Part 1 (1/2)
Vagaries.
by Axel Munthe.
PREFACE
He who has written these pages is no author; his life belongs to reality, and does not leave him any peace for indulging in fiction, and, besides, he has for nearly twenty years limited his best thoughts and efforts to that special authors.h.i.+p which has for its only public apothecaries. He thought it very easy and refres.h.i.+ng to write this little book. The only difficulty about it has been to find a t.i.tle, for it turned out that, when confronted with this problem, neither the writer nor any of the friends he consulted could say what stuff it was that the book was made of--was it essays, stories, or what? Essays is much too important a word for me to use, and stories it certainly is not, for I cannot remember having ever tried to invent anything.
Besides, isn't it so that in a story something always happens--and here, as a rule, very little seems to me to happen. I do not know, but can it be that it is life itself which ”happens” in these pages, life as seen by an individual who can but try to be as the Immortal G.o.ds created him, since conventionality long ago has given up in despair all hope of licking him into shape?
Now I want to tell you what made me publish this book--what made me write it cannot interest you. One day I found sitting in my consulting-room a young lady with a huge parcel on her knee. I asked her what I could do for her, and she began by telling me a long tale of woe about herself. She said that nothing interested her, nothing amused her, she was bored to death by everything and everybody. She could get anything she wished to have, she could go anywhere she liked, but she did not wish for anything, she did not want to go anywhere.
Her life was pa.s.sed in idle luxury, useless to herself and to everybody else, said she. Her parents had ended by dragging her from one physician to another: one had prescribed Egypt, where they had spent the whole winter; another Cannes, where they had bought a big villa; a third India and j.a.pan, which they had visited in their fine yacht. ”But you are the only doctor who has done me any good,” she said. ”I have felt more happiness during this past week than I have done for years. I owe it to you, and I have come to thank you for it.” She began rapidly to unfasten her parcel, and I stared at her in amazement while she produced from it one big doll after another, and quite unceremoniously placed them in a row on my writing-table amongst all my books and papers. There were twelve dolls in all, and you never saw such dolls. Some of them were dressed in well-fitting tailor-made jackets and skirts; some were evidently off for a yachting trip in blue serge suits and sailor hats; some wore smart silk dresses covered with lace and frills, and hats trimmed with huge ostrich feathers; and some looked as if they had only just returned from the Queen's Drawing-room.
I am accustomed to have queer people in my consulting-room, and I thought I noticed something glistening in her eyes. ”You see, Doctor,”
said she with uncertain voice, ”I never thought I could be of any good to anybody. I used to send money to charities at home, but all I did was to write out a cheque, and I cannot say I ever felt the slightest satisfaction in doing it. The other day I happened to come across that article about Toys in an old _Blackwood's Magazine_,[1] and since then I have been working from morning till evening to dress up all these dolls for the poor children you spoke about. I have done it all by myself, and I have felt so strangely happy the whole time.”
And I, who had forgotten all about this little escapade from the toil of my everyday life, I looked at the sweet face smiling through the tears, I looked at the long row of dolls who stared approvingly at me from among all my medical paraphernalia on the writing-table. And for the first and last time in my life did I feel the ineffable joy of literary triumph, for the first and last time in my life did I feel that mystic power of being able to move others.
A smart carriage was waiting for her at the door, but we sent it away, and I put the kind donor and some of her dolls in a cab, and I remember we went to see Petruccio. I could see by her shyness that it was the first time she had entered the home of the poor. She gave each child a magnificent doll, and she blushed with delight when she saw the little sisters' beaming faces and heard the poor mother's ”G.o.d bless you!”
Hardly had a week pa.s.sed before she brought me another dozen of dolls, and twelve more sick and dest.i.tute children forgot all about their misery. At Christmas I got up a big festa at the Jardin-des-Plantes quarter, where most of the poor Italians live, and the Christmas-tree was loaded with dolls of all sizes and descriptions. She went on bringing me more and more dolls, and there came a time when I did not know what to do with them, for I had more dolls than patients. Every chair and table in my rooms was occupied by a doll, and people asked me to show them ”the dear children,” and when I told them I was a bachelor and had not got any they would not believe me. To tell you the truth, when spring came I sent the lady to St. Moritz for change of air. I have never seen her since, but should she come across this book she may know that it was she and her dolls who decided its publication, and it is in her honour I have given the Toy article the first place.
There is nothing like success. Some time ago I received a letter from a man I do not know, who wrote me that he was the mayor of a large town.
He said that after having read a little paper called ”For those who love Music”[2] he had revoked the order which forbade organ-grinders to play in the streets of his town, and had told his children always to give the old man a penny, for ”perhaps it is Don Gaetano!” I admit I was immensely flattered by this, and in honour of the kind mayor I have placed his paper second.
But is this to be the end of my literary fame, or will any other laurel-leaf mark some hitherto unpublished page of this volume? What about ”Blackc.o.c.k-shooting”? Will ever an English mother write to me that she is teaching her son that he can grow up every inch a man without having ever killed a half-tame pheasant or a grouse, or stealthily crept up to murder a beautiful stag?
I have not heard from the Germans in Capri yet, but when that letter comes I believe my literary ambition will have reached its zenith, and that I shall relapse into silence again.
Rome, _Spring_ 1898.
[Footnote 1: ”Toys, from the Paris Horizon” was published in _Blackwood_ several years ago.]
[Footnote 2: This article was printed in _Murray's Magazine_ several years ago.]
VAGARIES
TOYS
FROM THE PARIS HORIZON
In Paris the New Year is awakened by the laughter of children, the dawn of its first day glows in rosy joy on small round cheeks, and lit up by the light from children's sparkling eyes, the curtain rises upon the fairy world of toys.
This world of toys is a faithful miniature of our own, the same perpetual evolution, the same struggle for existence, goes on there as here. Types rise and vanish just as with us; the strongest and best-fitted individuals survive, defying time, whilst the weaker and less gifted are supplanted and die out.
To the former, for instance, belongs the doll, whose individual type centuries may have modified, but whose idea is eternal, whose soul lives on with the imperishable youth of the G.o.ds. The doll is thousands of years old; it has been found in the graves of little Roman children, and the archaeologists of coming generations will find it amongst the remains of our culture. The children of Pompeii and Herculaneum used to trundle hoops just as you and I did when we were small, and who knows whether the rocking-horse on which we rode as boys is not a lineal descendant of that proud charger into whose wooden flanks the children of Francis I.
dug their heels. The drum is also inaccessible to the variation of time; through centuries it has beaten the Christmas and New Year's day's reveille in the nursery to the battles of the tin-soldiers, and it will continue to beat as long as there are boys' arms to wield the drum-sticks and grown-up people's tympanums to be deafened. The tin-soldier views the future with calm; he will not lay down his arms until the day of the general disarmament, and we are still a long way from universal peace. Neither will the toy-sword disappear; it is the nursery-symbol of the ineradicable vice of our race, the l.u.s.t for fighting. Foolscap-crowned and bell-ringing harlequins will also defy time; they will exist in the toy-world as long as there are fools in our world. Gold-laced knights with big swords at their sides, curly-locked princesses with satin shoes on dainty feet, stalwart musketeers with top boots and big moustachios--all are types which still hold their own pretty well. The j.a.panese doll is as yet young, but a brilliant future lies before her.