The Strumpet!
Though this underworld could never become very real to me there was yet a mystery which spurred my curiosity. On the road from the village to the lake woods — I passed a crazy sign.
“Green’s Colony”
What is Green’s Colony I asked in turn of everyone in the village — and of each one in turn I received — the answer of a deadly silence. It cost me great pains to discover the grim secrets of this colony of Greens.
Well you know said my informant most reluctantly, what a moron is — what a cretin is, what a degenerate is?
yes — yes—
Well that’s what they are in Green’s Colony—
Having at last decided on telling me, he meant to tell me really well. And as if the subject were one too vast for him he called together a few of his friends to help—
They presented it to me surprisingly well.
Nobody any longer dared to take that menacing path beyond the crazy sign — it was more than one’s life was worth—
But they could remember. Now things were getting more and more fearful, someone had once unwittingly strayed there and had not returned — either at all — or at least not what they were before.
They were not very clear as to which.
These degenerates were a race sprung from an unnatural brother and sister and had in a few filthy hovels continued to breed prodigiously in the same biblical manner—
They were dwarfed, they were hunched, some of them were web-footed, some web-fingered and from the half demolished hedges of that ostracised domain — their microcephalus heads with bulging eyes would “start out at you”. Their major impulse was murder then minor rape. They bred at deplorably infantile ages — their lives were spent in one long loathsome lust. In one infested lair, you could find if anyone dared to go there, five generations, forming the seraglio of the same pappa.
They had their own fearsome language of signs and snarls.
A tremendous interest in this race of dithering imbeciles supporting, clothing, protecting themselves without a keeper sprang up in me.
I must go and see. It was hard to take no heed of the frightened admonitions and vehement warnings — for one who finds it good sport to be alive — I should be flayed by the first prowling maniac for they were superhumanly strong, and then I should remember what they had told me. But my curiosity refused to die — by what amazing instinct did they light fires for themselves against the rigorous winters, who wove their clothes— How breed those more decently domestic animals on whom to feed— I enquired of many details — but was assured they were absolutely witless with their heads the size of an orange. They only knew how to kill and fornicate.
I asked and asked, I never found a strong man to protect me, but at last the fragile wife of a painter took up the idea with enthusiasm — we would go together — only a very genuine succession of vile headaches threatened to postpone our adventure indefinitely — and I went out to it alone.
But I did take a very stout walking stick to beat them off a little — in case — —
It was after all not such a long way, I wondered how it was the “dangerous” people never wandered—
A peaceful place.
The sunrays seemed to be zipping through the humming bees over the vibrant flowers of light— Everything smelt sweetly of everything else.
The riot of summer before it has succumbed to its own heat — the very dust was like a carpet in heaven—
It was impossible to feel afraid on such a day.
And after all they seemed to have their keepers, for at the outpost of the colony there stood a beautiful house covered with honeysuckle.
From the door onto the garden where a venerable old gentleman sat over the soup-tureen with his napkin tied over his magnificent white beard, a melodious tinkling of china issued like the call home from Wonderland that ended Alice’s dream.
The wife who also issued out of the honeysuckle was just as well starched as Mrs. Granger, but she had not the same damning aspect, her human nature like her skin was one “you love to touch.”
I almost shouted with joy at the way they called good day to me—
I prowled around to see if there were any strange children—
There were none at all—
So I walked along toward a roof on a distant hill, passing on the way a dilapidated house at which I knocked.
There was nobody at home.
Nobody starting out of the hedges — –
The house on the hill was built of stone and banged against the sun — its meadows sloped away from it into the shade, where an ancient ploughshare lay under an apple tree and a few white fowls pottered among the gleaming dandelions and daisies—
* * * * *
Everything around the place is just something to play with—
You see the school house is too far off— Thanks be to the Lord.
And we aren’t for putting any kind of notions into her head—
God’s the best schoolmaster for her kind — said Grandfather Green stretching his toes further out in the sunlight — while his old wife nodded to him.
Do you see anything of the people in the village—
Eh what—? Them newcomers— Nope — never set eyes on ’em — our little bit o’ tradin’, we do with the town over t’other side.
* * * * *
On my way home, I found the door of the dilapidated house wide open, and Bad Mary of Maine shading her glazing eyes with her hand invited me in—
She cleared me a space among the indescribable gimcracks of her poverty.
The place was not clean, those branch-like arms had begun to wither — sometimes she would stumble up a lame wooden staircase — to take stock of her bedridden husband — whose face seemed to have stuck fallen forever onto the flyblown linen of the pillow—
everyhow
MONDE TRIPLE-EXTRA
Contes Tommy-Rots
A couple of estimable parents who had believed in the establishment of a Moral Order became so disheartened with the proceeds, that they brought up the fag-end of their family atrociously.
With the result that while all the elder children are now working in factories, the last daughter married a prodigious profiteer, and the last son grew up with a certain little lift to the left corner of his mouth when he smiled
This son Jove Ivon Corvon I found one day seated under a hedge meditating upon his adolescence.
“Mina Loy,” he cried on perceiving me, “You know something of life
“I know only this,” I replied, “That he who cannot live on his smile, lives not at all.”
It was not long before Jove Ivon Corvon had heaved himself into the highest society, and his fame spread to the four corners of the cosmopolitan world. And every night when he came home, his spacious halls would look like a harem or a
Jove Ivon was of a playful nature and loved to tease these wakeful aspirants to his favours.
Some nights when the place teemed with aristocracy and stars, he would enter with an anaemic flower girl, or a flimsy waitress, and guiding her with hovering devotion through the ignored exasperated crowd, would disappear with her through a heavy door in the mysterious distance.
Upon which there would follow a great scuffling of footmen and blowing of whistles for taxis. For as the psychologists tell us War would be impossible were not each soldier convinced that the soldier beside him, and not himself must fall; so had each eager lady dismissed her chauffeur confident that she uniquely would no longer require him.