The Essential Booth Tarkington Collection. Booth Tarkington
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have told you that I carried no placard, that my costume was elegant, my demeanour modest in all degree.
"How, then, this excitement?" would be your disposition to inquire. "Why this sensation?"
It is very simple. My hair had been shaved off, all over my ears, leaving only a little above the back of the neck, to give an appearance of far-reaching baldness, and on my head was painted, in ah! so brilliant letters of distinctness:
Theatre
Folie-Rouge
Revue
de
Printemps
Tous les Soirs
Such was the necessity to which I was at that time reduced! One has heard that the North Americans invent the most singular advertising, but I will not believe they surpass the Parisian. Myself, I say I cannot express my sufferings under the notation of the crowds that moved about the Cafe' de la Paix! The French are a terrible people when they laugh sincerely. It is not so much the amusing things which cause them amusement; it is often the strange, those contrasts which contain something horrible, and when they laugh there is too frequently some person who is uncomfortable or wicked. I am glad that I was born not a Frenchman; I should regret to be native to a country where they invent such things as I was doing in the Place de l'Opera; for, as I tell you, the idea was not mine.
As I sat with my eyes drooping before the gaze of my terrible and applauding audiences, how I mentally formed cursing words against the day when my misfortunes led me to apply at the Theatre Folie-Rouge for work! I had expected an audition and a role of comedy in the Revue; for, perhaps lacking any experience of the stage, I am a Neapolitan by birth, though a resident of the Continent at large since the age of fifteen. All Neapolitans can act; all are actors; comedians of the greatest, as every traveller is cognizant. There is a thing in the air of our beautiful slopes which makes the people of a great instinctive musicalness and deceptiveness, with passions like those burning in the old mountain we have there. They are ready to play, to sing--or to explode, yet, imitating that amusing Vesuvio, they never do this last when you are in expectancy, or, as a spectator, hopeful of it.
How could any person wonder, then, that I, finding myself suddenly destitute in Paris, should apply at the theatres? One after another, I saw myself no farther than the director's door, until (having had no more to eat the day preceding than three green almonds, which I took from a cart while the good female was not looking) I reached the Folie-Rouge. Here I was astonished to find a polite reception from the director. It eventuated that they wished for a person appearing like myself a person whom they would outfit with clothes of quality in all parts, whose external presented a gentleman of the great world, not merely of one the galant-uomini, but who would impart an air to a table at a cafe' where he might sit and partake. The contrast of this with the emplacement of the establishment on his bald head-top was to be the success of the idea. It was plain that I had no baldness, my hair being very thick and I but twenty-four years of age, when it was explained that my hair could be shaved. They asked me to accept, alas! not a part in the Revue, but a specialty as a sandwich-man. Knowing the English tongue as I do, I may afford the venturesomeness to play upon it a little: I asked for bread, and they offered me not a role, but a sandwich!
It must be undoubted that I possessed not the disposition to make any fun with my accomplishments during those days that I spent under the awning of the Cafe' de la Paix. I had consented to be the advertisement in greatest desperation, and not considering what the reality would be. Having consented, honour compelled that I fulfil to the ending. Also, the costume and outfittings I wore were part of my emolument. They had been constructed for me by the finest tailor; and though I had impulses, often, to leap up and fight through the noisy ones about me and run far to the open country, the very garments I wore were fetters binding me to remain and suffer. It seemed to me that the hours were spent not in the centre of a ring of human persons, but of un-well-made pantaloons and ugly skirts. Yet all of these pantaloons and skirts had such scrutinous eyes and expressions of mirth to laugh like demons at my conscious, burning, painted head; eyes which spread out, astonished at the sight of me, and peered and winked and grinned from the big wrinkles above the gaiters of Zouaves, from the red breeches of the gendarmes, the knickerbockers of the cyclists, the white ducks of sergents de ville, and the knees of the boulevardiers, bagged with sitting cross-legged at the little tables. I could not escape these eyes;--how scornfully they twinkled at me from the spurred and glittering officers' boots! How with amaze from the American and English trousers, both turned up and creased like folded paper, both with some dislike for each other but for all other trousers more.
It was only at such times when the mortifications to appear so greatly embarrassed became stronger than the embarrassment itself that I could by will power force my head to a straight construction and look out upon my spectators firmly. On the second day of my ordeal, so facing the laughers, I found myself facing straight into the monocle of my half-brother and ill-wisher, Prince Caravacioli.
At this, my agitation was sudden and very great, for there was no one I wished to prevent perceiving my condition more than that old Antonio Caravacioli! I had not known that he was in Paris, but I could have no doubt it was himself: the monocle, the handsome nose, the toupee', the yellow skin, the dyed-black moustache, the splendid height--it was indeed Caravacioli! He was costumed for the automobile, and threw but one glance at me as he crossed the pavement to his car, which was in waiting. There was no change, not of the faintest, in that frosted tragic mask of a countenance, and I was glad to think that he had not recognized me.
And yet, how strange that I should care, since all his life he had declined to recognize me as what I was! Ah, I should have been glad to shout his age, his dyes, his artificialities, to all the crowd, so to touch him where it would most pain him! For was he not the vainest man in the whole world? How well I knew his vulnerable point: the monstrous depth of his vanity in that pretense of youth which he preserved through superhuman pains and a genius of a valet, most excellently! I had much to pay Antonio for myself, more for my father, most for my mother. This was why that last of all the world I would have wished that old fortune-hunter to know how far I had been reduced!
Then I rejoiced about that change which my unreal baldness produced in me, giving me a look of forty years instead of twenty-four, so that my oldest friend must take at least three stares to know me. Also, my costume would disguise me from the few acquaintances I had in Paris (if they chanced to cross the Seine), as they had only seen me in the shabbiest; while, at my last meeting with Antonio, I had been as fine in the coat as now.
Yet my encouragement was not so joyful that my gaze lifted often. On the very last day, in the afternoon when my observances were most and noisiest, I lifted my eyes but once during the final half-hour--but such a one that was!
The edge of that beautiful grey pongee skirt came upon the lid of my lowered eyelid like a cool shadow over hot sand. A sergent had just made many of the people move away, so there remained only a thin ring of the laughing pantaloons about me, when this divine skirt presented its apparition to me. A pair of North-American trousers accompanied it, turned up to show the ankle-bones of a rich pair of stockings; neat, enthusiastic and humorous, I judged them to be; for, as one may discover, my only amusement during my martyrdom--if this misery can be said to possess such alleviatings--had been the study of feet, pantaloons, and skirts. The trousers in this case detained my observation no time. They were but the darkest corner of the chiaroscuro of a Rembrandt--the mellow glow of gold was all across the grey skirt.
How shall I explain myself, how make myself understood? Shall I be thought sentimentalistic or but mad when I declare that my first sight of the grey pongee skirt caused me a thrill of excitation, of tenderness, and--oh-i-me!--of self-consciousness more acute than all my former mortifications. It was so very different from all other skirts that had shown themselves to me those sad days, and you may understand that, though the pantaloons far outnumbered the skirts, many hundreds of the latter had also been objects of my gloomy observation.
This skirt, so unlike those which had passed, presented at once the qualifications of its superiority.