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1836 lines
80 KiB
Plaintext
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This is part two of the text NOT THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF SIR ROGER
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BLOXAM by Aleister Crowley.
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N21.R1
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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
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DOES GET TO THE HOUSEHOLD CAVALRY AT LAST.
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Porphyria Poppoea was perhaps a trifle sore at the
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rudeness of the Scotsman. A sensitive maiden -- and she was
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that, God Knows! -- expects more consideration than she got. He
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had no savoir faire, this James, this L., this Dickson; he
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was restless, he fidgeted, he said nothing wise, or witty, or
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even graceful; and he withdrew finally with abruptness. He had
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had much the worst of the encounter to tell the truth; she had
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been fully equal to the situation. She had taken his point, she
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had pressed him closely, she had pumped him dry; finally she had
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forced him to contribute all his present havings -- the savings
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of weeks, or so he swore -- to her pet charity (The Seamen's
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Mission, or some such name 'twas; I forget; this was in
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Stockholm twenty years ago, and more). What a Portia she would
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have made! I'm sorry for the man that asks a pound of flesh
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where she is! Yet, despite her victory, she was perhaps a trifle
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sore. ``Perhaps!'' screams the girl Renee, looking over my shoulder.
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``Don't you know if she was sore or not?'' Silence is
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golden; I turn round; she turns round; she has now the
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opportunity to argue the point from analogy -- Mem: see Butler's
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Analogy -- but she's not arguing; she's gone to the drug
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store, and I can continue peacefully to record, in my own
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charming way, with just the limitations I desire -- oh not The
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Life and Adventures of Sir Roger Bloxam! But I think that I
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shall go to sleep for awhile, and try (once more) to get to the
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point in a new chapter. But I'll keep my promise, Cynara, in my
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fashion. Sore or not, she was following Sir Roger Bloxam with
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modesty and decorum through the streets, a few nights later,
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when Sir Roger was accosted by a Mysterious Stranger -- ha! ha!
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we come to it at last -- who was dressed in the gorgeous uniform
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of the (now!) Household Cavalry.
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N22.R1
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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
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A PLENARY, VERACIOUS, AND METICULOUSLY SCRUPULOUS ACCOUNT OF
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WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BEST REGIMENT OF THE HOUSEHOLD CAVALRY OF
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THE KING OF SWEDEN AND NORWAY: CALCULATED TO 33 PLACES OF
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DECIMALS, BY THE METHOD OF HARD INDURATED HUNTERIAN
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LOGARITHMS.
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Admiral Fitzroy, by no means the least of English poets,
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was wont to observe -- at least he was always putting it on his
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barometers -- ``Long foretold, long last: Short notice, soon
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past.'' So please settle down in that Oxford Basket Chair, draw
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the table close, for you'll need that jar you bought at Bacon's
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in your first teens because Calverle hypnotized you into doing
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so, fill the old Meerschaum (the nigger with the hat is the
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sweetest) with the pure Perique of St. James' Parish Louisiana,
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throw some coals and a log or two on the fire, and put your legs
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on the mantlepiece; for if the laws of weather apply to
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literature, this ought to be a terribly long chapter.
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You can smoke a pipe, and find the port, while you wait;
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for I'm in no mood to write it just now. Do you realize it's
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half past three in the morning?
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It was about eleven at night when Sir Roger Bloxam met
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Count Svendstrom. The Swede was under the influence of the
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prudish Queen, I suppose; for all he said was this ``Come, come!
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A boy of your age ought to be in bed at this time of night!''
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Sir Roger realized the good sense of his adviser; he acted at
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once on the word; and incidentally, he introduced the Count to
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Porphyria Poppoea. The Delight was mutual; the soldier waxed so
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enthusiastic that there was nothing for it but he must make a
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luncheon party for his brother officers the very next day; and
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Sir Roger made a hit indeed with his charming manners and his
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delicate boyish beauty and his sly wit. Porphyria Poppoea
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uttered not a single sound during the whole meal, though a
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Swedish bayonet is a sore tempter in this matter -- believe me
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who have eaten many such! -- but I never heard that her
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demeanour diminished the popularity either of herself or of Sir
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Roger Bloxam. You'll understand, dear Elizabeth, that as a self
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respecting novelist, I should never let my hero -- or whom you
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think my hero -- go gallivanting about, at his age, with all
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sorts of strangers. No; the Cardinal and his followers were
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always with him. They have not been assertive, up to now;
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there's a time for everything; don't worry me, please!
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Anyhow, after lunch, the old Colonel drew the Cardinal
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out, for he possessed much linguistic ability. The learned dwarf
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was encouraged, became excited. He expanded; he enlarged upon
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his subject taking those words of the Saviour that that which
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goeth into a man doth not defile him for his thesis. He touched
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lightly upon the lips, showing how idle and useless action of
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them must be accounted for at the Day of Judgment; passed by the
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teeth with tender and graceful touch, dealt pleasantly with the
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tonsils, which he compared to the pillars of King Solomon's
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Temple, and the uvula, a sort of guardian to the shrine; but he
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brought the head of his course to the throat itself, for it is
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here that speech begins, and therefore here that it must be
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brought to silence. The old Colonel sucked all this up with
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avidity, like a cat lapping cream; and when the good Cardinal,
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with a fierce spasm of eloquence, made that inimitable gesture
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of Saint Paul ``Let me spend and be spent for you'' the soldier
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bethought him that rarely if ever in all his life had he been so
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overwhelmed with the passionate torrent of that life-giving
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fervour which jets from the inmost being of the soul. Meanwhile
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the younger officers were introduced one by one to the happy
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Porphyria Poppoea. The party waxed merry, yea, exceedingly; but
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all good things have an end -- I know more good things than one
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that wouldn't be fun if they hadn't one -- and the time came at
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last for Sir Roger Bloxam to return to his hotel.
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The Colonel bowed very low to the Cardinal, and
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addressed Sir Roger: ``I assure you, sir, that in my opinion
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your guardian is indeed a Pillar of the Church. His utterance
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had found all the force of a Bull.'' But the younger men, who
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certainly were very drunk, cried in chorus: We have had a
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wonderful time in the pull-pit!
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N23.R1
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
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RELAPSE OF A PROMISING YOUNG NOVEL INTO A JOLLY DEVIL-MAY-CARE
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BOOK.
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The fact is, I've been as sick as a dog. Not a nice dog,
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either! I'm just over my tuberculosis, which has been neuralgia,
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rheumatism, swamp fever, abscess of the liver, cancer,
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arthritis, osteoma, and one or two other things in turn, and
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last night I though it must be gall-stones. But undeniably
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life's hard with gas leaking everywhere and poisoning one, and a
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series of sopranos taking lessons o'erhead, and Seven Tatosian
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Brothers ever and anon hammering tacks into carpets in the
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exercise of their unholy trade. (Curse all Armenians, anyhow!)
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But I'd take no heed to the pack of 'em had I but a story to
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tell, and I've none; I'm setting down plain truth, as I see it,
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for the God of Things as they Ought to Be. This novel's a tract
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in praise of chastity and some such virtues of true Christian
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man and woman; and I'll say nothing but the truth -- Shall be
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Truth in armour, mind you, with rich furniture and a broidered
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veil upon it; but Sir Truth shall his name be, and no
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masquerader. And so I go aghast; for so great and so wonderful
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is the story of the Life and Adventures of Sir Roger Bloxam that
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it is well I have not That to write. (I told you a long while
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since, did ye believe? Let him that did take another drink, and
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a long one, praising me, and himself, and the sweet God of Truth
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that did make such understanding between us!) But I was better
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off before, in New Orleans, not a doubt of it, Edward or no
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Edward; for there in Dauphine Street there was no need of
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getting up or going to bed. I knew nobody, and nobody knew me;
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my loves were casual and lonely as my lunches. This is the
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proper life for the pure poet who would commune evermore with
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Beauty, enjoy the Beatific Vision, pace the sapphire pavement of
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the Throne of God, and compose hymns in praise of Apis over the
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Filet de Boeuf Robespierre at Antoine's, or of Pitma over Sister
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Green, the smooth, muscular, black-purple glory of her body was
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like the stone of that many-breasted beauty Diana in Neapolis.
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(Poor U.S.A.! as Porphyria Poppoea would Morse-Code if Sir Roger
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Bloxam ate some horrible bad food, ``in England we've a New
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Forest, date before 1100; and in Italy a New City, date before
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their fabled Jesus.'') Which makes me wonder whether Jesus was
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not an American. Joseph and Mary are both common names here
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(`here', hell, hell, hell, that I must still write `here'!)
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There are several people in New York who at least look like
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Jews, talk like Jews, think like Jews, smell like Jews. The
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parents of Jesus may well have been Americans touring in
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Palestine. It is very American of Jesus that at twelve years old
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he should have been teaching all the most learned men their
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business, and that he should have `frozen out' the crowd in the
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Temple, which appears to have been the Wall Street of Jerusalem.
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The sublime ignorance of Jesus, his comic beliefs in the flood
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and other idiotic fables, his imbecile Puritanism, his
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determination to make God damn every one who disagreed with him,
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though he was himself too proud to fight, his servility to the
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Romans, his poor bluff about the `twelve legions of angels'
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which impressed Pilate as much as the existing bluff impresses
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Germany -- ``a million men between sunset and dawn'' Bryan, Wm.
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Jennings of that ilk ( -- oh well, they made good; but no
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matter!) -- all these things speak Jesus an American. Methinks
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I'll quit me novel awhile, and write this up for the Sunday
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papers, and get me some of their gods. N.B. There had better be
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plenty; this chapter has hardly been `jolly' up to now as the
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title did so loudly promise. Diseases -- Jews -- Americans:
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there's a descent of Avernus for you! A little dinner might
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brighten me up; say a Bronx, Little Necks, Gumbo, Shad, Jumbo
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Squab, Squash, Terrapin, Individual Miss Jordan, Pecanisques,
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Fudge Sundae: oh help! Great Sprites of Soy, of Brillat-Savarin,
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of your pity hear me! Brighten me up? -- great Gaster, pardon me
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my sins! My grandfather's grandfather laid down a pretty pipe of
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gout-podagra in the cellars of my veins; but what should I hand
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on to my descendants if I drank a `Welch-ball'? Don't worry, you
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wouldn't have any descendants.
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God help me! God help me! God help me! I've got to get
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up; so that's the end of the chapter.
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N24.R1
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
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HOW SIR ROGER COMPORTED HIMSELF IN THE DEBATE WITH THE
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C.U.N.T.S.
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This book is getting along very slowly; so I shall skip
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a century of chapters to encourage myself with the Illusion of
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Progress.
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To illustrate the remarkable precocity of Sir Roger
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Bloxam, it may here be stated that he said, at the early age of
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nine, that Women can never be any good, just as if he were grown
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up and knew all about it. Well rebuked he the pudding-faced,
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sausage-bodied, flabbinesses of feminism, did he, the saucy
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youngster. ``Look you, thing'', quoth he courteously (all things
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considered) to the Cambridge University New Testament Society
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and the Cincinatti Uplift New Thought Society, and other such,
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``look you, a woman must either be a mother or not a mother.''
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And all they cried ``Ay'', assenting. ``Well then'', he went on
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``what is a mother? The most animal of all traits is motherhood.
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The nearer a mother is to the cow, the better mother she! What
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is her life? A menstruation, a befutterment, a gestation, a
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parturition, a suckling -- and so it goes. She cannot mix in
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society; her duties as well as her vanity forbid it. She must
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perforce leave dinner half tasted -- the baby's hungry! Oh God!
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I nauseate to contemplate the revolting details -- the filthy
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rags, the hideous sicknesses, the deformed belly, the foulness
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of childbirth, the cow-udders that appease the brat's yell -- oh
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God! How can she do aught human, when she is dragged down to
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beastliness for half her life? No, say what you will, a mother
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is but a sow, a wallowing sow.'' But one spake, saying: ``But
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all this does not apply to the woman who is not a mother. What
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of her?'' ``Pah!'' snorted Sir Roger, ``she is simply a bitch.''
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But his opponent, staggering, struck his last blow. ``I'll grant
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you that'', say he ``but what of the woman who, having been a
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mother, is now so no more?'' ``Past bearing'' began the child --
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but he fell to the floor in a fit, and was awarded the fight on
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a foul.
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By the coccyx of good Saint Antony of Padua, how I vomit
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at them! But the bitches are the best.
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N25.R1
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(Memorandum to Publisher. Be sure to have this chapter
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illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson and Mr. Harrison Fisher.)
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CHAPTER CXXVI
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SIR ROGER GOES TO SWITZERLAND.
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It has been said, I think by Andre Tridon, that it is
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such a pity that God has no Christian name -- for if He had,
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what anecdotes could not Frank Harris tell about Him?
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But I cannot see that this has anything to do with the
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subject of our chapter, and though I could lead on to it --
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quis dubi -- tat? -- why should I? Art cannot be forced.
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Audax omnia perpeti gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas --
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libellum! So I might call the chapter De amicitiis
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Francisci Harris, tell the scandal about the Holy Ghost, and
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call God Walter Pater.
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N26.R1
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
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SIR ROGER REALLY DOES GO TO SWITZERLAND.
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This adding on a hundred doesn't work at all; I am
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merely in despair that after so many chapters I am so little
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advanced with Our Story. (Yes, Our Story, Lionel, sweet boy!
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never forget; this is Our Story.)
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You may well ask why this insistence on Sir Roger's
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visit to Switzerland. As you point out, he had been there
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already, and to France too, as a mere boy; and he had been all
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over Wales and Scotland even to Skye -- and what they did tell
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him in Glasgie, I'd be ashamed to tell you -- and in the English
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Lakes, and climbed all the mountains, and broke all the records
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-- Direct Climb of Mickledoor, first solitary Descent of the
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North Face of the Pillar Rock, first solitary ascent of Kenn
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Knotts Chimney, Twyll-Du, and dozens of other; yet I never said
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a word about it.
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(Well, never mind that, says you: let's hear about the
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Glasgow business.)
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Well, it came indirectly only on Sir Roger; the foot of
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the trouble was Cardinal Mentula. For that most learned and most
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subtle prelate had not yet found how to spend his evenings. When
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he got up every morning, he was still content to leave himself
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(in a manner of speaking) in the hollow of Sir Roger's hand as
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far as amusement was concerned. Happy indeed were the hours that
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he spent! But 'o nights, no! He was of the secret service, may
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be; he loved to seek out things usually hidden -- the Good, the
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Beautiful, and the Trou, as he never wittily observed. For he
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never spoke -- 'twas against his vow of silence -- though
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paradoxically, he was easily brought to con-fesses. (I abhor
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these Entente puns, don't you?) So in Glasgow his idea
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was to relieve the necessities of the poor, and he would go out
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slumming with Sir Roger and the rest of the gang. I can see them
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now, the good knight as almoner with two shillings extracted
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from an indulgent mother and his purse full to bursting (that
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reads funnily, but it's quite all right), the Cardinal leaping
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and dancing and thumping before him all down the street, brave
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Coglio and gay Cojone as eager as you wish, and Porphyria
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Poppoea following discontentedly in the background, sulking,
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hidden in her cushions, and probably muttering to herself. Damn
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it! she was right always, that girl! If Sir Roger had only taken
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her advice all through, this would not have been so tragic a
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story. She was a good friend, if ever a man had one! But that
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pugnacious little devil of a dwarf, he was for ever getting his
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ward into trouble. His only idea seems to have been to spend,
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and spend, and spend; bad for him, and worse for Sir Roger, who
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lost wealth and health in humouring his caprices, and had
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nothing much but a hell of a good time to show for it. Well,
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down Sauciehall Street they go, the crowd of them, and the devil
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patron Saint of Glasgow) knows where else. And the result is
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that poor God-damned Cardinal Mentula -- wished. What did poor
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God- damned Cardinal Mentula wish? Poor God-damned Cardinal
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Mentula wished that he could say with Saint Peter that he had
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toiled all night and had caught nothing. Oh yes! He was
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converted to the doctrine of Heraclitus PANTA 'PEI. When
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somebody said ``Das Ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan'' his
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unspoken comment was ``More German Schrecklichkeit!'' He would
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deliberately mistranslate ``Ab ovo usque ad mala'' and
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``Mulier desinit in piscem''. To him ``Nemo sapit
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omnibus horis'' seemed like an Accusing Voice. Every morning
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he awoke to the battle-cry of Sursum Chordee (have I got
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that Latin right?) and if he was a dwarf before, he was now
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twisted and deformed to excite the pity of a pirate or an
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evangelical clergyman. By the Fallopian Tubes of Saint Theresa,
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God bless her, the dainty little mystic! I tell you honestly as
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man to man, he could hardly read a poem without feeling that the
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bard was laughing at him. ``Men may come and men may go, But I
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flow on for ever'' sounded like sarcasm. He hated the very name
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of Rupert Brooke. You see the whole catastrophe came on him like
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a thunder clap; and bless my psyche! if I haven't forgotten to
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tell you what it was. (Loud applause.)
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N27.R1
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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
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NOTHING PARTICULAR HAPPENS TO SIR ROGER BLOXAM IN SWITZERLAND;
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SO WHY WORRY?
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If two and a half years in -- that word Porphyria
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Poppoea uses after too much dinner too unwise -- doesn't destroy
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a man's sense of humour, it is probably time for him to die.
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When poison has has merely the effect of laughing gas, there
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msut be something radically wrong with the gassed. To proceed:
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Sir Roger Bloxam enjoyed himself thoroughly in Switzerland. The
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Cardinal never bothered him in such places. He doesn't know to
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this day why he doesn't like the Swiss, who were always
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perfectly charming to him. I refuse to describe glaciers, and
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all that sort of thing; I shall not tell of Sir Roger's
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adventures on the mountains. The whole subject bores me utterly;
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I'm sorry I ever brought it in. He wasn't consumptive; he never
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met a Maiden; he never had an accident; what in the name of the
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Master of any College, and of my beloved Umfraville, who
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pantamorphopsychonosophilographer that he is, writes a complete
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novel without introducing a single incident of any kind -- I
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refer to The Buffoon -- what, I say, is the use of going
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on? This is worse than Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways and that
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third pole-axe sequel -- God knows I never knew its name --
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bound in one ghastly volume.
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Praise God, from whom all blessings flow
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Sir Roger Bloxam had to go.
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His safe return be now my boast:
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Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!
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Amen
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N28.R1
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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
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SIR ROGER BLOXAM AT CAMBRIDGE, AMSTERDAM, AND BIRMINGHAM. AN
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ADVENTURE OF PORPHYRIA POPPOEA.. THIS TIME WE MEAN BUSINESS.
|
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|
||
(CHAPTER CCCXXXIII. How Sir Roger Bloxam put to shame the
|
||
vulgarity of a famous Wit. It was on the good ship Campania that
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the darling of our dreams returned from Jew York. See him upon
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the poop (yes, poop! poop! poop!) his eyes flooded with tears of
|
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joy as the city fell away on the horizon. In this most religious
|
||
exercise he was joined by the world-famous wit Aleister Crowley.
|
||
They sobbed with gladness in each others' arms. A Yank
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approached them. ``Waal, boys, what do you think of God's
|
||
country?'' Crowley looked at him with a tinge of sadness in his
|
||
glance, and smiled softly ``Pox et preterea nihil.'' But
|
||
Sir Roger liked it not; his mother had taught him to avoid the
|
||
obvious. He made a darling little mone at the Nooyarker. ``Oh,
|
||
sir, your national motto nearly serves us; why not Et
|
||
pluribus prunum?'')
|
||
|
||
I would I were Philomena for this one hour, to wound my
|
||
breast upon this thorn, or Hyacinth to stain this one flower
|
||
page from my heart's heart. Pray, think not so ill of my
|
||
Porphyria Poppoea; for in all her loves she had one love, and
|
||
that for all her life. He was a man with golden hair so fine and
|
||
pale, yet, glowing, that one thought of Sun-rays incarnate in
|
||
gossamer; and his face was like the harvest moon. He came up to
|
||
his University every year; and there he met Sir Roger Bloxam at
|
||
a club called the Knights of the Round Table. I must not tell
|
||
his name: besides, would it sound sweet in your ears also? When
|
||
he divined the presence of Porphyria Poppoea, he fell instant in
|
||
love with her, and dared not speak, because he feared to offend
|
||
Sir Roger Bloxam! 'Twas in a week of revelry, and this man
|
||
played and danced for a dramatic club. Will God not give me a
|
||
name for him? Some name of angel strength and sweetness? Surely
|
||
Porphyria yearned for him as Phoedra for Hippolytus -- let that,
|
||
then, serve! Well, the week parted and we did not see Sir Roger
|
||
again. But when he left, he left a book, the Legendes des
|
||
Sexes of Edouard d'Haraucourt, the Sieur de Chamblay, and in
|
||
it he wrote five words. These words mean nothing: a chess-player
|
||
might have used them in the beginning to enumerate his pieces;
|
||
but when Sir Roger Bloxam read them, Porphyria Poppoea divined
|
||
that Hippolytus loved her. She was a nymph of excellent modesty,
|
||
and impudence unmatched -- o paradox sublime of God's invention!
|
||
She lusted nobly for all love, and gave herself utterly and
|
||
shamelessly; yet, despite herself, she acted in true Panic fear
|
||
at the approach of her god. Thus, urgently desiring Sir Roger to
|
||
take her to the Lake where Hippolytus had his palace, she forced
|
||
the good knight to fly with her to Amsterdam; thence only she
|
||
dictated letters so fiercely burning that her whole soul was
|
||
lost in them. Safe, she became bold. Yet, by his letters,
|
||
mocking and provoking, yet eager as hers, he drew her to him. Oh
|
||
but she must turn to him, heliotrope! Thus she came back to
|
||
England. And Sir Roger must perforce meet Hippolytus at the
|
||
Queen's Hotel in Birmingham. ``What a place for a romance! You
|
||
jest!'' Oh love knows not of time and space -- Always the
|
||
time and place and the loved one all together! Sir Roger
|
||
registered in the hotel book; at that moment Hippolytus walked
|
||
in.
|
||
``Hullo, monkey tricks!'' cried he; and Porphyria Poppoea's
|
||
soul went into shuddering blackness; for in his manner was no
|
||
hint of all he had written. She was not loved! And after dinner
|
||
he sat talking in his room with Sir Roger -- endlessly! Ot was
|
||
the last day of the Old Year -- the last hour -- Heaven and Hell
|
||
in her heart. Sir Roger went to bed early, thank the Gods. And
|
||
she -- she could not sleep. But ere the midnight car of Helios
|
||
crossed the nadir Hippolytus had come into the room where she
|
||
was, and possessed her.
|
||
|
||
Of all her happiness I am quite unable to write; but
|
||
pray you, weep with me, for now cometh an end. Alas! Alas! I
|
||
will not speak of their joy by English lakes, of their
|
||
passionate delight among the fells, of the terms they spent in
|
||
Cambridge; for 'tis one monotone of honied music. But may Sir
|
||
Roger Bloxam be forgiven that he slew this loveliness! When he
|
||
came of age, he wished to be rid of guardian and of handmaid; he
|
||
thought them tyrants -- and then Porphyria Poppoea -- eternally
|
||
chaste even in her wildest wantonness, resigned her lover. She
|
||
made Sir Roger carry her to Switzerland. Yet in the Gare de Lyon
|
||
she bade him write ``Did I say `Always'?'' thinking that
|
||
Hippolytus would understand that she still loved him, and -- may
|
||
be -- follow her. Did he ever get the letter? Did he interpret
|
||
it amiss? False friends had crept into their intimacy -- and
|
||
also fear. I do not know how it was; but Porphyria Poppoea never
|
||
renewed those hours -- that love -- that infinite passion of
|
||
Hippolytus. Sir Roger Bloxam learned later that he, musing
|
||
deeply as was his wont when walking, had passed Hippolytus in
|
||
Bond Street, and that Hippolytus through that he had cut him
|
||
purp sely. Also, Porphyria Poppoea, fearful of a repulse, never
|
||
followed up on her letter from the Gare de Lyon. Seven times the
|
||
Father of all Light whirled Earth about him through the Zodiac
|
||
-- and she knew surely that he was her true lover for all time
|
||
and all eternity. So, weeping, she caused a great monument to be
|
||
set up, with an inscription in the Persian language. And now and
|
||
again she sent him messages; but his great heart was broken --
|
||
even as hers. Many a lover has possessed her since Hippolytus;
|
||
but she has scorned them even while she abandons herself to
|
||
their caresses. She loves Hippolytus. Hippolytus!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N29.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY
|
||
|
||
A SHORT CHAPTER AND A GAY ONE.
|
||
|
||
Come, let us be merry! This is the very devil, to moan
|
||
and mope over the miseries of a morbid maid -- mistress --
|
||
misanthrope -- melomaniac -- moll! Come, consider rather how
|
||
fine the weather is in June -- sometimes! Let us rejoice
|
||
together over the fact that the interior angles of every
|
||
triangle are together equal to the two right angles, barring the
|
||
non-Euclidian geometries! Let us recall the fact that once upon
|
||
a time we had Hope. It seemed possible to our blind sense that
|
||
we might do constructive work, that we might help humanity,
|
||
enrich the world with beauty and with music, with high thought
|
||
and ecstasy of holiness. We wished to proclaim Will, and Love.
|
||
And lo! the world has slipped over Niagara; it is smashed upon
|
||
the rocks, its wreckage voided through the whirlpools of
|
||
destruction. How shall I write poetry for the cave-man, about
|
||
me? Here's Kipling, who wrote `Recessional' not long ago; he
|
||
says ``Time shall count from the date when the English began to
|
||
hate.'' It seems instane to build amid the roar of earthquake --
|
||
and I'm fitted for no other work. I can't turn into the cave-man
|
||
overnight, and howl and trowl and hate, and cook the hearts and
|
||
livers even of my country's enemies. I can't agree that Goethe
|
||
was no poet, Beethoven no musician, Du;"rer no draughtsman,
|
||
Boehme no mystic, Frederick the Great no soldier, Kant no
|
||
philosopher, Helmholtz no physicist, Ostwalt no chemist. I'll
|
||
fight Germans, if the want to put ``Entritt verboten'' and a
|
||
sentry at the Great Gate of Trinity. I've met German tourists,
|
||
too, and I hate the whole tribe. I loathe German manners, German
|
||
methods, German brutality; and I think it mere bad taste in Mark
|
||
Twain to try to be amusing about the ``awful German language''
|
||
as I should resent a joke about the toothache if I had it. But I
|
||
don't see why I should go insane in order to fight Germans; I
|
||
think to keep a cool head were better policy. Baresark fury is
|
||
out of date, some centuries. So I'll not deny plain facts; I'll
|
||
not play into German hands by bringing false accusations and
|
||
giving them a genuine grievance.
|
||
|
||
But what does it all matter? Civilisation has broken
|
||
down; we must begin again, if any one of the white races
|
||
survive, on fundamentals. New principles of morality, of
|
||
politic, of economics. Well, there's one constructive work then
|
||
-- when the chance comes! ``I've often said to myself, I said,
|
||
Cheer up, old chappie, you'll soon be dead, A short life and a
|
||
gay one'' can wait a little after all. My business is to
|
||
proclaim Thelema, the New Aeon: Do what thou wilt shall be the
|
||
whole of the Law.
|
||
|
||
Such considerations never troubled Sir Roger Bloxam
|
||
during any part of his life at the University.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N31.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
|
||
|
||
APOLOGIA PRO NOVELLISSIMO SUO.
|
||
|
||
Who said, by this was a novel? Who (also and moreover)
|
||
defined a novel? Novellum -- that's a new little thing. Most
|
||
novels are not that. This is the newest little thing yet writ --
|
||
even Lippy Leila and Sawny Simeon agreed to that! So let me
|
||
flaunt it on my title: a novellisim! That will show that
|
||
Our Story is no ordinary novel. Some readers read so
|
||
wondrous carefully that it may be just the right time to tell
|
||
them that!
|
||
|
||
And so they tell me that Our Story has no
|
||
order, no form, no concentration -- ay! there's the rub! This
|
||
talk of concentration is vile Puritanical tyranny, with its
|
||
roots in bourgeois utilitarianism. Beauty is with the butterfly
|
||
at least as much as with the ant. What says the Broadway Jew
|
||
when he is `in love'? ``Get busy with your face, kid!'' I know
|
||
it saves time, but yet I feel a certain poignancy, as of loss,
|
||
somewhere. Need I make further apology for the method of this
|
||
novellissim? Well, Louis says, that we cannot help thinking a
|
||
little of Laurence Sterne and Rabelais; to which I answer
|
||
``Would Got 'twere so!'' when modern poetry scans, it must jbe a
|
||
theft from Swinburne; when it doesn't, from Browning; where it's
|
||
hashed prose, from Whitman. What's one to do? Faith, 'tis as bad
|
||
as morals in the English mind. If one happens at any time to be
|
||
alone, its onanism; with a woman, fornication; with a man or a
|
||
dog, something worse; in a crowd, a ``priapic orgie.'' You can't
|
||
get away from it. So why should we try, dear girls? We won't.
|
||
Come off the grass! And that reminds me that I ought to tell you
|
||
about Kitty Williams.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N32.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
|
||
|
||
OF KITTY WILLIAMS, HER LOVES PASTORAL, PAIDOPARTHENICAL, AND
|
||
EXTRATERMINUMUNIVERSITATIDUOMILLERADIODEMAGNAESANCTAEMARIAECCLESISTI-
|
||
CAL.
|
||
|
||
``Xanthous as golden sunset were you, Kitty, from the
|
||
curled hair to the flushed feet that lay like curled rose
|
||
petals, tiny in my hand. I quiver now, the glow of you yet
|
||
radiant across the chill abyss of twenty times twelve moons.''
|
||
'Twas thus that Roger wrote, as his trick is, to people who are
|
||
not there -- and then, after a phrase or two, he will break off,
|
||
and sacrifice to Memory, when Imagination happens to be busy
|
||
elsewhere, and actuality gone out for a walk.
|
||
|
||
Kitty was flushed from crown to heel; it was a tawny
|
||
gold of passion that flooded her. There was none of that
|
||
dreadful milkmaid rosiness in her; here skin was pale, but it
|
||
glowed like old ivory warmed through by blood itself. There was
|
||
a curious fieriness in the hair and in the nails, as well as in
|
||
the skin; yet 'twas so subtle a matter that it was rather felt
|
||
than seen. She was graceful as a tiger-cub, and lithe, and hot;
|
||
yet she had all the awkwardness of a young she-goat; for her
|
||
vitality tumbled over itself, fulvous as a burn in spate. Ay!
|
||
she was muscular, nor spare nor plump; tall, not too tall; but
|
||
what caught Sir Roger Bloxam was her temperament. There was the
|
||
lass for him -- the true religous type. For her the good
|
||
Cardinal never became tedious; never could he labour a point too
|
||
fully, ejaculate too often or too long. Her dear little sisters,
|
||
Connie and Annie, were full of him; brave Signor Coglio and gay
|
||
Don Cojone counted them, you may believe it. Does it not remind
|
||
you of Watteau, or of Corot, those scenes pastoral in that most
|
||
fortunate corner wood on the road to Bishop's Stortford that
|
||
lies just beyond the two miles from Great Saint Mary's, where
|
||
ends the empery of proctor and vice-Chancellor and Esquire
|
||
Bedell. All May term ye can revel it there, lasses and lads;
|
||
there's grass and moss, and many a wild flower, all soft for the
|
||
foot, or whatever ye dance withal. Nunc est bibendum, nunc
|
||
pede libero Pulsanda tellus. But Kitty had Nijinsky's spring,
|
||
even when her clinometer equation was cot 90. 'Twas in the
|
||
early days of Dunlop; and Sir Roger was wont to say that his
|
||
racing Humber had them, but Kitty never did. So there in the
|
||
woodland they played many a pageant: the mystery of St. George,
|
||
the Comedy of Pan, the Morality of the Wild Beast, the Argument
|
||
of the Flood, a thousand merry and joyous rites of Saturn and
|
||
Flora, of Dionysus and of Paphian Aphrodite, of her that reigns
|
||
in Panormus, of him that guards great Lampsacus in his
|
||
reverberating splendour. 'Twas wonder Cardinal Mentula took not
|
||
Clergyman's Sore Throat, and Kitty Housemaid's knee. Gay scholar
|
||
she, in every mood (??) and tense crissare: cevere,
|
||
too, although another conjugation. As for brave Coglio and gay
|
||
Cojone, they were involved in theological discussion anent the
|
||
Kinesis. This was before the love of Porphyria Poppoea for
|
||
Hippolytus, else there had been division of interest in the
|
||
little world of Sir Roger Bloxam. Eheu fugaces! Termini Maiae!
|
||
The May week ended; Sir Roger ruffles it to Norway, flies back
|
||
for one night to his sweet wench of Wales, then off he goes to
|
||
Russia. I'll tell you of his love for Mathilde Doriac, when I
|
||
feel in the mood.
|
||
|
||
N33.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
|
||
|
||
A WORD ON PANTOMORPHOPSYCHOLONOSOPHILOSOPHY, INCLUDING ARTHUR
|
||
MACHEN.
|
||
|
||
Would I could write a glacous ineluctable novel, like
|
||
John Cowper Powys! With no more outfit than an ulcerated
|
||
duodenum, he produced Rodmoor. He presses seaweed into the
|
||
service of sadism, picks glacous and amphibian diatoms from
|
||
moonwort, and makes them inelectable and nearly everything
|
||
glaucous. And that is a very jolly feeling, when one has a bout
|
||
of malaria, as I have to-night, filling myself with quinine,
|
||
strychnine, arsenic, and cascara sagrada, almost ineluctably so.
|
||
I expect to be pretty glacous in the morning. What a lot of
|
||
words there are which are more atmosphere than meaning!
|
||
Definition is the curse of art; we want to wander in exotic
|
||
heady gardens amid small glaucous govins, mellicose at our
|
||
costals, ineluctably dalmatic! There should Euphorion woo
|
||
Eumolpe with pantoums and purfled wisps of moonrise, the
|
||
fritillaries of their pomegranate cusps fluttering mopishly in
|
||
the flambiance of Ra's cadenza. The wigsbane should plex its
|
||
arpling alianelle about their rampled olio; mammet and maropial
|
||
flooze emplishly upon the szyenite. See? You remember Arthur
|
||
Machen -- of the Angels of Mons, that gallant company! -- in his
|
||
``White People'' how he gets his horror from ``wicked Voorish
|
||
domes'' by simply failing to explain ``Voorish,'' and his final
|
||
tragedy by just not saying what occurred. I must do this (or
|
||
somewhat aequipollent, albeit solipsistically mine) for Sir
|
||
Roger Bloxam: what rotten asses writers are! They're alwasys
|
||
introducing `great Poets' without giving us a single line to
|
||
taste them by, and so on. They're always leaving everything to
|
||
the imagination of the reader. Poor fool of a reader! If he had
|
||
any imagination, he'd be a creative artist himself. Anyhow, Rule
|
||
One for writing a novellisim shall be to cross the `i's and dot
|
||
the `t's: except in the one show chapter, which I shall put in
|
||
to prove that I can do it. It can come in here, as well as
|
||
anywhere else; (be quiet, Elsie! I wasn't thinking of you) so
|
||
good-night. Sleep well, wake fresh, and tackle Chapter XXXV in
|
||
all its glaucous ineluctability. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
|
||
came!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N34.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
|
||
|
||
THE RUNIC PLASM
|
||
|
||
Ambiguous, Childe Roger rees the rune of Unna Klopstock.
|
||
Mobile Marry, but omen. ``The grey knight's at the ferry;
|
||
wink.'' He signed, pressed the plasm to his alb, pectoral-wise,
|
||
with a norm that made groined transept and waly welkin giddy as
|
||
the long-haired shagsters of Boeotia. Then clasps he speron to
|
||
palfrey, with whinnying jennet lank adown the wet west wind. I
|
||
now omit many adventures, but he gets to the ferry at last. The
|
||
Grey Knight Is Not There. There is however an unambiguous rune,
|
||
reading, in the character of Honorius: SVXIIV. The II is a Roman
|
||
Numeral; now it's quite easy, isn't it?
|
||
|
||
But when Childe Roger brings at last the mummied hand --
|
||
that had wrought such fearful mischief -- to the Master
|
||
Egyptologist, that person pales anaemically, glares goitrously,
|
||
yammers once, and then goes raving mad. At the same moment the
|
||
clock of Big Ben strikes Thirteen (don't you think? Something
|
||
ominous and totally disconnected). Of course, Childe Roger was
|
||
never the same man after this adventure of the runic plasm; he
|
||
retired to his castle -- but why did he always order Dinner for
|
||
Two, even when most alone? I doubt if even the old steward knows
|
||
about this. He is palsied and hoar already, on account of the
|
||
affair of the bedesman and the beldame, I suppose. Don't let us
|
||
load any more trouble on to the back of the poor old steward!
|
||
Whether Childe Roger's wife was a gorilla (thanks to clever
|
||
chaperones this can easily be done now-a-days) or whether the
|
||
First-Born son of the Bloxams is always a seal or a calf, as so
|
||
often happens in the best-regulated old Scottish families, I
|
||
shall leave, dear reader, to your imagination. You see, it would
|
||
be saving of much trouble to leave the whole damned thing! I'm
|
||
going on with this novellisim in the grand old way. SVXIIV.
|
||
(``Same to you, only louder,'' cries the Bunyip girl.)
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N35.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
|
||
|
||
OF THE EARLY OPINIONS OF SIR ROGER BLOXAM CONCERNING THE
|
||
IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.
|
||
|
||
IN his third year at Cambridge Sir Roger Bloxam,
|
||
prompted by the Cardinal and his suite, was already a famous
|
||
poet. In his second year he had taken the Chancellor's medal
|
||
with a poem on `Gehenna' -- not Ravenna, Mr Clever, of course,,
|
||
you think you know everything. Ravenna was by Wilde and won the
|
||
Newdigate, which rather gives Oxford away. No, Gehenna was a
|
||
hell of a poem, and he ruined it quite correctly with `senna'.
|
||
But hje beat this hollow in a month. Yes: of course I mean to
|
||
give the chapter and verse; I told you before I would never
|
||
bluff. Here's the opening chorus. ``From life hath death the
|
||
power to bar souls? Are souls immortal? Are souls? Are souls?''
|
||
He goes on ``Are souls of boys with glamour gilded? Shall not
|
||
love right the wrong the pill did?'' referring, apparently, to
|
||
the bitter pill of punishment for sin. Cf. Milton
|
||
Paradise Lost: a much duller poem. The yearning
|
||
earnestness of this poem won him many a friend. The exordium is
|
||
truly superb.
|
||
|
||
Are souls divine? Those crimson piles
|
||
Bear witness, while the sun-god smiles.
|
||
Reared in the desert -- blood and wine
|
||
Answer our sob ``Are souls divine?''
|
||
Is that last Angel's trumpet-boom
|
||
Not puissant on the mortal's tomb?
|
||
Are souls divine? Yes, cries the heart;
|
||
By the strong argument -- of art!''
|
||
|
||
Porphyria Poppoea was indeed his Egeria -- that's the
|
||
cliche, isn't it? -- in philosophy. He was in her the whole of
|
||
divinity. She taught him that he could shed mortality, and feel
|
||
the better for it; and also that great lesson of unselfishness.
|
||
For he was never able to behold her face to face, but in a
|
||
glass, darklyl; and love must come to him f om another, and that
|
||
other one like unto himself, id est, God. As he spent many
|
||
an hour, his fingers coyly straying in her wine-dark hair, while
|
||
her voice, like perfume, declared the glory and the goodness of
|
||
God. I wish you could see her rosy lips pursed up and puckered
|
||
with merry impudence -- yet utter holiness. See them part softly
|
||
to the pressure of a gentle sigh! Hullo! what's this? what
|
||
golden god comes flaming from the portal, his disk cloud-capped
|
||
like a volcano? Let us cover our eyes in reverence, and begone
|
||
-- is it not written ``Upon whom this stone shall fall?'' You
|
||
may not be expert enough in Attic to read KOPROS `O TEOS
|
||
you are still playing with KUPRIS in the shade, or with
|
||
the tangles of Neaera's hair. Shame is the spur that the clear
|
||
spirit doth raise, that last infirmity of noble mind, But the
|
||
fair guerdon when we hope to find And think to burst out in
|
||
sudden blaze Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears,
|
||
and mixes our metaphors still more, I'm afraid. Surely this is
|
||
the place to insert Sir Roger Bloxam's views on Death, regarded
|
||
as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N36.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
|
||
|
||
OF FROU-FROU, AND FRISSON, AND DEATH.
|
||
|
||
There is no frisson possible without the element of
|
||
surprise, that is, of ignorance. AS one assimilates all books,
|
||
all pictures, all things beautiful, enjoyment increases, but
|
||
frisson becomes rare. To be blase is not to be impotent. But
|
||
after loving say 1500 women it is unlikely that one will often
|
||
discover a `new sensation'. A man may be most potent when he
|
||
does find the right woman; which was not so at eighteen, when
|
||
the rustle of every skirt produced its full physiological
|
||
effect. Sir Roger Bloxam had many a year of this early stage. It
|
||
was not only Kitty Williams; it was every landlady's daughter,
|
||
every skivey, every barmaid. But 'twas all butterfly love once,
|
||
twice, and thrice, and a new flower caught his fancy. Indeed, he
|
||
was short with them; a quick-firing gun was he, by Gosh. He grew
|
||
into a 16-inch gun, a 42-centimetre howitzer. It takes more to
|
||
load such a gun -- but 'tis not smaller and impotent because you
|
||
cannot fire it 600 times a minute! Don't be afraid of being
|
||
blase, darling; you're nearer `death', it's true; but that's
|
||
because you've finished life, mastered it, put it in your
|
||
breeches pocket. You've made yourself ready for a higher life by
|
||
your familiarity with the lower. How dreadful to be always 15 or
|
||
25 or 35 or 45! You'd get more bored every day; suicide would
|
||
soon seem the one way out. Surely by 35 the earnest man who had
|
||
had all opportunities and lived every minute ofhis time has
|
||
become one with all possible beauty. Is he likely to discover a
|
||
new Beethoven at 40? No: he has taken all life in; if he is an
|
||
artist, he can go on to give it out to others; bar that, his
|
||
life may be pleasant, but it must be nigh stagnation, as regards
|
||
new impressions. He must work on his material if grow he would.
|
||
Once his creative force is spent, he is ready for death; and I
|
||
cannot see but that death is a logical continuation of life. Not
|
||
by man's logic, but by nature's, whatever that may be; but be
|
||
sure, 'tis right, when we understand it. So as the poet says
|
||
``Give me passion, give me death!'' For the two are one; and
|
||
death shall be the orgasm wherein the true ego escapes the man,
|
||
-- to spend -- given a suitable menstruum -- in energy in
|
||
recreating body and mind, like a wanton God adorning himself
|
||
with flowers and laurels. ``What a serious chapter! And you
|
||
haven't mentioned the one great consolation to the dying, that
|
||
we have no evidence of the continued existence of Australia
|
||
beyond the grave.''
|
||
N37.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
|
||
|
||
HOW SIR ROGER BLOXAM BETHOUGHT HIM OF CHOOSING A CAREER.
|
||
|
||
A sapper, in sinking a well-shaft,
|
||
Was stricken by death with his fell-shaft
|
||
But Hindenburg said:
|
||
``He's much better dead --
|
||
``Kadaververwertungsgesellschaft!''
|
||
|
||
This is a very important passage, dear children, in the
|
||
life of any man, when he decides to what he shall devote his
|
||
life. For all courses are just equally vain and idle. This world
|
||
is so obviously a rotten practical joke that a wise man is
|
||
disgusted with it by the time he is twenty-five or so. The
|
||
everlasting guffaw of God at his horseplay irritates the nerves.
|
||
Only the artist who eschews the Learned Professions, and sticks
|
||
to Beauty, is likely to enjoy life. But -- Usefulness -- that is
|
||
not to be had. The Pragmatists define Truth as Usefulness -- and
|
||
one can see the ghost of Pilate decorously concealing mouth with
|
||
toga!
|
||
|
||
Sir Roger did not enter the School of Journalism,
|
||
although they promised to teach him to write like this
|
||
following:
|
||
|
||
HUNS CHEW PALS
|
||
|
||
EXTRA. VIA Amsterdam. June 19. The
|
||
Kadaververwertungsgesellschaft have added a kitchen department
|
||
by direct Imperial Order. Brochette d'Enfant Belge a la von
|
||
Bissing is now a regular feature of the goulash-cannon, the
|
||
children being spitted on bayonets, and toasted over burning
|
||
cathedrals, libraries, Rembrandts, and other combustibles. The
|
||
officers usually prefer the broiled breasts of violated nuns;
|
||
sometimes, however, these are seethed in their own milk. But on
|
||
those parts of the front where the supply of nuns and babies has
|
||
given out, owing to the rigour of the British blockade, the
|
||
German soldier subsists almost entirely on the bodies of his
|
||
comrades. The men actually in the trenches are said to be
|
||
lamentably tough, but the Landsturmers afford excellent tripe.
|
||
Men who have served in the German colonies and so ruined their
|
||
livers furnish an admirable pate de foie gras for the tables
|
||
of the higher officials. Bones not only supply glue for the
|
||
Kaiser to paste his press-cuttings, and gelatine, of which
|
||
motion-picture films are made, but commands a high price in
|
||
Catholic Germany and Austria as authentic relics of the Saviour.
|
||
The tough guts of the mountain regiments are used for violin
|
||
strings. The blood is invariably drained off and used as a
|
||
substitute for red wine; this is the favourite drink of the
|
||
Kaiser himself, Admiral Tirpitz, and Count von Reventlow.
|
||
Hindenburg, on the contrary, eats British prisoners, raw.
|
||
|
||
(Pad this to four columns, double-leaded, and add
|
||
confirmatory `statements of eye-witnesses', `what my wife's
|
||
brother's wife's aunt's best friend heard from the chauffeur of
|
||
somebody who once saw the Crown Prince at a review', `affidavit
|
||
of an American professional divorce court witness', etc.
|
||
etc.
|
||
|
||
Newspapers bribed by German gold may not accept this
|
||
article; then, try them with this other.
|
||
|
||
FRENCH BOOZE STUNT
|
||
|
||
The French are openly boasting that the failures of the vines,
|
||
ravaged by raiding Uhlans who have laid waste the country from
|
||
the Belfort to Bayonne -- the censorship has suppressed this
|
||
important news hitherto, but Truth will out -- has not
|
||
diminished their supply of alcohol. It is well known that
|
||
Frenchmen will not fight unless intoxicated. they have therefore
|
||
replaced wine by `esprit de corps' (Translation `spirit from the
|
||
body'). This beverage, a thousand times more pernicious even
|
||
then absinthe, is distilled in immense retorts (etc., pile in
|
||
with the scientific stuff). Frenzied by this demoniacal liquor,
|
||
the wretches, although starved, diseased, crippled, -- not one
|
||
per cent is between the ages of 8 and 80 -- beat off the
|
||
gallant, well-ordered, determined attacks of the noble German
|
||
soldiers, who are, besides, too kind-hearted to advance against
|
||
such miserable cowards.
|
||
|
||
(If this goes, try to derive `poilu' from `pois-elu',
|
||
i.e. `selected pea' and prove that they make their
|
||
soldiers into Erbsuppe. And write up Potage Bonne Femme.)
|
||
|
||
However, they tried to make Sir Roger reconsider his
|
||
decision, as will be explained, by trying to rouse his
|
||
indignation about the white slave traffic. Here is their little
|
||
paper of statistics, from which a clever journalist can earn a
|
||
fine income any day of the week, especially Sunday.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N38.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
|
||
|
||
FACTS ABOUT THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC. 1917 A.D
|
||
|
||
|
||
Population of the United States 196,343,277
|
||
White Slavers (male) 85,671,242
|
||
ditto (female) 146,221,849
|
||
ditto (sexless) 196,343,277
|
||
Dope Fiends (all sexes) 621,387,551
|
||
Crooked politicians 91,729,984
|
||
Grafting policemen 112,478,236
|
||
Men higher up 38,211,719
|
||
Women spiders 29,322,963
|
||
Satyrs 84,716,437
|
||
Victims of lust 1,491,624,588
|
||
Sob-sisters .606
|
||
Clear-cut red-blooded straight-living young
|
||
men 462-891-468
|
||
ditto including the President 462-891-469
|
||
Mrs. Wilson 1
|
||
Annual profits of White Slave
|
||
Trust $998,444,591,876,212,641,982.45 and a plugged nickel.
|
||
Tons of Chloroform used annually to stifle
|
||
victims 611,343,528,941
|
||
Value of candy used annually for administering dope
|
||
(average of 5 years) $711,812,369,745,382,118.16
|
||
ditto ditto chewing gum $949,984,759,892,776,538.35
|
||
|
||
|
||
Pithy Points for Pornographers.
|
||
|
||
If the limousines used for kidnapping virgins were put
|
||
in a straight line, it would extend from the Knickerbocker Hotel
|
||
to Arcturus.
|
||
|
||
Mr. Lloyd George was awakened recently by the roar of
|
||
the British barrage at Messina, a distance of 140 miles. If the
|
||
shrieks of the chloroformed victims of lust in one week were
|
||
simultaneous, he could hear them too -- a distance of over 3000
|
||
miles.
|
||
|
||
Yesterday, housewreckers broke into a cellar in the
|
||
Bronx; they could not find a single body of a `Ripper' victim.
|
||
The unique event will be celebrated by a parade of the United
|
||
Body-Snatchers.
|
||
|
||
Every man, woman, and child in the United States
|
||
consumes daily, on an average, fourteen and a half times his own
|
||
weight in heroin.
|
||
|
||
The late Stanford White is said to have ruined 12,642
|
||
angel children in five months, when at the height of his
|
||
career.
|
||
|
||
Evelyn Thaw and Lilian Russell are almost the only
|
||
virgins left in the United States, if we exclude Vaudeville and
|
||
cabaret performers. All others who may be proved medically to be
|
||
virgins, must, according to a leading judge, be degenerates. The
|
||
american woman is the purest in the world. The American man is a
|
||
clean-cut, straight-living, red-blooded intellectual hero, a
|
||
satyr who lives only to drag pure women to his hell of lust, the
|
||
too easy dupe of the vile empresses of vice who throng every
|
||
street.
|
||
|
||
Any American woman loses her virtue if she drinks a
|
||
cocktail. The cocktails used for seduction in one night in the
|
||
Tenderloin, if collected, would raise the level of the Ocean by
|
||
eight feet and five inches.
|
||
|
||
Respectable looking old ladies are always procuresses.
|
||
The action of the pure, high-minded, self-sacrificing, heroic,
|
||
beautiful, fearless, dainty, pious, well-bred, chic, bully,
|
||
dandy, American woman journalist has stamped all vice out of
|
||
every corner of the country. Extra-marital intercourse is
|
||
absolutely unknown from Maine to Texas. It only remains to tread
|
||
upon the loathsome practice of intra-marital intercourse with a
|
||
firm hand; it is the serpent in the Eden of Marriage. The birth
|
||
rate must be increased some thirty-fold and some sixtyfold and
|
||
some an hundredfold; America needs workers.
|
||
|
||
I really cannot imagine why Sir Roger Bloxam declined
|
||
this fascinating field of labour.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N39.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY
|
||
|
||
OF SIR ROGER BLOXAM'S SECOND CHOICE OF CAREER.
|
||
|
||
If was reasonably hoped by many that, under the direct
|
||
tutelage of so great and so upright a churchman as Cardinal
|
||
Mentula, it would come about that Sir Roger developed into a
|
||
theologian of the first water. The words ``Holy Orders'' were
|
||
freely mentioned in connection with his name. None doubted his
|
||
fundamental capacity. Yet -- could one so modest and so pious
|
||
face a multitude, and deliver a sermon? 'Twas this, naught else,
|
||
that determined his advisers to rehearse him. Fiat
|
||
experimentatum in corpore vilo, cried they; and summoned the
|
||
Master and Fellows of Saint Catherine's College to hear him, one
|
||
Shrove Tuesday. It may well be that they chose the day badly;
|
||
the God Pan is an ill councellor in speech and act, think you
|
||
not, Euphemia?
|
||
|
||
``My text for this morning, dearly beloved brethren,''
|
||
began Sir Roger, ``is taken from Saint Paul's Epistle to the
|
||
Romans, the Twelfth Chapter and the Fourth Verse. ``Many members
|
||
in one body.'' The Fourth Verse of the Twelfth Chapter of Saint
|
||
Paul's Epistle to the Romans. ``Many members in one body.'' What
|
||
can be more glorious, dearly beloved, than this wonderful
|
||
thought? Many members! Not one member only, not two, three or
|
||
four members; not even several members; no, brethren; many
|
||
members.
|
||
Many members! There is no limit to the Divine Love; and
|
||
in this fresh proof of the Great Mercy of God we are constrained
|
||
to lift up our hearts in utter overflowing. Think of this apex
|
||
and apostrophe of the Apostle, I beseech you: many members! Try
|
||
to represent them to yourselves. Think of them in rows -- in
|
||
files -- in squadrons. ``Not in single spies, but in
|
||
battalions.'' Think oif them as the stars squandered over the
|
||
whole field of fight. Think of the great loving-kindness of the
|
||
Lord, his munificence, his bounty, nay, if one dare say so with
|
||
reverence, his prodigality! Many members! Is it legitimate to
|
||
pursue this analogy of stars, dearly beloved? Surely we may do
|
||
so. Surely we may reckon on the uniformity of His creation! So,
|
||
just as no two stars are exactly alike, no two men, no two
|
||
roses, we may assume that of all these many members the variety
|
||
is infinite. Even as with the very noses upon our faces, where
|
||
we perceive short noses, long noses, straight noses, bent noses,
|
||
stumpy noses, lank noses, turned-up noses, pudgy noses, snouty
|
||
noses, broken noses, red noses, pale noses, sensitive noses,
|
||
vigorous noses, flabby noses, strong noses, fat noses, muscular
|
||
noses, bulbous noses, vinous noses, warty noses, port-wine
|
||
noses, itchy noses, greasy noses, dewy noses, Jewy noses, Hughie
|
||
noses, bluey noses, ticklish noses, ready-to-blow noses, hairy
|
||
noses, fairy noses, drooping noses, inquisitive noses, thoughful
|
||
noses, may it not be with these many members of which the
|
||
Apostle of the Gentiles speaks with such eloquence and fervour
|
||
even as it was given him of the Holy Spirit? Dearly beloved
|
||
brethren, were these two words alone -- many members -- the very
|
||
sum and apogee of the divine grace, what cause should we not
|
||
have for thanksgiving? Should we not praise Him? Should we not
|
||
extol Him? Yea, verily. But, by overplus and superstroke of
|
||
mercy, the Magnificence of the Heavenly Bounty beggars our
|
||
gratitude. How does the sublime phrase culminate? Many members.
|
||
Ah, but where? Scattered and lost, as sheep not having a
|
||
shepherd? Wasted as the sands of the desert? Nay, dearly
|
||
beloved, it is not so! These many members are collected,
|
||
concentrated, into One Body! It humbly seems possible to me that
|
||
Saint Paul may have had the figure of the Empress Messalina in
|
||
his mind when the Spirit of God led him to use this phrase of
|
||
joy. In one body! Many Members! Many members in one body! What
|
||
blessed words of comfort they are! Think of it; consider all
|
||
that it implies. It might have been that all these many members
|
||
were dispersed among an infinitude of bodies; it might have been
|
||
that you or I might have had to eke out the exiguity of a single
|
||
member with some such succeedaneum as a banana. But God is the
|
||
author of all true riches; and He does not leave His servants
|
||
without full provision. Many members in one body! Blessed,
|
||
year blessed for ever be His name! We all of us know how
|
||
unreliable is any single member; one may be weak, another weary,
|
||
a thirt sick, a fourth grown old. Brethren, the Lord has
|
||
foreseen all such calamities; He has provided against failure.
|
||
In one body -- many members! Let us pray!''
|
||
|
||
We shall touch but lightly upon the painful sequel to
|
||
this sermon; for a novelissim should be pleasant as ice-cream in
|
||
Hell, or in New York in Summer. Suffice it to say that the
|
||
congregation came up to congratulate the preacher, two by two,
|
||
and then four by four, so that Sir Roger had his hands full.
|
||
Ave Virgo, plena gratia! The boy remarked, after Blake,
|
||
that you never knew what was enough till you knew what was too
|
||
much -- and abandoned theology.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N40.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTH-ONE
|
||
|
||
HOW SIR ROGER BLOXAM REPUDIATED A NAVAL CAREER.
|
||
|
||
Carissima, do not fret; I shall not be horridly
|
||
technical. I hardly know the difference between a midshipmate
|
||
and a stopcock. My aquatics have been mostly on Cam and Indus. I
|
||
can tell a brig from a schooner if I am drunk enough; and I know
|
||
that once aboard a lugger, the girl is mine. I often recognise
|
||
nautical words, such as fore-top-mizzen-spanker and taffrail
|
||
boom and trysail and careen and rum, but I'm not sure of the
|
||
meaning of any but those `terms of endearment common among
|
||
sailors' which, oh well! We must do our little best. We must
|
||
bring a whiff of salty spindrift across the bows of our
|
||
novellissim; bos'un, pipe all hands! Half-a-gale o' wine
|
||
nor'nor'east and a pint to the nor'ard. Typhoon off the port
|
||
quarter, sir! `Bout ship, lads, hearty, yo-heave-ho! Ay, ay,
|
||
sir! Quartermaster, heave the lead! Ay, ay, sir! One-and-a-half,
|
||
one, mark six, one and eleven three, by God, she's struck! We're
|
||
sinking by the poop! Mr. Carpenter, sound the fo`mast! Ay, ay,
|
||
sir. Cyclone from sou'sou'west right of the larboard quarter.
|
||
B'gosh, the barometer's dropping. 29,28,27 -- glory be, it's
|
||
gone to zero. Oh! cracked the glass -- may be we'll live through
|
||
it then! Man the pumps, lads! Yo-heave-ho! We're in the
|
||
doldrums, and the ship's in stays. Put out the best bower, and
|
||
lower the yawl! Ay, ay, sir! Run up the pennant to the fore
|
||
halyards! Ring astern! Stand by to repel boarders! Our
|
||
cutlasses! Ay, ay, sir! Show the dirty swabs etcetera
|
||
etcetera!
|
||
|
||
Oh, I suppose it could be done; but please God it never
|
||
shall be: simply rotten, showing off, what? Per Bacco, a
|
||
straight narrative style is bad enough. In fact, between you and
|
||
me, Lavinia, darling, it may be that some of our nautical
|
||
writers conceal a certain disability in this respect by
|
||
overloading their frigates with all that ship Ahoy stuff, eh?
|
||
|
||
So -- driven by the mephitic blast of the Simoom, Her
|
||
Majesty's Ship `Electric Eel' plunged through the ruddy foam of
|
||
the Red Sea. ``Suez!'' cried the lookout suddenly; ``Suez
|
||
Canal!''
|
||
|
||
Devil take you all, my darlings! I'm not going to bother
|
||
to finish this rotten chapter. It's obviously meant to lead up
|
||
to a feeble joke about naval affairs being too shallow for a man
|
||
of Sir Roger's penetraton. Let's get on to something jolly --
|
||
why not the story of the Whistling Coon?
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N41.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
|
||
|
||
SIR ROGER'S OBJECTIONS TO THE STUDY OF LAW.
|
||
|
||
I shall leave this chapter entirely to the imagination
|
||
of the reader -- see Chapter XXXIV for reflections on the
|
||
morality of this procedure.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N42.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
|
||
|
||
THE OMNIFIC AND GRANDIOSE INTERMEZZO OF THE WHISTLING COON.
|
||
|
||
In the antechamber of the Rosicrucian's cabinet stood a
|
||
strangely carven pedestal, on which the young and elegant woman
|
||
whom we have already introduced to the gentle reader as Flotilla
|
||
was leaning. Her lustrous eyes exuded unfathomable sorrow as she
|
||
gazed into the Magical Mirror of Zamboni. In those astral
|
||
horizons she saw many a mystery ineffable, many a wonder
|
||
mirific, many an arcanum irresolvable even in the limpid
|
||
luminance of theophany. But, search as she might, her soul
|
||
shrank from the Threshold of the Great White Way.
|
||
|
||
(That, you see, is how we link Lytton and Irvin S.
|
||
Cobb; that is how we get from Bologna to Broadway.)
|
||
|
||
On the stage of a famous variety theatre, by Castor and
|
||
Pollux, there stood a slight pale figure -- fill it up from the
|
||
waste paper basket, please, Mr. Dollar-a-Syllable! -- his name
|
||
don't matter; in the perfesh, he was The Whistling Coon. And in
|
||
the audience was a -- oh! you know: I'm a tired novellissimist
|
||
to-night -- call her Ethel. She wanted to get his job. She went
|
||
to the stage door, and sent in her card. (By Serapis, this is a
|
||
python of a story, cut it how you will!) He came out. They met.
|
||
``Walk as we talk?'' ``Yes.'' They walked. (And now my style's
|
||
getting like Aimee Gouraud's, or whoever wrote `Moon-madness'
|
||
for her.) Well, presently the Whistling Coon said to Ethel: ``I
|
||
suppose you have whistled before?'' She modestly replied: ``I
|
||
hardly like to call it whistling, you know, to you.''
|
||
``But you can whistle?'' ``Oh, well, I suppose I must say
|
||
I can whistle.'' And he smiled a long, low, sad, subtle
|
||
smile -- and they walked on. Now they were in the depths of the
|
||
Park -- and he smiled a long, low, sad, subtle smile -- and he
|
||
said ``Now you can't.''
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N43.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
|
||
|
||
VIVE L'ENTENTE CORDIALE!
|
||
|
||
Well I am aware that this is a second edition of Chapter
|
||
XLIV. But did not the first performance deserve an encore?
|
||
Good.
|
||
|
||
Glabrous was Cardinal Mentula as an emu's oef, chauv
|
||
from his nasence; I ditties you that there in the sub of this
|
||
over, not is this not? 'Twas as the crane of an old marcher in
|
||
the ledges of the Shepherd-Follies; but it redded like a spall
|
||
of agnew at the point, or like the altered drake at the blood,
|
||
when bezin was. The nayne was scarce grander than a jamb of
|
||
pullet, but never an hom dressed himself pluss superb, and he
|
||
brilled like a spey, the spey of Arthur, Excalibur, or like the
|
||
spew of Nimrod. Yes, he flamboyed like a stoil, like an aster
|
||
tumbling, nay, semblable to the solil at haught south, in
|
||
stey.
|
||
|
||
Perhaps we had better change the subject.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N44.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
|
||
|
||
``WASHED IN THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB.''
|
||
|
||
As Verlaine says, c'est a recommencer -- though
|
||
that only proves -- to my mind -- that it was not properly
|
||
finished. You don't expect an Eight to row over the course again
|
||
ten minutes after the race, do you? These machine-gun men
|
||
advertise their clumsiness, not their force.
|
||
|
||
The point is that we've got so mixed up over the chapters that
|
||
we had better begin again well ahead of the hunt.
|
||
|
||
And her name is Mrs. Hunt.
|
||
And she's ordered to the front
|
||
With no hair on -- hair on -- hair on
|
||
her old toot -- toot.
|
||
|
||
Good night, everybody! (No, not you, Belgacem!)
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N45.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MII
|
||
|
||
OF HOW SIR ROGER BLOXAM MET MR. HANK FARRIS.
|
||
|
||
How? Why, how should they meet, Clorinda? It was at
|
||
lunch at Romano's, let me tell you that, in the grand days of
|
||
their hors d'oeuvre, and when the cheese was ``le Fromage
|
||
de M. Fromage.'' There was a pretty decent Moselle, too, -- oh
|
||
well, 'tis in vain to repine! Et puis, les filles! Merde pour
|
||
New York! No matter. You shall have a new automobile, Sadie,
|
||
if you can tell me why Hank Farris, on seeing Sir Roger, was
|
||
reminded of a night long ago when he had been driving with the
|
||
Empress Eugenie, poor dear fat old thing! and found himself in
|
||
the Marlborough Club with nothing to do, when who should stroll
|
||
up Pall Mall but dear old Willie Gladstone; ``Frank, dear old
|
||
top,'' cried the Premier, ``let's wander up to Bond Street, and
|
||
look for a bit of fluff!'' ``Charmed, dear man!'' I murmered,
|
||
and off we went -- and ran right into Tom Carlyle. ``Ouch, ye
|
||
sculduddery rapscallions!'' cried Carlyle, ``a braw day the day!
|
||
D'ye no ken I'll gang whiles we`ye!'' This was the very devil;
|
||
Willie couldn't possibly do any business with that peevish old
|
||
fool on his arm. But as luck would have it, we found the Prince
|
||
of Wales at the corner of Park Place, groping in the gutter for
|
||
a shilling he had dropped, and there was Lily in the hansom
|
||
screaming, and the cabman swearing that his fare was half-a
|
||
crown. ``Kommen Sie nur!'' I cried in German ``Ned,
|
||
Liebchen, wie geht's?'' (The Prince spoke hardly any English,
|
||
you know.) ``Donner und Blitzen,'' ye yelled, ``der
|
||
verfluchte Schweinkopf!'' and went on to curse the cabby in
|
||
thick gutteral broken English. I tossed the man a sovereign --
|
||
jthe thing was becoming scandalous -- Lily jumped out of the
|
||
cab, and in her hysteria threw her arms around Willie's neck.
|
||
``Take her home,'' I whispered, ``It's the only way out.'' For
|
||
already a little crowd had collected, and any one of us might
|
||
have been recognised at any moment! So poor dear Gladdie had to
|
||
take on the Langtry -- he was never his own man again, through
|
||
Hutch did his best, dear old Jonathan, what a man he was! As for
|
||
Ned, he took Tom down to Marlborough House, of course, I packed
|
||
them off, and damned glad I was to get out of it so easily. Poor
|
||
old Tom! I met him again a year later at Lady Devonshire's.
|
||
``Been back to Ned's, Tom?'' I cried laughingly. He frowned at
|
||
me. ``Na,'' says he, ``na! once a philosopher -- twice a pile
|
||
driver!'' I don't know what the devil he meant. So I fired off
|
||
Pokilothron' Athanat' Aphrodite at him on the chance of a
|
||
hit, and he went off growling to talk to Bobbie Salisbury, just
|
||
as Alf Tennyson came up, and pulled out the Manuscript of In
|
||
Memoriam, and asked me to put it right for him. ``In Memoriam,''
|
||
I cried, ``In Victoriam, you mean!'' digging his ribs, ``through
|
||
as a matter of fact I don't believe he ever had the old
|
||
girl!''
|
||
|
||
The effect of this sparkling anecdote was great upon Sir
|
||
Roger Bloxam. I'll tell you about it some other time when I'm
|
||
not so lazy, unless I forget, as I shall, for yours sakes, try
|
||
to do.
|
||
|
||
On with the revel!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N46.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
|
||
|
||
OF THE DESPAIR OF SIR ROGER BLOXAM ANENT HIS CAREER; AND OF THE
|
||
APPEAL THAT HE MADE TO THE CARDINAL.
|
||
|
||
Well, you know, it was a bit thick, eh, what? Time was
|
||
passing; it's a damned bad habit of his; and Sir Roger was no
|
||
nearer to the choice of a career than when he first put on his
|
||
long trousers. His despair was positively frightful to witness.
|
||
He ate, drank, smoked, rode, played cards or chess, tennis or
|
||
cricket, went canoeing up to Byron's Fool, or pulled a skiff
|
||
down to Dilton, and in a thousand other similar ways strove to
|
||
express the anguish, agony, anxiety, worry, torture, grief,
|
||
pain, torment, horror, apprehension, woe and so on that bit,
|
||
clawed, scratched, tore at his vitals. It preyed upon hi so much
|
||
that his favourite bull-dog, whose name was John Thomas, did not
|
||
notice it. Nevertheless -- and that reminds me of a story. It
|
||
was at a music-hall in the old days, and the manager came
|
||
forward to introduce Miss Joconde Jujube, or whatever her name
|
||
was. A drunken man in the stalls rose to protest: ``She's the
|
||
lousiest old cow on the stage.'' The manager, unperturbed:
|
||
``That may bery well be, sir; nevertheless, she -- will --
|
||
perform.''
|
||
|
||
Now, dears, get your laugh over, and we'll go on with
|
||
the Awful Despair of Sir Roger. I feared that without the comic
|
||
relief you might have lost your reasons.
|
||
|
||
For I fear that you will be in suspense yet awhile. I
|
||
raised your hopes with the chapter-heading; you thought
|
||
naturally enough that the appeal to the Cardinal would fix the
|
||
whole caboodle. But alas! ``Oh woe to me that have to sing this
|
||
thing!'' as Victor Neuburg so selfishly says -- for his hearers
|
||
are in still more evil case -- through Sir Roiger did indeed
|
||
consult Cardinal Mentula -- the dwarf was absolutely absorbed in
|
||
Browning.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N47.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MIV
|
||
|
||
OF THE DESPAIR OF THE NOVELISSIMIST; ANENT HIS CAREER; AND OF
|
||
THE APPEAL THAT HE MADE.
|
||
|
||
`Twere unreasonable to expect me to write a novelissim
|
||
at Seaside, Long Island, with its vomit of sour-smelling
|
||
canaille. Thence did I flee to the verandah; the mob is but a
|
||
distant yowl, and the winds from the bay. But my legs are
|
||
scorched by the whips of my great Father; and despite all manner
|
||
of grease, they burn. Yet -- what else is there to do? Life's
|
||
naught to me but worship, art, or love; and love's impossible
|
||
amid these cattle -- 'tis plain bestiality. And so Religion too
|
||
wears thin, since Love under Will is the law. What's left but
|
||
art? What's art but St. Paul's `faith,' the substance of things
|
||
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen? Then art should be
|
||
able to move mountains: oh if one could only dump the Central
|
||
Asiatic Plateau on to this infernal country! It's a curious
|
||
thing, perhaps even a little morbid, the way in which hatred of
|
||
America eats up all one's other passions. It's omnipresent. It's
|
||
not pure hatred; it's loathing and disgust. And it certainly
|
||
does interfere with the writing of a novelissim; for I'd more
|
||
easily write sonnets when I'm seasick.
|
||
|
||
Now, upon what God shall I call? It's a far cry to
|
||
Lochawe! There are no gods on the long-distance telephone. The
|
||
most disreputable outcast of Olympus would hide this shame
|
||
elsewhere -- so long as there was a latrine or a cicada outside
|
||
America he would not haunt their pinchback palaces. I fear me I
|
||
must call on their own deity, the dollar; and use him to get
|
||
out.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N48.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MV
|
||
|
||
HERIOC RESOLUTION OF THE NOVELISSIMIST.
|
||
|
||
No, by the anvil of lame Vulcan, I'll not budge. I'll
|
||
dree my weird. I'll take it out in art. Bricks without straw, by
|
||
the Phoenix Wand of Cheops, and by the Crowns of the Upper and
|
||
the Lower Nile! A puritan community can never breed artists, for
|
||
they feed on beauty; and in America one has to go for beauty to
|
||
the caterpillar. Yes, there are some pretty decent insects here,
|
||
I must admit. Thus comforted, let us return to those enthralling
|
||
vicissitudes in the career of Sir Roger Bloxam which were
|
||
interrupted about a month ago, something suddenly, by my taking
|
||
over The International.
|
||
|
||
You'll remember that Cardinal Mentula was absorbed in
|
||
Browning. (The reader is requested not to attempt to parse
|
||
Browning.) What's the object? cried Sir Roger. The Cardinal
|
||
handed him a copy of Tristam Shandy. ``How are you
|
||
working?'' Mentula passed him a Gulliver's Travels. ``Is
|
||
it hard?'' Down came a copy of The Channings. ``What's the
|
||
colour of his hair?'' He produced the Elegy in a Country
|
||
Churchyard. ``And how do you feel?'' The busy churchman pointed
|
||
to Jude the Obscure. ``Hot work, eh?'' The Cardinal
|
||
laughingly opened a Tam-o Shanter. ``Who is he?'' An
|
||
Erewhon was immediately indicated. ``What's the best part
|
||
of him?'' Cardinal Mentula got out a volume of sermons by Dean
|
||
Hole. ``How do you know?'' Evangeline was on the table in
|
||
an instant....
|
||
|
||
I could go on for an hour; but I do hate all this bloody
|
||
cleverness.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N49.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
|
||
|
||
OF THE HALT CAUSED BY THE ABSENCE OF A NOVELISSIMATRIX; AND HOW
|
||
THE LORD TOOK PITY UPON THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN.
|
||
|
||
I am perfectly well aware, thank you, darling, that a
|
||
month has slipped by, without my doing a line of the novelissim.
|
||
You see, I hadn't time; for I had just taken up the work of
|
||
The International. But I would have found time if I had
|
||
had the One Thing Needful. And what's that, say you, Ambrosia?
|
||
Natuer-lich -- a novelissimatrix. Gewiss. I'm really rather
|
||
grateful to dear Maitland. He sent me to the Murray Hill Baths,
|
||
where, by the Missing Section of Osiris, I met a Popular Movie
|
||
Writer in the flesh. He calls hils films ``Shades and Shadows,''
|
||
``Right or Wrong?'' and sich, and he talks as he writes. He
|
||
spends a night of drunken orgie with a lady, and, on leaving,
|
||
thanks her for a very pleasant evening. I didn't know that these
|
||
things were! Then Maitland also told me of a Cingalese Joing,
|
||
where I could get a really truly curry. And of course I ran
|
||
right into my beloved Catherine. She was sitting in a little
|
||
inner room, by the window, in the twilight. I could not see her
|
||
clearly. But her magnetism drew me over to her. She was in a
|
||
coarse white dress, smoking endless cigarettes, and drinking
|
||
many an unfathomable seidel of beer. She looks a little like
|
||
Soror Hilarion, and, a little like Frank Harris, and altogether
|
||
like some kind of Chinese dog -- a barbarian brigand kind from
|
||
beyond the Wall. So I shall call her Tchao, and that will be all
|
||
right, won't it? I can lie about on the bed in our little room
|
||
on Central Park West, while she wraps up the laundry in copies
|
||
of the Evening Telegram, and write my nice novelissim.
|
||
And, praise the pigs, I didn't have to appeal to the dollar; it
|
||
was Father himself that gave me this dog. I'm telling you; it's
|
||
a most amazing thing; the dear old boy is there with the goods
|
||
from noon to noon. ``Everybody works but Father'' is no song for
|
||
our little menage, by Wilkins! I'm a member of the Upper
|
||
citcles, by Aaron's rod that budded! This is the Inner Life, all
|
||
right, my dear old H. P. B.! She's a Pennsylvania Dutch girl,
|
||
this Tchao, no Frankfurter about her; but she's the Original Hot
|
||
Dog. Also, b'gosh, one of Nature's children; she has no acquired
|
||
technique; it's all talent ab ovo. But what talent! No:
|
||
it's pure genius; she doesn't know how, and she doesn't know
|
||
why; but she gets there. She inscribes me among the lyric poets,
|
||
and the rest follow as Horace once indicated. A Week-end in this
|
||
house needs the very opposite kind; byt have no fear! In fact,
|
||
your only dread be this, that I cannot find time to write Our
|
||
Story.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N50.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MVII
|
||
|
||
REFLEXIONS UPON FREE WILL AND DESTINY: CALCULATED TO ELUCIDATE
|
||
THE COMPLEX OF THE CAREER OF SIR ROGER BLOXAM.
|
||
|
||
My labour, most ambiguous Henri, will indeed have been
|
||
waste matter, a very newspaper, if I have failed to bring into
|
||
assimilation with your Vinnanam the F.A.C.T. that whatever
|
||
Sir Roger was, he was, and be damned to you! How could he have
|
||
been otherwise? If he could, he would. And as otherwise I should
|
||
have drawn him. But he being himself (poor devil!) he was just
|
||
that. See you not how even our dreams, our wishes, all that we
|
||
are, dates back to hidden ancestor-work? Only the Freudians go
|
||
not far enough; the glowing seed that made my mind so brilliant
|
||
had its orgin in the Father of all brilliance, Our Lord the Sun.
|
||
Thus once again, by yet another path, we reach the brave ``There
|
||
is no part of me which is not of the Gods.'' Rejoice, o
|
||
brothers, we are altogether of the divine substance. We neither
|
||
think, nor feel, nor perceive, nor are, any other thing than
|
||
that all-bounteous, all-beautiful One, that Lord in his spendour
|
||
and his ecstasy that cometh and goeth in his chariot upon high,
|
||
giving light and praise, yet neither moveth nor uttereth any
|
||
Voice! For there is nothing in the Universe that is not of that
|
||
Unity -- rejoice! rejoice! All paths are spectra, in the prism
|
||
of consciousness, of that One Light; so that it mattered not to
|
||
Sir Roger whether he were tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,
|
||
gentleman, apothecary, ploughboy, thief. Nor does it matter to
|
||
you, does it, what I do with him? Little ones, it seems to me
|
||
enough, maybe too much, that I should do aught at all. Very
|
||
good, then: Sir Roger entered the Diplomatic Service. That
|
||
finishes that, and I can take Tchao for a stroll in the Park.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N51.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MVIII
|
||
|
||
OF THE VICISSITUDES OF NOVELISSIMAKING, AN EXAMPLE.
|
||
|
||
Observe! Just as I was ready to begin, Tchao has taken
|
||
to looking like a potato, and I have to call her Murphy.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N52.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MIX
|
||
|
||
OF CANALS.
|
||
|
||
The very A.B.C. of True Love is that a Canal is either
|
||
Banal or -- not. Amen to that, with all my heart, quoth Sir
|
||
Roger, and applied himself to the brandy. At the end of a long
|
||
life let me lift up my voice and beaer witness to the eternal
|
||
glory of Pan!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
N53.R1
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MX
|
||
|
||
OF THINGS HUMAN AND DIVINE; BEING OTHER EPIGRAMS LABORIOUSLY AND
|
||
PERTINENTLY CONSTRUCTED BY SIR ROGER BLOXAM, IN THE VERY
|
||
PRIMROSE AND WOOD ANEMONE OF HIS YOUTH.
|
||
|
||
To a pretty woman I prefer an ugly one, the uglier the
|
||
better; for it is better to have a relief than a shock when I
|
||
turn to the business end.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
I hate Heine; for it is impossible to deny that he was a
|
||
poet and impossible to deny that he was a Jew.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
American women are anxious to safeguard the purity of
|
||
their girls, because if they make it difficult for men to get
|
||
them, the will be able to hire them for less money.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
Woman is necessary to a man as a sewerage system is to a
|
||
city. Cities on mountains need less attention in this respect;
|
||
live therefore in the City of God upon the Mountain Abiegnus!
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
``It's love that makes the world go round.'' And round!
|
||
-- and round! -- and round!!!
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
The University of Oxford was founded by the son of a
|
||
butcher. (The bitterest remark that ever left those amiable
|
||
lips.)
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
(In America) I love American women ( -- it makes me
|
||
think I am crossing the Atlantic Ocean.)
|
||
|
||
(Meaning: all A. W.'s have immense vesicae and I loathe
|
||
to be in America.)
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
A woman's love. A play in 3 acts. For Mathematicians.
|
||
|
||
Act I 23
|
||
Act II 69
|
||
Act III 606
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
I like Lionel Parrish because he arouses in me precisely
|
||
the sense of satisfaction which I have in regarding an
|
||
exceptionally healthy motion.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
Even when things are at the worst, one can always thank
|
||
God that They haven't got claws.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
Lord Kitchener died like a gallant gentleman. A classic
|
||
example of protective mimicry.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
Woman are like toilet paper. Use them for your comfort
|
||
and convenience, then put them where they belong.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
Woman.
|
||
|
||
You dangle a carrot in front of her nose
|
||
And she goes wherever the carrot goes.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
Cardinal Mentula once told me: The End justifies the
|
||
means. Morals, conventions, etc. are but the codifications of
|
||
those means which experience has shown to lead most directly to
|
||
the end. Exceptions occur, so that every act is a matter for
|
||
individual judgment. Up, guards, and at 'em!
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
A philosopher reminds me of a guinea-pig chasing its own
|
||
tail.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
Half the joy of acquiring a new mistress is relief at
|
||
getting rid of the old one.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
Humanity did well indeed to honour Charles Darwin; he
|
||
did his utmost to provide it with decent connexions.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
Cardinal Mentula once began a play.
|
||
|
||
He. ``We've had our quarrel; but, on the whole, you've done
|
||
what I wanted you to, so -- ''
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
You can make a joke that even an Englishman can
|
||
understand, and only use two letters. Even an Englishman's
|
||
imagination can supply the rest. -- One doesn't have even to use
|
||
the two letters.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
Married people are socially impossible; for you either
|
||
make love to the woman, and lose his friendship; or you don't,
|
||
and lose hers.
|
||
|
||
==
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
R78
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER SUPPOSE WE SAY FORTY-FOUR: Knobsworthy Bottoms.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER ONE: The Love of a Pure Girl; the Quarrel; and the Mystery.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THREE: In Which the Reader is Introduced to the Hero.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FOUR: The Shadow of Tragedy.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER SEVEN: Before the Beginning of Years.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Dawn of a Brighter Day.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER NINE: Alas! Poor Yorick!.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TEN: The Murder in Greencroft Gardens.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER SIX HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-EIGHT: Kissed At Last.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Of Publishers: With an African Fable.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TWELVE: Horrific and Grotesque Corollary of the Foregoing
|
||
Argument,
|
||
Presented as an Epicene Paradox.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Of the Quality of the Ancestry of Sir Roger Bloxam;
|
||
His
|
||
Forebears, of their Chastity, Decency, Fidelity, Sobriety, and Many
|
||
Other
|
||
Virtues.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: How Sir Roger Got His Nick-Name.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Of the Logos That Spake Never, and of His Witnesses.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Silence -- To Take the Sound of the Last Capitulum Out
|
||
of the
|
||
Ears.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Of the Monologue Between Sir Roger and the
|
||
Mysterious Monk.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Of a Ladye Mine, and of the Dream She Had.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Of the Combat Between Sir Roger Bloxam and Cardinal
|
||
Mentula.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TWENTY: Of the Household Cavalry of the King of Sweden and
|
||
Norway,
|
||
What Came to its Best Regiment.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Contains What I Meant to Write in Chapter Twenty.
|
||
Or
|
||
Nearly.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: A Plenary, Veracious, and Meticulously Scrupulous
|
||
Account of What Happened to the Best Regiment of the Household Cavalry
|
||
of the
|
||
King of Sweden and Norway: Calculated to 33 Places of Decimals, by the
|
||
Method
|
||
of Hard Indurated Hunterian Logarithms.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Relapse of a Promising Young Novel into a Jolly
|
||
Devil
|
||
May-Care Book.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: How Sir Roger Comported Himself in the Debate with
|
||
the
|
||
C.U.N.T.S.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER CXXVI: Sir Roger Goes to Switzerland.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Sir Roger Really Does Go to Switzerland.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Nothing Particular Happens to Sir Roger Bloxam in
|
||
Switzerland; So Why Worry?
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Sir Roger Bloxam at Cambridge, Amsterdam, and
|
||
Birmingham. An Adventure of Porphyria Poppoea. This Time We Mean
|
||
Business.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY: A Short Chapter and a Gay One.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: An Interlude with Certain Critics.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Apologia Pro Novellissimo Suo.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Of Kitty Williams, Her Loves Pastoral,
|
||
Paidoparthenical, and Extraterminumuniversitatiduomillera-
|
||
diodemagnaesanctaemariaecclesiastical.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: A Word on Pantomorphopsychonoso-philosophy,
|
||
including Arthur Machen.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: The Runic Plasm.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Of the Early Opinions of Sir Roger Bloxam
|
||
Concerning the Immortality of the Soul.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: Of Frou-Frou, and Frisson, and Death.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: How Sir Roger Bloxam Bethought Him of Choosing a
|
||
Career.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: Facts About the White Slave Traffic. 1917 A.D.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY: Of Sir Roger Bloxam's Second Choice of Career.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: How Sir Roger Bloxam Repudiated a Naval Career.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: Sir Roger's Objections to the Study of Law.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: The Omnific and Grandiose Intermezzo of the
|
||
Whistling Coon.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: Vive l'Entente Cordiale!
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MI: ``Washed in the Blood of the Lamb''.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MII: Of How Sir Roger Bloxam Met Mr. Hank Farris.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MIII: Of the Despair of Sir Roger Bloxam Anent his Career; and
|
||
of the Appeal that He Made to the Cardinal.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MIV: Of the Despair of the Novelissimist; Anent His Career; and
|
||
of the Appeal that He Made.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MV: Heroic Resolution of the Novelissimist.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MVI: Of the Halt Caused by the Absence of a Novelissimatrix;
|
||
and How the Lord Took Pity Upon the Innocence of Father Brown.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MVII: Reflexions upon Free Will and Destiny: Calculated to
|
||
Elucidate the Complex of the Career of Sir Roger Bloxam.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MVIII: Of the Vicissitudes of Novellissimaking, an Example.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MIX: Of Canals.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER MX: Of Things Human and Divine; Being Other Epigrams
|
||
Laboriously and Pertinently Constructed by Sir Roger Bloxam, in the
|
||
Very Primrose and Wood Anemone of His Youth.
|
||
|