Pan v. Rima

Wandering in a haunted Venezuelan jungle, a naturalist once heard a trilling note, birdlike, clear, unearthly. Stumbling in the thickets, he sought its source for days, but it always eluded him. One day by accident he came upon the triller.

It was Rima, a bird-girl.* In his famed Green Mansions, Novelist William Henry Hudson invented this tale, described the graceful Rima thus:

"Her figure and features were singularly delicate but it was her color that struck me most. ... It seemed a some-what dim white or pale grey. . . . It was not white, but alabastrian, semipellucid, showing an underlying rose colour. . . . in shadow . . . rosy purple to dim blue. The eyes . . . flamelike . . . a tender red. The hair . . . slate . . . sometimes intensely black . . . sometimes white as a noonday cloud."

In 1925, three years after Novelist Hudson died, London bird-lovers dedicated to his memory a bird-sanctuary decorated by Sculptor Jacob Epstein, situated in Hyde Park. Sculptor Epstein's panel represented Rima, arms outstretched, succoring two birds of prey. But to the consternation of the bird-lovers and the embarrassment of then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin who unveiled the statue (TIME, June 1, 1925), Epstein's Rima was not the melodious and polychromatic creature of Novelist Hudson's fancy, but a new, strange, bovine character. Her archaic, flat-footed figure, her tremendous and sagging muscles, her heavy Buddhistic countenance roused a deafening discussion. She was called grotesque, horrible. The protests culminated in a student uprising in which the bird-girl was painted green. Londoners today point out with chagrin her quiet nook, declare she "scares the birds away."

Epstein partisans have defended Rima in abstract terms, excoriating the beloved statue of Peter Pan by Sir George Frampton in Kensington Gardens as the "wedding cake" variety of sculpture, "fit only for mid-Victorians."

Last May stolid Britishers were shocked one morning to hear that Peter Pan had been tarred and feathered. They remembered the pronouncements of Epstein partisans.

Last fortnight a London ''bobby," strolling through Hyde Park on his early morning round, noticed something amiss with the bird sanctuary, approached and looked at Rima. She was almost invisible beneath tar and feathers. There were no clues. Public opinion was satisfied that this was the work of outraged friends of Peter Pan, the boy-who-would-never-grow-up.

*Not to be confused with Bird Girl Koo-Koo of Ringling Side-Show fame.