Taboo<br />A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Sævius Nicanor, with<br />Prolegomena, Notes, and a by James Branch Cabell (most read books TXT) 📗

[5] Codman annotates this: "Synonyms, since P.E.M. is obviously Persicum Esculentum Malum—that is, the peach; 'which,' says Macrobius, 'although it rather belongs to the tribe of apples, Sævius reckons as a species of nut.'"

All groaned at this abominable word. And then another lackey cried, "You are a prosperous and affected pseudo-littérateur!" and all the mummies spoke sepulchrally the word of derision, which is "Tee-Hee": and many said also, "The scavenger has never meddled with us, and we never heard of you," and there was much other incoherent foolishness.

But Horvendile had fled, bewildered by the ways of Philistia's adepts in starch and fetters, and bewildered in particular to note that a mummy, so generally esteemed a kindly and well-meaning fossil, appeared quite honestly to believe that all [36] literature came out of the beer-cellar of Paff, or Pfaff, or had some similarly Teutonic sponsor; and that handball was the best training for literary criticism; and that the cookery-books of fifty years ago had something to do with Horvendile's account of his journeying, from he did not know where toward a goal which he could not divine, now being in the garbage pile. It troubled Horvendile because so many persons seemed to regard the old fellow half seriously.

Still, Horvendile was not quite routed by these heaped follies. "For, after all," says Horvendile, in his own folly, "it is for the normal human being that books are made, and not for mummies and men of law and scavengers."

So Horvendile went through a many streets that were thronged with persons travelling by compulsion from they did not know where toward a goal which they could not divine, and were not especially bothering about. And it was evening, and to this side and to that side the men and women of Philistia were dining. Everywhere maids were passing hot dishes, and forks were being thrust into these dishes, and each was eating according to his ability and condition. No matter how poverty-stricken the household, the housewife was serving her poor best to the good [37] man. For with luncheon so long past, all the really virile men of Philistia were famished, and stood ready to eat the moment, they had a dish uncovered.

So it befell that Horvendile encountered a representative citizen, who was coming out of a representative restaurant with a representative wife.

And the sight of this representative citizen was to Horvendile a tonic joy and a warming of the heart. For this man, and each of the thousands like him, as Horvendile reflected, had been within this hour sedately dining with his wife,—neither of them eating with the zest and vigor of their first youth, perhaps, but sharing amicably the more moderate refreshment which middle-age requires,—without being at any particular pains to conceal the fact from anybody. Here was then, after all, the strong and sure salvation of Philistia, in this quiet, unassuming common-sense, which dealt with the facts of life as facts, the while that the foolish laws, and the academical and stercoricolous nonsense of Philistia, reverberated as remotely and as unheeded as harmless summer thunder.

"Sir," says elated Horvendile, "I perceive that you two have just been eating, and that emboldens me to ask you—"

But at this point Horvendile found he had been knocked down, because the parents of the representative citizen had taught him from his earliest [38] youth that any mention of eating was highly indecent in the presence of gentlewomen. And for Horvendile, recumbent upon the pavement, it was bewildering to note the glow of honest indignation in the face of the representative citizen, who waited there, in front of the restaurant he usually patronized....

[39]

Here, rather vexatiously, the old manuscript breaks off. But what survives and has been cited of this fragment amply shows you, I think, that even in remote Philistia, whenever this question of "indecency" arose, everybody (including the accused) was apt to act very foolishly. It has attested too, I hope, the readiness with which you may read ambiguities into the most respectable of authors; as well as the readiness with which a fanatical training may lead you to imagine some underlying impropriety in all writing about any natural function, even though it be a function so time-hallowed and general as that to which this curious Dirghic legend refers.

[40]

(French of C.J.P. Garnier)