The Scarlet Pimpernel Looks at the World E-Book

Baroness Emmuska Orczy

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Sir Percy Blakeney comments on the modern world of the 1930s.

Leseprobe

Baroness Emmuska Orczy

THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL LOOKS AT THE WORLD

Copyright

First published in 1933

Copyright © 2019 Classica Libris

Foreword

There is no doubt that Sir Percy Blakeney, “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, is the most outstanding, as he certainly is the most popular character of Baroness Orczy’s creations. This really is very astonishing because Sir Percy, besides being the perfect type of an English gentleman, is nothing if not British, whilst the Baroness herself, who created him, is Hungarian.

She was born at Tarna-Eörs, in the county of Heves, some fifty miles from Budapest. Tarna-Eörs lies in the centre of the Great Plain of Hungary, which is as flat as a table top and is almost exclusively devoted to corn-crowing. The Orczy family have owned considerable property there for many generations, and do still, but the Baroness’ father, Baron Felix Orczy, started life in the diplomatic service of his country: he married Emma, daughter of Count Wass of Czege in Transylvania — the Eastern part of Hungary, and our authoress — Emmuska, which means little Emma — is their only child.

All this seems so remote from her subsequent life and work in the world of English letters that it requires explanation. After his father’s death, Baron Felix Orczy came back from abroad and took up the farming of his property. But in the course of his diplomatic career he had picked up certain modern notions which were not at all suited to the archaic ideas prevailing in Hungary, and these he tried to introduce into the management of his estates. Into a country in which hitherto every kind of agricultural work had been done by hand he introduced the latest type of machinery and even set up a steam-mill.

The peasants — very much like our own men in Lancashire when the steam-loom was first brought to Manchester — were terrified at first, then enraged. They looked upon all machinery, which they did not understand, as the invention of the devil, and when the smoke emerged out of the factory chimney, they looked upon it as coming from the fires of hell. The end of it all was that when, after harvest time, the entire crop of wheat stood in stacks on the fields, the poor people in their ignorance set fire to the whole thing — the mill, the corn, the maize, the machinery — and ruined not only the property but also its unfortunate owner.

The whole circumstances of this disastrous affair, which occurred when our Baroness was three years old, she has incorporated in her novel, A Son of the People.

Baron Orczy, thoroughly discouraged and disappointed with his attempts at farming, then settled down in Budapest, where he was able to devote himself to music of which he had always been passionately fond. The Abbé Liszt became his friend and dedicated one of the great Hungarian rhapsodies to him. The Baron was considered in those days one of the finest amateur musicians of his time and was presently appointed director of the National Opera of Budapest — a position he held for several years. Meanwhile, his little daughter’s education was in the hands of a governess, and she learned to speak French and German. Her father resigned the directorship of the opera and took his wife and child to Brussels — partly to give little Emmuska a more modern education and partly because the then Queen of the Belgians was a Hungarian Princess, and very musical, so he felt sure of a welcome in the Belgian capital. He had met with some financial reverses and was no longer very well off, so when he met some English friends who suggested that he should settle in London, where his music would be appreciated, he crossed the sea and with his wife and daughter — now almost sixteen years old — settled down in London. Here he conducted some of his own compositions at the Philharmonic Concerts, and sometimes conducted the Royal Amateur Orchestral Society — and his opera, Il Rinnegato, was performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

Meanwhile his little daughter went to a dame school to learn English, which language she picked up wonderfully quickly; then she entered Queen’s College, and soon passed the Higher Examination for women — always taking prizes for languages. Her artistic temperament urged her to take up painting — to her father’s disappointment, she showed no particular talent for music — and she entered Heatherley’s studios as an art student and worked there for five or six years. She had quite considerable success and exhibited several of her pictures at the Royal Academy, one of them, “The Jolly Young Waterman”, being hung on the line. It was at Heatherley’s that I met her. I was working there, and we became art student chums. Baron Orczy died very suddenly of heart failure, and his widow, the Baroness’ mother, decided to return to Hungary, but his daughter did not want to leave London, her many friends, and her Art, so she stayed on in England. Shortly afterwards we got married and set up a studio together. I took up “black and white” work as a readier means of making money than picture painting, and it was at this time, when I had often to sit up late into the night at my easel to get some work done, that my wife fell into the habit of reading aloud to me, mostly French detective novels, Gaboriau and others, and I think it was originally from these — that are classics in their way — that she learnt how to set out and construct a story.

Later on we happened to come across a family consisting of father, mother, and two daughters. The latter wrote short stories for the magazines — we did not think very highly of them, but sometimes passed an evening listening to one or other of them reading her “latest” aloud. One night after such a reading my wife said to me, “I could write better stories than those girls,” and I said, “Well! why not have a try?” No sooner said than done; the very next day I found her armed with pen, ink and paper scribbling for all she was worth! Soon she had written two stories — both of the thrilling kind, and when she’d read them to me I ejaculated, “Damned good!”

I happened to be doing work for Pearson’s Magazine at the time, and said I’d take her stories and show them to the editor. I did so, and he promised to read them the next day — which was Sunday. On Monday morning a telegram was handed in — not for me, but for my wife, from the Editor, and it said, “Come to the office and lunch with me.” Off she went, and I stayed in the studio working and wondering what was happening at Pearson’s office.

In the afternoon my wife turned up, fearfully excited. The Editor had not only accepted the stories but commissioned her to write several more to make a series. These stories are known now, almost the world over, as The Old Man in the Corner series, and are selling in book form to this day!

Now I come to the Scarlet Pimpernel. It really is almost unbelievable, but this is just what happened. A magazine editor — not Pearson’s this time, but the Baroness’ stories had by now found their way into other publications as well — asked her to call at his office. She went off. It was a regular London day, foggy and damp, and I didn’t like her going off by herself, but she would go: The Editor told her he had an opening for a long serial story, but it must be of a very exciting and “romantic” character. My poor wife came away from the interview feeling despondent — she had done nothing but detective fiction so far and said she hadn’t a romantic idea in her head. As she paced up and down the platform at the Temple underground station — waiting for a train — the place wrapped in fog and mist, she suddenly looked up and saw The Scarlet Pimpernel! She stood rooted to the spot and simply stared — he came towards her and laughed and looked at her through his quizzing glass — he was dressed in his caped coat and wore breeches and hessian boots: he passed her, and she turned to watched him, but he had disappeared! She came home nearly frantic with excitement. All she could say was, “I’ve found him — my Hero!”

So you see the Scarlet Pimpernel does, in all reality, take a quiz sometimes at our world of today. Our author has often seen him since, for to her eyes he takes visible shape — in fact, he sometimes “barges in” when she is writing on quite different subjects, nothing to do with him at all. She looks up and finds him sitting against the angle of her desk, looking at her and smiling and she says to him, “I’m not writing about you now, my dear man.” And she sees him smile and say, “Oh, you think not-but I’m not demmed sure of it!”

And sometimes when she is dozing in a chair in front of the fire after her day’s work, she feels he is there and looks up and finds him laughing quietly and looking at her through his quizzing-glass — and he begins without any preamble:

“Now, m’dear, I must tell you what happened on the 3rd Brumaire in 179 — I was in Paris, you know, by the Seine, and it was a demmed disagreeable sort of day.”

And he just tells her the whole story so that she is compelled to write it down — and that’s how it happens.

You may believe it or not-but it’s a fact!

Good-bye, and God bless you all.

Montagu Barstow

Chapter 1

SIR PERCY BLAKENEY PUTS UP HIS QUIZZING-GLASS

Odd’s fish! But I am already beginning to wonder whether my visit to your modern world is going to be depressing or exhilarating. Lud love you, m’dears, think on it! To be compelled to be serious — really serious, mind you — through the whole length of a book; to say what I think of your modern culture; to make you see the romance of an era which you yourselves deem unbearably prosaic — la! the task would be impossible were it not for the fact that after taking a preliminary look round I have found that these modern times of yours are quite as romantic as were those in which I lived: they are just as full of adventure, of love and of laughter as when I and Sir Andrew and Lord Tony wore rapiers and ruffles, and Lady Blakeney danced the minuet and sang “Eldorado” to the accompaniment of the spinet.

It would in very truth be an impossible task were it not for the delight in store for me of scoring off all those demmed dull Chauvelins, or Chambertins, of your twentieth century and of proving to them that with all their Committees of Pussyfoots and Boards of Public Morals they cannot manacle a certain little blind god we all wot of, nor can they destroy that lure of adventure and of danger which beckons to you modern young people with just as much insistence as it did to us.

Therefore am I here now in your midst — an eighteenth-century dandy, seemingly out of place amid your plus-fours and swallow-tailed coats, but nevertheless prepared to prove my argument up to the hilt. It is demmed embarrassing, believe me, to speak to you in the pages of a book and to remain invisible and inaudible the while, even though in the days of my friends Robespierre, Fouquier-Tinville and their like my capacities in that direction were mightily embarrassing to them. But even after the first page or two I already have scored off your arrant pessimists: one hundred and fifty years ago the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel was made up of nineteen gallant English gentlemen, but now, by contrast, I can enrol under my banner hundreds of thousands — nay, millions — of men and women of every nation; all those, in fact, who worship beauty, who dream romantic dreams, who love every kind of adventure, so be it that adventure is spiced with danger. Every soldier of fortune — and your modern world counts these by the million — is really a member of this new League of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

You don’t believe me? You smile? You scoff? You shrug your shoulders? By gad! if I do not succeed in proving my case within the space allotted to me in this book then I will take a ticket — not a return ticket, mind you — for old Charon’s boat and never utter a word of complaint.

Now let me confess at once that yours is a strange world, even though it be not strange to me. I see changes — a power of changes, from our wigs and ruffles and rapiers, our coaches and gigs, our leisurely ways, our inconsequent aristocracy and, for the most part, contented, easy-going working-classes. You live in a rush in this twentieth century; grim earnestness pervades your whole existence; you make and accept great and marvellous wonders — miracles, I would call them — as a matter of course, simply because in your impatience and your restlessness you are always eager to get on — to get on, on, on, inventing and making things greater and more marvellous still.

But this is where the strangeness comes in: you — or, rather, the pessimistic Chauvelins amongst you — vow that romance is dead in this modern world; they speak regretfully of the good old days when Sir Percy and Lady Blakeney were the stars of London society, when a romantic love-affair or quixotic adventure met you at every turn. You find your century a dull one, and I marvelled at first whether I, too, would find it so, or would deem it necessary to tint my quizzing-glass with a roseate hue.

As a matter of fact, what do I find?

I find an age so racked with boredom, so surfeited with pleasure and novelty, that it cannot recognize the incomparable adventure of living in the midst of the most marvellous inventions devised by the ingenious brain of man; of living at a time when a man can speak to wife or friend across the width of the world; when he can put a girdle round the earth by flying through space or listen to voices that speak hundreds of miles away.

It was the fashion in my day to cultivate an air of boredom that one did not feel, but, bless me! your detachment and boredom today in the midst of all your modern marvels are neither a fad nor a pose. I see that they are very real indeed.

Strange, did I say? La! it is astounding.

I reckon to have enjoyed a pretty turn now and again in France with those demmed dirty fellows of the Committee of Public Safety. But what a record of heroic deeds you established in France less than a score of years ago when you transformed a matter of blood and mud and hate and horror into an epic of nobility and self-sacrifice and splendid comradeship to which mere words cannot attempt to do justice! My League and I were ready to take our lives in our hands when it came to spiriting an aristo from under the guillotine, but there is not a man among us who would hesitate to take off his hat in sincere respect and boundless admiration for the greater courage of that band of miners who recently, in a pit disaster in Yorkshire, went down unhesitatingly into the bowels of the earth to risk flame and poison-gas, death by explosion or drowning, in order to try and save their comrades, even though these were, perhaps, already beyond the hope of human aid.

You declare that romance today is dead? What, then, but romance is the story of the young nurse who a few weeks ago saved the life of her lover by drawing with her own breath and through her mouth the diphtheria poison from his throat when nothing but this difficult and dangerous method could save him from death? What, indeed, is the whole life of the great Italian inventor, Signor Marconi, but a living romance?

Nay, ’tis not romance you lack in this twentieth century. Had but one quarter as much of it come our way in the days when I frequented Richmond and Vauxhall, my faith! we should have been staggered by it. We had to seek Romance; for you it flaunts its magic before your eyes every day and in a hundred different ways. By gad! when the last word of this book is written and the last tale told, I shall feel happy in the thought that I had a sight of all that is roseate and silver in the midst of the drab existence you complain of.

Cupid, my friends, is not dead. He will never die while eyes are bright and cheeks as fair as I see them today. Mars is in durance vile for the moment — thank God for that! — and I hope soon to see you devoting his courage, his audacity and defiance of danger to the service of humanity instead of to its destruction. The steep slopes of Parnassus are still there for those who dare to climb; the golden apples of the Hesperides still grow in the enchanted garden for those who have the spirit to gather them

Look wide, you moderns! your feet may be plodding in clay, but your eyes can be raised to the eternal hills and let the memory of the Scarlet Pimpernel show you the way along the silvery paths of Romance which wind their way as deftly through your crowded city streets of today as ever they did when I followed them to Paris; for I can hear the clarion sound of high adventure as clearly now as when it called to me in the rattle of the tumbrils.

La! I find myself almost serious, and I see myself in this small book becoming more serious still; but at least, my friends, give me the credit of throwing off my cloak of badinage for the sole purpose of making you see the world or romance in which you live. For this I am ready for the time being to sacrifice my reputation, which I may modestly assure you is that of a lover of adventure, of joy and of laughter — the immortal spirit of the gay and gallant Scarlet Pimpernel.

Chapter 2

ROMANTIC BRITONS

I have just chanced upon a story — the story of a mongrel dog — which interested me vastly. This dog was the friend of a group of soldiers in a dug-out during the late War, and on one occasion his opportune waking and growling warned his company of a heavy German attack which was pending, and which otherwise might have broken through a vital part of the British defensive lines. In return his name was inscribed on the roll of the company, and he was entitled thereafter to draw one man’s rations daily.

A year later, in the heat of a furious enemy attack, this dog’s master fell seriously wounded in the bottom of a trench, and a German attacking force poured along, past the place where he lay. In their haste they would certainly have trampled the man to death, but for the fact that Mike, one ear torn by a bullet, stood growling over his master’s prostrate body; so threatening was his attitude that the hurrying Germans made shift to avoid him.

So the two were found an hour later when the trench was recaptured by a British unit; and it was all the ambulance men could do to persuade the dog, faint from loss of blood as he was, to relinquish his guard. For that episode Mike was awarded the privilege of marching on parade in front of the regiment, even before its officers and colour-sergeants. And I pray you, my friends, in what country save in romantic, sentimental England would that great honour be given even to the noblest of animals?