Evening Star Newspaper, June 28, 1931, Page 80

[8 o - ILLUSTRATED BY WALLACE MORGAN. Y fiiend, Mr. Massey, was sitting beside me upon the rocks at Cobble Reef and speaking of Mary's Neck, that lively resort some miles distant where he has his Summer residence. I never interrupt him when he discourses upon this the:ne, and so, remaining silent to thz end, I listened to a narrative that added not in- considerably to my inward profit. A Summer resort of cottages (Mr. Massey said) is like a village, only more so, because you'd have to imagine a village where, in the first place, nobody’s doing any business or going downtown to the office or ever leaving the women folks to themselves, practically. Just that alone would make a mighty peculiar village, you see, but you also have to allow for the fact that three-fourths of the time all the villagers are scattercd and leading lives un- known to their fellow villagers. What's more, they don’t all come back, but entirely new, mysterioys families are found living in some of the houses. You can see right away how natural it is for everybody to be kind of looking everybody else over practically all the time, which is a thing that pretty often leads to a good deal. It's a little like the way Mrs. Massey is when she and I are on a train every now and then after I've been to the smoker, she’ll say some- thing like this to me, likely: ‘“She’s his wife, not his granddaughter; he was am old bachelor from Fall River, Mass, and the reason we thought he was acting so peculiarly is that they've just got married.” Or else maybe she'll say “It is her own hair, after all,” or else, maybe, “The fat man’s had too much to drink again.” And another thing, my own home town Lo- gansville, Ill, is a place where the inhabitants pretty much all feel the best good will in the world toward one another and where they all work together for the good of the community; but, my soul! Just suppose that the whole population of Logansville went down to the Court House Square and sat on the grass there in little groups and cliques all looking side- ways and buzz-buzzing about each other for two hours every singlé day for three months, how long do you think there’d be any Logans- ville at all? Yet that's exactly what we all do over at the neck, only it's the beach where we sit and buzz-buzz instead of the Court House Square. It's a wonder the place hasn’t blown up long ago. ELL, if I make myself clear, you can un- derstand something of what would hap- pen at the neck before a new family’d have its status settled—if it ever did. Take the people that rented the Ballingsr cottage, next door to us, one Summer, for instance. There was a youngish, middle-aged couple and a funny look- ing, pale old man, terribly thin, who spent his whole time picking worms and bugs off of the trees and bushes and out of the grass. Mrs. Dalrymple, who lives in the cottage on the other side, said she watched him out of her window until 2 o’clock one night and saw him making snatching motions among the shrub- beries. “Hot! Got you that time, darling!” she heard him say, and she spread it all over Marys Neck that he was a maniac. Everybody said something ought to be done about it, and Mrs. Dalrymple wanted me to go in and tell the middle-aged couple, his atten- dants, they had to keep the old man confined to the house because she was afraid he mijght take a notion to injure the Dalrymple chjkiren. I went to the trouble of finding out that the old man was Prof. Albert Thompson, chief entomological expert of the Carson Institute, and the middle-aged couple were his niece and her husband, who kept house for him, but I couldn’t really make much headway against Mrs. Dalrymple's theory because she’d got it too well established, and she’s still telling people what a terrible time she had the Suramer when there was & dangerous lunatic in the Ballinger cottage next door. But all this doesn’'t amount to any more than Just a feeble, pale shadow, as you uszht call it, “I could feel their eyes like a dozen ice poultices plastered ;p and down my spine.” THE SUNDAY STAR, V\'AQHIN(‘TO\' § 5 5 ol JUNE 28, 1931, TALK AT MARYS NECK Mme. Palma, Who Sang, Came to Mary’s Neck and Was Nicely Cold- Shouldered by the Summer Inhabitants. But Did She Care?—This I's a Story Peppered With Laughs—Truly a Story Such as Only This Author Can Produce. of the disturbance that’s been going on lately and right up to now concerning the people living in that same Ballinger cottage, which is the matter I've had on my mind to tell you about. Mrs. Massey heard the news less than an hour after we'd got back to Marys Neck for the season. “Who do you think has rented the Ballinger cottage?” she asked our daughters, Clarissa and Enid, and me. Judging by her looks and the way she shouted “who” I thought it must be at least the Vice President of the United States, and when we gave up guessing and she said “Madame Palma!” like an explosion, I was disappointed. “Madame Palma?” I said. “It seems to me I've heard of her somewhere. Isn't she some kind of a clairvoyant?” But Mrs. Massey and the girls just whooped at me, the way they do when I show more than customary ignorance; they said anybody that read the newspapers was supposed to be aware that Madame Palma was one of the most prominent grand opera prima donnas in the world. They must have been right about that, because at the beach next day I appeared to be the only person in the whole of Marys Neck that didn’t know more about her than an automobile dealer does about the president of the company that makes his cars. Where Mrs. Masscy and I were sitting, with Mrs, Weeder and Mrs. Dalyrmple and Mr. and Mrs, Bullfinch, there wasn’t any other topic at all. “You'd think that if a great foreign prima dona like Madame Palma weren't going to spend the Summer in her own country, at Deauville or Biarritz, for instance,” Mrs. Weeder said, “she’d at least select Newport or Bar Harbor. Really, her coming here “hcws what an irportant resort Marys Neck's getting to be.” “Yes,” Mrs. Dalrymple agreed. “Madame Palma p:obably likes to be among people of her own sort. She’s a Hungarian countess by birth and——" “Not at all,” Mrs. Weeder told her. “She began life peddling dried sea horses in Naples.” But Mr. Bullfinch intervened, feeling that he had the right information. He usually does feel that way, being a severe, sandy-haired man with a considerable sense of importance and never much laugh to him. “I can tell you absolutely all about Madame Palma,” he said. “Her stage name—all these headline singers take Italian names—is Flametta Palma; but her real name is Fanny Palmer and she’s from California. I know, because a second cousin of mine was well acquainted with this Fanny Palmer out there when she was studying music in Oakland. She left there to go abroad, but he heard her sing in New York about four times; her last husband was a Russian prince, but she’s a widow again, because he jumped off a clifr.” “I don’t see how she could be an Amierican,” Mrs. Weeder said, “because the papers were all talking about her learning English only last Autumn when she came to sing in America for the first time.” “No, you're mistaken,” Mrs. Bullfinch told her, in a prim kind of way she has, because Mrs. Bullfinch is that sort of a woman generally, prim and mostly disapproving. “No, I heard Mr. Bullfinch’s cousin from California talking about Mme. Palma myself, and he said exactly what Mr. Bullfinch has just told you he did. I can’t think what the woman means, taking a cottage among so conservative a Summer colony as ours and I very much doubt if I shall decide to call on her.” “But even if she has a pretty mixed-up past,” Mrs. Dalrymple said, ‘“people rather overlook these things in great artists.” Mrs. Bullfinch gave a coldish sort of cough and shook her head. “Whether I decide to call upon her or not,” she said, “will depend en- tirely upon whether she appears to be a lady or not. After she’s been here for some time, if she seems to be——" “Oh, but we ought to decide beforehand,” Mrs. Weeder interrupted. “Is Marys Neck going to call on her, or is Marys Neck not going to?” Other groups of ladies up and down the beach were already discussing that question, I found, as I walked around a little, saying howdy-do, but I don't think any of ’em got it settled any more than they did whether Mme. Palma was from California or somewhere in Europe, or whether she'd had four husbands or not any. The way it looked to me, all the questions about her (and there were plenty) didn’t do anything but get more and more un- settled right up to the time of her arrival, which was after dark and during a rainstorm, so everybody missed it. EXT morning it was still raining, but after a while Clarissa told me there was a man sitting out on the porch of the Ballinger cot- tage in an ulster and looking at the rain. She said he had dark, curly hair, and she and Mrs. Massey and Enid all thought he was right romantic- appearing, but after I'd had a look at him myself from our living room window I didn’t think so; he seemed to me to be just a little, thin, sallow man, not especially no- ticeable. Mrs. Dalrymple telephoned over from her cottage later that he’d been walking in part of the Ballinger yard near her living room windows and she'd heard a woman’s voice call- ing to him and saying, “Orlando! Orlando, you wish to die of the wet? Orlando, come in!” There was a considerable telephoning, and Mrs. Massey and Mrs. Dalrymple and Clarissa and Enid got it all fixed up between them that he was an Italian tenor in love with Mme. Palma and probably oughtn't to be there, ex- actly. Mrs. Dalrymple said it would be better not to tell Mrs. Bullfinch, and I guess she didn’t—at least not until after she’d hung up on our number and got connected with the Bullfinches. . It didn’t stop raining until the next after- noon; then the sun came out, bright and warm, and right after that, sitting in our living room with the windows open, Mrs. Massey and I heard a piano going next door, something won- derful, and a soprano voice that I thought at first was a flute, only it turned out to be a good deal too powerful for a flute. “Practic- ing,” Mrs. Massey told me. “I wonder if I oughtn’t to go over there and call when she gets through. It really would be the right thing to be a little neighborly, I think, even if the other women here decide not to know her. § do believe I But right there she stopped, because the piano next door broke off with a kind of crashe ing and the voice that was singing did much the same; it began to shout in some foreign language, fairly pouring the words out and al« most yelling. “Goodness me!” Mrs. Massey said, and, looking out of the window, we saw the Bullfinches’ limousine just driving away fron in front of the Ballinger cottage. “Well, I don't know,” Mrs. Massey said, after a minute, looking thoughtful. “Perhaps I'd better put off calling until she's had more time to get settled.” So we went for a drive instead, and when we got home again, toward evening, Mrs. Weeder came over from her porch, where I expect she’d been waiting for a chance to talk apout what had been happening with somebody that hadn't aready heard. It seemed Mrs. Bullfinch had decided to call upon Mme. Palma just about the minute the rain stopped and had been informed that Mme. Palma was not at home. “Though, as she told me later over the telephone,” Mrs. Weeder went on, “she could hear Mme. Palma fairly screech- ing at the maid all the time she was standing at the door. Well, of course, I didn't know any= thing about how Mrs. Bullfinch had been re- ceived until later, #d neither did Mrs. Dal- rymple. Mrs. Dalrymple and I decided to calld together, and a maid came to the door and took our cards, but told us in a most insolent way, we both thought, that Mme. Palma was not at home. The same thing precisely hap=- pened to Mrs. Alilstover, Mrs. Ruckleboys, Mrs. Griggs and Mrs. Carmichael, because Mrs. Dal- rymple and I were sitting on her porch and saw them go up to the door and come right away, and we talked to them afterward.” “Well, that doesn't seem to terrible,” Mrs. Massey said, a little surprised probably by the excited tone of voice Mrs. Weeder was using. “It isn’t so very unusual for people to——" “Listen!” Mrs. Weeder said. “A little while after I went home from Mrs. Dalrymple’s I was called to the telephone by Mr. Jackson, the agent who looks after the Ballinger cot- tage. He said he had a message for me that he didn't like to deliver, but his life wouldn’t be worth living unless he did it. He said that about every half hour since Mme. Palma’s ar- rival he'd been called up from that cottage about the plumbing or the furniture or the mattresses or some door's having a squeak in it, or goodness knows what. He'd had to come up there five different times, and the last was the worst. He apologized and said he supposed the best thing was to lay the case before the ladies who had called upon Mme. Palma that afternoon, and she’d given him our cards and absolutely insisted that he should in- form us that she’d comes to Marys Neck be- cause she'd heard it was an obscure place with- out any social attractions and where she could find perfect quiet. She wished the ladies who had called to inform all the other ladies in the place that she preferred to make no ac- quaintances and would not submit to any lion= izing whatever. Mr. Jackson said he was min- imizing the expressions she used, at that; but he thought probably it would be better, espe- cially for himself, if word were passed around for no more ladies to call. I told him he needn’t worry!” “I should think not!" Mrs. Massey said, look- ing a little flushed. “I should think «qnot, in- deed!” o “Mrs. Bullfinch is the most upset of all,” Mrs. Weeder told us. ‘“‘She says she never would have dreamed of going, especially with that Italian tenor, Orlando, in the house, but she thought she ought to on account of Mr. Bullfinch’s second cousin's having been an ac- quaintance. We all feel that deliberate insult has been offered to Marys Neck, and from now on the only thing to do is to simply and ab- solutely ignore her.” ELL, that seemed sensible to me, and I supposed the ladies of Marys Neck would go ahead and carry out the idea—which shows I didn't understanad much about what the ladies mean when they speak of ignoring! If ignoring a person is making her pretty nearly your sole topic of conversation, then Marys Neck ignored Mme. Palma, and the first time