Tuberoses and Tigers
Back in the summer of 1919, a fifteen-year-old youth at Riveride, Rhode Island, a watering place on the shores of upper Narragansett Bay, was a victim of a temporary but none the less powerful hallucination still referred to in southern New England as the “Riverside hallucination.” For a space of three or four days, or until the effects of a novel called Three Weeks, by Elinor Glyn, had worn off, the boy believed himself to be a wealthy young Englishman named Paul Verdayne, who had been blasted by a searing love affair with a mysterious Russian noblewoman. His behavior during that period, while courteous and irreproachable to family and friends alike, was marked by fits of abstraction and a tendency to emit tragic, heartbroken sighs. When asked to sweep up the piazza, for instance, or bike over to the hardware store for a sheet of Tanglefoot, a shadow of pain would flit across his sensitive features and he would assent with a weary shrug. “Why not?” he would murmur, his lips curling in a bitter, mocking smile. “What else can life hold for me now?” Fortunately, his parents, who had seen him through a previous seizure in which he had identified himself with William S. Hart, were equipped to deal with his vagaries. They toned up his system with syrup of figs, burned his library card, and bought a second-hand accordion to distract him. Within a week, his distraction and that of the neighbors were so complete that the library card was hastily restored and the instrument disposed of—the latter no minor feat, as anyone knows who has ever tried to burn an accordion.
Not long ago, in a moment of nostalgia laced with masochism, it occurred to me to expose myself again to Miss Glyn’s classic and see whether the years had diluted its potency. The only vivid recollection I preserved of the story was one of a sultry enchantress lolling on a tiger skin. I realized why the image had persisted when I ultimately tracked down a copy of the book. It was illustrated with scenes from the photoplay production Samuel Goldwyn gave it in 1924, and on the dust jacket, peering seductively at me across a snarling Indian man-eater, lay Aileen Pringle, mascaraed, braided, and palpitant with sex appeal. The very first page I sampled, before settling down to a leisurely feast, yielded a sweetmeat that corroborated my boyhood memory:
“A bright fire burnt in the grate, and some palest orchid-mauve silk curtains were drawn in the lady’s room when Paul entered from the terrace. And loveliest sight of all, in front of the fire, stretched at full length was his tiger—and on him—also at full length—reclined the lady, garbed in some strange clinging garment of heavy purple crêpe, its hem embroidered with gold, one white arm resting on the beast’s head, her back supported by a pile of the velvet cushions, and a heap of rarely bound books at her side, while between her lips was a rose not redder than they—an almost scarlet rose.” It was very small wonder that when I originally read this passage, my breathing became shallow and I felt as if the Berea College choir were grouped in the base of my skull singing gems from Amy Woodford-Finden. Even the author seems to have had some fleeting compunction after writing it, for she went on hastily, “It was not what one would expect to find in a sedate Swiss hotel.” If it thus affected Paul, you can guess what the impact was on Riverside, where our notion of barbaric splendor was a dish of fried eels.
Three Weeks touched off such a hullabaloo in England that, on its publication here, Miss Glyn wrote an exasperated preface for American readers, enjoining them to consider the spiritual rather than the fleshly aspects of her romance. “The minds of some human beings,” she declared scornfully, “are as moles, grubbing in the earth for worms. . . . To such Three Weeks will be but a sensual record of passion.” The real story, however, she explained, was the purifying effect upon a callow young Englishman of his gambol with a heroine whom Miss Glyn likened to a tiger (a simile she milked pretty exhaustively before the whistle blew) and described as “a great splendid nature, full of the passionate realization of primitive instincts, immensely cultivated, polished, blasé.” She concluded her message with a request I am sure every novelist has longed to make at one time or another, and would if he had the courage: “And to all who read, I say—at least be just! and do not skip. No line is written without its having a bearing on the next, and in its small scope helping to make the presentment of these two human beings vivid and clear.” I took the entreaty so much to heart that every last asterisk of Three Weeks was literally engraved on my brain, which, after two hundred and ninety pulsating pages, must have borne a striking resemblance to an old bath sponge peppered with buckshot.
The situation that obtains at the opening of Miss Glyn’s fable, in all honesty, does not rank among the dizzier flights of the human imagination, but, in the vulgate of Vine Street, it’s a springboard, and what the hell. Paul Verdayne, twenty-two years old, devastatingly handsome, and filthy with the stuff, has been dispatched by his elders on a tour of the Continent to cure his infatuation for a vicar’s daughter. Nature, it appears, has been rather more bountiful to Paul’s body and purse than to his intellect; above the ears, speaking bluntly, the boy is strictly tapioca. As the curtain rises on what is to be the most electrifying episode of his life, he is discovered moodily dining at a hotel in Lucerne and cursing his destiny. Suddenly, there comes to his nostrils the scent of tuberoses, and a lady materializes at the next table. At first, her exquisite beauty and sensuous elegance are lost on him; then, as she proceeds to sup on caviar, a blue trout, selle d’agneau au lait, a nectarine, and Imperial Tokay, he perceives he is face to face with a thoroughbred, and the old familiar mixture of fire and ice begins stirring in his veins. Without any sign that she has noticed his presence, she glides out, overwhelming the young man with her figure: “ ‘She must have the smallest possible bones,’ Paul said to himself, ‘because it looks all curvy and soft, and yet she is as slender as a gazelle.’ ” On a diet like the foregoing, I wouldn’t give odds the lady would stay gazelle-slender perpetually, but perhaps her metabolism was as unusual as her charm. In any case, there is, as everyone is aware, a standard procedure for those smitten by mysterious sirens smelling of tuberoses; namely, to smoke a cigar pensively on the terrace, soothe one’s fevered senses, and await developments. Paul faithfully adheres to the convention, and at length the lady, presumably having nullified gastritis with a fast Pepto-Bismol, slithers out onto her balcony and casts him a languishing glance. From that point on, it is sauve-qui-peut and prudent readers will do well to hold Three Weeks at arm’s length, unless they want to be cut by flying adjectives.
In the ensuing forty-eight hours, Mme. Zalenska, as Paul ascertains her name to be from the register, plays a hole-and-corner game with her caballero, ogling him from behind beech trees, undulating past him in hotel corridors, and generally raising the deuce with his aplomb. Finally, when she has reduced him to the consistency of jellied consommé, she summons him to her suite for a short midnight powwow. The décor is properly titillating and, inevitably, includes Miss Glyn’s favorite carnivore: “The lights were low and shaded, and a great couch filled one side of the room beyond the fireplace. Such a couch! covered with a tiger skin and piled with pillows, all shades of rich purple velvet and silk, embroidered with silver and gold—unlike any pillows he had ever seen before, even to their shapes.” Paul, in his pitiable innocence, assumes he has been called to render some neighborly service, like installing a new Welsbach mantle or cobbling Zalenska’s shoes. Actually, she wishes to warn him how lethal she is:
“ ‘Look at me,’ she said, and she bent forward over him—a gliding feline movement infinitely sinuous and attractive. . . . Her eyes in their narrowed lids gleamed at him, seeming to penetrate into his very soul. . . . Suddenly she sprang up, one of those fine movements of hers, full of cat-like grace. ‘Paul,’ she said . . . and she spoke rather fast. ‘You are so young, so young—and I shall hurt you—probably. Won’t you go now—while there is yet time? Away from Lucerne, back to Paris—even back to England. Anywhere away from me.’ ” Had Paul, at this juncture, slipped into his reefer and whistled for a fiacre, it might have saved both him and me considerable anguish, but Miss Glyn’s royalties certainly would have been stricken with anemia. He therefore gallantly confides his heart into the lady’s custody, snatches up an armful of tuberoses, and retires to the terrace to stride up and down until dawn, soothing his fevered senses. This is technically known in Publishers’ Row as a tease play or the punch retarded, a stratagem designed to keep the savages guessing.
In a brief pastoral interlude next day, idling about the lake in a luxurious motor launch heaped with even stranger pillows and dialogue, Mme. Zalenska’s mood is alternately maternal and bombastic. “I wish to be foolish today, Paul,” she says (a program she achieves with notable success), “and see your eyes dance, and watch the light on your curls.” His ardor becomes well-nigh unendurable when, before teatime, she bends over him with the tantalizing comment “Great blue eyes! So pretty, so pretty!,” and he hoarsely begs her for instruction in the art of love. Her orotund answer sets the placid bosom of the lake rippling: “Yes, I will teach you! Teach you a number of things. Together we will put on the hat of darkness and go down into Hades. We shall taste the apples of the Hesperides—we will rob Mercure of his sandals—and Gyges of his ring.” Just as the steam is bubbling in Paul’s gauges, however, Mme. Zalenska laughingly twists out of his grasp, and another sequence ends with the poor schlemiel patrolling his beat on the terrace. Whatever deficiencies of logic the author may display on occasion, she surely cannot be accused of hurrying her climax.
The spark that ignites the tinder, oddly enough, is a gift Paul purchases for his affinity—one of those characteristic souvenirs that litter sedate Swiss hotels, a tiger skin. “It was not even dear as tigers go, and his parents had given him ample money for any follies.” Sprawled out on it, strange greenish flames radiating from her pupils, Mme. Zalenska goads the boy to the brink of neurasthenia by withholding the tuition she promised and proposing in its stead a literary debauch. “ ‘Paul,’ she cooed plaintively, ‘tomorrow I shall be reasonable again, perhaps, and human, but today I am capricious and wayward, and mustn’t be teased. I want to read about Cupid and Psyche from this wonderful Golden Ass of Apuleius—just a simple tale for a wet day—and you and—me!’ ” By then, though, the lad in his own stumble-foot fashion has evolved a more piquant formula for passing a rainy day, and, with a prodigious amount of whinnying, purring, gurgling, and squealing, the education of Paul Verdayne swings into its initial phase.
How high a voltage the protagonists generate in the two remaining weeks of their affair, I cannot state with precision; the dial on my galvanometer burst shortly afterward, during a scene where they are shown cradled in a hotel on the Bürgenstock, exchanging baby talk and feeding each other great, luscious red strawberries. At Venice, to which they migrate for no stringent reason except that the author wanted to ring in a vignette of Mme. Zalenska biting Paul’s ear lobes in a gondola, there is an account of their pleasure dome that deserves attention:
“The whole place had been converted into a bower of roses. The walls were entirely covered with them. A great couch of deepest red ones was at one side, fixed in such masses as to be quite resisting and firm. From the roof chains of roses hung, concealing small lights—while from above the screen of lilac-bushes in full bloom the moon in all her glory mingled with the rose-shaded lamps and cast a glamour and unreality over the whole. . . . The dinner was laid on a table in the center, and the table was covered with tuberoses and stephanotis, surrounding the cupid fountain of perfume.”
And now the plot, hitherto snowed under by suchlike verdant Katzenjammer, refuses any longer to be denied. Awakening one noonday from his finals, which he has evidently passed summa cum laude, Paul finds a farewell note from his coach, setting forth that they must part forever, inasmuch as sinister forces in her background endanger both their lives. There have been sketchy intimations earlier that Mme. Zalenska is some sort of empress on a toot, or at least a margravine, and Paul has observed several dubious Muscovites tailing them around St. Mark’s but, in his exaltation, has dismissed them as phantoms induced by overwork. The realization that he is henceforth cut off from postgraduate study exerts its traditional effect, and he goes down like a poled ox. By the time Sir Charles, his father, has arrived bearing cold compresses and beef tea, Paul lies between life and death, madly raving with brain fever. His convalescence, of course, follows the mandatory pattern—the Adriatic cruise aboard a convenient yacht, the Byronic soliloquies in the moonlight, and, back in England, the solitary rambles on the moors with the devoted rough-coated terrier. As time assuages his grief, a new Paul re-enters British society, older, fluent, worldly-wise. He prepares to stand for Parliament, scores a brilliant social success: “He began to be known as someone worth listening to by men, and women hung on his words. . . . And then his complete indifference to them piqued and allured them still more. Always polite and chivalrous, but as aloof as a mountain top.” I don’t want to sound vindictive, but can you imagine asking a man like that to scoot over to the hardware store for ten cents’ worth of fly rolls? That’s the kind of thing I was up against on Narragansett Bay thirty years ago.
The rest of Three Weeks is soon told, although not soon enough, frankly, by Miss Glyn, who consumes fifty marshmallow-filled pages to accomplish what she might have in two. After an endless amount of palaver, she discloses that Paul’s and Zalenska’s seminar has resulted in a bonny little cub and that, for all their pledges of devotion, the lovers are never reunited. The latter oversight is excused by as nimble a washup as you will find anywhere in the post-Victorian novel: “Everyone knows the story which at the time convulsed Europe. How a certain evil-living King, after a wild orgie of mad drunkenness, rode out with two boon companions to the villa of his Queen, and there, forcing an entrance, ran a dagger through her heart before her faithful servants could protect her. And most people were glad, too, that this brute paid the penalty of his crime by his own death—his worthless life choked out of him by the Queen’s devoted Kalmuck groom.” This salubrious housecleaning elevates the tot to the throne, and as the book ends, Paul kneels in the royal chapel before the boy, quivering with paternal pride and chauvinism: “The tiny upright figure in its blue velvet suit, heavily trimmed with sable, standing there proudly. A fair, rosy-cheeked, golden-haired English child . . . And as he gazed at his little son, while the organ pealed out a Te Deum and the sweet choir sang, a great rush of tenderness filled Paul’s heart, and melted forever the icebergs of grief and pain.”
A few hours after finishing Three Weeks, there came to me out of the blue a superb concept for a romantic novel, upon which I have been laboring like a demon ever since. In essence, it is the story of an incredibly handsome and wealthy youth of forty-four whose wife and children, dismayed by his infatuation for servant-girl literature, pack him off to Switzerland. There he meets and falls in love with a ravishing twenty-three-year-old girl, half tigress and half publisher. The tigress in her fascinates him at the same time that the publisher revolts him, and out of this ambivalence, so to speak, grows the conflict. . . . But why am I telling you all this? I can see you’re really not listening.