United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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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

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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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ALSTA: I didn’t lie, I used action in the sense of being acted upon. OSCAR: True, you quivered like a loose blanc-mange, thrust your chattering money in your month old sock, and heavily fumed your bed. You changed your ocular guards all night long. All this is action. He threatened to shoot us, only if we dared surprise him in his bed. ALSTA: Oscar, art is selection. Not every detail suits the selected theme. OSCAR: Pardon. ALSTA: Granted, proselyte. (Janet returns.) JANET: The long hovering summer clouds are burst and water my thirsty dying roots. What a happy union is this. ALSTA: (alarmed) Union? JANET: Yes. Of action and meditation in you. You have taught me much, Sesame . . . You must permit me to join your faith. Tell me the creed and the awful rites of initiation. Well, daren’t you let me in? ALSTA: (cautiously) O well, there is no ceremony, and only a few tricks to be learned. One, catch your man on a ferry, he can’t refuse you there. Two, conceal all bags behind the largest. (It all sounds rather idiotic.) JANET: O Sesame! How prosaic. Teach me to love men dearly, wisdom of owls, pride of lions, (laughingly she adds) And I want to be at one with all of creation that hitch-hiked once, remember, in its entirety. ■ OSCAR: With whom? JANET: Noah, you ass . . . Sesame, I have thought of a magnificent act of initiation. I possess the lamb which is to be sacrificed to purify my sin of blindness. ALSTA: What lamb? (The spring which produced fountains of ideas hitherto has apparently dried up. He fears because he does not understand the nature or extent of his conquest.) JANET: Push, Sesame! Push, lord and mas¬ ter. (She begins to push the car and Alsta assists mesmerically. Janet steers it as she walks. The car swings to the right and over a precipice . . . There is a long awful silence following the crash.) The deed that purifies, makes a disciple of, and will probably kill, Janet Suracci. (An enormous black taxi rounds a distant bend. It looks like a great menacing beetle.) It’s my father, Alsta, he got my message. God have mercy on us. (Her voice sounds like a tolling bell. Alsta slumps down onto his enormous sack looking white and limp. Janet stands behind him hands on his shoulders. She is trembling a little.) It will be hell. But he who can face a gun can face a grizzly bear. (Oscar picks up his bag and hurries off.) ALSTA: Where are you going Oscar in my hour of need? OSCAR: Exploring. ALSTA: Exploring? OSCAR: O yes. To find a tributary of courage to divert into your waterfall of wisdom. Goodbye. THE CURTAIN FALLS Ode to the Editor Who Would Laugh at Genius He casts an aspersion upon my ambition To write for a public; (whose woeful condition Makes reading seem well-nigh impossible). Hence, in order to spite him I’ve decided to write him A verse that is wastebasket-tossible. —Des McCalmont. Page Thirty-one