United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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through North Africa, half Europe, painted Venice and given innumerable one-man shows. He is the enthusiastic convert to a more exciting mode of travel, and fashion of painting. JANET: Equality is the musical ripple on the top . . . The murky male collusion’s under¬ neath. If life were not the exciting sea it is, and arms and legs to paddle the body’s boat, I’d curse my father to his very face, though I’d crumple in his mad grizzly grip . . . (Enter Alsta). ALSTA: Having trouble? JANET: Let us not be obvious. ALSTA: Then let’s be frank, her rich re¬ lation. JANET: A rich, what? ALSTA: I’m asking for a lift. That is when we are repaired. JANET: Hitch-hikers (she sounds disgust¬ ed). ALSTA: That calling. JANET: Calling? ALSTA: O yes we’re religiously inspired; that is the primates among us. There are of course the laymen. Penny flips we call them. JANET: And you are dollar flips I suppose? ALSTA: O, no. Much better. We’re dollar- fifty flips. Five thousand miles for a dollar- fifty. JANET: Be off, man! I know your religion. Canons of lampreys, hyperorthodoxy of hyenas, beliefs of bald eagles that prey on burdened ospreys. At least I’m the daughter of the self- sufficient. (The girl slithers under the car with a dex¬ terous wriggle, spanner in hand.) OSCAR: She’s the daughter of a self-made man, note. ALSTA: Our Maker’s abused. Hired by one generation, and fired by the next. And now currently indisposed by a battery of peeping Toms, led by a two hundred inch pussyfoot, nosing nightly among His mattresses of stars. OSCAR: Let us walk. ALSTA: Walk! And flout the first law, sacrosanct. Offend the Prime Cause who effect¬ ed motor cars for us who revel in the miracle we’re heir to. Besides, our calling’s been spat on, and our self respect bellows for reinstate¬ ment. She’ll pay the recompense I’ve settled on. OSCAR: How? ALSTA: By driving us into town. OSCAR: My feet are cold. ALSTA: And by belly’s burning with hot indignant coals. OSCAR: I’ll catch my death of cold, unless— ALSTA: You warm your blue nails in my display of firewords. Remember the tongue— OSCAR: And the thumb are the tools of our profession. I know. ALSTA: Then remember, proselyte. Wrap your argumentum as a wife wraps her Christ¬ mas cake. Tinsel of antitheses, frills of white wit and purple pathos. Yes, and a glass of euphony clouds the insipidity of an ill—mixed proposition. OSCAR: Why whet your tongue on her? She’s the stone you get no blood from. Besides Maillol carved her out of the tenth rib of a fossilized whale. ALSTA: O, we can command waterfalls of wisdom, rainbows of rhetoric, rivers of disserta¬ tion, whose springs rose in the first primeval thought and rillets multilingual. Little we piddle in, but may unlock milleniums of flood to wear away a stone. OSCAR: It should mortally offend the artist in you to use art for persuasion. Suppose you should stumble into the valley of the shadow of the half true, being lost in a maze of words. ALSTA: You’d expurgate me, I suppose. I could call you by a fashionable dirty name. OSCAR: Not that! Why? ALSTA: Because you would blow up parlia¬ ments and pull down pulpits . . . Shall I tell you what everyone else can plainly see; that man is a demi-god? OSCAR: How? ALSTA: Because he makes that which is born, copulates and dies, like him. OSCAR: What is that? ALSTA: Truths. You should know. You’ve spent half your irreplaceable hours squatting among ‘tome-stones’ reading epitaphs. Men re¬ spect the well-wrapped lie. Imagine the tonnage of wholesome stuff dumped into the sea of the world’s forgetfulness, because men abhor an un¬ attractive carton. Why have we incorporated the lemon, the sourest of fruit? OSCAR: Because men love the color yellow, and the shape of a woman’s breasts. ALSTA: My pupil! Oscar! (A glow of pride is perceptible). Page Twenty-eight

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of all that is good and right in the world and so all who threaten our way of life are evil. However, it is the Christian faith which sees most profoundly into the true nature of evil. It is true that Marx saw evil with a clarity that his contemporaries lacked, but even he could not see its true dimensions. He put it outside of men; the Christian says that man himself is corrupted in the very depths of his heart. The Christian faith sees evil as that positive force in man which not only corrupts socio-economic forms but also has shattered the very structure of his own being. This is not just a different emphasis from Marx’s under¬ standing but an entirely different understand¬ ing of the true nature of evil. Evil always has to do with man’s structural relationship with God. Therefore, Christians cannot believe that the ills of the world can be resolved simply by changing the external forms. Man can be only redeemed through the re-establishment of the structural relationship with God. Man cannot re-establish this relationship; it is God alone who can do that. The Christian affirms in faith, that God did in Jesus Christ.. Only as men know the forgiving love of God are they reunited with the true centre of their lives. And only within this structural relationship do men stand in the true community of the Brotherhood of Man. To the living God and to Him only can men give utter obedience. The Artful Hitch-hiker A ONE ACT PLAY by JAMES WILLER CHARACTERS (in order of appearance) Janet Suracci (Daughter of an important railway official) Alsta Fyffe (An up and coming artist) Oscar Gabion (Younger, and the companion- pupil of Alsta) Scene The Trans-Canada Highway somewhere be¬ tween Trail and Nelson. The summer of 1952. A young lady is busy tinkering with a car. She is very well built. Raphael would have de¬ lighted in her as a model. Of course she would have refused him were it possible they could meet; unless he painted her in the turret of a tank, testing an aeroplane, or driving Hyperion’s Chariot in his stead. She possesses the bearing of one who knows what she is doing, and where she is going. In other words she is absolutely deadly—from the point of view of men. At this moment she is in the act of readjusting some device for the control of the speed of the car. Her father installed it, knowing her for an incurable dare-devil. She is rather irritated by the fact that she must secretly engage and dis¬ engage this device a few miles out of town, at the cost of quite a bit of trouble. However, she thinks it is worth while. Two hitch-hikers appear, carrying enormous haver-sacks, with rolled sleeping bags hanging askew. Their heavy burdens look painfully un¬ comfortable to bear, and can be best described as a bloated confusion of underwear, writing paper, bread, books and paints. The interstices are filled with rolled-oats, the accumulation of four months of leaky cartons. In addition, each carries a parcel, and a paper shopping bag. A palette is seen hanging out to dry. They are artists, returning from a summer’s tour of the Rockies. Travelling expenses amount to a dol- lar-fifty for five thousand miles. Oscar the younger, is glowing with pride in this accom¬ plishment, and in a few miserable drawings which supply him with visions of memorable canvases. The elder is nonchalant, by contrast. But then, the younger has not hitch-hiked Page Twenty-seven

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OSCAR: Pour your Niagara on her innocent head. I’m already num with cold. I suffer. I shall surely die. ALSTA: You add import to the challenge. Your life nestles in my mouth like a family of tender fish fry. (Alsta with serious intent hurries to the front of the car and bending calls: Hey there! Miss Granite! (The girl wriggles into view.) JANET: The name is Janet. (She perceives suddenly who it is). Are you still here? Be off with you! I’m religiously inspired too, but I believe in hard work and paying my way. ALSTA: The road to Hell is paved by those who’ve payed their fares. JANET: O how I abhor lickspittles, truck¬ lers, hangers-on, who refuse to drive their own canoes. ALSTA: You mean, paddle their own cars. JANET: You irritate me. I swear, by heaven, you’ll never ride in this car. My father, and his, and innumerable men like them, blasted this impossible road from the East to the West oceans— ALSTA: But did they ever take their eyes off it? Did you while you were driving here? JANET: Would you at seventy miles an hour? (She is temporarily carried away.) O, to feel the wind in your face. I took Wed¬ ding Cake Corner and Suicide Bend at forty- five, and on a wet road and at night and alone. O, the thrilling evil smell of burning timber. I passed everyone. I frightened deer and killed a quail. Now the car’s christened in blood. That’s lucky on cars, unlike ships you know. (She returns from her reverie.) Be off! You have no scruples. And you, there. (She points to Oscar.) Don’t look so pitiful. ALSTA: (Sensing defeat, makes a last ditch stand.) You take your tempered scruples and rivet them into armor for the better protection of your tender soul. I’ll weave my scruples into rope and bind myself to the first rocket into space . . . and send you letters by the meteoric mail describing heaven. (Janet launches an attack upon Oscar for he is obviously the weaker of the two.) JANET: And since you have no scruples either, what kind of deity inspires you? OSCAR: O well, objects of worship change. Last week it was Mt. Assiniboine. ALSTA: To-day it might be the loveliest of all women. JANET: Fickle, fickle, minds, (he ignores her). ALSTA: It’s simply that we prefer the un¬ complicated life. Some people require a gallon of rationale to make a pinch of God palatable. We prefer to take our Maker in little doses of revelation. JANET: (She arrests the act of sliding un¬ der the car.) This is a challenge, really, and makes me more determined to defeat with plain woman-sense the irrationality of the male. We’ll Mr. Defendant! proceed. Defend your disreput¬ able profession, if you can. You sing like the cicada. I believe you are wort h squashing . . . ALSTA: We are proud of heart and mind, man we love deeply, knowledge dearly, warm of heart, savior faire, courage of cougars, jaegers in thrills, foxes in stealth, owls in wisdom, dogs in a venture, pride of lions. OSCAR: And let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman. ALSTA: Oscar! Go and make another sketch! What’s this? Are you copying nature again? Let nature speak expressively through you. JANET: Oscar. Will you deliver this? There is a garage along the road a bit. I know the proprietor well enough. OSCAR: The nerve. Will I get a ride out of it? JANET: No. OSCAR: Then I refuse. JANET: How can you? Remember that part of your defence: Man you love deeply. ALSTA: You’d better go, Oscar. OSCAR: Curse. (She hands him a note. A swish of wind is heard.) JANET: That’s the second ominous sign to¬ day. (She pauses a long while.) Well? ALSTA: Did you interpret orchards on the way? JANET: Interpret? I saw straight rows of dying blossom, and changed them by the magic wand of speed into the aromatic quilt of Allah. ALSTA: There are four ways to fertilize a flower. Page Twenty-nine