Let's Chat About Loudon!

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 206, 19 November 1927, Page 24 (Supplement)

Let's Chat About Loudon!

Pamela— on “Cabbages & Kings

(Written for THE SUN by

PAMELA TRAVERS

T is not because I have a new red dressinggown that looks like a tiger in a particularly bad temper that I have got up at three in the morning to write this

morning to write ima letter —simply because I could not go to sleep. Either It was the lobster sandwiches or the play I saw to-night —perhaps a mixture of both.

“The Silver Cord” pleased me very much. I would welcome any play that puts even its eyebrows up above the hollow, horrible rut into which the English stage has fallen —but “The Silver Cord” is head and shoulders, waist and feet above the rut. it comes from an American, Sidney Howard, and its theme is a beautiful punch in the eye for the sentimentalists. “The Silver Cord” is the cold that binds a mother to her son. Lilian Braithwaite as the mother who swamps her sons with the soft slime of sentiment, plays upon their feelings by protesting that her perfectly sound heart may cease to beat at any minute, and attempts to steal them from their wives by subtle insidious suggestions, gave a superb performance. It was so good that at the end when she came on to take a call there was hardly a clap. That was our dignified and refined imitation of the boos and hisses which the villain gets at the Elephant and Castle. Our disgusted silence was the greatest praise her acting could have had from us. The part of the wife who triumphs over the mother-in-law was played by Clare Eames —an American actress —and when I say actress I mean it in the widest and best sense. She could act. I have yet to see an English actress with such restraint and such repose and such hidden depths of fire and passion. Repose they have in abundance —but it is an easy quiet, a door closed against any influence from without rather than a door shut with difficulty upon the driving winds within. When these Americans are intelligent they are intelligent with a vengeance—full of virility of thought, abundance of suggestion and of a subtlety one onlylooks for in a Gaul or a Gael. I keep turning the play over and over on my mind like a bee sampling a peony’s pollen, and I think that, after all. this sleeplessness cannot be laid at the lobster's door —even if he has one.

I saw Pachmann and heard him play at the Albert Hall last Sunday. Eighty years old—alert and erect, full of vitality, the little old man came on to the stage. The broad brow, the smiling mobile face, the dreamful eyes—well, do you wonder that 1 cheered, too? But it seems that he has not come here to play—oh, no! Not yet, at any rate. He has come to gossip, has come like a child to tell you about himself. “See my hair—cut for the occasion. I myself like it long, but they say to me, “You must be tidy—many people are coming to see you.’ So I am lopped—for you. And my fingers—this one, see! He would not work. He would do nothing but stand up all the time like a policeman. But I have persuaded him—oh, yes, yes. He is a very good finger now—l teach him my own system of fingering. Not like the lady music-teacher tells you—hands out stiff like this. Bah! No! But like this—like nature, easy, supple —so. Quite, quite easy!” Ah! He sees the piano for the first time. Oh, but of course! It is music they want —-not gossip. He sits down and smiles, disarmingly, as though he has been very naughty but is good again now. He feels for the pedals that, have been blocked high so that his feet may reach them. And then he goes away—only his little black-coated body is there, his fingers as lissome as lambs in a field.

He comes to Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor, bowing tenderly over the keys, calling out their secrets. Then suddenly he throws up his arms and shouts, “Now for Brahms,” as one who has politely eaten a suitable portion of thin bread and butter cries,

“Now for the birthday cake!” He laughs all the way through the Walzermasken in F sharp major and then retires very reluctantly like a child whose bedtime has come at last. Each time he comes back he is more pleased. “Oho, I am being allowed to stay up a little longer.” At last the crowd rushes the platform surrounding the old man and his piano. He plays everything they ask for until the applause and the music and the stir in his heart draw him into tears. The gnarled hands are quiet and still upon the keys, he cannot play any more. They know it —all of them, and very quietly they get up and go away, leaving him there gazing at the black and white parchment on which he has written out his heart. We are now to be made slim

through the medium of the electric chair. Poundage reduced by voltage —as it were. Slimness by shocking. Plink —off goes a pound of avoirdupois. Plink—and the elephant becomes a sylph. 1 cannot tell you what it feels like as I am not, at the moment, in need of being shocked. Indeed, if I were I should probably fade away to nothing and a ghostly hand would write this letter to you every week from the underworld. And it is now possible, in France at any rate, to insure against the jockey falling off the horse you have backed. The money is only returned, however, if, in the words of the rule,

“a complete separation between horse and the body of the jockey occurs. The latter may continue to hold the reins but the cause must be independent of the will of the jockey.” This is all very pleasant. I wo.ider if I might, without being found guilty of corruption, request the jockey of the next horse I back to be good enough to fall off if he sees the horse has no hope of winning. I would, of course, insist that the “accident” occurred in some nice soft muddy spot

so that no harm should come to part or parts of the jockey. I offer this idea —without any thought of remuneration —-to all New Zealanders who frequent racecourses. Last week, when I was motoring through Falmouth —a sad drab little port, it seemed, with the night upon it —I saw a full-sailed ship coming into the harbour, her sails out thrust like the breast of a swan, her movement as quiet as a swan’s movement. At first I thought she was a ghost, come from some wreck in the Bay of Biscay or the Channel, but an elderly coastguard with a face like a walnut, hearing my surmise, told me it was the Discovery,” Scott’s ship home from a two years’ voyage in the Southern Seas. She looked too frail a thing to weather the icy storms and the cold seas of the South —she was like a fairy ship fit only for a cargo of Hans Andersen's dreams. And yet she has the salt of half the oceans of the world upon her keel, and she knows what it feels like to skim a sea that is as deep as Mont Blanc is high.

Dear Mr. F. E. Weatherley, who is known intimately in a million draw-ing-rooms throughout the Empire as a writer of “such sweet, human songs, my dear,” hac written yet another on the eve of his 79th birthday. He usually writes for the dear persons who coyly, after much persuasion, oblige mezzo-soprano-ly when an uncomfortable lull comes in the conversation. But this time he has given to the world a beautiful and poignant thing for which every baritone will rush. It is called “Glory Be To England," and I really must quote a verse for you! Gome rally up for England and sing a song with me, A song of all that England is and all she yet will be, A song that makes our pulses beat and keeps us proud and strong, And glory be to England, the land where we belong. By St. Christopher, that’s the beautiful song, so it is—making pulses beat and keeping us per-oud and ster-ong. Yet I could wish we had been given some soft feminine lay like those Sir Owen Seaman parodied so beautifully:— Sing me a song of poor children, darling, Get them to die in June, Wake if you can on the stair, darling, Echoes of ting slioon. And let the verses be few, darling, Stick to the rule of three, That is enough for you, darling, More than enough for me! There is a griffin in Fleet Street mounted upon a pedestal that holds also the sculptured figures of King Edward VII. and Queen Victoria. The griffin stands where Old Temple Bar used to stand —and to-day —out of very idle curiosity, I asked a constable where Old Temple Bar had gone*

“Away into the country—to Cheshunt,” he told me, and told me, too, that even the King had to knock at Temple Bar before the gates were opened to allow him to enter the City of London. Dear Christopher Wren built the Bar to replace the earlier gate destroyed in the great fire of London. So the policeman said. And then the odd thing happened. “Do you know,” he asked, “a person called Walter de la Mare?” I said that I knew his work. “Then,” he said, “you know ‘Up and Down.’ ” And looking up the Strand and down the Fleet to make sure that no traffic needed his attention he began to recite.

Down the Hill of Ludgate Up the Hill of Fleet, To and fro and east and west With people flows the street Even the King of England On Temple Bar must beat For leave to ride to Ludgate Down the Hill of Fleet.

Long before the end I had joined in, and the two of us regaled the { passers by with a joint elocutionary I exhibition. How I love policemen!