He suddenly rose and put both hands on her shoulders. He looked into her eyes. He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. He picked up his hat and was gone. It was five minutes before Priscilla noticed that his breakfast had been left untouched.
A fog horn, sounding unceasingly.
THE SMART SET MEDICINE SHOW
“'Smart Set Medicine Show, it's called, run by a fellow named Mencken. Sells cheap whiskey to the Indians—makes them crazy, they say.'”
She listlessly put away the breakfast dishes. She tried to drown out the sound by singing hymns. She fell on her knees and tried to pray. She found her prayers keeping time to the rise and fall of the notes of that horn. She determined to go out in the air—to find her husband—to go to church, anywhere—as far as possible from the Smart Set medicine show.
So she went out the back door and ran as fast as she could toward the place from which came the sound of the fog horn.
IV
An open space on the edge of the forest.
In the centre of the clearing a small gaudily-painted tent.
Seated on the ground in a semicircle before the tent, some forty or fifty Indians.
Standing on a box before the entrance to the tent, a man of twenty-five or fifty.
In his left hand he holds a fog horn; in his right, a stein of beer.
He puts the horn to his lips and blows a heavy blast.
He bellows, “Beauty—Beauty—Beauty!”
He takes a drink of beer.
He repeats this performance nine times.
stify> He takes up some mud and deftly models the features of several well-known characters—statesmen, writers, critics. In many cases the resemblance is so slight that Priscilla can hardly recognize the character.
He picks up a heavy club and proceeds to beat each one of his modeled figures into a pulp.
The Indians applaud wildly.
He pays no attention to this applause.
He clears his throat and begins to speak. Priscilla is so deafened by the roar of his voice that she cannot hear what he says. Apparently he is introducing somebody; somebody named George.
George steps out of the tent, but does not bow to the audience. In one hand he carries a fencing foil, well constructed, of European workmanship; in his other hand he holds a number of pretty toy balloons which he has made himself.
He smiles sarcastically, tosses the balloons into the air, and cleverly punctures them one by one with his rapier.
At each “pop” the announcer blows a loud blast on the fog horn.
When the last balloon has been punctured George retires without acknowledging the applause of the Indians.
The next act is announced as Helen of Troy in “Six Minutes of Beauty”. Priscilla learns from the announcer that “this little lady is out of 'Irony' by Theodore Dreiser”.
“All ready, Helen—”
The “little lady” appears.
She is somewhat over six feet six in height and built like a boilermaker. She is dressed in pink tights.
“Six Minutes of Beauty” begins when Helen picks up three large iron cannon balls and juggles them. She tosses them in the air and catches them cleverly on the back of her neck.
The six minutes are brought to a successful conclusion when Helen, hanging head downward by one foot from a trapeze, balances a lighted lamp on the other foot and plays Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the slide trombone.
The announcer then begins his lecture. Priscilla has by this time gotten used to the overpowering roar of his voice and she discovers that once this difficulty is overcome she is tremendously impressed by his words.
She becomes more and more attracted to the man. She listens, fascinated, as his lecture draws to a close and he offers his medicine for sale. She presses forward through the crowd of Indians surrounding the stand. She reaches the tent. She gives her coin and receives in return a bottle. She hides it in her cape and hurries home.
She slips in the back way; she pours some of the medicine into a glass; she drinks it.
V
A terrible overwhelming nausea. Vomiting, which lasts for agonizing minutes, leaving her helpless on the floor.
Then cessation.
Then light—blinding light.
VI
At 3:10 Priscilla drank the Mencken medicine; at 3:12 she was lying in agony on the floor; at 3:20 she opened her eyes; at 3:21 she walked out of her front door; and at 3:22 she discovered what was wrong with Plymouth and the pilgrims.
Main Street. Straight and narrow. A Puritan thoroughfare in a Puritan town.
The church. A centre of Puritan worship. The shrine of a narrow theology which persistently repressed beauty and joy and life.
The Miles Standish house. The house of a Puritan. A squat, unlovely symbol of repression. Beauty crushed by Morality.
Plymouth Rock. Hard, unyielding—like the Puritan moral code. A huge tombstone on the grave of Pan.
She fled home. She flung herself, sobbing, on the bed. She cried, “They're all Puritans—that's what they are, Puritans!”
After a while she slept, her cheeks flushed, her heart beating unnaturally.
VII
Late that night.
She opened her eyes; she heard men's voices; she felt her heart still pounding within her at an alarming rate.
“And I told them then that it would come to no good end. Truly, the Lord does not countenance such joking.”
She recognized the voices of Miles Standish and Elder Brewster.
“Well—what happened then?” This from Kennicott.
“Well, you see, Henry Haydock got some of this Mencken's medicine from one of the Indians. And he thought it would be a good joke to put it in the broth at the church supper this evening.”
“Yes?”
“Well—he did it, the fool. And when the broth was served, hell on earth broke loose. Everyone started calling his neighbor a Puritan, and cursing him for having banished Beauty from the earth. The Lord knows what they meant by that; I don't. Old friends fought like wildcats, shrieking 'Puritan' at each other. Luckily it only got to one table—but there are ten raving lunatics in the lockup tonight.
“It's an awful thing. But thanks to the Lord, some good has come out of this evil: that medicine man, Mencken, was standing outside looking in at the rumpus, smiling to himself I guess. Well, somebody saw him and yelled, 'There's another of those damned Puritans!' and before he could get away five of them had jumped on him and beaten him to death. He deserved it, and it's a good joke on him that they killed him for being a Puritan.”
Priscilla could stand no more. She rose from her bed, rushed into the room, and faced the three Puritans. In the voice of Priscilla Kennicott but with the words of the medicine man she scourged them.
“A good joke?” she began. “And that is what you Puritan gentlemen of God and volcanoes of Correct Thought snuffle over as a good joke? Well, with the highest respect to Professor Doctor Miles Standish, the Puritan Hearse-hound, and Professor Doctor Elder Brewster, the Plymouth Dr. Frank Crane—Blaa!”
She shrieked this last in their faces and fell lifeless at their feet.
She never recovered consciousness; an hour later she died. An overdose of the medicine had been too much for her weak heart.
“Poor William,” comforted Elder Brewster, “you must be brave. You will miss her sorely. But console yourself with the thought that it was for the best. Priscilla has gone where she will always be happy. She has at last found that bliss which she searched for in vain on earth.”
“Yes William,” added Miles Standish. “Priscilla has now found eternal joy.”
VIII
Heaven.
Smug saints with ill-fitting halos and imitation wings, singing meaningless hymns which Priscilla had heard countless times before.
Sleek prosaic angels flying aimlessly around playing stale songs on sickly yellow harps.
Three of the harps badly out of tune; two strings missing on another.
Moses, a Jew.
Methuselah, another Jew. Old and unshaven.
Priscilla threw herself on a cloud, sobbing.
“Well, sister, what seems to be the matter here?”
She looked up; she saw a sympathetic stranger looking down at her.
“Because you know, sister,” he went on, “if you don't like it here you can always go back any time you want to.”
“Do you mean to say,” gasped Priscilla, “that I can return to earth?”
“You certainly can,” said the stranger. “I'm sort of manager here, and whenever you see any particular part of the earth you'd like to live in, you just let me know and I'll arrange it.”
He smiled and was gone.
IX
It was two hundred years before Priscilla Kennicott definitely decided that she could stand it no longer in heaven; it was another hundred years before she located a desirable place on earth to return to.
She finally selected a small town in the American northwest, far from the Puritan-tainted Plymouth; a small town in the midst of fields of beautiful waving grain; a small town free from the artificiality of large cities; a small town named Gopher Prairie.
She made known her desire to the manager; she said goodby to a small group of friends who had gathered to see her off; she heard the sound of the eternal harp playing and hymn singing grow gradually fainter and fainter; she closed her eyes.
When she opened them again she found herself on Main Street in Gopher Prairie.
X
From the “Heavenly Harp and Trumpet”:
Mrs. Priscilla Kennicott, one of our most popular angels, left these parts last Tuesday for an extended visit to the Earth. Mrs. K. confided to Ye Editor that she would probably take up her residence in Gopher Prairie, Minn., under the name of Carol Kennicott. The “Harp and Trumpet” felicitates the citizens of Gopher Prairie on their acquisition of a charming and up-to-date young matron whose absence will be keenly regretted by her many friends in the heavenly younger married set. Good luck, Priscilla!
XI
Heaven.
Five years later.
The monthly meeting of the Celestial Browning Club.
Seated in the chair reserved for the guest of honor, the manager.
The meeting opens as usual with a reading by Brother Robert Browning of his poem “Pippa Passes”; as he proclaims that “God's in his heaven, all's right with the world”, the members applaud and the manager rises and bows.
The chairman announces that “today we take up a subject in which I am sure we are all extremely interested—the popular literature of the United States”.
The members listen to selected extracts from the writings of Gene Stratton-Porter, Zane Grey, and Harold Bell Wright; at the conclusion they applaud and the manager again bows.
“I am sure”, says the chairman, “that we are all glad to hear that things are going so nicely in the United States.” (Applause.) “And now, in conclusion, Brother Voltaire has requested permission to address us for a few minutes, and I am sure that anything Brother Voltaire has to say will be eminently worthwhile.”
Brother Voltaire rises and announces that he has listened with interest to the discussion of American literature; that he, too, rejoices that all is well in this best of all possible United States; and that he hopes they will pardon him if he supplements the program by reading a few extracts from another extremely popular American book recently published under the name of “Main Street”.
XII
At the next meeting of the Celestial Browning Club it was unanimously voted that the privileges of the club be denied Brother Voltaire for the period of one year, and that the name of Priscilla Kennicott be stricken from the list of non-resident members of heaven.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
In the Manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald
This story occurs under the blue skies and bluer laws of Puritan New England, in the days when religion was still taken seriously by a great many people, and in the town of Plymouth where the “Mayflower”, having ploughed its platitudinous way from Holland, had landed its precious cargo of pious Right Thinkers, moral Gentlemen of God, and—Priscilla.
Priscilla was—well, Priscilla had yellow hair. In a later generation, in a 1921 June, if she had toddled by at a country club dance you would have noticed first of all that glorious mass of bobbed corn-colored locks. You would, then, perhaps, have glanced idly at her face, and suddenly said “Oh my gosh!” The next moment you would have clutched the nearest stag and hissed, “Quick—yellow hair—silver dress—oh Judas!” You would then have been introduced, and after dancing nine feet you would have been cut in on by another panting stag. In those nine delirious feet you would have become completely dazed by one of the smoothest lines since the building of the Southern Pacific. You would then have borrowed somebody's flask, gone into the locker room and gotten an edge—not a bachelor-dinner edge but just enough to give you the proper amount of confidence. You would have returned to the ballroom, cut in on this twentieth century Priscilla, and taken her and your edge out to a convenient limousine, or the first tee.
It was of some such yellow-haired Priscilla that Homer dreamed when he smote his lyre and chanted, “I sing of arms and the man”; it was at the sight of such as she that rare Ben Johnson's Dr. Faustus cried, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” In all ages has such beauty enchanted the minds of men, calling forth in one century the Fiesolian terza rima of “Paradise Lost”, in another the passionate arias of a dozen Beethoven symphonies. In 1620 the pagan daughter of Helen of Troy and Cleopatra of the Nile happened, by a characteristic jest of the great Ironist, to embark with her aunt on the “Mayflower”.
Like all girls of eighteen Priscilla had learned to kiss and be kissed on every possible occasion; in the exotic and not at all uncommon pleasure of “petting” she had acquired infinite wisdom and complete disillusionment. But in all her “petting parties” on the “Mayflower” and in Plymouth she had found no Puritan who held her interest beyond the first kiss, and she had lately reverted in sheer boredom to her boarding school habit of drinking gin in large quantities—a habit which was not entirely approved of by her old-fashioned aunt, although Mrs. Brewster was glad to have her niece stay at home in the evenings “instead”, as she told Mrs. Bradford, “of running around with those boys, and really, my dear, Priscilla says some of the funniest things when she gets a little—er—'boiled', as she calls it—you must come over some evening, and bring the governor.”
Mrs. Brewster, Priscilla's aunt, is the ancestor of all New England aunts. She may be seen today walking down Tremont Street, Boston, in her Educator shoes on her way to S. S. Pierce's which she pronounces to rhyme with hearse. The twentieth century Mrs. Brewster wears a highnecked black silk waist with a chatelaine watch pinned over her left breast and a spot of Gordon's codfish (no bones) over her right. When a little girl she was taken to see Longfellow, Lowell, and Ralph Waldo Emerson; she speaks familiarly of the James boys, but this has no reference to the well-known Missouri outlaws. She was brought up on blueberry cake, Postum, and “The Atlantic Monthly”; she loves the Boston “Transcript”, God, and her relatives in Newton Centre. Her idea of a daring joke is the remark Susan Hale made to Edward Everett Hale about sending underwear to the heathen. She once asked Donald Ogden Stewart to dinner with her niece; she didn't think his story about the lady mind reader who read the man's mind and then slapped his face, was very funny; she never asked him again.
The action of this story all takes place in MRS. BREWSTER'S Plymouth home on two successive June evenings. As the figurative curtain rises MRS. BREWSTER is sitting at a desk reading the latest instalment of Foxe's “Book of Martyrs”.
The sound of a clanking sword is heard outside. MRS. BREWSTER looks up, smiles to herself, and goes on reading. A knock—a timid knock.
MRS. BREWSTER: Come in. (Enter CAPTAIN MILES STANDISH, whiskered and forty. In a later genera
tion, with that imposing mustache and his hatred of Indians, Miles would undoubtedly have been a bank president. At present he seems somewhat ill at ease, and obviously relieved to find only PRISCILLA'S aunt at home.)
MRS. BREWSTER: Good evening, Captain Standish.
MILES: Good evening, Mrs. Brewster. It's—it's cool for June, isn't it?
MRS. BREWSTER: Yes. I suppose we'll pay for it with a hot July, though.
MILES (nervously): Yes, but it—it is cool for June, isn't it?
MRS. BREWSTER: So you said, Captain.
MILES: Yes. So I said, didn't I?
(Silence.)
MILES: Mistress Priscilla isn't home, then?
MRS. BREWSTER: Why, I don't think so, Captain. But I never can be sure where Priscilla is.
MILES (eagerly): She's a—a fine girl, isn't she? A fine girl.
MRS. BREWSTER: Why, yes. Of course, Priscilla has her faults—but she'd make some man a fine wife—some man who knew how to handle her—an older man, with experience.
MILES: Do you really think so, Mrs. Brewster? (After a minute.) Do you think Priscilla is thinking about marrying anybody in particular?
MRS. BREWSTER: Well, I can't say, Captain. You know—she's a little wild. Her mother was wild, too, you know—that is, before the Lord spoke to her. They say she used to be seen at the Mermaid Tavern in London with all those play-acting people. She always used to say that Priscilla would marry a military man.
MILES: A military man? Well, now tell me Mrs. Brewster, do you think that a sweet delicate creature like Priscilla—
A VOICE (in the next room): Oh DAMN!
MRS. BREWSTER: That must be Priscilla now.
THE VOICE: Auntie!
MRS. BREWSTER: Yes, Priscilla dear.
THE VOICE: Where in hell did you put the vermouth?
A Parody Outline of History Page 3
