Mrs. Willoughby on the Plains of Troy

by MARY ELIZABETH PLUMMER

1

FOR an entire fortnight Mrs. Peter Willoughby had jogged along, not thinking anything extraordinary, when suddenly the thought came to her that everything in the history books had actually happened. “On a real day,” thought Mrs. Willoughby. “A day that was hot, cold, or medium — with actual people breathing, moving, loving, wondering what they would have for dinner.”

Mrs. Willoughby always recognized a good idea when she had one; and she knew that this was one of her best. It illumined and vivified the field of history, which previously had seemed to her a bit of a bore.

History had happened gradually, on separate days, while children rolled their hoops in the sun and old people sat on their front stoops, talking.

“Did you know the Great Pyramid’s nearly done? Quite a thing, they say.”

“Hear Caesar has reached the Rhine.”

All those days once were today, thought Mrs. Willoughby, with sunrise, sunset, and newspapers (of course after newspapers were invented). Even those old kings — Khasekhemui Besh, for example —probably were much like people today: toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing.

Khasekhemui Besh had sat on his throne, blinking his eyes. Perhaps he thought, “ I need a haircut.” He considered the day’s agenda and thought, “I should like to go fishing,” or “This empire is going to pot.” A pretty Egyptian girl passed by, and Khasekhemui Besh leered.

“What were your dreams, old Khasekhemui?” Mrs. Peter Willoughby wondered.

She was fired with interest to know more about history. Hannibal. Xerxes. Magellan. Tecumseh. So, while everyone else was peering toward the future, Mrs. Peter Willoughby turned to the past.

“Jim,” said Mrs. Willoughby to her husband one evening, “did you know that Cleopatra was only sixteen when Julius Caesar married her?”

James Peter Willoughby said he had known this, but hadn’t thought of it in a good while.

“Just the age of our daughter Jane,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “Caesar might have fallen in love with our Jane instead of Cleopatra, if Jane had been born in 69 B.C. Have you ever thought of that?”

James Peter Willoughby hadn’t.

Mrs. Willoughby paused a moment, and added, “Think of sex in 69 B.C.! Anyway,” she continued, “I would not have given my consent to Caesar’s marriage to Jane under any circumstances, because Caesar already had a Roman wife.

She would have said, kindly but firmly: “No, Julius. You may not have Jane. You are already married.”

It made history seem very real, to think what she herself would have done in these situations.

“Don’t feel depressed about having forgotten Cleopatra’s age,” she told her husband, “because I didn’t know any history until recently, except 1492, 1776, and the fact that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. It’s only since I got this new, fresh slant about how history actually happened that I started to brush up.”

Mrs. Willoughby’s researches in the field of history were conducted in the time she ordinarily would have spent reading fiction. She began by selecting a history book from the Willoughby bookshelves. Then she would picture history, for a moment, in the mass: like a great newsreel run off at an accelerated pace, with empires rising and falling, and prairie schooners hurtling westward.

After this, she dipped at random into the stream of history, and seined up a tidbit. Perhaps something about Bismarck. Or a stray fact about Daniel Boone. She knew that it would be impossible to fit these influences into the current picture until she closed up the gaps in her knowledge.

Conversation at the Willoughby dinner table now reached a height of erudition hitherto undreamed of. Mrs. Willoughby staggered the dinner guests with references to Talleyrand, the Punic Wars, and Millard Fillmore’s Administration. She offered little side lights, and passed lightly on to another era. Everyone thought, “Mrs. Peter Willoughby is at home in any age.”

But Mrs. Willoughby did not pretend to be. The more she learned, the more she realized how much she did not know; and she yearned for the time when she would understand the past so well that the present would seem merely the logical sequence of the causes. Sometimes, reading a few lines of history, she felt very humble. An isolated scene from the past suddenly would come real, in all its majesty.

One day it was the death of the Duke of Wellington. She imagined his funeral procession moving through the streets of London. There would have been muffled drums and the sound of marching feet; perhaps a voice intoning Tennyson’s mighty lines:

At other times, Mrs. Willoughby simply dabbled for pleasure in the past, speculating about the love life of bygone monarchs, wondering whether any bystanders were around when Magna Carta was signed, and what women wore in the Reindeer Age.

2

JAMES PETER WILLOUGHBY became a little annoyed with this dalliance over the entire expanse of world history — particularly when Mrs. Willoughby got her facts mixed up.

“Did you know how people went up to the higher levels of the hanging gardens of Babylon?” she asked him one evening.

“In an old, creaking elevator,” said Jim, exasperated.

“No,” said Mrs. Willoughby triumphantly.

“In a balloon,” said Jim.

“No, dear,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “By staircase. Think of the beautiful women of Babylon, swishing down the stairs of the hanging gardens in their Paris clothes.”

“Paris wasn’t founded yet,” said Jim.

“Did you know that Genghis Khan had whiskers?” said Mrs. Willoughby, sweeping on through the corridors of time.

“No,” said Jim. “Do you know who Button Gwinnett was? No? Well, he signed the Declaration of Independence. I shall now list all the kings of England in order.” He began to recite: —

“I don’t see what connection that has with Button Gwinnett,” interrupted Mrs. Willoughby.

Jim continued, “Did you know that Michelangelo never took off a pair of boots until they were worn through the soles?”

“I was talking about history,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “You are talking about trivia.”

Mrs. Willoughby went into the bedroom and began to brush her hair vigorously. Jim appeared in the door and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

“Jim, you’re very intelligent,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “ but you have such a miscellaneous mind.”

He hadn’t been fair, she thought, but she really ought to get her history organized on a systematic basis. She might confine herself to wars. She had been shocked to discover how much battling there had been through the ages. A vast amount of pillage, too. It was surprising that the world had got on as well as it had, considering all that had happened.

She might study how one object figured in all the different eras. Such as the umbrella. Only the day before, she had come upon a picture of a woman of ancient Nineveh, carrying an umbrella. At least, it looked like an umbrella.

“Now that’s something I never knew before,” Mrs. Willoughby had thought. “I never knew that the women of Nineveh had umbrellas.”

Suddenly the vanished city of Nineveh had seemed quite real. The rain had fallen on Nineveh, just as it falls here. The rain had slanted across the statues of the great winged bulls. There were puddles in the street. The Nineveh woman had skirted these, gracefully holding her umbrella.

“It would be revelatory,” thought Mrs. Willoughby, “to study the umbrella through the ages.” Probably primitive man had dreamed up this object. First a shelter, then a portable shelter. He would have carried a clumsy arrangement of leaves, and gone off in the rain to look for acorns.

There had been a picture in the same book of Abraham Lincoln’s umbrella, lying on a drop-leaf table beside his tall hat. It was a big, homely umbrella, but the picture was quite moving.

One could go on to modern umbrellas. Neville Chamberlain’s. The umbrellas of air power.

Such a survey would, however, give only a partial view of history. No, there was only one way to make the jigsaw puzzle of events completely clear. It was to go back to the very beginning, and work up chronologically.

3

BACK she went, to the first faint glimmerings of time, wondering how long it would take her to get up to Paul Revere’s Ride and the defeat of the Indians at Tippecanoe.

Now in her free hours — three or four a week — she considered fossils, strange tree-ferns that rose from the steamy swamps millions of years ago, and dinosaurs grasping food with their forelegs.

“How tedious!” thought Mrs. Willoughby. She loathed those eras.

On she plowed through the glacial periods. Meanwhile, heart-shaking events were happening in the world around her. She must hurry and catch up; for not only were all past days once today: today would be history also.

On the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she was battling the Hittites in the second millennium B.C. When Jimmy Doolittle bombed Tokyo, she was sailing to ancient Thebes with a Pharaoh.

She was running a race with the clock, and losing. But she was unwilling to give up. If she slackened now, so much more history would happen that her task would be insuperable.

Mrs. Willoughby was on the plains of Troy when the great War Bond parade moved up Fifth Avenue in June, 1942. She left the siege of the ancient city to go with her children, Joyce and Peter, to see the parade.

They found a place in a hotel window at Fiftyninth Street, and looked out on the marching uniformed ranks, the floats, the flags, the pieces of torn paper fluttering down.

The children were absorbed and quiet. Occasionally young Peter made brief comments. When the airplanes flew over he said, “B-17’s.”

Mrs. Willoughby rested her hands on the children’s shoulders, and scanned the faces of the marching men. The image of Troy faded from her mind; she thought of the scenes these boys had come from.

She saw the waving winter wheat in the Texas Panhandle; the smokestacks of the Great Lakes cities, the plains of the Dakotas. Things she had seen in photomurals of America, or from train windows on trips she had taken with Jim: a quiet small town with autumn leaves lying on the little park; frame houses with front porches and flower boxes; a newsboy tossing an evening paper against a door.

Far down Fifth Avenue, a band was playing the tunes of World War I: “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” and “Mademoiselle from Armentieres”; but below Mrs. Willoughby and her children the new army passed, with its tanks named “Ignatz” and “ Invincible,” its plane detectors, its pontoon equipment.

A tanned young man riding by in a tank named “Ball of Fire” looked up and caught Mrs. Willoughby’s eye and waved, thinking she was Ina Claire. He pointed to the guns and held up his fingers : V for Victory.

Suddenly Mrs. Willoughby’s cheeks were wet with tears. “O God,” she prayed, “I come to Thee from Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, a humble suppliant. I hold no public office; I am just a typical consumer; but help me to help win the war.”

She knew that she would never return to the siege of Troy until this war was over. She was sorry she hadn’t arrived at the moment in history which would have given her a key to her world, but now she had new duties.

Mrs. Peter Willoughby became an airplane spotter for civilian defense in the time she previously had spent reading history. She gave blood to the Red Cross, she rolled bandages, she sold War Bonds in a Fifth Avenue department store.

But there was a further service which Mrs. Willoughby gave to the war effort: an emanation of courage and moral backing which she contributed to the armed forces of the United Nations on the land, the sea, and in the air. Thereafter, no troops fought without Mrs. Willoughby. They didn’t know that she went into action, but she did.

When the gray ships nosed down the East River, with their gunnery crews aboard, Mrs. Willoughby was aboard too. From the fortress of her own home, helping to take care of things, she was vigilant. She would pace the decks, in her mind, after the ships got out to sea, and call, “Submarine to port, sir!”

No plane pilot took off in the Pacific area without Mrs. Peter Willoughby at his side, scanning the skies for the enemy. She knew that many other women were doing the same thing; but if she left off, there might not be enough.

James Peter Willoughby was sincerely impressed by the scope of his wife’s war effort. “Maybe this does some good,” he said. He cited Peer Gynt, of whom it was said when he met an adversary, “He was too strong. There were women behind him.”

“Janie is fighting the war on all fronts,” Jim told his friends when they asked what Mrs. Willoughby was doing. He started calling her “The Iron Angel.”