Celebrity (after lengthy monopo'y of the conversation). "BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME; LET US TALK ABOUT YOURSELF. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF MY PART IN THE NEW PLAY?" YOU CAN'T GO THERE. THIS time last year we spent a month of week-ends in debating where to go for our early summer holidays. The dining-room table was always being submerged by a huge map of Europe, held in position by a few volumes of Baedeker and the illustrated brochures of our tourist agencies. Little flags recorded the projected halting-places on our journey across the Continent. The General Staff, I believe, plays a similar sort of map game at the War Office, but theirs is much easier. The Army hasn't to pay its own expenses; we had. This considerably cramped our style, and we were always pushing our flags back from Buda- Pesth or Bucharest because we couldn't afford it. We expected to be told it was an act of treachery to the Old Country to think of going abroad, and what was wrong with England, anyway? But none of this happened. Our friends were all most helpful. Mrs. Burdock-Jones descended on us first. "So you young folk are going abroad TELL ME at last!" she exclaimed brightly. "I hope you're not going to anywhere stuffy." We told her we were going to Ostend. "You can't go there," she decided. "Far too obvious. Unless you want hordes of tourists" Secretly we thought a few fellowcreatures who spoke our language would be delightful, but we dared not say so. We assured her we loathed hordes of tourists. "Now I'll tell you where to go," she volunteered. "Thanks so much," we murmured politely; "if you don't mind.” "Timgad," she pronounced explosively. I picked up another flag and held it poised in mid-air while I searched for Timgad. Mrs. Burdock-Jones offered us introductions to Timgad society and was prepared to book our rooms herself. We were quite resigned to Timgad when George dropped in. "Hear you young people are barging across the Continent," he boomed. 'Do you good. What do they know of Europe who only England know?' 66 and that sort of rot. Where are you going?" "Timgad," we said impressively. "You can't go there," he decided. "Everybody goes there. It's bung full of Americans. Now let me tell you where to go." "Awfully good of you, George." "Oslo," he whispered mysteriously. I marked Oslo on the map. James was surprised when he heard we were going to Oslo. "You can't go there," he decided. "You want something off the beaten track, something wild and primitive, where there are great open spaces and that sort of thing, don't you?" That wasn't quite our idea of a holiday, but we didn't say so. We left our destination in his hands. He recommended Spitsbergen. I sent out for some more flags. Mabel booked us a passage on a tramp steamer to the Balearic Islands, and we were hounded in turn to Tyrol, Prague, Reval and Ragusa. By that time we were in such a state of nervous prostration that we called in the doctor. "You want a holiday," he cried cheerily. We explained that we were taking one. "Splendid!" he agreed. "And where are you going? We showed him our flag-strewn map of Europe. "Not to all those places?" he exclaimed. "Most of them," we admitted. "We've promised our friends "You can't go there," he decided. "Let your friends go to these outlandish places if they like. You need a rest. Go to some seaside place that you know where there's sun, bathing, tennis and dancing, and just have a good time." So we went to our old quarters at Folkestone. The first persons we met on the Lees were Mrs. Burdock-Jones, George, James and Mabel. They were just breaking the journey to Riga, Ekaterinoslav, Albania and Kamschatka. They were still breaking it when we left. Musical Diet. GAETANO DONIZETTI mento; Palpiti" under the influence of Chianti; But GOUNOD refreshed himself with Angostura When writing "Salve, dimora casta e pura." Lady (with dog). "I ALWAYS BRING TWEETIE WITH ME TO THE ACADEMY. I'M CERTAIN THE ANGEL GETS AS MUCH OUT OF IT AS I DO." RHUM BABAISTS. place for artists and writers in 1937 than it was in 1927. No. I.-SEBASTIAN SIMCOX. Simcox, who is a founder member, is I HAVE just returned from lunching a blond exquisite of twenty-five. He with young Sebastian Simcox at the is a B.A. (it was with difficulty) of 1937 Club. The club, Simcox told me, Queen's College, Oxford. He is of was formed last year. It is a mixed medium height, very sleek and wellclub, the membership being restricted brushed, and he affects brown and grey to fifty men and fifty women, who in suitings and irreproachable soft hats 1927 were under twenty-five years of with pastel-hued linen in discreet harage. An indispensable qualification for mony. He has a weak chin, which is membership, it seems, is the choice of compensated by a nose of Roman build. Art or Literature as a vocation. Another I should add that he lives in Bloomsis the possession of an independent un-bury with a gaunt elder sister whose earned income of not less than three absurd name is Amaryllis. She stands hundred pounds a year. And the idea five feet ten in her stockings and is of the club is to make England a better called Rilly for short. Rilly is a good She In your eyes I read it You will go, the blind urge calls you; soul and, in a hushed and bewildered He tion he has held (and has generously consolidated in the restaurant and at the bar) for nearly twelve months. "Baba! c'est moi!" he remarked, and I agreed, receiving a Corona Corona from a passing waiter for being so understanding. One other poem by Sebastian Simcox may be quoted to support his theory that poetry should be "nude and passionate and austere." It is called "SkyScrapers," and is the only poem he was impelled to write during his stay in the States. As Rilly Simcox said, "It does "SKYSCRAPERS. tained me at the 1937 Club I knew that would come with the coffee. It did, in full It was after writing" Frog" (in 1926) that Sebastian Simcox heard Miss GERspate from a loose-leaf note-book through Simcox's rather red lips for one hour TRUDE STEIN read one of her singularly lucid manifestoes in Paris. Light came and forty minutes by the club clock. I had been rendered indulgent by the club to him, as he said, "like the unshutter-give you a definite feeling of going up and up and up and then coming down cocktail, an excellent Liebfraumilch and ing of all the windows in the world." and down and down. And that's so a Grand Marnier. Also I had nothing He scarcely remembers now how he exhilarating, don't you agree?" much to do and it was raining outside. got back to his hotel the next morning. So I listened: I listened to the theory was intoxicated (I think he said and applauded, with my eyebrows, the divinely intoxicated) and proceeded simpractice. His great aim, Simcox told ultaneously to remove his trousers and me, was to achieve that emancipation write his first poem in the new manner, from tradition, "that jagged severance from the past which will give the poet's in the morning the poem and his trousers spirit a flame-like nudity of avowal, were on the chair by his bed, and, as he before which the muttering shibboleths brightly said, money in both. Simcox of metre and shambling errors of rhyme will retreat abashed.", At that point he tactfully ordered a second Grand Marnier. "Iconoclastes." When he awoke later American editor-proprietor of Ba-Ba for the organ "Just think of me," Simcox said, trenchantly and derisively style them"wasting myself in the composition of selves Babaists. Here it is, and I think deciduous sonnets when the stark free- I should experience the same difficulty as doms of uncloyed and underivative Simcox in reading it aloud. At my best verse lay before me virgin and undefiled. I don't sing like a bird, and even if I practise in my bath I shall never be able to make a noise like a fish:"ICONOCLASTES. Broken light of sunset yellow glass Just think of me." I did, and out came the notebook in a flash. "I rather like this little thing," he said, with what I can only describe as bashful truculence, and he began the first of twenty-eight-and-a-half poems (not to be confused with poetry). The half poem occurred at 4.15, when the room was required for a committeemeeting. The first poem was announced by Simcox, almost in accusatory tones, as "Frog," and I immediately thought of Mrs. Leo Hunter's "Can I view thee panting, lying But Simcox's frog was of a different order entirely. There was nothing leisurely or elegiac about it. It jumped at me in the querulous staccato of its creator's voice like this: Thou lonely too, "FROG. Gazing past reedy actuality beyond At thy feet The mud of satisfaction. Safe-but that lure beyond! the tweed suit of Montmorency in the Bois. You cannot tell me, CIC 10000 I CIC ICICI You cannot tell me dumb My god this hateful pestilential world! Although Simcox missed the bird and Visitor (to Small Boy). "So, PETER, I HEAR YOU'RE LEARNING TO SPEAK FRENCH. HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW?" PITY THE POOR DÉBUTANTE. THIS is Ascot Week, and during these few days I ask all men of goodwill to give their thoughts to a body of their fellow-citizens who are distressed, deserving and misunderstood. It is a commonplace that millionaires are unhappy, but it has now come to my notice that débutantes are miserable. Débutantes, of all people! Have they not everything that is good (we think), youth, beauty, health and pretty frocks, no work, no worries, and pleasure brimming over? Is not their life one gay protracted party? If there is unrest ness here then where can we look for happi- the buffet for a lemonade and became But I shall expect next to be told The first year is ghastly, She said. that the birds are bored and the butter-That first year, which you and I thought fly a prey to melancholy. For at the must be like the first flight of the young height of the revelry I took Her to eagle, the first song of the adolescent lark, a glorious entrance into experience heard. What will that hiss be like, I be as well to have no Season?-The and pleasure, she compared it can you thought, by the end of July? witness did not reply. guess?-to a boy's first term at school. Well, the sad tale went on. Parties, As for Ascot a little cloud shadowed One's second Season, She thought, might parties, parties! Lunches, teas, dinners, her brow as I spoke the word. "Ascot ? be endurable, but Tom Brown himself dances incessant work. Sometimes I loathe the idea!" "Then you will not did not suffer more than a sprig of the dances four or five nights a week, some-be going?" "Yes, three days." One nobility in her first three months of times three dances in a night. In that day, she said, might be fun, but three grown-up Society. case one flits like a fastidious bee from would kill her. However, she had With Her elders, I gathered, the name party to party, testing each for dul- three new frocks, and these would keep of the débutante is mud. They are re-ness and giving marks for supper. The her at it, one frock a day. Débutantes, garded as a class of being unnecessary one thing common to every dance is it appears, are classified by the number but unavoidable, gregarious and ubiquit- that there is no room to dance; the of their new frocks, as men were once ous, swarming every where like so many varying factors are the conversation and by bottles. If you are a three-frock girl ants, a perpetual nuisance cluttering up the champagne. It is still considered you go three days, and so on. the town, always requiring to be taken decent to stand for a few minutes in the Therefore, kind Britons, spare a to dances or taken away from dances, to attitude of persons waltzing among the thought this week for these poor girls, be goaded into marriage or dissuaded huddled hundreds on the dancing-floor; cruelly condemned to three days at from marriage, to be dressed and fed but after this gesture the only question Ascot, with probably three nights of and entertained and rapped over the is whether to queue up for supper here gaiety to follow; and never tell me that knuckles. They have no individual exist- or look for better treatment elsewhere. I the rich do not deserve what little ences, but are thought leisure they have. of, and go about, in shoals, like minnows. Indeed, She said that to be taken for a débutante was wounding to Her. When an adult discovers that he is in conversation with one of the species, his whole manner changes and he begins to humour her, talking as one would to a favourite fish, for it is accepted that that is the level of their intelligence. And so the poor girls are thrown back on their own generation; and these are not much comfort. Young men in these days, it seems, are a stupid lot, and, as for the girls, She whispered, what cats! The most intelligent young men, I was interested | It's always possible of course to have to hear, are now in the Guards, but the rest of the young male species of good family have no chins and no conversation, and She would as willingly exchange ideas with a sofa-cushion. Recent Bridegroom. "YES, I'LL TAKE THESE TWO APPLE-TREES. NOW CAN YOU DIRECT ME TO THE HAMMOCK DEPARTMENT?" three suppers, but that means a lot of A. P. H. A SORRY SUBSTITUTE. "You'll be Mrs. Gibbins' first visitor," remarked the Sister as she conducted me down the infirmary ward. That drunken brute of a husband nearly finished her off this time," she continued in confidential undertones, "but she's pulling round nicely now, if she weren't so terribly depressed. She seems to have got a sort of a grievance against us all." The bandaged head turned slowly on the pillow at the sound of our footsteps. Mrs. Gibbins lay gazing at me for a moment and then exclaimed in a weak voice "Well, I never! If it ain't Miss Newton! 'Ow ever did you get 'ere, Ma'am?" In cross-examination: No, she did not "How did I get here? Why, by I heard no details about the cattery enjoy going to so many dances. Then the tram, of course," I replied, thinking of the girls, but a few minutes later why go?-Well, one had to. Why?- a matter-of-fact answer might steady She said in calm clear tones, "This girl Well, she didn't quite know. Now and her wandering wits. standing next to you is supposed to be then there would be an amusing party. Politeness compelled her to display a great beauty, but I think she has a One never knew. The whole idea, pre-a perfunctory interest in the cakes face like a pudding-don't you?" I sumably, is matrimony?-She supposed and fruit I had brought her, and she glanced, embarrassed, at the sweet so. But at these tumultuous and over-fingered them over carefully one by young thing beside me and decided that crowded revelries is there ever an oppor-one. she the description was inadequate and un-tunity for such intimate conversation as "Just common rock-cakes," just. She heard, I am confident, every might lead up to matrimony?-(Emphat-muttered at the end of a close scrutiny. word, and shortly moved away. My ically) Never. Did she know of any "Anyhow, they will be a nice change She, I am sure, had no catty intention; person who had become engaged at a from the ordinary food," I replied, a she was simply making, as she thought "Season" dance?-No. The older gen- little nettled by the criticism. unheard, a simple statement of fact. eration, presumably, endure the Season "Might well be," she assented gloomWhat then must be the cattiness of the for the sake of the young, who are sup-ily. deliberate cats (if any)? The Season is posed to enjoy it?-Yes. But if the Being a member of the Board of not half done, and already among the young do not enjoy it either, and if it Guardians I could hardly let such a lilies-of-the-valley the serpent's hiss is does not lead to matrimony, would it not remark pass unchallenged, especially |