How Ruritanian Can You Get?

I trust I may be spared the accusation of being an old fogy, but prices these days are really unconscionable. As recently as 1918, it was possible for a housewife in Providence, where I grew up, to march into a store with a five-­cent piece, purchase a firkin of cocoa butter, a good second-­hand copy of Bowditch, a hundredweight of quahogs, a shagreen spectacle case, and sufficient nainsook for a corset cover, and emerge with enough left over to buy a balcony admission to The Masquerader, with Guy Bates Post, and a box of maxixe cherries. What the foregoing would cost her today I shudder to think; one fairly affluent Rhode Islander I met last summer confessed to me that he simply could not afford a pat of cocoa butter for his nose, and as for corset covers, his wife just threw up her hands. Along with the necessities of life, labor in the early twenties was unbelievably abundant and cheap. Imagine, for example, being able to hire the recording secretary of the Classical High School debating society—a man whose mordant irony reminded his auditors of Disraeli and Brann the Iconoclast, although he had scarcely turned sixteen—to sift your ashes and beat your carpets at thirty cents an hour. Even I find it almost too fantastic to credit, and, mind you, I was the recording secretary.

It was while sifting and beating about the home of a Providence chatelaine one spring afternoon that I came into possession of a book that was to exert a powerful influence on me for a long time to come. In a totally inexplicable burst of generosity, my employer, an odious Gorgon in brown bombazine, presented me with an armload of novels that had been moldering in her storeroom more than a decade. Among them, I recall, were such mellow favorites as V.V.’s Eyes, by Henry Sydnor Harrison; Satan Sanderson and A Furnace of Earth, by Hallie Erminie Rives; William J. Locke’s The Beloved Vagabond; The Goose Girl, by Harold MacGrath; and Graustark, George Barr McCutcheon’s best-­seller published at the turn of the century. Curled up in my den on a mound of pillows covered with the flags of all nations, I consumed the lot in a single evening, buffeted by emotional typhoons so tempestuous that the family twice broke down the door to discover the cause of my spectacular groans and sighs. The one that gave me the most lasting belt was Graustark. Not since Janvier’s masterly In the Sargasso Sea, a thrilling saga of the adventures of two boys mired in the North Atlantic kelp, had I read a story charged with such arresting characters and locales, such bravado and rollicking high humor. As I sped with Grenfall Lorry from our Western plains to the crags of Edelweiss in his mad pursuit of the beauteous Miss Guggen­slocker, it seemed to me that for sheer plot invention and felicity of phrase McCutcheon must forever dwarf any other novelist in the language. For at least a fortnight afterward, I patterned myself on his insouciant hero, spouting jaunty witticisms like “You tell ’em, goldfish, you’ve been around the globe” and behaving with a nervous hilarity that sent acquaintances scuttling around corners at my approach.

Several months back, I was sequestered over a rainy weekend in a cottage at Martha’s Vineyard whose resources consisted of a crokinole board and half a dozen romances of the vintage of those mentioned above. By an electrifying coincidence, the first one I cracked turned out to be Graustark. Our reunion, like most, left something to be desired. I do not think I had changed particularly; perhaps my reflexes were a little less elastic, so I often had to backtrack forty or fifty pages to pick up the thread, and occasionally I fell into a light reverie between chapters, but in the main my mind had lost none of its vacuity and was still as supple as a moist gingersnap. Graustark, on the other hand, had altered almost beyond recognition. During the twenty-­eight intervening years, it was apparent, some poltergeist had sneaked in and curdled the motivation, converted the hero into an insufferable jackanapes, drawn mustaches on the ladies of the piece, and generally sprinkled sneeze powder over the derring-­do. Of course, mine was a purely personal reaction, and the average bobby-­soxer reading it for the first time would doubtless disagree, but, as they say on the outer boulevards, chacun à son goo.

The principals of Graustark—a wealthy young American sportsman named Grenfall Lorry and a fair blue-­blood traveling, under the laborious incognito of Sophia Guggenslocker, with her aunt and uncle—meet at the outset in this country aboard a transcontinental express, a setting subsequently much favored by the Messrs. Ambler, Greene, and Hitchcock in their entertainments. Apart from this footling resemblance, though, McCutcheon lacks any visible kinship with those masters of suspense; for instance, he jealously withholds the secret of his heroine’s identity for a hundred and fifty-­five glutinous pages, long past the point where you care whether she is the Princess Yetive of Graustark or Hop-­o’-­My-­Thumb. Lorry is the type of popinjay who was ubiquitous in the novels of the nineteen-­hundreds but has largely disappeared from current fiction. He has been everywhere, done everything; he has an income “that had withstood both the Maison Dorée and a dahabeah on the Nile,” and, as the author explains in as natty a syllepsis as you will find in a month’s hard search through Fowler, “he had fished through Norway and hunted in India, and shot everything from grouse on the Scottish moors to the rapids above Assouan.” He is, in fine, a pretty speedy customer, and the photographs of him in the text, taken from the play version, confirm it. Even if his toupee is askew and his pepper-­and-­salt trousers are so baggy in the seat as to suggest that he is concealing a brace of grouse, Grenfall Lorry is a cove to be reckoned with.

In accordance with the usual ground rules, Miss Guggenslocker’s dimples effectively snare Lorry as their train chuffs out of Denver, and he sets himself to further their acquaintance through a number of ruses too roguish to be exhumed. That she is not wholly oblivious is evidenced as he vaults aboard the carriage after a brief stop: “There was an expression of anxiety in her eyes as he looked up into them, followed instantly by one of relief. . . . She had seen him swing upon the moving steps and had feared for his safety—had shown in her glorious face that she was glad he did not fall beneath the wheels.” This display of feeling, while not quite tantamount to an invitation to creep into her sleeping bag, nevertheless heartens Lorry and he perseveres. His opportunity comes when the two of them, through an elephantine convolution of the plot, are temporarily marooned in a mining town in the Alleghenies. Frenziedly careering through mountain passes in an ancient stage, Lorry assists the lady in rejoining the train, learns she is a Graustarkian, and, in the course of their intimacy, revs himself up to a rather alarming pitch of emotion: “Her sweet voice went tingling to his toes with every word she uttered. He was in a daze, out of which sung the mad wish that he might clasp her in his arms, kiss her, and then go tumbling down the mountain.” Safe again on the flier, Miss Guggenslocker commends him to her party for his gallantry but in the next breath dashes his hopes; she is about to sail for home on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. They share an idyllic afternoon of sightseeing in Washington (during which they glimpse President Cleveland taking a constitutional, a sight that mysteriously evokes a ringing eulogy on our democratic process) and part with Lorry’s fierce assurance that he will someday follow her to Graustark—possibly the most paltry bon-­voyage gift ever tendered a girl in the history of the American novel.

For the sake of brevity, a virtue McCutcheon cannot be said to have held in idolatry, we may dust lightly over Lorry’s Sturm und Drang in the months that follow, his departure for Graustark, and his arrival in Edelweiss, the capital of that country, in the company of Harry Anguish, an ex-­Harvard classmate as painfully blithe as himself. The profundity and broad social tolerance of the latter can be gauged from his reactions as they near Edelweiss, the capital: “I’ll be glad when we can step into a decent hotel, have a rub, and feel like white men once more. I am beginning to feel like those dirty Slavs and Huns we saw ’way back there.” The search for Lorry’s inamorata leads them to the chief of police, a Baron Dangloss, whose name appears to be a suspicious hybrid of Danglers, in The Count of Monte Cristo, and Pangloss, the philosopher of Candide, though he has none of the savor of either. Dangloss foxily pretends not to know who Miss Guggenslocker is, and Lorry is on the verge of defenestrating himself when he spies her in a royal carriage guarded by footmen and outriders. To his dismay, she drives on with only the most casual sign of recognition, but inside the hour a groom arrives with a note bidding him to call on her the next day. As Lorry, still without any suspicion of her actual identity, ponders these baffling developments, his colleague offers a deduction right out of 221B Baker Street. “I’ll tell you what I’ve worked out during the past two minutes,” he announces portentously. “Her name is no more Guggenslocker than mine is. She and the uncle used that name as a blind.” It is plain as day that there are no flies on Harry Anguish. Those little black specks you see are merely vertigo.

Before the scheduled meeting can take place, the plot suddenly puts forth a series of tendrils and strangles the reader like a tropical liana. Strolling under the castle walls that evening, Lorry and Anguish overhear a design to abduct Princess Yetive. Conveniently for them, the conspirators couch it in a language they can grasp: “We must be careful to speak only in English. There are not twenty people in Edelweiss who understand it, but the night has ears.” Ensues a sequence bristling with muffled oaths, judo, and chloroform, at the end of which Lorry bilks the kidnapers and discovers Miss Guggenslocker to be the Princess Yetive. What with the impact of this thunderbolt and a felonious blow on the sconce, he falls senseless, and spends the following chapter being nursed back to health by his royal sweetheart. Instead of their developing the rapport one would normally expect, though, it now transpires that Yetive’s throne stands between the lovers; their dialogue resounds with echoing periods like “I find a princess and lose a woman!” and “The walls which surround the heart of a princess are black and grim, impenetrable when she defends it, my boasting American.” There is, in addition, a whole labyrinthine complex of political reasons why Graustark girl and Melican boy may not fuse at the moment, and, reining his narrative back on its haunches, McCutcheon proceeds to catalogue them with all the exhaustive detail of a Gibbon or a Macaulay.

Boiled down to their marrow, it seems that Graustark, in consequence of a disastrous war with Axphain, a bordering state, owes its neighbors twenty-­five million gavvos it cannot pay. Bankruptcy and dishonor face the nation, and Yetive, who is de-­facto ruler, is nearly beside herself with anxiety. “Her Royal Highness,” Lorry is told by Count Halfont, her uncle, “spent the evening with the ministers of finance and war, and her poor head, I doubt not, is racking from the effects of the consultation. These are weighty matters for a girl to have on her hands.” Eventually, Yetive’s head stops racking, and she agrees to marry Lorenz of Axphain to lift the mortgage, notwithstanding Lorry’s reproaches and tantrums. The second the betrothal is announced, a chain of fictional firecrackers begins exploding. Lorenz of Axphain, a debauchee and wastrel, utters a coarse jape about Yetive in a saloon, sustains a haymaker from Lorry, and demands satisfaction under the code. Just before the duel, he is found murdered; Lorry is accused, on circumstantial evidence, and is flung into poky. His release is effected by a bosomy hussar with a piping voice and a strangely reminiscent perfume, who persists in shielding her face as they flee in a carriage. Lorry, hardly what might be called the intuitive sort, at last surrenders to curiosity and insists on seeing his benefactor’s features: “Below the arm that hid the eyes and nose he saw parted lips and a beardless, dainty chin; above, long, dark tresses strayed in condemning confusion. The breast beneath the blue coat heaved convulsively.” In the next moment, the soldier melts into the fugitive’s arms and the prose into nougat: “The lithe form quivered and then became motionless in the fierce, straining embrace; the head dropped upon his shoulder, his hot lips caressing the burning face and pouring wild, incoherent words into the little ears. ‘You! You!’ he cried, mad with joy. ‘Oh, this is Heaven itself! My brave darling! Mine forever—mine forever! You shall never leave me now! Drive on! Drive on!’ he shouted to the men outside, drunk with happiness. ‘We’ll make this journey endless. I know you love me now—I know it! God, I shall die with joy!’ ” The degree of fever this passage induced in me at sixteen was so intense that steam issued from my ears and I repeatedly had to sluice myself down with ice water. At forty-­four, while it is true my breathing grew increasingly stertorous, it was marked by a rhythmical whistling sound, and had a cigarette not fallen on my chest in the nick of time, I would still be hibernating on Martha’s Vineyard, and nobody the wiser.

It would be permissible to suppose that Lorry and his sugarplum are now ready for the orange blossoms and flat silver, but anyone who did so would indulge in wishful thinking. Yetive, stashing her beau at a monastery until he cools off officially and personally, returns to confront problems of state. The enraged Axphainians insist on Harry Anguish’s being held as a hostage, and finally propose to remit the national tribute if Lorry is captured and executed. Meanwhile, as if to further befog his lens, the author whips in yet another complication, a satanic toad of a monarch named Gabriel of Dawsbergen, likewise hungry for Yetive and prepared to square the debt in exchange for her hand. The whole fragrant chowder comes to a boil when Lorry steals back to visit the Princess, is surprised in her boudoir by the aforementioned Gabriel, and is blackmailed into giving himself up. Ultimately, in a climactic scene that travels with the speed of library paste, Gabriel is publicly unmasked by Anguish as both the assassin of Lorenz and the engineer of the scheme to snatch Yetive, and Axphain generously agrees to laugh off the horrid old indemnity that has been animating the plot. Amid popular rejoicing, Yetive persuades her ministers to accept Lorry as prince consort, Anguish and a countess he has been spoony on pair off, and as the book slips from one’s nerveless fingers the foursome leaves in a shower of ennui for Washington, D.C.

I forget exactly what Eastern religion it is, whether Buddhism or Taoism, that holds that life is entirely a series of repetitions and that everything we experience has happened before. If I ever doubted it, it was proved overpoweringly that afternoon on the Vineyard. Within ten minutes after I finished rereading Graustark, a sensitive young kid on the order of Barbara LaMarr knocked timidly on the door and offered to sift my ashes or beat the carpets for a simply laughable fee. Inasmuch as I was only a house guest, I had no need of her services, but I presented her with a novel that had been moldering on my chest all day, and you’ve never seen anyone so bowled over. Poor thing broke down, and if I hadn’t caught her in time, I believe she would have fainted; upon my soul I do. I was pretty moved myself—one of those cases where the gift enriches the giver as well, I guess. Oh, pshaw, you mustn’t mind my running on. I act this way every time I get near one of those mythical kingdoms.