Like Cyrano

"Miss Helene Mayer and Miss Marion Lloyd in the final bout," said the announcer at the national women's fencing championship last week. The people in the boxes of the grand ballroom at the American Woman's Association Clubhouse in Manhattan smiled understandingly. They knew that the announcement was technically incorrect--a defeat for Miss Mayer would mean a fence-off--but they knew also that a defeat for Miss Mayer was highly improbable. A 23-year-old from Offenbach-am-Main, Germany, she was indisputably the best woman fencer in the world from 1927 to 1932, when she was defeated in the Olympics. Last week, fencing for the U. S. indoor title for the first time, she had won all her previous bouts with almost ridiculous ease. The two women stepped onto the black strip of linoleum, laid across the centre of the square, silver-walled room in a sudden, tense silence. Miss Mayer wore her usual fencing costume, a short white dress. Miss Lloyd, in a white jacket and black velyet trousers, scored a touch on a stop-thrust, then another, on a direct attack. Miss Mayer evened the score with a remise and a stop-thrust. The score was tied again at three-all, then at four-all before the spectators, remembering that Miss Lloyd (U. S. champion in 1928 and 1931) was the only woman who defeated Miss Mayer in the 1928 Olympics, saw that she might really do it again. The foils flashed slowly until Miss Lloyd started an advance that ended with a foul. They parried cautiously again, the foils barely catching light in the long mirrors at the end of the room. Then, in a sudden, brilliantly quick attack, Miss Lloyd scored the deciding point with a direct lunge. Miss Mayer's defeat was surprising but not significant. Miss Lloyd, having lost three earlier bouts, was not qualified for the fence-off, in which Miss Mayer faced Dorothy Locke, defending champion. Miss Mayer won handily, 5-to-3, thus adding the U. S. indoor title to the U. S. outdoor title she won last summer. From Anne Morgan, president of the American Woman's Association, Miss Mayer received the Amateur Fencers League gold medal.

Miss Mayer is not the only famed fencer who comes from Offenbach. Like Erskrath de Bary, Hans & Julius Thomson, H. Halberstadt, Stephanie Stern and many another, she was taught by Offenbach's famed professional, Arturo Gazzerra. In 1924, at 13. she was fencing champion of Germany. In 1928 she won the individual championship at the Olympics. In 1932, Helene Mayer visited the U. S. with the German Olympic team, stayed on as an exchange student at Scripps College in

Claremont, Calif. There she takes a two-hour trolley ride once a week to get to a Los Angeles fencing club where she practices. At Scripps College, Miss Mayer meant to study international law to prepare for a career in the German foreign service. The Hitler regime changed her plans. Her mother is Aryan, her father was a Jewish physician. Helene Mayer has been expelled from the Offenbach Fencing Club. She hopes nonetheless to fence for the 1936 German Olympic team. Slim, tall, flaxen-haired with charming manners and a smile as bright and sudden as her foil, she speaks English with no accent, an occasional ja. Last week she reproached photographers who asked her to pose in bright sunlight: "The last pictures in California were in the sun. They made my nose too long. Like Cyrano almost."

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