In Memoriam: Cornelia Lunt

IT was in connection with an enviable labor-saving device she had invented for her own convenience that I first heard of Miss Lunt. I think it was an actor chap of the same name — he was no kin to her as far as he knew — who first told me about it. It seemed she was a great lady out in Evanston. Because her lakeside house was big, or perhaps because her father, the late Orrington Lunt, had been one of the patron saints of Northwestern, she always felt impelled to throw Anchorfast open for a reception whenever that overgrown university on the fringe of Chicago had a Nobel Prize winner or some such notable to entertain. Cornelia Gray Lunt had a knack for hospitality in the grand manner, but, at the mere prospect of making herself heard in a roomful of twilit jabber, her spirit faltered. That was why she ordered a bell for her tea tray and, with a little firmness, established among her guests the custom of falling silent whenever she rang it. Into the startled and obedient hush she would then toss a word of welcome, an epigram, a bit of gossip, or whatever else may have just occurred to her. When she had said her say, she would graciously ring the bell again as a signal that general conversation might be resumed.

I laughed at the report of such high-handedness, and was thinking that only a pampered egoist like Miss Havisham or Queen Victoria could venture to be so peremptory, when I was decently abashed by the reflection that every time I went near a microphone I was doing something rather like that myself. Certainly it was my professional practice to ring a bell as a signal that everyone in the room should be quiet (without, of course, the comfort of knowing whether anyone obeyed) and then, when I had finished, to ring it again. Indeed, in my next broadcast I confessed the resemblance, and she heard me and chuckled out in Evanston and wrote me a friendly note.

Later in the fall she would be treating herself to a few weeks in New York to hear some music and see the new plays. Also, she said, there had just come on to New York to go on the stage a young neighbor of hers who, she was inclined to think, would some day amount to something in the theatre. Perhaps the two of us would dine with her one evening at the St. Regis. As the opportunity approached, she noted the period at which I was scheduled to broadcast at a station just around the corner from her hotel, fixed the dinner hour early enough for me to get away in time, and sent me a summons.

The waiters had finished setting the table when, with word that Miss Lunt would be with me presently, I was shown into her sitting room. On my heels arrived her other guest, who proved to be none other than a young man for whom, on the mere say-so of Thornton Wilder, I had just been instrumental in getting a job. It was a good place in the company already assembled for Katharine Cornell’s tour of the country, and he told me he was even then rehearsing with her in three plays. At the moment this nineteen-year-old behemoth was going through the phase of trying to look like a curate, and in that manifestation he was still clutching a neatly furled umbrella as he collapsed into a seat, all thanks and blushes and galoshes. His heroic frame was oddly surmounted by a pink baby face from which, to complete the confusion, there issued a voice of effortless magnificence. Even so, I found myself wondering skeptically if Mr. Wilder and I had done well by Miss Cornell. The youngster’s name, I might add, was Orson Welles.

On this occasion, to relieve him of the visible discomfort induced by my speculative scrutiny, I glanced around the sitting room. Although Miss Lunt had been in town only three or four days, the room was already in glorious disorder, and I realized she must be one of those helplessly acquisitive women who may arrive at a hotel with only a small handbag but cannot move out a fortnight later with less than three trunks. There were flowers everywhere and freshly broached boxes of candy. The latest magazines, American and English, were strewn all about, together with concert programs and theatre programs. From a half-opened Brentano package a cascade of new books tumbled across the table. Here and there on the desk and mantelpiece were framed photographs belonging to one who obviously converted her household gods into traveling companions.

I was mildly surprised to see that one of these was an inscribed portrait of Algernon Blackwood. Now why in heaven’s name would this Evanston spinster be junketing around the country with a photograph of that cloud-capped English mystic? The son of a duchess and eventually a writer of some repute, Blackwood had roamed America in the nineties, but for the most part it had been for him a down-at-heel novitiate during which it seemed improbable that he had received an honorary degree from Northwestern. How and where and when had he become a household god of Cornelia Lunt’s? A relative, perhaps. Did Master Welles happen to know? No, he had never heard her mention anyone named Blackwood. Mostly when she talked to him it was about people of the theatre. Charlotte Cushman, for example, or Edwin Booth.

’Miss Lunt,’ he said, ‘ attended Booth’s debut at the Boston Museum.’

As this sank in, it effectively put to rout all further speculation about the nebulous Blackwood.

‘Booth’s debut!’ I exclaimed. ‘Good God, how old is she?’

‘Well,’ he said with a curate’s nice reluctance at being too precise about any woman’s age, ‘she’s going on ninetyone.’

Just then Miss Lunt came in to greet us. She was slim and erect. Her hair was soft and white and she wore a ground-sweeping gown of soft white cashmere, and her rings were set with great cabochon emeralds. In manner she was not dictatorial at all, as her bellringing habits might have suggested, but, aided by a mezzo voice of notable charm, she was diffident and altogether winning. And although she sat there, an indisputable expert in the art of survival who had seen more of the world than most, she let Master Welles (when he could get a word in edgewise) explain to her what the world was like. Indeed, she was so zestfully contemporary with each new thing it was hard for me to realize she had known Emerson and had had her coming-out party the year Mr. Lincoln went to the White House.

Now from New York, after a brief bout of plays and concerts, she would be cravenly retreating to Evanston. No London for her at all that year. She hardly knew what had come over her. She who had had the same suite at the Hotel Connaught in Mayfair for fiftyseven London seasons was now conscious of a puzzling disposition to stay at home. It was so easy to see she felt that in this she was being rather spiritless. Wherefore I could not help recalling the last time I saw Bernhardt. It was a few months before that fabulous creature died, and I had called upon her in the Boulevard Pereire. At the time there was some talk of her making another visit to America. But not one of those long tours, mind you. They were far too exhausting, she said, and she was getting too old for them. While I was trying to remember the French for ‘Nonsense!’ Madame Bernhardt went on to explain. Of course she would not mind playing Boston, New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and Kansas City. That was all. Well, perhaps Denver and San Francisco. But one of those long tours? Never again. Apparently she was going to cut out Amarillo, Texas. Miss Lunt, at ninety, was a little like that.

It was after the Infant Roscius had collected his healthful impedimenta and gone off to rehearse the Queen Mab speech under a pilot light that I went back to the improbable photograph and asked Miss Lunt where her path and Algernon Blackwood’s had crossed. She described theirs as a quite recent friendship by which she set great store. She had known him only ten years, and it had all come about so oddly. It was a friend they had both had in common who brought them together — a dear, dear friend who, when she and Blackwood met, had been dead for many years. His name was Louis — Alfred H. Louis.

Mr. Louis was a man older than herself whom she had come to know out in Chicago when she was a girl still in her teens. He was an English Jew, and in her girlhood her life had been so circumscribed that he was the first Jew she had ever met. No one she had ever known talked as Mr. Louis talked and none wrote so beautifully. For on any day when he could not call upon her or take her for a walk he would write her. Such lovely letters they were, the like of which had not come her way before or since. It was these letters which prompted a lecture from her elder sister who turned duenna for the emergency and said she must discourage such attentions from a mere passer-by, a man so much older and a foreigner to boot. So, with a docile suggestibility for which she had never forgiven herself, the young Cornelia, so pretty in her crinoline, lightly told Mr. Louis she was going away for the summer and would rather he did not write. She went away and he did not write, and that was that. When she came back in the fall, he had taken to the road and left no word behind. She never saw or heard from him again.

In no time she was bitterly regretting her mistake. Even after many healing years it was not easy for her to talk of it. ‘One is so ignorant at nineteen,’ the old woman said, twisting a ring on a wasted finger. ‘How could I have known then that nothing so wonderful as Mr. Louis would ever happen to me again?’ Some years later she came upon a sonnet of his in Harper’s, and, writing him a long, contrite, imploring letter, she enclosed it, with the address left blank, in a note to the editor. It came back to her. One never knew, the editor explained, where Mr. Louis was. He might send in a manuscript from Singapore or Stockholm. Any payment for it could wait until the next time he found himself in New York.

Fifty years slipped by before next she had word of him. That was in 1923 when she chanced upon a new book by Algernon Blackwood, a trial flight in autobiography called Episodes before Thirty. It was dedicated to Alfred Louis, and in it Blackwood told how in his vagrant youth he, like Edwin Arlington Robinson, had sat at the feet of this mad, haughty, inscrutable, tattered old exile whose chair of philosophy was a bench in Battery Park, and from whom they both had learned more than they would ever learn from anyone else in the world. Old Louis had left orders that they were to carve two stones for his grave — ‘Sorry I spoke’ at the head and ‘Sorry they spoke’ at the foot. ‘His voice,’ Blackwood said, ‘his eyes, his smile, his very gestures, had in them all the misery and all the goodness in the world.’ On reading this and more, Miss Lunt wrote Mr. Blackwood, telling of the letters from Alfred Louis which she had conned and cherished all these years and eventually arranging with him to edit and publish them after her death. I do not know if they seemed as wonderful to him, or what, if anything, he now plans to do with them.

My time was drawing short and I was beginning, as always, to be infected by the chronic panic of the radio station, where, if a broadcaster be not on hand a full quarter-hour ahead of schedule, the men in charge collapse under a neurotic conviction that he has been run over by a truck. Yet, as I got into my overcoat and started reluctantly toward the elevator, I was still groping for some word that would give definition to this ghost which by now seemed to be helping her speed me on my way. I had not then read Captain Craig, the prodigious Robinson poem that is recognized as a portrait of Alfred Louis, but from the Blackwood sketch I dimly recalled him as a sonorous old ne’er-do-well challenging the indifferent stars. What manner of man was he?

Well, said Miss Lunt, as she escorted me into the hallway, he was a gentleman. Yes, but — Well, he had been baptized (ineffectually) by Charles Kingsley, and he was an alumnus of Cambridge. Then at one time he was on the staff of the New York Times, and in London before that he had been on the Spectator and the Fortnightly. Still the dead-and-gone Louis remained adrift in my mind with no pigeonhole of his own. Of what status was he? Of what origin? Her answer, given just as the elevator boy snatched me from her, picked up that elevator boy and myself and Orson Welles and the waiting microphone and all the gadgets of 1933 and lumped us together as so many intrusive anachronisms.

‘I have always understood,’ she said, ‘that he was an illegitimate son of Mr. Benjamin Disraeli.’