (all ladies of t.i.tle): some say she swooned; others aver that she merely sat down rather suddenly. Fate had indeed dealt her a smas.h.i.+ng blow. Once her Imperial lover left her side she would at once be taken prisoner and flung G.o.d knows where. This she knew instinctively, intuitively. Klick describes for us her dramatic scene with the Tsar.

"He was just retiring to bed," he writes, "preparatory to making an early start the next morning, when the door burst open, and Anna, tear-stained and sobbing, threw herself into the room and, hurling herself to the bed, flung herself at his feet, which, owing to his immensity of stature, were protruding slightly over the end of the mattress. 'Take me with you!' she cried repeatedly. 'No, no, no!'

replied the Tsar, equally repeatedly. At length, worn out by her pleading, the poor woman fell asleep. It was dawn when the Tsar, stepping over her rec.u.mbent form, bade her a silent good-bye and went out to face unknown horror. Half an hour later Anna was flung into a dungeon, preceding her long and tiring journey to Siberia."

Thus Klick describes for us the pulsating horror of perhaps one of the most pitiful nights in Russian history.

In those days the journey to Siberia was infinitely more wearisome than it is now. Poor Anna! She was conveyed so far in a litter, and so far in a sleigh, and when the prancing dogs grew tired she had perforce to walk. Heaven indeed have pity on those unfortunate women from whom the eye of an Emperor has been removed.

For thirty long years Anna slaved in Siberia. She drew water from the well, swept the floor of the crazy dwelling wherein she lived, lit the fire, and polished the samovar when necessary. In her heart the bird of hope occasionally fluttered a draggled wing: would he send for her--would he? If only the war were ended! But no! Rumours came of fierce fighting near Itchbanhar, where the troops of General Codski were quartered. It was, of course, the winter following the fearful siege of Mootch. According to Brattlevitch in Volume II. of "War and Why," the General had arranged three battalions in a "frat" or large semi-circle, in the comparative shelter of a "boz" or low-lying hill, in order to cover the stealthy advance of several minor divisions who were thus able to execute a miraculous "yombott" or flank movement, so as to gain the temporary vantage ground of an adjacent "bluggard" or coppice. All this, of course, though having nothing material to do with the life of Anna Podd, goes to show the reader what a serious crisis Russia was going through at the time.

It was fifteen years after peace was declared that the Tsar sent a messenger to Siberia commanding Anna's immediate release and return, and also conferring upon her the time-honoured t.i.tle of Podski. Anna was hysterical with joy, and filled herself a flask of vodka against the journey home. Poor Anna--she was destined never to see St. Petersburg again.

It was while they were changing sleighs at a wayside inn that she was attacked by a "mipwip" or white wolf,[27] which consumed quite a lot of the hapless woman before anyone noticed.

Brattlevitch tells us that the Tsar was utterly dazed by this cruel bereavement. He had Anna's remains embalmed with great pomp and buried in a public park, where they were subsequently dug up by frenzied anarchists.[28] He also conferred upon her in death the deeds and t.i.tle of Poddioskovitch, thus proving how a poor cabaret girl rose to be one of the greatest ladies in the land.