Part 15

'Ah, Heaven! Popularity! The disgrace of it -- the horror of it! Popularity! Ignominy! When it catches me -- when it happens ----"

He plucked from his pocket a small phial and held it up toward the light and gazed upon it desperately and raptly.

"I am never without this!" he said. "It is my means of escape. I will not be taken unawares! I carry it always. At night it is beneath my pillow. The day it happens -- the moment I feel myself in the grip of Popularity----"

I caught his hand; in his excitement he was raising the poison to his lips.

"What I cannot understand, Fothergil," I said, "is why a Poet of the Virile, a Reincarnation of the Cave Man -- excuse me, but that is what you are being this year, is it not ? -- should give way to Fear. Is it not more in character to meet this Beast and slay It? Is there not a certain contradiction between your profession and your practice?"

"More than a contradiction," he said eagerly. "It is more than contradictory! It is paradoxical!"

I eliminate much that followed. When Fothergil gets started on the paradox, time passes. He is never really interested in things until he has dis- covered the paradoxical quality in them. Sometimes I think that his enthusiasm over himself is due to the fact that he discovered early in life that he himself was a paradox -- and sometimes I think that discovery is the explanation of his enthusiasm for the paradox.

"What," said Fothergil, "is the most paradoxical thing in the world? The Human Snore! It seems Ugly-yet it is Beautiful! It seems a trivial function of the body -- and yet it is the Key to the Soul ----"

"The Key to the Soul?"

"Man sleeps," he said, "and his Conscious Mind is in abeyance. But his Subconscious Mind is still awake. It functions. It has its opportunity to utter itself. The Snore is the Voice of the Soul! And not only the Soul of the individual but of the Soul of the race. All the experiences of man, in his ascent from the mire to his present altitude, are retained in the Subconscious Mind-his fights, his struggles, his falls, his recoveries. And his dreams and nightmares are racial memories of these things. Snores are the language in which he expresses them. Interpret the Snore, and you have the psychic history of the ascent of man from Caliban to Shakespeare!

"And I can interpret it! I have listened to a million Snores, and learned the language of the Soul! Night after night, for years, I harked to the Human Snore -- in summer, hastening from park bench to beach and back again; in winter, haunting the missions and lodging houses. Ah, Heavens! with what devotion, with what passion of the discoverer, have I not pursued the Human Snore! I have gone miles to listen to some snore that was reported to be peculiar; I have denied my self luxuries, pleasures, and at times even food, in order to hire reluctant persons to Snore for me!

"And I have written the Epic of the Snore in vers libre. You shall hear the prelude!"

And this is Fothergil's prelude:

Snore me a song of the soul, Oh, sleeper, snore! Whistle me, wheeze me, grunkle and grunt, gurgle and snort me a Virile stave! Snore till the Cosmos shakes! On the wings of a snore I fly backward a billion years, and grasp the mastodon and I tear him limb from limb, And with his thigh hone I heat the dinosaur to death, for I am Virile! Snore! Snore! Snore! Snore, O struggling and troubled and squirming and suffering and choking and purple-faced sleeper, snore! Snore me the sound of the brutal struggle when the big bull planets bellowed and fought with one another. in the bloody dawn of time for the love of little yellow-haired moons, Snore! Snore till Chaos raps with his boot on the walls of Cosmos and kicks to the landlord!

Turn, choke, twist and struggle, sleeper, and snore me the song of life in the making, Sneeze me a universe full of star-dust, Snore me back to the days when I was a Cave Man, and with my bare hands slew the walrus, for I am Virile! Snore the death-rattle of the walrus, O struggling sleeper, snore! Snore me ----

But I was compelled to leave. There is a great deal of it, Fothergil says. If you know Fothergil you are aware that when he declaims his Virile verses he becomes excited; he swells physically; sometimes he looks quite five feet tall in his moments of expansion; all this is very bad for him. More than once the declamation of his poem, "Myself and the Cosmic Urge," has sent him shaking to the tea urn.

Before I left I was able to calm him somewhat. But with calm came reflection. And with reflection came his great, gray Dread again.

When I left,. Fothergil was looking out of the window and shuddering, as if the Monster Popularity might be hiding behind the neighboring chimneys. One hand clasped the phial caressingly.

But somehow I doubt that Fothergil will ever be compelled to drink the poison.

BALLADE OF UNDERSTANDING

"Does not the World's stupidity At times make Serious Thinkers fret?" I asked the fair Hermione; "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and yet .

We feel we owe the World a debt!" She waved a slim, bejeweled hand, She brooded on some vague regret. . "I hope," she sighed, "you'll UNDERSTAND!"

"Is not your high Philosophy Too subtle for the Mob to get?" I asked . . . She pondered seriously; "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and yet . . .

She trifled with an amulet Imported from some Orient land. . . . "What fish can burst the Cosmic Net? . . . I HOPE," she sighed, "you'll Understand."

"Art, Science and Psychology, Causes that rise and shine and set,

Do all these never weary thee?" -- "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and yet . Would Thought and Life have ever met Unless" . . . She paused. Her lashes fanned Her eyes, with tears of ardor wet. . . . "I hope," she sighed, "YOU'LL Understand!"

"Princess, is Bull the One Best Bet?"- "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and yet She mused, and then; in accents bland, "I hope," she said, "you'll UNDERSTAND!"

HERMIONE ON FASHIONS AND WAR