“The tear-strained echo of David Lamb’s confession died and was immediately buried by silence. He waited for an eternity, but still she did not speak. Then he rose slowly through the moon-streaked air which suffused their diminutive pup-tent with magic odours of the mysteriously throbbing jungle and strode to the open flap of the tent door, moving his putteed legs gradually one after the other like some defeated beast, clenching and unclenching hands which resembled not so much enormous and pathetic paws as empty and quivering symbols of despair.”
Of course, this might all have occurred in a suite at the Ritz, or even in New Mexico, but Africa is a trifle more picturesque.
“Her immovable gaze pursued him mutely to the tent door where his height, pausing for one awful moment, hung itself: a picture of overgrown agony, framed in the bloodcurdling shriek of a pygmy head-hunter.
“ ‘Goodbye,’ he dimly articulated, through wisdom teeth.”
Richard Dix, the film actor, at seven hundred a day, would do that part well. And now for the familiar miracle.
“Somehow the girl’s limp spirit tensed with pity for this big, helpless, tortured boy and the orange with which she had been nervously toying rolled to the tent floor with a soundless crash as in her pale eyes there flashed a ruddy fire. Her slim, voluptuous form sprang from the patented folding camp cot like a jaguar and landed beside him: alert, angelic, luminous.
“ ‘Stop!’ she guttered.”
Nor does it take a crystal gazer to see Gloria Swanson guttering for the movies at two dollars a minute.
“Her interlocutor swung round, his gaze squarely fixed upon her.
“ ‘Goodbye,’ his teeth repeated, dark with anguish. And his lips added, ‘I’m going.’
“ ‘Don’t,’ she commanded quietly.
“This time it was his tongue which spoke: ‘Why not—Mary?’
“ ‘Because—I forgive you, Dave.’
“And with those wondrous words she wilted toward him hungrily—not demon nor angel, but Woman.
“ ‘My Mary!’ Feeling seven feet tall in his newly purchased happiness, he turned to her a face crucified by emotion.
“ ‘My Lamb!’
“And all of Mary’s soul-transfigured loveliness allowed itself to be irrevocably swallowed by her Lamb’s awaiting arms. . . .”
With these few, well-chosen words we leave the Soul Kick and turn to the third or final variation: the Kick Direct (and long may it wave)—
“ ‘O—’ She blushed, from the brim of her stylish but faded cloche hat to the buckles of her modish but worn suède slippers.
“ ‘Why not?’ he asked coolly.
“The question seemed to sear Mary’s flesh and her young voice quivered.
“He pointed briefly. ‘Behind that screen . . .’
“Desperately, her eyes sought his. ‘But . . . but . . .’
“Abruptly, L’Estrade turned, went to a corner of the studio and picked up a palette and some camel’s-hair brushes.
“ ‘Everything?’ Her very syllables throbbed.
“ ‘Of course . . .’ the artist replied in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, adding, ‘Hurry please . . . I have an inspiration.’
“His voice, or was it his manner, or something about the magnetism of his flowing necktie, seemed to hypnotize her and, moving as if in a trance, Mary Dolittle stepped behind the fateful screen . . .”
The audience is respectfully requested to observe the three-little-dots motif. No word in the entire dictionary, no phrase in the whole language, is as valuable to a composer of the Kick Direct type of magazine fiction as these unassuming yet indispensable little dots. Without their assistance the author is worse than helpless. With them alone he can do wonders. They are his quid pro quo and his sine qua non, his urim and thummin, his indestructible, always dependable Cape Cod lighter which makes the greenest log burn merrily.
And stories with the Kick Direct invariably end as follows:
“About a week later, Lucille came running up to Mary on the street. Lucille was all excitement. ‘My dear, where have you been?’ she cried. ‘Everyone at the biscuit factory is asking. I told them you had the mumps but nobody believed it.’ Then with a sudden change of expression: ‘What a beautiful mink coat! What happened to your old coat with the lamb collar?’
“ ‘I . . . I lost it,’ Mary murmured softly.”
From Vanity Fair, August 1927.
MR. X
Mr. X was one of those inscrutable people who do not exist.
But the reason Mr. X did not exist was as far from inscrutable as far can be. Had Mr. X (like certain martyrs of whom you and I have read) vigorously refused to exist, there might have been an element of inscrutability involved in his not existing (and then again, there might not). If, on the other hand, Mr. X, like Our Very Best People, had tacitly agreed to not exist, inscrutability would have jumped into a parenthesis and risen to the nth power of itself before anyone could murmur Q.E.D. Unfortunately, Mr. X was neither best nor a martyr. He was merely inscrutable. But to make matters worse, this inscrutable man did not exist for the very far from inscrutable, the, in fact, merely obvious, reason that he was always much too busy not existing to exist even a little. He was merely a man, in the first place. In the second place, he was merely the kind of man of whom the world will remember that one warm, still day in February a cold March wind was blowing as Mr. X did not walk down the street.
Having introduced my reader to Mr. X, I am now in a position to turn the tables by introducing Mr. X to my reader; which means nothing more nor less than introducing Mrs. X—and that suggests the good old proverb “it never rains but it pours,” because Mrs. X was the sort of woman who needs no sort of introduction.
The Xs lived happily ever after in more than one and less than two rooms, accurately situated on the nonexistent or thirteenth floor of a model Workers’ Home just outside Mekano City (if you know where that is). But they did not live alone or with each other or even by themselves. Quite the contrary. They lived with Flora and Fauna, their children; Flora being twins.
And the Workers’ Home being a model Workers’ Home, the view from the Xs’ front window was always different. Sometimes it consisted of Mr. X’s underwear and it sometimes consisted of Mrs. X’s underwear and it consisted sometimes of the children’s underwear (and sometimes of Mr. and Mrs. X’s and the children’s and sometimes of Mr. and Mrs. X’s and sometimes of Mr. X’s and the children’s and sometimes of the children’s and Mrs. X’s) but never, never, for any reason, under any circumstances, did it consist of nobody’s. When Mr. X arose, of a twilight, he opened his eyes on underwear and when Mr. X retired, of a twilight, he shut his eyes on underwear. As Miss Gertrude Stein would say, there was somehow no escape from underwear. He had tried everything, but without success. So had Mrs. X. Being a woman, she had done more than try everything without success. She had put a flowering geranium on the windowsill; which made the underwear look a little more like underwear than it had previously looked like underwear.
Every morning, dark and early, when the last robberies were occurring among the First Families, Mr. X cursed the day he was born, swallowed a package of Lifesavers, bit Mrs. X, kicked Fauna, knocked down the twins and (breathing deeply) walked five miles to town to have his breath examined by the First Assistant Superintendent of Breaths in the great Wheel Mines at Mekano.
Like the Workers’ Home, the Wheel Mines were model. And now I suppose you will ask me what model Wheel Mines are like. Well, they are like nothing. In the first place, they are model. That means, not underwear, as in the case of Mr. X’s habitat, but shafts and efficiency and steam and elevators and silence and electricity and machines and discipline and (last but not least) people. In the second place, all the wheels of all the machines of model Wheel Mines mine nothing but wheels. That means bigger steam and busier electricity, and better discipline and efficiency, and hundreds of silences, and thousands of elevators, and hundreds of thousands of shafts, and thousands of thousands of mac
hines all mining wheels, and millions of billions of people all mining wheels, and (last but not least) trillions of quadrillions of septillions of nonillions of absolutely nothing but wheels.
If you can imagine wheels, and if you can imagine but, and if you can imagine nothing, then you certainly ought to be able to stand on your head and imagine nothing but wheels; and if you can do that, you can get some idea of what model Wheel Mines are like. In my opinion, they are like a novel by Mr. Dos Passos, only different.
The Mekano branch of the great Wheel Mines, in common with one billion, two hundred and thirty-four million, five hundred and sixty-seven thousand, eight hundred and ninety (and Heaven knows how many other) branches, was owned and operated by Drof, the greatest industrial genius of the twentieth century; and indirectly, of course, the richest man on earth. Drof, as you might expect, had started in a small town as a poor baby in a poor baby carriage with a poor mother and a poor father. The poor father had died, leaving the poor baby in the poor baby carriage with the poor mother, who was forced to sell the poor baby carriage. It was nothing more nor less than this terrible catastrophe that inspired poor baby Drof with the extraordinary notion which I am on the verge of attempting to expound.
Deprived of its poor baby carriage, this poor baby realized, in its tiny way, that what makes the world go round is wheels. Consequently, no sooner could it walk than (with characteristic Yankee ingenuity) it apprenticed itself to an old wheelwright, who taught it the secrets of wheels from Z to A and vice versa or, in other words, backwards and forwards. Having thus learned whatever there is to learn about wheels, the boy Drof opened a tiny model Wheel Mine of his own and was soon mining all the wheels that were used in the neighbourhood. A little later, at the the tender age of eleven, Master Drof had paid off all his poor father’s debts, had established his poor mother in a model Renaissance mansion, with running water, a pianola and everything, and was negotiating with a prominent junk man the purchase of the original and only poor Drof baby carriage, for which the junk man (who was a Hebrew) wanted ten dollars.
At twenty-two, Drof had extended his business to include all the wheels used in the U.S.A.; which enabled him to sell the Renaissance mansion and buy a model Moorish palace with real fountains, in the strictly geometrical center whereof he caused to be erected a supremely magnificent tomb of imported Parian marble for his model mother, who immediately died. Meanwhile things were looking up. At thirty-three, this invincible man was mining all the wheels used all over the world with the sole exception of Greenland, and had purchased (in such parts of Europe, Asia and Africa as were known to be unthinkably rich in vitamins) three hundred thousand two-hundred-acre farms for the amusement of his rapidly disintegrating employees; most of whom enjoyed that particularly insidious form of epilepsy which, being characterized by violent delusions of grandeur coupled with an insatiable spinning of the vasculomotor centers, is affectionately known as “Drof’s disease.”
Of course, what made Drof a really great man was, not that he mined wheels from Zanzibar to Arizona, nor yet that he learned wheels from A to Z. Between you and me and the fencepost, it was the fact that he loved wheels. For since he loved wheels, Drof also loved the things that mined wheels; he loved machines. And since he loved machines, Drof also loved the things that run machines—that is to say (or as Dr. Frank Crane would remark) he loved people. And now I am going to tell you something that will really astonish you. I am going to tell you that this contemporary Colossus of Rhodes, this nowadays Napoleon of industry, this tireless and momentous and many-sided personality, was at heart just a plain, honest, simple, normal, straightforward, natural, unaffected person with only one hobby: the collecting of idées fixes. This sounds incredible and I don’t want you to believe it if you don’t want to; because all I want you to believe is that at the time our story opens the Drof model collection of imported and domestic idées fixes (comprising scientifically tabulated specimens of practically every known and unknown variety of idée fixe extant or obsolete) was already without a parallel in the whole course of human history. Needless to add, Drof’s incomparable and model collection functioned solely for the benefit of Drof’s innumerable and loving employees; all of whom familiarly called him “Papa Drof” and, in return, were forbidden to drink, flirt, play cards for money or on Sunday, marry foolishly, read light fiction, sing, lie, expectorate, or swear. Which brings us back to the inscrutable Mr. X.
Arriving, after his five-mile stroll, at the grand portcullis of the Mekano branch of the Drof Wheel Mines, Mr. X surrendered himself unconditionally to the Second Assistant Superintendent of Breaths, who tested Mr. X’s breath for traces of alcohol by the latest and most approved scientific methods, sparing neither the mah jong nor the litmus paper. Having failed to find any alcohol, the Second Assistant Superintendent of Breaths stamped OK in red ink (with the date) on Mr. X’s left knee-cap and called for silence—whereupon the somewhat exhausted Mr. X was immediately handcuffed to a murderer, marched down a corridor by several policemen and locked in a pitchdark room with his vis-à-vis and the admonition to be “more careful next time.” Ten minutes passed. A trapdoor in the ceiling then opened to admit the Third Superintendent of Minds; who, leaping to the floor, and paying no attention whatever to the murderer, thoroughly vacuum cleaned Mr. X in the hope of finding telegrams from Moscow. But as no telegrams were forthcoming, the Third Assistant Superintendent of Minds OK’d Mr. X’s right elbow in green ink (with the date) and called for silence—whereupon guards rushed in, unlocked the handcuffs, beat the murderer into insensibility and escorted Mr. X upside-down as far as a vast chapel, presided over by the Fourth Asssistant Superintendent of Souls. Here Mr. X was righted and immediately placed among such of his innumerable fellow workers as had been lucky enough to get their OKs. The entire group then sang Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Episcopal, Baptist, Anabaptist, Mormon, Quaker, Lutheran, Holy Roller, Christian Scientist, Dutch Reform and Unitarian (but no Hebrew) hymns without interruption for twenty minutes, to the accompaniment of an electrically controlled calliope (the Largest in the World); after which all were forcibly seated by a squad of plainclothes men. The radio was then turned on with great ceremony and silence reigned for an hour, while everybody enjoyed a Daily Good Will Lecture entitled, “We Are All Just One Big Family,” by Papa Drof, broadcasting in robin’s-egg-blue pyjamas from his suite at the Hotel Ritz-Carlton, New York City.
But precisely as the mammoth automatic earth-inducted clock over the altar indicated 4:55 A.M., Papa Drof’s voice ceased. Mr. X, along with his comrades, silently stood up, silently about-faced and silently marched to the door of the chapel; where he silently received in his open left hand a lollypop and on the strictly geometrical center of his silent forehead the OK of the Fourth Assistant Superintendent of Souls, in ultraviolet ink (with the date). These formalities accomplished, Mr. X silently entered elevator number ZA-AZ and (meditatively sucking his lollypop) dropped seventy stories in twelve seconds. He then silently quitted the elevator, silently checked his silent lollypop at the silent Lollypop Desk, silently stepped on an escalator, silently floated to machine number 0987654321, silently stepped off the escalator and silently began to silently mine silent wheels.
With which split infinitive, we will leave him.
From The Bookman, September 1927.
MIRACLES AND DREAMS
The show of shows continues. A murdering mutter of profit and protest suggestingly haunts the theatre of theatres, but the curtain of curtains is conspicuous by its absence. And over and over the stage of stages monotonously marches our heroine, Industria—carefully presenting to the audience of audiences her miraculous cinematographic face which has recently learned to speak.
Very occasionally, thanks to a social revolution, that face relinquishes its habitual idiocy to look at us with such epics as Potemkin: in the silence of these immortal glances we read the meaning of ourselves. Occasionally, thanks to Aristophanes, the monster grins at us. Occasionally, thanks to Charlot,
she smiles. But it is thanks to the progenitors of the animated cartoon that the miraculous eyes occasionally wink and the monotonous mobility forgets itself in fabulous clowning.
This clowning, by its very nature, burlesks the photo- and phonoplay; which is an achievement in itself. But let us not fail to observe that the animated cartoon does several other things—such as giving the uninitiate a revealing peek into the mighty mysteries of mathematical physics and summarizing, in a single inimitable sequence, several hundred volumes of psychology; not to mention pounding, naughtily and noisily, its own strictly mythical pulpit and proclaiming (to him that hath ears)—Ladies and gentlemen, verily verily I say unto youse, unto youse the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand; for verily verily I say unto youse, by accepting the gospel of science youse have become as little children!
And what the animated cartoon—or, to be scientific, Schizophrenia Triumphans (Wake Up and Dream)—implies by such an astonishing statement is really all too obvious. Religions, being for children, are based on miracle; as witness our own beloved religion, a successful cult of the truly miraculous. Science is that religion and that cult. To be sure, science is said to have dispensed with Santa Claus. But are not “the miracles of science” (that Super Santa Claus) everywhere—from Brooklyn Bridge to Morning Mouth? Do not “the miracles of science” move and think and feel for us? Do they not die and hate for us? Do they not wash us this day our daily teeth and forgive us our debts even as we forgive (sic) our debtors? Then, in the sacred name of Uncommon Sense, shall not the exploits of the animated cartoon—whose technique is miracle per se—rank with the most strictly Super Santa Claus exploits of the telescope and the microscope and all the other holy instruments of our religion?
“So huge is this watch that it takes light travelling through space at the rate of 186,000 miles a second or 6,000,000,000,000 miles a year, 3,000 centuries to traverse its diameter and nearly 1,500 centuries to cross its thickness. Our solar system is way off to one side of this watch, near the rim”—the Bishop of Telescopy is loudspeakering. Miraculous? Yes; but come into the projection room!—A steamboat, a sternwheeler with two funnels, is hurrying over a tempestuous sea; the funnels are jazzing to your favourite ditty; suddenly these funnels reach down and pick up what might be called the steamboat’s body, revealing feminine underthings from which legs protrude. Why this unexpected transformation? Because Milady Steamboat is every inch the scientist. A chain of rocks having miraculously appeared (as so frequently happens in mid-ocean) Super Santa Claus is equal to the occasion.
A Miscellany (Revised) Page 21
