GROCK THE INIMITABLE
By W. RUSSELL BRAIN
T0 go to Stockholm and find Grock there is to receive a bonus from the gods. How many years have passed since this clown of genius last visited England? Could time and the crash of empires have left him unscathed? One need not have worried. His fatuity is, perhaps, a little mellower than it used to be, and it may be that he accepts with a little more poise the calamities that befall him: otherwise he is the same. He looks like a dilapidated but benevolent ape as he shambles on to the stage wearing the traditional clown's dress and carrying upside-down an enormous suitcase, from which, when he opens it, falls the same minute violin as of old. He tunes this to the squeak of a deflating balloon, and is prepared to give a recital without taking off his gloves. Indeed he begins to play, but it appears that he has really come in answer to an advertisement for an accompanist to a gentleman in evening dress, who plays a violin of normal size.
His would-be employer requires no references, but is interested in his origins. Is he French? No, but he can speak French, at least some French—in fact he knows one French word. What is it? Alas, he has forgotten it! What a pity! Now it has come back to him, but he cannot bring himself to mention it. The more he is pressed, the more coyly he writhes. Well, if he must say it—" Mademoiselle "! Rather surprisingly he is engaged as accompanist and goes away to put on evening dress himself. He is soon back, wearing a battered tall hat, the same white gloves, an abbreviated tail-coat that stops at his waist, and very baggy trousers. Any misgivings that his appear- ance might induce are instantly dispelled by his bland and disarming smile. His intentions indeed are excellent, but he is all too easily distracted. His leg itches and he must scratch it ; but having put his hand inside the top of his trousers he cannot get it out, and has to be led behind a screen, emerging in a worse plight, for now he cannot get the other out either. He manages to extricate them and is ready to begin, but the chair is some feet away from the piano, which means that he must move the piano to it. At last he sits down, but now his back itches and he has to borrow his companion's violin bow and push it down the back of his neck in an ecstasy of discomfort. Finally they start to play, but the lid of the piano keeps falling on his hands till he is reduced to tears. He finds that the lid can be evaded by a sharp, snatching movement at the keys, but no sooner has he overcome this difficulty than the seat of his chair gives way and he falls through. He gets up, so firmly wedged into the frame that his partner has to use a good deal of force to extract him. This episode makes him nervous, and he is clearly apprehensive when the seat has been replaced and he sits down again, rather gingerly. The next time the seat collapses, however, he manages to defeat the chair by falling on the floor outside it, which gives him great satisfaction.
His hat has dropped off and he picks it up and puts it on the sloping lid of the piano, from which it slides on to the floor. To get it back he climbs on to the piano and toboggans down after it. But something has to be done about the chair, so he licks round the edge of the seat and replaces it firmly. Now he thinks he would play better with his gloves off. He removes them and slowly rolls them into a ball, which naturally suggests a little juggling. Of course, it would be more spectacular if he had more than one ball, but nothing is simpler than to imagine the others, which incident- ally makes the juggling a good deal easier. So he throws his gloves a few inches into the air with one hand, while with the other he performs marvels of invisible jugglery, throwing imaginary balls behind his back and over his shoulders. Meanwhile his companion has been getting more and more impatient. Grock returns to the piano, but soon gets tired of the accompaniment and deviates into a rendering of the chimes ef a church clock, which, to his surprise, strikes midnight. He had no idea it was so late. He takes an imaginary watch from his pocket, verifies the time, gathers up his hat and makes for the door, to be dragged back by the coat-tails.
After this he decides to play the concertina, but, learning nothing from experience, he must play it perched on the back of that malevolent chair. Naturally he falls through it, but this time feet foremost, which leads to the discovery that by a standing leap he can recover his seat. This pleases him so much that he falls through the chair again in order to do it once more. So he goes on, from disaster to disaster—like all great clowns a virtuoso of catastrophe.
Why do we laugh at Grock? What is funny in an elderly gentle- man in ill-fitting evening dress falling through a chair when he is trying to play the piano? But is he an elderly gentleman? Does a grown man weep because the piano lid hits his knuckles? That minute violin and that very small tail-coat—were they not made for a child? And that bald head—does it belong to an old man or a baby? As we grow older we almost forget that there was a time when we should have enjoyed falling through a chair, especially if it interrupted a music lesson, and that we once took pleasure in falling down for its own sake, and did it to music again and again. Only a child would see in a grand piano—to the scandal of its elders —a potential toboggan. And is not the pretence of juggling a child's make-believe? "See me do it! " it cries, imitating the expert solely in imagination, like the small boy who whirls a cricket- bat round his head and shouts: "Look, look! I'm Denis Compton! " Is not this Greek's secret—that he is the perpetual child who still sleeps in the oldest of us, delighting in all the things we once did, and—dare we confess it—should like to do again, and living in that world of fantasies where bruises, whether of body or mind, cause no pain? And his partner in the "faultless" evening dress—is he a mere stooge? No, he is Reality, that exacting per- former on the full-sized instrument. Greek's act ends with a piece of profound symbolism: both of them—child and adult, fantasy and reality, in harmony at last—play with two bows on the large violin.
The curtain falls, and a white-haired man bows in front of it. We walk back to our hotel, looking at the spires of Stockholm silhouetted against the soft northern twilight and its lights reflected in the water, and grateful for another glimpse of one of the immortals.
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