He joined his family in Paris, and they all spent the Christmas holidays again at St.-Moritz, stopping at the Kulm Hotel. Among the guests was a rich Rumanian, M. Stolojean, whose beautiful wife, Marna, was the daughter of Rumania’s War Minister, M. Filipesco.
Before dinner every night, M. Stolojean gave a cocktail party for his own group and invited the Woods. They got along famously. Marna, Wood says, wore a new dress and a new jewel every evening, and her husband had a pocketful of gold pieces, one of which he always left on the table after signing the card. There was bobsledding by day and dancing at night. The climax was to be a costume ball at Christmas. At lunch on the day of the ball Margaret asked her father whether he was planning to go and what he would wear.
I’ll let Wood tell the story, since it’s one he likes to remember.
I replied to Margaret, “I’m not going to pay a hundred francs to rent a harlequin pajama, or three hundred francs to be an Indian prince for a night”. But Margaret kept at me to go, and I finally said, “All right, I’ll come. I’ll come as Pegoud, upside down in an aeroplane”.
“Oh, marvelous, but how will you do it?”
“Well”, I said, “my head and shoulders will be in the pasteboard fuselage. Gnome motor and propeller in front, the wings supported by my extended arms, white gloves on my feet, and a huge Frenchman’s head, helmeted and goggled, and with a thick beard, all securely fastened on upside down on my behind”.
Gertrude said, “It won’t be funny, it’ll just look like you with a mask on your behind”. But I saw the picture in my mind’s eye, dashed down to the village, and bought yards of yellow cheesecloth, got an armful of thin bamboo sticks from my ski man and a lot of cardboard, and hurried back to the hotel. By forcing Gertrude, Margaret, and Elizabeth to sew vigorously all the afternoon, and gluing and painting cardboard myself, I had the whole contraption finished by six o’clock. It cost altogether less than three francs.
M. Stolojean came in to view it after the cocktails. He danced about in delight. “You shall have the first prize. Leave all to me”, he said. “I will arrange all; the floor shall be cleared after the fourth dance, you are to stay in my room until the band strikes up the Marseillaise, I will have a claque by the door, and there will be shouts of Il vient Pegoud! Vive Pegoud! Pegoud comes! and you tear across the hall and dance a pas seul!”
“Great”, I said. “I’ll do stunts, spirals, sideslips, everything”. We’d had some cocktails. “I’ll do my celebrated whirling dervish act, in which I spin for over a minute and then walk a chalk line”.
It came off exactly as planned, and there was tumultuous applause as I did a sideslip through the door, and shrieks of laughter as I turned and the face and beard came into view. With the band crashing the Marseillaise with an enthusiasm created by many gold pieces, and the huge waxed floor completely deserted, the walls packed with standing spectators, I did things I did not imagine possible in the way of stunts. That the illusion was fairly good, I found out the next morning when shown photographs, one of which appeared the next week in the London Sketch. Later I was able to dance with the ladies, for I had constructed the wings in such a way that I could wrap them around my partner, enveloping her in the manner of a bat doing a bunny hug with a white mouse. At the end of the party, the drum rolled for silence, and the master of ceremonies, a retired English colonel, arose to announce the prizes.
“This first prize, by unanimous vote of the committee”, he roared, “goes to Pegoud”. I folded my wings around my body, bowed, and was handed a white box, which when opened disclosed a full set of garnet sleeve links, studs, collar buttons, etc. Gertrude overheard in a group next morning, “Really, my dear Lady Mary, I don’t see why they gave the prize to Pegoud, because after all it wasn’t Pegoud at all, and besides it wasn’t a pretty costume”.
Wood never brags of his great scientific achievements, but is vain as a child concerning triumphs of that sort.
He returned, with his family, to Paris, finished up his research, and sailed for home in June, 1914.
Chapter Twelve.
Wood as a Poet and Author — or the Splendors and Miseries of a Scientist Who Strayed into Popular Literary Fields
One day Wood met Oliver Herford in the Players Club, and Herford said, grinning, “Come along and have lunch and I’ll promise not to autograph any more of your funny books”.
Wood had turned aside from science, as Lewis Carroll did, to perpetuate “a revised manual of flornithology for beginners”, entitled How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers. It had got off to a bad start in 1907 — then suddenly was all over the place — and a lot of people later attributed it to Herford, saying that only Herford could have written it. Dr. Wood had written it for his own amusement, to spoof the public and as a book to end all books on botany written for children by the mushy male and female nature-fakers of the period. It was done with jingles, woodcuts of his own drawings, and appalling puns. It began by explaining how to tell the difference between the crow and the crocus, the catbird and the catnip, the clover and the plover, the quail and the kale, the roc and the shamrock — then invaded the piscatorial and animal kingdoms to treat of the ape and the grape, the pansy and chimpanzee, the puss and octo-pus, the cow and the cowry.
It had appeared under the imprint of Paul Elder & Co., and Elder hadn’t succeeded in making it go. “None of the bookshops would stock it when approached by Elder’s salesmen (if he had any)”, says Wood. “Boston’s largest bookshop reluctantly took six copies, on consignment. A few weeks later they ordered five hundred”. It was super-nonsense and had begun to catch on by word of mouth. Then the Sunday supplements began splurging its cuckoo drawings — and all of a sudden it was going like wildfire.
Wood sent President Theodore Roosevelt an autographed copy of Birds and Flowers at a time when he was being violently attacked as a “nature-faker” by a certain Reverend Long. Wood wrote on his flyleaf, “I am venturing to send you a remark-proof copy of my current Nature book, which I trust will fill a Long-felt want”. Roosevelt sent a cordial acknowledgment, and asked to see more of Wood’s writings. So Wood sent him a copy of Physical Optics!
And who, wondered children and grownups, was this Robert Williams Wood? If they’d ever heard of a famous professor of physics by that name — which most of them hadn’t — it didn’t occur to them to connect the names…
Wood is no shrinking violet, and one night the story that Herford had written it got in his hair. It was at a dinner party in Washington. Someone chanced to quote from the book, and the man sitting opposite said, “Oh, yes, that’s from the Birds and Flowers thing by Herford”.
Wood said, “I beg your pardon, but Herford didn’t write it”.
“Well, I happen to know he did”, said the man a bit truculently. “You see, Oliver Herford happens to be a friend of mine”.
“I can’t help that”, insisted Wood, “but I tell you he didn’t write it”.
“What makes you so sure he didn’t?”
“Because I wrote it myself!” Wood exploded. “And then”, says Wood, recalling the episode, “he knew I was lying”.
How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers is now in its nineteenth edition and still going strong.