“And then too it has been the hobby of his leisure hours to form an unequalled collection of Early American antiques,” remarked Senora Etcetera. “That shows such a proper feeling, I think. And moreover, he got into trouble over his income taxes.”
“They may have called it that, but it was really for sodomy,” declared Lady Ampersand. “You see, the man is a confirmed vegetarian—or perhaps it was a Communist. Anyhow, I saw something about it in a newspaper. So his books may be quite worth while.”
“Yes, but the real point as to his high position in literature is that story about him and the Queen of Roumania,” said Anon.
“Not at all,” Ibid assured them. “He has shown conclusively that we are upon the brink of something or other. And two prominent clergymen and a senator from out West have agreed with him. So I most certainly must borrow one of his books.”
“No, it does not specially matter, my darling, what his books are like,” the world replied, to his wife, with indulgence. “But people are talking about his books. So you ought to ask for his books at the library.”
“I think his books are perfectly wonderful,” declared Mrs. Murgatroyd, “and I only wish to goodness I could remember something about his books. I believe I will buy one of his books.”
All this they exclaimed with the fervor of virtuosi, because of their enthusiasm for fine literature and their regard for the seven great auctorial virtues. And it was with a pleased attentiveness that the graceful object of universal interest thus heard the public at large acclaim his home-coming into the realms of flesh and blood.
“Public Agog Greets Noted Author,” he remarked, gratefully.
For here, as the man recognized with all proper reverence, now that he had returned from the lands beyond common-sense, here were the true rulers of a more rational world than his restless dreams could ever have invented. Here were the all-powerful folk who, in a sturdy day-lit era of enlightened democracy, determined what gods might be worshipped, what heroes honored, what fantasies unloosed in the name of government, what fames made immortal, and what crimes glorified. These people had the final say as to all flesh-and-blood affairs. They decided everything, at long last. But in particular, as the patrons of the best-paying magazines and of lending libraries, did they determine what special compounds of wit, fancy and erudition might be applauded, as ever-living literary masterpieces, for entire weeks. So was it that the poietes, the dream-vendor, now saw before him, yet again, his paymasters, in the kind-hearted, the chuckle-headed and the snobbish middle-classes of an imperfectly civilized nation, upon whose favor and whose unpredictable whims he and his famousness, and every form of art, and all flesh-and-blood affairs, and the general fate of mankind stayed, at the last pinch, dependent.
Well, but thus far, matters had sped favorably. Jane waited for him; he had the Devil’s own word for it that her grim attentiveness would make certain his paradisaical future; and the public at large were according him, to the full reach of their all but omnipotent powers, the customary tributes of acknowledged literary genius.
That was the reflection which caused him to shrug in the same instant that he stepped ashore, still treading jauntily, to meet the supreme judges of human success and of human failure in a world with no nonsense about it.
EXPLICIT
The Nightmare Had Triplets Page 57
