Pan’s Fair Throng
Fairest monarch of our empire, great king, conduce in me, lowly tanner of hides, a righteous song as I embark to tell the tale of your origins, spinning for townsfolk the narratives of the province whence you come, that savage northern province of brigands upon highways who accost travelers with blunt, crusted foils called, in those lands, squeegees, or in due course how you came from the prolific farms of Jersey to rule over all this principality of scribes and divers musicians, how you brought probity to scoundrels of disputatious cast. Lead me as you have led others, eternal administrator, make your tongue my tongue as my inscriptions cover this stone and I tell of your reign, to those in the crib, to those upon sickbeds rank and odiferous; let it be me, the tanner, who paints your masterpieces, paints your portraits in tongues of men, as if tales were altarpieces of historical churches, let me be as a butterfly with your paintbrushes, as you climb down from your folding chair.
There was a lad, born in the first third of our century, precocious stripling, much given to reverie and to silence. In his bedchamber, he labored over problems mathematical and geometrical, never venturing forth, even should he chance to see a fair maiden dancing on the village green beyond his mullioned windows. He paid no mind to her jolly braids, nor to her furious dancing, nor to the particular brother of this particular girl, a woeful prince (for any comely lad of means was potential regent during the bloodshed and disorder of our interregnum), whose acute melancholy was said to have been owing to his terror of ascending to the throne. No, our future king secreted himself in his chamber, covered with animal skins, studying magics and potions through which he might better the station of workers of fields and shopkeepers and salespersons of viands and pickled vegetables. The lads formula, for the upstanding meritorious valor of aforementioned salespersons, was said to have been called the Formula of Surplus Value, completed by him in quill on goat’s parchment, under a candle that, according to spell of witchery, never burned down.
One day, our yet-to-be monarch and chief agonist, buoyed by the influence of a thick Turkic potion known as espresso kaffee, and because of faintest impropriety of speech that by and by inhibited the correct recitation of spells, turned the comely nervous prince — Maxwell Hennesy Charming, brother of the flapper maiden already mentioned — into a performing monkey, or hanuman. As I say, it was inadvertent. The young artist of physick was making as to formulate a concoction of creamy distillate for his beverage. Nevertheless, wherefore Prince Maxwell, with fashionable opiated eyes and bulbous cheekbones, had dressed in long flowing garbs that might as well, in a dreamer’s tossings, have been the robes of women, now, as hanuman, he became the dandy. Breeches of a dusty rose and a blue waistcoat with diamonds and rubies all upon it and stones as these days are called by the name rhinestones, such that he shimmered when he crawled on all fours or hung from a bough by his serpentine tail. Wherefore Prince Maxwell had been known to help a blind woman of our village, Miss Hogg, ahead of the carriages thundering by at street trivia, only to be named infernal scamp on deliverance of her to the farther side, as hanuman the prince was a rake and a Lothario, and would as soon inflict his manly endowments on a maiden as he would devour a banana in payment for his games of chance. I tell you, Inever liked that particular prince, when he was under the curse, and would occasionally seize his tail and dip it into inks or poisons.
The family of Charming, a lordly assemblage of counselors and barristers, made suit against our young hero for having turned Prince Maxwell into a tree monkey, and this case was duly heard, on a day marked by grand hailstones. Well it is remembered in my village, how we had to flee the collapsing of thatched roofs, the merciless raining down of godly disapproval, but the courthouse, never have you seen such astonishing manufacture, with steps made out of the same pink marble used for imperial towers of clerks, and a roof that held fast beneath all assault. The carriages in which the barristers arrived to disgorge the principals of this story pulled fast to the curbstone and lords hastened indoors. Two or three footsoldiers were yet crushed by the hailstones so that their brains ran out into the street, each ofthem a mother’s son, alas. Yet I was lucky among townspeople to sit in witness of that trial, in a box marked for commoners. A rabid bitch kept us in our place by gnawing ceaselessly if any of us should so much as take modest breath.