I Have Never Loved a Man Named Entwistle

The Simple Confession of a Romantic Girl

IN VANITY FAIR

SOME girls never ride in the underground, and some never go on the scenic railways. It is their whim. To these quirks and crotchets I have always said, with the French philosopher, "Chacun a son gofit," exerting at the same time a more sweetly catholic spirit for my own part. Rubber plants, cotton gloves and men named Charlie I have banished from my existence; otherwise a happy tolerance is mine, especially in affairs of the heart. For who has not observed that love, too oft restricted in its pretty play, soon folds its wings forever? "Up! Up!" I have therefore cried, ever and anon to my slumbering emotions, "let us be no laggard in the race!" And, since embracing this philosophy, I may say that I have been, within the limits of good taste, a busy, busy girl.

I have held hands with Harrises, danced with Dillingwaters, canoed with Carterets and eloped with Ericsons. Simpsons have swayed me with the ardour of their wooing; Tollivers have tempted me down the spangled ways of romance; Poindexters have all but persuaded me to follow them to somewhat lilied altars.

But I have never loved a man named Entwistle.

That is my simple boast.

I HAVE sworn this should be so. In a general sense, I said, I will be the world's playmate. Tapering on a golden wind, I will allow wistful earth vapours to cluster in delight around me, and all who wish may worship. Only to Entwistles I shall be as a nun. For them I shall not exist. To Entwistles I shall be the cloistered fragrance which they may sense, but never, never approach.

There were, I told myself—and rightly —other men on earth.

There was Rollo Mainstream, for instance, a crisp youth. He had quivering nostrils and a clear green eye, and I think I loved him because he seemed always about to break in two. Confronted with beauty, he would cry out softly, and there would be a faint shattering sound, like splintered glass, which was Rollo's soul falling into fragments of ecstasy. "What would happen," I asked myself, "if one were to cease cherishing this brittle boy? What if he were indeed allowed to break?" My curiosity overcame me. One Sunday at Long Beach, I led Rollo along the ocean's edge until his heart rode high in a blue velvet heaven, and when, hungering, he sought in me a sympathetic response, I turned aside lumpishly into a food emporium fronting the boardwalk, and sat down behind a bottle of ketchup. "Hot dogs! Hot dogs!" I raised the cry. Rollo sat down, his brightness a little obscured by doubt. I waited breathlessly. What would be the effect of such brutality upon a structure so sensitive? I glanced out at the limpid, turquoise sea, and again, in a mist of fear and dread, I looked at Rollo.

He was spreading ketchup on a cracker.

Then there was Herbert, the hypochondriac. Herbert had the prettiest gargles, green and amethyst and pale blue; and he knew so beautifully how to invite these down his throat in a way that produced happy and sensational noises.

I came upon Herbert one summer morning, pale and remote in his mother's garden, where hollyhocks and delphiniums and larkspur grew. "Stand back," he said severely, "I have a touch of grippe." But a butterfly with cinnamon wings fluttered slowly by on the warm, scented wind, and I disobeyed Herbert. I came closer and kissed him happily on his startled chin.

"Oh, Herbert, Herbert, what have I done?" I cried then, undismayed.

He stood quite still, with a kind of molten look, and closed eyes. A mysterious expression masked his features. Then, suddenly, he patted me tenderly on the shoulder. "Wait, little girl," he said, "I want to give you something." He walked swiftly back to the house while I waited eagerly with clasped hands. A memento! Perhaps a tiny ivory fan inlaid with amber, perhaps an unset jewel, perhaps only a lace Valenr tine, yellowed with age. ... I fell into a gentle dream.

I was aroused by Herbert, returning. "A stitch in time," he said, and presented his gift.

It was the blue gargle.

CLAUDE, on the other hand, was melancholy. He would have looked very well in a grotto. His passionate attraction to me dated from the evening when I appeared at the opera in a black dress, having recently recovered from arthritis and looking at the time a little like the Spirit of the Plague, and a little like a boned herring. Claude was ensnared. A subtle and sanguine Dolores, he called me, and from then on our romance was a book of splendid, sombre pages. On rainy nights we used to go to the Morgue, and on fine summer evenings, more frivolously, to Williamsburg Bridge to watch the hearses roll by. A fragrant mortality filled the air, and above us a delicate web of steel fantastically floated. "Like skeletons dancing against the sky," observed Claude with keen pleasure.

Sensitive and adaptable creature that I am, I fell in with his whims and even fostered them, and all would have been as merry as a funeral bell had not a painful lack of foresight led us both to accept an invitation to the same house-party at Easthampton, and, once there, to read Les Fleurs du Mai on the beach together every morning. What an opportunity for Old Sol, the prankster! Laying his finger aside of his nose, he had his naughty way, and Claude and I—how can I write the horrid words?—got roundly sunburned. Shamed and quivering at the gradual discovery, we two scarlet, stricken creatures gazed at each other in horror. Where was the pale charm of our former comradeship? Alas! Claude bowed his head while the slow tears coursed down his swollen cheeks, and I, shrouded in a kindly veil, took the first train back to the city and did my best to get over the unhappy incident.

AND now I come to the denouement, or crux, of my little story. Disturbed but not contented by these futile engagements on the outskirts of romance, I still sought blindly for something more. There must, I reflected wistfully, be someone, somewhere waiting for me, for I had always believed the popular songs. And then, as I wandered in the Park one windy day, an answer fluttered straight into my path in front of the cage which housed the giant Yak. It was only a torn scrap of paper, borne on the breeze to my ankles, which it encircled, but as I stooped impatiently to free myself, my glance was arrested by its printed words. I snatched the fragment and read it avidly. "More," I breathed, "there must be more!" It was at that moment that I noticed a man wearing a top hat and chamois gloves running down a small hill, or promontory, on my right. "Page 36!" he cried, approaching, "I have lost page 36!"

I looked at the fragment which I held. Its upper right hand corner bore, in figures black but chaste, the numerals 3 and 6. My eye then fell upon the gayly-coloured object in the gentleman's gloved hand.

"Then you," I exclaimed, "arc the fairy godfather with the magic wand!"

"Au contraire," he said briskly, "I'm Charlie Entwistle."

We placed page 36 among its rightful companions, and sat down on a bench in front of the giant Yak. And there, reader, you have it in a nutshell. I am now betrothed to this man whose name is not only Entwistle but Charlie, and my vows are shattered. The world may smile, but who could help loving a man who reads, nay, who persistently subscribes to? VANITY FAIR?

MARGARET CASE