CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE




AN INTERLUDE WITH CERTAIN CRITICS.





   One moment, ere we proceed! This breathless interest, this clamour to hear more of Our Story, dog-gone it, is parlous flattening, mighty perlite, but, by the shade of my first governess, unlady like. You must not grab the chocolate creams. You must not ask for a second helping of rice pudding, or encore a poem by W. B. Yeats. Wait, therefore, with hands folded, while I recount mine adventures of this day! 'Twas in a studio, and, while I snoozed, that lousy old lollipop, Leila, was being painted psychochromatically, by the hybrid host of mine, that Irish French Canadian Dutch Jew, that semi-sexual saphead, with his fish-belly face, his negroid hair, his slimoplastically deSemitized probiscis, his jaw like an old toothless hag's, his egotism bearing the same ratio to his personality, as his vanity to his good looks, and that's about the trillionth power of the factorial of the number of electrons in the universe to one poor lemon-pip. Painted, I say, by that ape, bug, clam, dingo, eel, frog, goat, hoopoe, icthyosaurus, jigger, kite, lobster, mare, newt, ornithorhynchus, pig, quagga, rat, something, tapir, urethrococcus, vaginophile, wombat, xanthoplasm, yak, zebu, whom I am proud to call my friend. They had no brains; they could not talk; I'm tired of trains; get out and walk! So I took compassion, by the scruff of the neck, upon them, and offered to read them the manuscript of Our Story. I might as well have sent tickets for a Shaw play to Pinero or offered a position in the first line of the trenches to a fight-it-out-boys-to-a-finish-I'm-behind-you politician. True, Leila said, at first, that it was ``mixed vivacity,'' and I'll take her to lunch for that; but Simeon Leon never caught on to it at all. You must have humour, sweetheart, to enjoy Our Story! If I could conscientiously have written The Life and Adventures of Sir Roger Bloxam, what a tale it would have been! What pep! What punch! what human interest! But as it is, it is but Mixed Vivacity. As if Mixed Vivacity wasn't the one hope of keeping sane amid this ghastly witch-rout of demons! Just look at me, myself; jhere's two chapters running with the war grinning through my magic mirror. A thousand days and a day of it, and more; oh let us keep one corner of the soul clean-swept, brimming with Mixed Vivacity! I want to splash about in the English Language like Richard Middleton's boy in the Sea. Damn seriousness, concentratian, purpose! Vive la de'mence All I'm afraid of is that they will call this a Futurist novel, and a Work of Art! I assure you that I'm only a wild boy out of school, leaping at every butterly for sheer joy to be alive, not at all in pursuit of entomology. Curse all connectedness; it only leads to liquid fire and poison gas and submarines and Liberty Bonds; we've got back to the cave-man, so give me my edged flint and rein-deer bones. If you have no fun reading it, Ish Kabibble, I love writing it; and the psychoanalyst and the alienist can quarrel as they will over the aetiology and pathology and histology and diagnosis and prognosis of my case. This is a fine world to call any man a lunatic! Come, be Merry; live in the untainted sea of thought of thought, salt, sweet, fresh, cordial, kissed by the great sun of the soul. Leave the earth of action; it is befouled. Men are all mad; let me listen to the starlings. They shall preach as the sparrows preached to my dear master Laurence Sterne. Of all the easy asses, give me Saint Francis of Assisi -- preach to the birds and fishes, what impudence! Down on your faces, men, before a blade of grass! It has a thousand times more sense than you with your theologies and economics, that only lead to wholesale murder -- disguised under the finest names in the world. Oh dry up! this is not the way to write a novel, even a novel like this!