Our Hearts Were Young and Gay

DODD, MEAD

THE century had passed two decades, but the age of Cornelia Otis Skinner and her friend Emily Kimbrough was still a bit short of that when the girls set out on youth’s glorious adventure of Going Abroad ("I was going off on my own,” says Miss Skinner, “whatever my own was”). You’ve read such books before? Oh, no: never anything like this!

Cornelia was afraid, first, that her mother’s insistence on a “safety pocket” for her valuables would destroy the “slinking” symmetry of the Theda Bara costumes which at the moment enchanted her; and second, that Emily would miss the boat. What happened was quite different. Their ship went aground in the St. Lawrence River, and when they had been luxuriously transferred to another, Cornelia capped the wonders of the voyage by getting measles. It was a terrifying affliction, but all went well — and hilariously — at the end. The end, of course, was just the beginning.

They had exciting times right from the start. But whether they were treated to exciting events was a thing that didn’t matter. For excitement was in them: excitement, and joy, and merriment, and swift and beautiful appreciation, and a rapturous absorption in the largesse of the present moment which never dulled the eagerness of welcome for whatever might come next. They did their first English sightseeing, and some lightheaded shopping; they had their first experience with an English boardinghouse and learned not to think they must tip an elderly eccentric when the slavey said, “It’s always best to have tuppence handy for the geezer.” They had a marvelous time every minute in England, even if they couldn’t play that odd outdoor game at H. G. Wells’s country party. And then they went to France.

Beguiling — not to say uproarious — as the first half of this chronicle of adventurous enjoyment is, the French part of the Young Visitors’ expedition is more delightful still. For Cornelia Otis Skinner has brought her fidelity of observation to play along with her nimble wit, and she has projected not only the sense of two gay and innocent travelers having a glorious time, but a real feeling of the French scene. In its recalling here, the first twilight walk along the shore at Saint-Valery is as beautifully authentic as it is simple. The visit to the wounded veterans’ home strikes notes of courage and pride and tenderness more strongly because of sympathetic young humor. And it will be a strangely insensitive reader who can soon forget the unaffected poignancy of their pilgrimage to the Market Place where St. Joan died: Emily “stood in the center of that beautiful and heartbreaking square murmuring, ‘This is the place. This is the very place.’ And quietly, unpremeditatedly, we both stooped down and touched the cobblestones.”

The girls worked, too — lectures at the Sorbonne, diction classes with socictairées of the Comédie Française. But in work as in play, everything was unexpected and wonderful. Vividness and response and light-heartedness and mirth, keen young minds and the fresh joy of living—all this, on the First Trip Abroad: was there ever radiance like it?

That is what shines through all this irresistible book. K. w.