by Don Marquis
of those quaint
places boss and all those
quaint places have to
be ye instead of the
in a ye place you can
serve almost anything
and get away
with it but in a
the place you have to
have a certain amount
of eats and drinks
and that increases the
expense of operation
enormously i am no
pig but i do wish to
make enough money once in
my life to be
among the
excess prophets or the
excise profits or
what ever you call
them
For our part, we shall never eat goulash in a place that is conducted by Archy—so many of these Greenwich Village artists are always Putting Themselves Into Their Work.
the artist
i called on some friends in a
studio building the other evening and
while we were foraging about
for something to eat
we got caught on a
palette smeared over with all
the colors there are
leaping from this danger seven
or eight of us
landed upon an untouched canvas
that stood upon an easel
nearby waiting for the masters hand
and we walked across the
canvas on our way out of that
place it seems that we builded
better than we knew before
we could get to any safer place
than a spot behind a
gas radiator we heard human footsteps
approaching and an
instant later two men entered the
studio one of them switched on
the lights and the
other gave an exclamation of
pleasure and astonishment by jove
tommy he said to the owner of
the studio what is this new thing
of yours on the easel it is
the best thing you have done yet
i thought you were against
modernism and all
the new fangled stuff but i see
that you have come over to the new
school your style has
loosened up wonderfully old kid
i always said that if you
could only get away from the stiffness
and absurdity of the
conventional schools you had the
makings of a great painter in
you what do you call this
picture tommy
well said tommy with rare
presence of mind i have not
named it yet it is not altogether in
the newer mode you will observe i
have been struggling for a
compromise between the two methods
that would at the same time
allow me to express my
individuality on canvas i do
think myself that i have got more
freshness and directness into this
thing you have said his friend
it has the direct and naive approach
of the primitives and it
also has all that is
worthy to be retained of the
reticent sophistication of
the post pre raphaelites but what
do you say you are going to
call it it is said tommy as
you see a nocturne i have
been thinking of calling it
impressions of brooklyn
bridge in a fog and when his
friend went out he stood and looked at
the picture for a long time and
said now i wonder who in
hell slipped in here and did that it
is nothing short of genius could
i have done it myself when i
was drunk i must have done so
anyhow i will sign it and
taking up a brush he did so well i
stole a look at the canvas
myself and it looked like nothing
on earth to me but a canvas over
which a lot of cockroaches had
walked i may be a
critic but still i know what i
dont like yours for another
renaissance of the arts every
spring and every autumn
archy
the suicide club
boss i ran onto a queer bunch
in the back room of a saloon on william street
the other night there were six of them
two cockroaches
a grass hopper
a flea
and two crickets
they have what they call a suicide club
not the sort our old
friend r l s made famous
the members of which intend to kill
themselves but each member of this
club has committed suicide already
they were once humans
as i was myself
at least i was a poet
after they killed themselves their souls
transmigrated into the bodies
of the insects mentioned
and so they have got together and
formed a club the other night the grass
just as i got my shoe off we passed a glue factory
hopper told why he had killed himself
it was a misunderstanding
with one i loved he said
which impelled me to the rash act
she and i were walking down a country
road and i got some gravel in one
of my shoes shortly afterward we
boarded a trolley car would you
mind i asked her if i took my shoe off
and shook out the gravel
help yourself she said
just as i got my shoe off we passed
a glue factory
i hastily put the shoe on again by the
time it was on again we were well past
the glue factory
the period during which the shoe was off
and the period during which we
were passing the glue factory exactly
synchronized
she did not see the glue factory
and refused to believe there had been
one in the neighborhood i could
never explain a month later
i killed myself tough luck
old top said the flea i will now
tell you why i took the fatal
plunge i will
tell you how it was i
committed suicide and transmigrated
into the body of an insect i was
the india rubber man in a circus side
show and fell in love with a
pair of beautiful Siamese twins
public opinion was against
me marrying both of them
although both of them loved me as i
loved them both you
must choose between them said the
manager what god has joined together
let no man put asunder i said but
public opinion was too much for me
but the surgical operation which
severed them changed their
dispositions you cant fool with
a freak without running some such
risk when they were cut apart one of
them eloped with the surgeon
who had done the work and the other
married an interne in the
hospital they had a double
wedding and i slew myself that night
well said one of the crickets i will
now tell you how i shuffled off
this mortal coil and
transmigrated into the
body of a cricke
t and became a
member of this has been club my father
belonged to a religious sect which
forbids shaving and i was
brought up in that way no
razor ever touched my face when i was
forty years old i had a beard that hung
down to my knees it was red and
glossy i went around the country
posing as a doctor for a medicine
company hitting the tank towns in a
wagon and giving a spiel and
playing on the banjo i did well as
my beard attracted
crowds and was happy and
prosperous until one day a
malignant old man who
had just bought six bottles of tonic
for five dollars made of roots herbs
and natures own remedies
containing no
mineral ingredients and brewed from
juniper leaves hazel roots choke
cherries and the bark of the
wild cohosh exactly
as the indians made it for a
thousand years
in the unpathed forests before the
pale face came said to me mister
can i ask you a question yes i
said i have nothing to conceal i am on
the level if one wine glass full before
meals does not give you an appetite
take two or three
mister he says the question is
personal go ahead i says i am the
seventh son
of a seventh son a soothsayer and a
seer i can tell by the way
you chew tobacco you have liver
trouble i will make a
special price to you fourteen
bottles for ten dollars cash no he said
it is about your beard it grew i told
him through using this medicine
my chin was bald at
birth it is a specific for erysipelas
botts neuralgia stomach trouble loss
of appetite hearts disease dandruff and
falling hair thirty bottles to you
for twenty dollars and i will throw
in an electric belt
mister he said i only want to ask
you if you sleep
with all your beard outside
of the covers or
under the covers when you go to
bed at night and he gave me an evil
grin and went on i
never thought of it
before i had just gone to bed and slept
as a rule but that night when i
climbed into bed i thought of the old
mans question i spread all my
beard outside of the covers and it
was immediately apparent to me
that i did not have the habit of
sleeping with it that way then i put it
under the covers and was
no less certain that i did not
sleep with it that way i worried
about it till morning and each way i
put it seemed at
once to be the wrong way
the next night it was the same
thing i could not keep from
thinking about it i got no sleep at all
and became the mere shadow of my
former self it so preyed upon me
that at last i saw i must either
shave off the beard or end it all but i
could not shave off the beard
without deserting the religious principles
instilled into me by my father and so i
took the fatal plunge hard lines said the
second cricket the way i happened to
commit suicide and undergo
transmigration and
thus qualify for a member of this club
was this when i was a
human i was wedded to a lady whose
mother had a very strong
and domineering character she
lived with us night after
night i would lie awake thinking
up schemes to get even
with her i thought up
some lovely schemes but when
morning came my nerve would
leave i never had the courage to
put them into execution finally
the thought came to me that if i was
a ghost i could haunt her and
she would have no come back i slew
myself but alas my soul transmigrated
into the body of a cricket and
if you had ever seen that strong and
bitter old woman slaying spiders and
crickets you could realize
the despair that has settled down on me
since too bad said one
of the cockroaches i will now narrate the
events which led up to my
determination to
take the leap into the
darkness
i cant say that i
had any good reason for
slaying myself i had done everything
else at least once i was a
young man possessed of a
considerable fortune which it was my only
occupation to dissipate when
everything else palled i
took up theology i made a bet
with another student that the soul
was not immortal the only way to
settle it was to die and find out we both
did well fellows we both lost mine
proved to be immortal for here i am but his
was not it completely disappeared and
has never been heard of again
which shows you never can tell and
yet i am still interested in
games of chance
archy
psychic
boss i have had a terrible time
since i last wrote you as i
told you long ago i was originally a
vers libre poet and my
soul after leaving that body
migrated into the
body of a cockroach before that
happened i did not believe in the
doctrine of transmigration of
souls but after it happened
how could i refuse to credit it well
it gave me a great deal of interest
in all psychic matters and it
struck me not many weeks ago that
if it were possible for a soul
to leave a poet that way and go into
the body of a cockroach
at the poets death it might be
possible to manage it without death the
truth is that i got tired of being a
cockroach and wanted to be
human again i practised and practised
until i found myself able to get out
of the cockroach body and
naked on the air of heaven ride but it
is not all that it is cracked up to be
there is nothing that can get so
cold as a soul these autumn nights
when it has no body and no blankets
and in winter it is worse yet after i
had gained proficiency i began
to look around for a human to
get into but as far as i could
learn every human was filled with
a soul already but i began to
make longer and longer trips away from
my cockroach body imagine my
consternation and surprise one day
some weeks ago upon returning to the
cockroach body which i had left to find
that it had been squashed and swept out
with a broom i looked at the fragments
with horror it was a very discouraged
looking se
t of remains but there i
was out in the world with
no shelter all sould up as you might
say and no place to go it may strike you
as nothing to worry about and it
wasnt so bad for a day or two but there
is a horrid sense of helplessness
about it if you are interested in
psychic research and that
sort of thing you can get a
little fun for a while appearing in
seances and balling up the messages
but believe me psychic research is more
interesting when you are the human calling
up the spirits than when you
are the ghost too often
they make you the goat that
soon palled on me and i wandered for
weeks the most lonely thing in new york
city at last in despair i
got into the carcase of another cockroach
again of about the same size and
general appearance of my old frame but
the whole affair has had a most
depressing effect on me imagine taking
all that trouble to get away from
being a cockroach and then get
shoved back into one by
fate again i think i will
stick to the old homestead for a
while how do i know but what the next
time i might get into the body of a
flea or a communist
archy
destiny
well boss here i
am a cockroach still boss
i have often been disgusted
with life but now i am
even more disgusted
with death and transmigration i
would rather not inhabit
any body at all than
inhabit a cockroachs
body but it seems i
cant escape it that
is my destiny my doom my
punishment
when you struck me that
terrific blow a few
days ago and i
died there at
your feet my first
sensation was one of glad
relief what body will
the soul of archy transmigrate
into now i asked
myself will i go
higher in the scale of
life and inhabit the
body of a butterfly
or a dog or a
bird or will i sink
lower and go into the
carcase of a poison
spider or a politician
i sat on a blade of
grass and waited and wondered
what it would be i
hoped it wouldnt be
anything at all too soon
because if you remember
it was a hot
day and as i sat
on that blade of grass
in my naked soul and
let my feet hang over i
was deliciously
cool try it some of
these hot nights leave
your body in the
