THE VAMP

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 12, 1 June 1925, Page 21

THE VAMP

STEPHEN LEACOCK, THE FAMOUS HUMORIST, WHO HAS RE-TAUGHT A WEARY WORLD HOW TO LAUGH, WANTS TO KNOW WHERE HE CAN FIND A REAL, LIVE ACTUAL “VAMP”.

J UNDERSTAND that there is a kind of woman round just now called ai Vampire Woman, or a Vamp. I’d like to know her. From all I hear she is just the kind of woman that I think I’d like. I believe I first noticed her in the moving pictures. In these she. wears a shimmering, snaky kind of dress that fits her like onion peel. Personally, I know nothing of dress. In fact, my wife says I never observe it. That is an error. At the right moment, I do. And I must say that that onion-peel effect commands my warmest approval. The Vampire Woman wears nothing on her arms and shoulders. She doesn’t need to. And her dress is generally slit up the side a good deal. This allows her freedom of movement. In my opinion she ought to have it. Freedom of movement is a splendid thing. I don’t mean to say that the Vampire Woman is found only in the moving pictures. You see her in all the new plays and in the magazines, and on book-covers, and in all the up-to-date advertisements. I .read a description of her on the play-bill of a theatre the other day, and it said: “Dowered with a fatal and mesmeric charm, the lure of the iridescent beauty concealed the smallness of the soul within.” But that’s all right about the soul. I’m not looking for that. I don’t care how small it is. Give me the iridescent stuff and I can overlook any shortage of soul that goes with it. In the magazines the Vampire is generally shown in that scene in her boudoir where her victim (she’s been luring him to his destruction) is seen grovelling at her feet. But I never worry about him; he’s a nut. Let him grovel. In the moving pictures you always sec the two of them—the Vampire and the —going out together for the evening. He is in evening dress, very pale and with his hair plastered down (poor Nut, he’s nearing his end), and she is in her onion-skin dress with a seal cloak thrown over her shoulders. In this dress you see them entering one of those dreadful places where all the men and womenother Nuts and Vampires—are sitting at little tables drinking black sarsaparilla out of champagne glasses, and eating black oysters on the half-shell. In words, the place is one of those that are called “fashionable Hadeses,” or words to that effect. I know those places ever so well by sight—little marble tables and beautiful rubber trees, and Vampires everywhere. I know them. But I can’t find them. I wish some one would open up a few fashionable Hadeses in my home town. I know a lot of men who’d go. Well, that’s where the pictured Vampire is principally seen, leading the Nut after her; and, of course, as soon as they sit down at the marble table and she picks up the

bill of fare, you knozv that she’s going to order a champagne glass of black sarsaparilla and a plate of black oysters. That’s all right. Let her. I’d pay for them myself. If I could meet that woman I’d buy her black oysters all the evening. Later on, you see her dropping little drops of something into the Nut’s glass. She’s drugging him. I think she puts in little drops of Scotch whisky, or some dreadful stuff like that. In fact, this Vampire Woman doesn’t care for the eighteenth amendment one little bit. nor for the interstate commerce clause, nor the Ten Commandments, nor anything. So she drugs the Nut without compunction. And when she has him just about drugged she winds her long arms about his neck, and that is the end of him. At the same time, if she wants more men to drug I’ll find her a dozen; friends of mine; I know lots of them. But somehow, wherever you see the pictured Vampire Woman, it’s a’wavs this luckv Nut who is with

her. Sometimes you see them in a motor (they use one about as big as a freight car) ; sometimes you see them at a Swiss hotel (that’s where she throws the Nut over a precipice) ; and sometimes on an ocean steamer, where there are three thugs, in league with the Vampire, hidden behind a ventilator. But it is always this same kind of Nut that is with her. I wonder at it. It seems as if our whole art and literaturedrama, films, magazines, and —were getting filled up and pre-occupied with Vampires and Nuts. But what I think particularly exasperating is the impossibility of finding the Vamp in real life. Often you think you are very near to it, but you never are. In my own town, for example, there are getting to be a lot of women who look a good bit like Vampires. It’s something, I suppose, in the way they dress; not that I ever observe dress at all ; like all men. I hardly see it. But I’m wonderfully quick in the absence

of it. And very often when I come into the After-Dinner Alley of an hotel, or the corridor of the theatre, I say to myself, “Here Arc Vampires.” But they never are. You think they are till you get near them and meet them, and then you’re disappointed. The other night, just when I thought I had met a real one, she turned to me and said, “I want so much to introduce my husband.” It jarred upon me. And a few nights before that I met two. or what I thought to be two, who had on Onion Skins, and were just going out for the evening. So I took it for granted that they must be going to one of those fashionable Hadeses with the sarsaparilla and the black oysters. I went with them. But it turned out to be a lecture on Recent Advances in Physical Science. Too bad, wasn’t it? Personally, I don’t care whether Physical Science advances or goes backward. Especially after that. I suppose the trouble is that they want to be Vampires and can’t. We’re such a hopelessly moral race, after two thousand years of law courts and penitentiaries, that we can’t be bad if we try to. It’s no use. We give a “New Year’s Revel,” and you couldn’t distinguish it in tone from a Sunday-school picnic. We hold a Mardi Gras and it’s as moral as a Mothers’ Convention. So I see now why those women went to the Advances in Physical Science. It’s the only thing that dares to make them. And I think I begin to see, too, more in that Nut than I did at first. After all, he has his points about him. Did you notice, in the movies, the reckless way in which he left that pocketbook full of money on the leather seat? I wouldn’t do that. And did you observe how he gave the five-pound note to the doorkeeper ; and the way in which, on the steamer, even after they had him drugged, he tried to fight the three thugs all at once? That little Nut has a size to him that you and I haven’t got. And he and the Vampires are primitive elemental types, and we aren’t and haven’t been for two thousand years. But there’s a faint survival in us of what we were that makes us admire them. In anything that I have said I shouldn’t wish to disparage for a moment the splendid types of women that we see about us. It is fine to think of the progress that women have made in this last generation. Everywhere now we have women who vote. We have even women who are fit to hold office and lake a seat upon a board. In fact, I know a lot of them that I would be pleased to put on a board and leave there for years. Oh, no, I have nothing to say against the New Women’s movement. I only mean that when it started I got left behind. I imagine that quite a lot of other men did too.