Lincoln High School - Cardinal Yearbook (Portland, OR)

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-u my dream, and wept for anger at their immobility. I cursed their black souls, and swore to avenge the wrong they did me. For twenty-three years I lived thus. I lacked one hundred marks. I gloated in the knowledge of Dexfiny at my finger-ends, and borrowed the gold from a dealer in usury lest someone cheat me of my supreme goal as I thrust out my hand to receive it. The director laughed at me when I demanded the portrait. He laughed at me,-my shoes were worn. Trembling with passion I thrust the money in his hands and gave him a wrinkled letter Creply to an inquiry I had addressed seventeen years before to the trustees of the institution-whether the canvas was for sale and the price?J He smiled now, at the money for which I had bled twenty-three years, but he sold Destiny to me. Nursing the tears of eagerness I ran to my sorry rooms in the West Quarter and wept, unconfined. The portrait was mine, mine! It was the happiest moment of my life. The grey of Diana was lovely, alluring, fascinating, the blended colors were in- describably beautifull 'll could feel the numbing influence of the colors creep upon my consciousness, binding slowly and carefully my senses in a mesh of tangled twines- and infuriating mel Destiny laughed at me and called me fool. Were I-I to yield myself to this bit of rag and smirch of color? Were I to permit this profanity of reason to persuade me, and to beat me into insensibility? It taunts me with hypocrisy! I seized the portrait and hurled it into the open fire and heaped a pyre of raw wood about it while I shook with vicious rage and spattered the oil about the grate. The fire leaped up in straining anxiety with the fire within me as I crouched in the blue glare and watched my dream shrivel into the nothingness from which it sprang. To a Dead Sparrow SIEGFRIED ROSEN How small you lie upon the sidewalk there, You, with your sudden bankrupt wealth of song, While your fellows fling their trifle lyrics through the airg But you shall not be cold nor lonely long. Come, comeg I'll build you a nest, Deep in the sweet warm earthg And you shall lie on your broken breast, And pause till your other birth. I'll make you a place with my slight bare hands Under this cherry tree, And its life shall take you to foreign lands As the seasons come and flee. And you shall sing. And you shall sing Brave lyrics from your pretty mouth, When sparrows make the April meadows ring With songs they purchased in the South. To One Lost CARLOTTA Mrrcri ELL I wonder if forever I must dream Of valleys where the blue smoke idly drifts, Must all my dreams be mingled with a theme Of mountain-kisses, splendid fleeting gifts? And must each flower nod and point the way, That I shall follow in my tired questg Must I in dreams relive the sun-filled day She left that quiet valley of the west? O, city windows with flowers on the sill, ' I know she comes at morn to one of you. O, tell me do her brown eyes ever fill, As she looks westward when the sky is blue? Page 26

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a se -' A' LE.DBElZs PORTRAIT OF A DREAM GEORGE Pom. II. Herr Americaner, I laugh at you. Yesterday I watched you wander through these galleries, your graven face fraught with eager interest, today--the same. This Diana is a beautiful canvas, and I do not wonder at your enthusiasm of the pettiness of life but of more interest to me is not the Diana you see before you, but that it is painted in the curious plane, the same livid, impressionistic tone as the portrait. Will you read me the monogram in the lower corner? As you see my hunched back ridi- cules the desire. The Portrait, sir, the portrait of whom ? Ill' 1 1 Of myself, or as the artist names it, Destiny. Surely you knew the picture. CI am a fool and blind, not merely a twisted cripplell But surely you know the black precipices of Destiny, veined with this grey of Diana, monstrous, and sinister, with pinnacled peaks flung recklessly against a sullen sky. The rocks are weighted with the burden of utter hope- lessnessg here they have slumped to an indistinguish- able mass of stolid dejection. The blackness of Hell lays his smug hand about while his sister, still blacker white, melts behind his shielding cloak. Tremulous with dizziness the cliffs sway slowly upward, inv accessible to dim sight and terrible in their portend. Gaunt, obscure shadows crawl from ledges, creep from Caverns, andlgo slinking to thesvoid below. A slender summit thrusts out its crow-like head, and clinging to its beak is a whiteness, a foreign speck, infinitesimal, yet awfully apparent in its unreality. It is horrible! The rocks are strangely still, they smother my thought-outcry. I cannot hold. My fingers bleed on the glazed rocks, and the clotted blood baffles their gnawing hold. I feel the blood trickle down my arm and form a tiny pool in the hollow of my chest, shuddering with the rise of breath. I must fall! I looked below, an immensity, an eternity hungered for me. A sob of hope forever lost flows down my throat, and chokes me, and blinded by the switch of heavy air I fall--down, and down, and down into the ghastly nothingness--I died. ll l7hCYCDt? Undoubtedly I abuse your intelligence and credulity but first you should know, sir, that as a child I was a weakling, victim to a malignant disease, and extremely reticent in nature. Stumbling through youth with these hand- icaps, it is not to be wondered that I soon acquired a taste for the morbid, and eccentric in literature, in lifeg to console me in my contempt for the man in life mob. This perverted leaning had grown like a fungus on my mind, craving the distortedf-and with a fierce indulging laugh, I drank deeply. Sometimes at night I awoke with some repulsive dream or fancy my confused brain had pitifgully evolved from the maze of lives I had lived in the printed word. I watched the dusk deepen with dread, yet awaited it with a sort of rampant pleasure, knowing well its inevitable horror but enchanted by that horror as one secretly loves best the things that cause him pain and misery. I lived a dissolute dream. I de- spised my own existence and thatlof the scurrying and aimless.-rats that forever woreuthe streets. It is a lie that youth loves lifel Q, vw, , ,my ,A H Then one day I came here. I saw Desiihy. I saw the portrait of one of myr--ima stubborn' dreams painted on the canvas, as I had lived it. It caused my mind to reel, to sicken, to dlrop doivnfand down, until the winch-like strain drew' me' intolai faint, but it was a conscious faint. I w,atohed,the,portrait of my dream. It fascinated ,metguitvrepelled meg it embittered fe. It kindled within me a fire, an un- reasoning desire for its possession. I saved my paltry marks and grew into man- hood. My father had died--in debt. I would tell myself, Today, I shall eat only once, and so hasten the dayfl One night I awoke with a deathly start, feeling a presentiment that the portrait was gone. Perhaps it was stolen, perhaps someone had pur- chased it. I threw my cloak about me and limpcd hurriedly to the great museum. All was still and silent as though to torture me with mock serenity. Great woven bars guarded the entrance, but per- haps I could creep- through? The two stiffened guards threw me into the bare streets. I oleaded Pag: 25

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-11-LY . . BEAUTY AND YTUAEB lEdit0r's Note-As the -'word . ugliness is unpleas- ant, we have taken beauty and tts. reverse as the title for this artifle, the first of a series to he 'written by .Hes belies amies, it makes me so happy to think that at last I can reveal to you the secrets of my beauty preparations, which can be found in every drug Store and on every dressing table of your so- wonderful America. Before beginning, let me make sure that you understand the derivation of the word cosmetics, one of the most frequently used terms in the expla- nations of my marvelous CEditor's Note: and lucrativel methods of rejuvenation. The singular of the word cosmetics is cosmos . After many years of exhausting research, I was finally able to discover that Cosmos was a Glreek word, which by those oral changes which are so frequent, was distorted from its original form cause . That is why, when a woman is asked the reason for her use of these complexion aids, she answers causc . Truly, the use of cosmetics is the cause of many things. One of the basic rules of beauty is that its seekers should always carry my rose-petal powder, creamy scarlet rouge, etc., with her, so that the moment she finds that the freshness of her appearance is vanish- ing, she may apply them. This is often a tres bon ex- cuse for not listening to the long but simple annals of a boor QI am not very well acquainted with your English poets, but I do know some of the best selec- tionsj for you can appear preoccupied with even spreading of votre poudre. When going down Main Street and finding it necessary to pluck two hairs from your left eyebrow, and then re-blacken it, be sure to say I use Madam Cerise's toilet prepara- tions in a pleasantly conversational tone at the con- clusion of your operations. Often men object to the use of cosmetics. This, mes belles femmes, is all bluster, or as you Americans Madam Cerise, the famous French exponent of facial emhellishmentsj say with evident reference to the color which the man turns when called Canother quaint bit of phraseology, which, I believe, originated at the tea tablej, all huff. Your lovable Lovelace expresses this false masculine viewpoint in these lovely lines I could love thee, dear, so much, if thou loved lipstick less. As for the question of superfluous avoirdupois that is the bane of many womens' lives. There's no question about your President Coolidge's belief in his words Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. Let me have men about me that are fat, for he immedi- ately appointed a Cabinet composed largely of stout men. There is a moral hidden deep in this incid- ent, mes belles filles. It is: don't think too much. As your clear-visioned president has said, it is dangerous. I am not allowed to print the names of toilet preparations in this column, but I believe that I can, without breaking a plank in the editorial policy, recommend a very reputable line to you. It is manufactured by a famous French beauty specialist, and goes under the name of Madam ,.,,,,.,.,,,..,. 'S Beauty Aids. I shall permit you to fill in the blank as you wish, for as the Irishman said, You know me name, Al. In closing this, the first of my messages to the American public, I would say that Mark Antony hated Cleopatra because she did not use enough of my lip-rouge, Henry VIII had Anne decapitated because she did not put my perfume behind her earsg Queen Elizabeth ordered Mary Stuart executed be- cause she stole some of the royal cold cream which carried my label, and you-may profit by their ex- amples. Page 27