United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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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

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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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JANET: The wind and the buzzing bee. Two! ALSTA: O! You’re extinct. You’re fossilized, Oscar was right. The bee was excommunicated by the Edict of Parathyne. JANET: Was the wind laid off? (Her tone is bitterly sarcastic.) ALSTA: O, yes, definitely. Made redundant by a shower of pollen-filled shells, bayonets of dabbers, and a miraculous contraption for lay¬ ing smoke-screens of magic apple-dust. JANET: Who else is unemployed? ALSTA: An unreliable tipster called Cli¬ mate, with his overcomplicated system of per¬ mutations. He’s replaced by nests of aluminum serpents spitting government inspected meas¬ ures. JANET: And where might I find all this? ALSTA: Under Allah’s quilt. JANET: And how did you interpret— ALSTA: O, yes. I missed the battle of the fireblight, and the collect for the day derived therefrom, recalling all prayers for Earth’s par¬ don and the forgiveness of Heaven’s transgres¬ sions, recited to the accompaniment of the Inter¬ national Anthem, whose theme is the overthrow of the kingdom of Streptococci and played on a quartet of cyclotrons. JANET: And who told you? ALSTA: A dry and weather-cracked old man, foretelling his wind-scattered end in little leeward spittles. You’d have dismembered him in the draft of your racer. I rode one hundred miles with him. JANET: And you gave him in return? ALSTA: What an insufferable barrage of questions! A noble Roman’s request and a great artist’s gift, an ear. JANET: Tell me, how are you jaegers in thrills? ALSTA: Oscar tells best of a forty-nine mile drive in the company of four spirited Indians. JANET: Drunken Indians? Of course he ordered them to stop. ALSTA: Yes. So they offered him a drink, and demonstrated a well argued superiority by an experiment in volumes. JANET: He refused, of course. ALSTA: And violate an Adam-made de¬ cree? Refuse meat or drink the symbol of amity? Have mercy woman! JANET: Is this your fox in stealth? He was cowardly. ALSTA: Nonsense! Scientific! Is it good me¬ chanics to try to balance eight hundred wine- wild pounds of flesh against one hundred and forty-two? JANET: Where did the thrills begin? ALSTA: Along a mountain road, when a blissful squaw played blind man’s buff with the driver. JANET: (She ponders awhile, and a com¬ paratively pleasant expression dawns on her face). I hope you’re not as scandalously low as Oscar. (Alsta loosens his collar.) How I long for the open sesame. I could un¬ lock my gates to. Are you a cougar in courage? ALSTA: One sundown, out of the grotesque yellow smelter-fog of Trail, and the currents of the wide Columbia, carving the black and tan toffee hills, we divined a certain manic-depres¬ sive, self-schooled Mumbo Jumbo from medieval Wales. A doctor of a race of fire-possessed caco- demons. He took us to his den. JANET: Was he mad? ALSTA: Until they brought a polio-wither¬ ed crone. Then he removed his shirt together with a concatenation of diabolical amulets— animal magnetism, celery viruses, and a hotch potch of atmospheric pressures—-and woke the sleeping nerve with his Clarion fingers. JANET: Then he was practical! Sane! ALSTA: O quite. He threatened to shoot us. (Oscar returns—panting. He is delighted to see an obvious thaw in the icy face of Janet.) JANET: Were you afraid? What did you do? ALSTA: I was instantly seized by action. Cougar in courage (he adds superciliously. Janet rushes to him uttering ecstatic noises and kisses him violently). JANET: O Sesame! Sesame! You are a man of courage. OSCAR: The name is Alsta, Alsta Fyffe. JANET: Sesame Fyffe! What a glorious name, I thought you were word without deed. (She rushes off to peer down the highway as if expecting someone. They hear her singing to herself. Sesame, Sesame). OSCAR: O, what a rogue and peasant knave you are. Page Thirty