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 SHELL-SHOCKED VIEWS OF LIFE 
 
 BY 
 LOUIS MOLNAR 
 
 1921 
 GRAFTON PUBLISHING CORPORATION 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
COPYRIGHT 
 
 LOUIS MOLNAR 
 
 1921 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 On The Mountain 9 
 
 Desert Places 21 
 
 Vicarious Activities 33 
 
 Charity 43 
 
 Lizard Lodge 55 
 
 The Count 63 
 
 Ceremony 73 
 
 Helping To Build Rome 83 
 
 Love Murders 93 
 
 The Postman 101 
 
 Walking 109 
 
 The Tourist 119 
 
 From Cellar To Garret 127 
 
 Caste 135 
 
 Suicide 145 
 
 The Grab Bag Vision 153 
 
 Thoughts ....163 
 
 The Ideal The Only Real 171 
 
 Five Towns In One 179 
 
 The Poetic Attitude.... ....189 
 
ON THE MOUNTAIN 
 
 "You win the tomatoes," said a voice very 
 near me. 
 
 I jumped to my feet and looked behind the 
 manzanita bush. There sat a large handsome 
 man. He smiled at my surprised gesture, and 
 then repeated : "You win the tomatoes." 
 
 "Good morning," I stammered, "but I don t 
 exactly see " 
 
 "I registered a bet," he explained, "that I was 
 the only person on the mountain so early in the 
 morning." 
 
 "Oh, I understand. It is early for city peo 
 ple to be on the trail. Were you going to the 
 top of San Gabriel?" 
 
 "Well, no," he said hesitantly, as though he 
 might be persuaded to change his plans. "I 
 am going to Barley Flats, but it s all a whim, 
 as you might say. I am studying the habits 
 of nocturnal animals and insects. I like the 
 mountain mists." He grasped the manzanita 
 and shook a shower of dew upon the ground. 
 "Look at that spider web. What perfect en- 
 
10 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 gineering ! Look how scientifically it has placed 
 the guy lines. No human engineer could have 
 done better. I like to hunt these delicate webs 
 when the dew is on them." 
 
 "Yes," I assented, "they are very interesting, 
 and I" 
 
 "Excuse me," he interrupted, "you don t 
 have to agree with me about spiders or any 
 thing else. I am only a perambulating shell- 
 shock, which means that I am different. I was 
 one of the eight horses that went up from Brest 
 with the forty men, and we went all the way. 
 They drafted me out of my senior year in the 
 university and sucked me into a thing called the 
 Argonne. They spoiled a good engineer in the 
 making. For these reasons you need not feel 
 obliged to agree with me. Take me as an old 
 friend, for you see, one of my peculiarities is 
 that I get acquainted with strangers very eas 
 ily." Then he beamed upon me with such an 
 explanatory smile that to doubt would have 
 been impossible. 
 
 "All right, old friends we are then," I re 
 turned, "but I am really interested in spiders. 
 Of course I can not pretend to be up on spider 
 lore from the scientific viewpoint, and I don t 
 belong to any society for the study of ento- 
 
ON THE MOUNTAIN 11 
 
 mology, but I have watched spiders by the 
 hour." 
 
 "Speaking of a society reminds me," he spoke 
 up quickly, "it seems that a man in shabby 
 clothes sat for several hours opposite Central 
 Park in New York, intently watching a tree. 
 Officious by-standers called the attention of a 
 policeman, saying that they believed the man 
 was crazy. He told the policeman that he was 
 watching a pair of sparrows, in whose nest a 
 cuckoo had laid an egg. This explained noth 
 ing to the officer of the law, but a card in the 
 possession of the tree-gazer showing that he 
 belonged to an ornithological society saved the 
 situation." 
 
 "And do you belong to a spider society?" I 
 asked. 
 
 "Oh, no," he laughed, "I don t have to belong. 
 I keep far away from the habitat of policemen. 
 I am bewildered and dizzy enough yet to wonder 
 why a tree-gazer should be considered crazy in 
 a city where men howl for hours in a stock ex 
 change six days in the week and then refresh 
 their frenzied souls by listening to a jazz band 
 in a roof -garden on Sunday." 
 
 "You are a very young man to denounce 
 jazz," I observed. 
 
12 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 "Yes, I know that is true. Possibly I should 
 apologize or, rather explain, but, you see, that 
 only shows up another phase of my strange dis 
 ability. Ever since that Boche shell with my 
 number on it, came over, I can t see things the 
 way I once did. When I hear the newsboys yell 
 ing about bloody murder, wrecks, suffering and 
 suicide, I wonder just why that kind of news is 
 so pleasant to every one but me. I can t seem 
 to understand. Is there never any good news? 
 Even in books I find that happiness has no his 
 tory; it leaves no trace. I suppose all this can 
 be explained by the fact that I am reversed on 
 everything. My nerves will not respond in 
 ecstasy, to the tales of other people s suffering. 
 The news boys offer it and try to please me, but 
 I can not enjoy this misery as normal people 
 do." 
 
 "May it not be," I suggested, "that people 
 wish to read about the unusual?" 
 
 "Well, yes, but," he objected, "murder, war, 
 scandal, sudden death, accidents, general mis 
 ery and suicide are not at all unusual. They 
 are common and usual to the point of mono 
 tony. Indeed, I have to come up here to escape 
 them. If I could look at these things from the 
 angle of the normal man undoubtedly I would 
 
ON THE MOUNTAIN 13 
 
 discover much good in them. The people who 
 enjoy these tales must be right after all. I 
 can see that. I remember how I enjoyed them 
 when I was normal. Nature must have her 
 contrasts, and a natural man will derive much 
 pleasure from the shadows of life. Now, you 
 should understand that I like the world as it 
 is. I don t want to fix anything. Whether I am 
 right or wrong about my dislikes, the world al 
 ways has a pleasant place for me. I can run 
 away to my spiders and things." 
 
 "Are you going back to the university?" I 
 asked. 
 
 "No, I feel that it makes no real difference 
 now. I am reversed on that too." 
 
 "Are you going to make entomology your 
 life work?" I pursued. 
 
 "Life work?" he chuckled. "That s another 
 subject I m reversed on. I express myself only 
 in play; work is immoral." 
 
 "Immoral?" I repeated, incredulously. 
 
 "Yes, immoral, in a sense," he replied smiling 
 at the same time to soften the challenged state 
 ment, "unless you love it. Unloved work is 
 simply the disgraceful slavish price we pay for 
 our needless necessities. The cry of more pro 
 duction is all nonsense. I am an individualist 
 
14 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 on this subject of work. It pleases me better 
 to cut down my needs rather than to speed up 
 my efforts. I got over-speeded in the war; that 
 war velocity is going to last me a whole life 
 time." 
 
 By tacit consent we followed the up-grade 
 of the trail and approached the top of the moun 
 tain. From time to time we stopped and ad 
 mired the scenery. I felt very much at ease 
 with my new companion. He radiated cheer; 
 he was young and yet disliked excitement and 
 jazz ; he lived in the strength and turbulence of 
 youth, but he was calm after the great storm 
 of war had done its worst for him; he seemed 
 like a part of the impersonal mountain spirit, 
 loveless and yet full of affection. 
 
 "Where s the girl?" I asked him suddenly. 
 His artlessness had made me impudent. "Of 
 course there must be a girl?" 
 
 "Yes, yes, the girl," he answered quite freely. 
 "There s always the girl. After that shell came 
 over some one took the trouble to mislay me in 
 a base hospital. I must have been an unknown 
 quantity for several months. News reached the 
 girl that I was dead. Mother kept on sending 
 letters for a long time, refusing to believe that 
 I was gone, and so I learned that the girl mar- 
 
ON THE MOUNTAIN 15 
 
 ried another man. That was all right too. 
 When I came out of the mist or whatever it 
 was, in the hospital, I had a vague feeling that 
 something in addition to myself had been mis 
 laid. I asked the nurse about my barrack bag 
 every day and told her that I had lost some 
 thing, but I couldn t remember what it was. 
 Then one day came the letter from Mother tell 
 ing about the girl and how sore Mother was 
 about the wedding; all at once I knew it was 
 my romance that had been mislaid. I had for 
 gotten the girl entirely until that letter brought 
 her back. There I was left with my love hover 
 ing in the air, like a bird over the ocean, with 
 no place to light. I saw then that love had been 
 one thing and the girl another sort of an ideal 
 and an idol, with the idol wearing the ideal for 
 a gilded crown. It doesn t make any difference 
 at all that she married another man. What is 
 an idol unadorned?" 
 
 "Don t you wish to possess the girl herself?" 
 I asked. 
 
 "No, not at all," he replied ; "my romance got 
 blasted into three fragments, the love, the idol 
 and the possession. I still have the love. It is 
 like the sunshine that gilds that snow moun 
 tain over there; it gilds everything it touches. 
 
16 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 I feel safe and happy with my heart affair just 
 where the shell put it. I have noticed that the 
 average male of the human species begins life 
 by loving his mother; next he loves his wife; 
 then his child, and he ends by loving love or 
 merely an abstract idea. I went through all 
 these stages in a few seconds by the force of 
 high explosive." 
 
 "Did the shell change your views on religion 
 and politics also," I asked. 
 
 "Yes," he answered with a good-natured 
 laugh, "it more than changed my views; it 
 scrambled them. When I was in the university 
 I thought I liked socialism. Now, I see in it only 
 a diseased gregariousness, the accentuation of 
 an unfortunate propensity. Bolshevism and com 
 munism are fatty degenerative diseases that at 
 tack animals with the herd instinct. I believe 
 in getting away from people instead of herding 
 with them. I like capitalism and individualism. 
 I like the rule of the jungle where God loves 
 the deer so well that He makes it fleet to escape 
 the lion, and then loves the lion so well that He 
 enables it to catch an unwary deer now and 
 then. With the deer in the lion s stomach, the 
 lion is fed and happy; with the deer escaped, 
 the deer is happy. 
 
ON THE MOUNTAIN 17 
 
 "It is a fair field and Nature always wins, 
 loving all her children without any of the nar 
 row restrictions we impose. As the Christian 
 religion has never yet been applied to the lives 
 of nations, it did not figure in the great war. 
 The only forces that operated in the war were 
 the forces of the jungle. The attitude of God 
 there was the same as His attitude everywhere. 
 He left man free to slaughter his kind ; victory 
 went at last to the side with the greatest gun 
 power and the most efficient soldiers." 
 
 "Do you not think it was also the triumph 
 of right in the end," I asked. 
 
 "Yes, right was victorious," he replied. 
 "Right has always been victorious; otherwise 
 life would have ceased for man long ago. The 
 right that survived after the war is like a dia 
 mond with many facets. It gives the people 
 now living remarkable opportunities. Every 
 person has a laudable desire to fly away on his 
 own tangent. He will reject the political medi 
 cines that contain the sticky properties of com 
 munism. The war produced individuals who 
 lived through unique experiences. It brought 
 to some the thrill of danger, to others the hu 
 miliation of a slacker s safety. It called some to 
 sacrifice all their worldly goods, and it called 
 
18 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 others to be profiteers. It caused mothers to give 
 up heroic sons and it caused other mothers to 
 keep their sons away from danger. To each and 
 every individual it gave some kind of reward. 
 It created new perspectives in things moral, im 
 moral and unmoral. It was good for the rich 
 to become poor, and good for the poor to become 
 rich. In a very real sense the slacker lost his 
 life in saving it, while the hero found his life 
 in losing it. Everywhere there is balance and 
 justice. There is nothing to feel sorry about; 
 no dire prophecies to make ; everything is pre 
 cisely as it must be. We don t need new laws 
 to regulate our conduct. I would not reform 
 any one but myself." 
 
 We had reached the summit of San Gabriel, 
 and the parting of our ways. 
 
 "May I know your name?" I asked timidly, 
 feeling at the same time that my request struck 
 a false note. 
 
 "Think of me only as your shell-shocked 
 friend for the present," he replied, a little em 
 barrassed. "My name went out like a light; it 
 belonged to former ideals and perished with 
 them; it would not truly represent me today, 
 even if I had the power to remember it; but," 
 he continued, and his face lighted up with a 
 
ON THE MOUNTAIN 19 
 
 smile, "perhaps you will help me to find a new 
 name." 
 
 I promised to look for a name, and then we 
 parted. He went down into Barley Flats, where 
 the spider webs and their engineering wonders 
 awaited him ; I returned to the city where 
 noises produced by normal people and pneu 
 matic hammers awaited me. 
 
DESERT PLACES 
 
 I took up the quest of a name, only to learn 
 that he of the spiders and mountain clouds, he 
 who loved ideas separated from their human re 
 lationships, and who lived in rapport with su- 
 persensuous states, would require a name that 
 had never done duty for any other living crea 
 ture. 
 
 Our next meeting took place on the dusty 
 path by the railroad track. I had not expected 
 to meet him there, for I had not believed that 
 any other person shared my secret affection for 
 the glistening rails on a hot day. He shouted 
 a greeting while the distance of two telegraph 
 poles still separated us, and I answered with a 
 sweeping wave of my hat. 
 
 "Here we meet again," he said, "but where s 
 the name?" His eyes simulated a reproach. 
 "You have no name for me?" Then with the 
 evident fear that I might take his question seri 
 ously, he adopted a casual tone. "Well, never 
 mind. I was unable to find one myself, and, to 
 tell you the truth, I am more pleased than sorry. 
 Names are strange, uncanny things when you 
 
 21 
 
22 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 come to think about them ; it is so very impor 
 tant that they should fit. We should be able 
 to see the spirit of the man behind the veil 
 before we attempt to name it." 
 
 "Yes," I admitted, "no combination of sounds 
 I could make seemed accurately to name you as 
 you appeared to me on the mountain." 
 
 "That proves that we are becoming ac 
 quainted," he said. "We are on the high road 
 to friendship. When you know a little more my 
 name will appear. May it not be that I will also 
 have another name for you? Why should we 
 not take on different names for our changing 
 moods? I, under the spell of poetry, am not 
 tiie same man that I am under another mood. 
 It is better to be nameless than to be yoked to 
 a word that places me in the wrong category." 
 Then, with a sudden change in tone and thought 
 h.s exclaimed: "But this railroad here, this 
 hot, dusty railroad, how it does affect me." 
 
 The railroad?" I repeated in surprise. 
 
 "Yes, the railroad," he confirmed. "I often 
 come here when I feel the need of absolute soli 
 tude. This thin, long desert of wooden ties and 
 steel rails is but the elongation of the city 
 loneliness projected into the life of the coun 
 try. In the city there is no change, no germina- 
 
DESERT PLACES 23 
 
 tion, no growing. The streets are paved and 
 dead; the buildings that guard them are also 
 dead; mechanical things move along the dead 
 streets and carry people who are dead in every 
 faculty where Nature really lives. 
 
 "The noises of the streets are produced by 
 the clanging of dead substances and the strident 
 voices of mimes that strive to prefigure to them 
 selves an illusion that they call life. The rail 
 road leaves the city and brings all that impres 
 sive solitude out here and lays it down in a nar 
 row ribbon of contrast close beside the teem 
 ing activity of the living earth. It is well for 
 us to ponder over this contrast ; it is even good 
 for us at times to endure the wretched loneli 
 ness of the city, and to learn by experience what 
 the deprivation of companionship can actually 
 mean in an artificial desert. I like to take my 
 city sophistication here on this strip of urban 
 ized ground because it is only a step from the 
 rails to the fields where my companions reside." 
 
 The sun approached the zenith and raised 
 quiverings of mirage over the heated roadbed. 
 We sought the shady side of a pile of ties and 
 settled ourselves comfortably into a position 
 where we could view a field of barley waving in 
 the breeze. 
 
24 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 "Isn t it pleasant," said my friend, "when 
 perspiration begins to evaporate ? How delight 
 fully cool it is." He sighed blissfully. "Some 
 thing always happens, too, when we pause to 
 take an observation on this borderland of city 
 and country. Just look at those blackbirds on 
 that telegraph wire two, four, six of them." 
 He stared at them thoughtfully for a time and 
 then chuckled : "A comical sight, indeed, those 
 six birds on a wire ; scandalized birds they are, 
 all in a ridiculous, straight row, ruthlessly 
 breaking Nature s law of beauty in the curve." 
 
 I looked at the birds, and, true to my friend s 
 fancy or suggestion, they took on a silly air in 
 that compromising row. I had never noticed 
 such an absurdity in blackbirds before, but now 
 it was obvious that they were putting the wire 
 to an inconsequential use. The longer I looked 
 the more it seemed that they wished to flout 
 man s genius and dignity. 
 
 "There is something wrong with them," I 
 conceded, "but I am unable exactly to explain 
 what it is." 
 
 "Well, to say the least," my friend explained, 
 "they occupy a false position, using the electric 
 nerve of the world as a perch for their scrawny 
 feet. There is something painfully unsatisfac- 
 
DESERT PLACES 25 
 
 tory and almost human in their predicament. 
 They have conformed to a line-up, but man 
 like, they know not that they have conformed ; 
 all the news of the nation is flowing through 
 their feet, and yet it leaves them unenlightened ; 
 they receive nothing and impart nothing. They 
 are unable even to talk among themselves. Bird 
 number one cannot communicate with number 
 six, because four unsympathetic, mechanically 
 arranged birds intervene. Hypnotized by a me 
 tallic convention that keeps them in a foolish 
 row on the fringe of things, they are in no 
 position to maintain their self respect. If they 
 stay there very long they will become es 
 tranged. I predict that they will soon fly to a 
 friendly tree and smooth out the incipient en 
 mity that lurks in the straightness of the wire." 
 
 "Do you think that cities and line-up people 
 are wholly unfortunate and out of harmony 
 with life?" I asked. 
 
 "No, I do not say that," he replied. "We 
 all need some of the solitude that can only be 
 found in the city. There may be a little too 
 much companionship in the country. The soul 
 must also learn what it is to be without com 
 panionships, to be utterly alone, and where can 
 it be more alone than among thousands of arti- 
 
26 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 ficial creatures who think standardized conven 
 tional thoughts or do not think at all. To gain 
 the experience of that abysmal loneliness coun 
 try people must leave their living, active envir 
 onment and go to the city where Nature s voices 
 are silenced. They must live for a season where 
 nothing grows, where nothing changes, where 
 nothing unfolds. In such a solitude meditation 
 may indulge itself, and, you know, a little medi 
 tation acts as a tonic. City people go to the 
 country for rest. To them the country seems 
 quiet because they themselves are dead to the 
 countless activities of Nature. There was a 
 time in my own life, before that shell came over, 
 when I thought the city was a noisy, stimulat 
 ing place, but now I go there for that voiceless, 
 thoughtless quiet which can only be found 
 where man has killed the living soil and covered 
 it with stones from murdered hills." 
 
 I had been watching the blackbirds while 
 listening to my friend. Their uneasiness was 
 very apparent. Number one looked along the 
 foolish line and gave a screech of digust; his 
 voice closely imitated the note of a rusty hinge ; 
 then he deserted the wire ; the other birds fol 
 lowed at once and all flew to a tree in the field, 
 just as my friend had prophesied. We could 
 
DESERT PLACES 27 
 
 hear them gurgling and warbling as only happy 
 blackbirds can. 
 
 "They are more than human in their feelings 
 and discernments," my friend observed. "They 
 have a wholesome dread of classification and 
 standardization. They name themselves only in 
 their songs. By the way, did you ever think of 
 the dangerous power that resides in a brand 
 or mark of identification? I thought of it when 
 we were discussing names. The blackbirds 
 prove that I am right." 
 
 "No," I replied, with a little hesitation, "I 
 had never exactly regarded classification as a 
 dangerous power." 
 
 "Well," he continued, "you saw how it af 
 fected the birds. I feel that it is a special 
 danger of city life, although it lurks every 
 where. A butterfly may have fascinating qual 
 ities before the entomologist s pin is run 
 through its body, but after that only a Greek 
 name is left. A man may have brilliant apti 
 tudes and even genius before he permits himself 
 to be known and admired for a specific talent; 
 after that disclosure, however, he is betrayed 
 and lost. His friends and foes will conspire to 
 brand the sign of a single trait upon his dis- 
 
28 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 mayed ego and force him to do his one little 
 trick over and over." 
 
 "You may be right about that," I conceded, 
 "but after all, why should the branded one care 
 so very much?" 
 
 "He should care a great deal because he 
 should wish to save his individuality, the only 
 phase of him that amounts to anything. There 
 is a struggle for life in the world of ideas the 
 same as there is in the jungle A classified mind 
 is a chained mind; it can no longer carry on 
 the fight. Behold what the mania for classifi 
 cation has done! It has defaced the pages of 
 history with soul cartoons. Woe unto the man 
 who emphasizes a character trait in the pres 
 ence of the classifying foe. Has not King Ruf us 
 been doomed to plunge forever through bosky 
 dells after the festive wild boar? Could King 
 Ruf us do anything else? Notice how Henry 
 VIII marries with dizzy repetitions; how 
 Charles I is always receiving the executioner s 
 axe, and how Hannibal crosses the Alps with his 
 shivering elephants. In more recent times our 
 own Paul Revere, forgetting prudence, went 
 forth on his steed. Did he ever do anything 
 else? We know not, but history has classified 
 
DESERT PLACES 29 
 
 him for his riding and ordained that he shall 
 ride forevermore." 
 
 "Yes," I admitted, "history can be very nar 
 row and unjust to the individual, but it can not 
 actually rob the living man of his personality. 
 He can still live his own life and be himself in 
 the city or the country." 
 
 "I think you are mistaken there," he replied. 
 "Living men are also classified. Even now I am 
 fighting for my status as an individual. I really 
 have a status worth defending, and in defend 
 ing it I fight against the very things that nor 
 mal men seem to love. I must resist being swal 
 lowed by their organizations. So many people 
 want to be organized ; they worship institution- 
 alism, ceremonies and forms, while I worship 
 individuality. I do not wish to be drowned in 
 their great Nirvana, their ocean of absorption ; 
 I would much rather wade around alone in my 
 own little puddle. Yet I have no desire to re 
 form or change the normal man s club, associa 
 tion, league, lodge or union. If he likes it, let 
 him have it. I only resist the attempt of a clan 
 to make me over on its own pattern; I am jeal 
 ous of my shell-shocked aloofness. War lined 
 me up once too often. It is my special care now 
 to refuse both the tag of a classified talent and 
 
30 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 the insignia of an organized unit. I would be 
 free to try all possible exploits. I am also mind 
 ful of the fact that an individualized man must 
 be ever on his guard when expressing his own 
 ideas, for, should his outpouring accidentally re 
 semble the standardized jargon of the Jub Jub 
 Club, some one is sure to say: I see you are a 
 Jubjubist/ or worse by far, he may receive from 
 that precious organization some token of its ap 
 proving ownership and thereby lose his own 
 soul." 
 
 "Do you not entirely overlook the augmented 
 intellectuality of the city with its clubs and 
 unions where minds coming into contact with 
 minds are stimulated and improved?" I asked. 
 
 "No," he replied, "I do not overlook that 
 phase at all. A great naturalist once said : Men 
 kindle one another as do fire-brands, and beget 
 a collective heat and enthusiasm that tyrannize 
 over the individual purposes and wills/ It is the 
 tyranny over individuality that I resent. The 
 hive gives nothing to the bee. The bee gives 
 everything to the hive. Even from the flower 
 the bee gets only sweet water or nectar; she 
 must add her own formic acid before honey is 
 made. The natural man adds the formic acid of 
 his own mind to the nectar that he finds every- 
 
DESERT PLACES 31 
 
 where in the wild life of actuality and so makes 
 the honey of thought. City minds are supplied 
 with formic acid, but they have no nectar ; they 
 live in a state of famine, and therefore when 
 a gentle thinker from the thought-feeding fields 
 enters the city desert he places himself in peril 
 of ambuscade and robbery. Artificial people 
 need his thoughts to save themselves from in 
 tellectual cannibalism. Let him feed them spar 
 ingly according to their digestive capacities, but 
 also let him beware of the head-hunters, the 
 fierce and hungry head-hunters of the Jub Jub 
 Club." 
 
VICARIOUS ACTIVITIES 
 
 As I returned one day from a big league ball 
 game I bought an evening paper and proceeded 
 to read all about the game I had just seen. This 
 post-game reading is an approved American 
 custom. Walking and reading, I presently came 
 to a vacant lot where boys were playing a ball 
 game of their own. I forsook the newspaper for 
 the time being and gave attention to the sand- 
 lot activities. 
 
 Very soon I noticed that one of the players 
 was much larger than any of the others. A 
 second glance showed that it was my shell- 
 shocked friend. I had not seen him since the 
 day we met on the railroad track. He was cov 
 ering third base, and doing it with such bound 
 less enthusiasm, that standing room on the bor 
 der of the field was soon taken up by the throng 
 flowing from the big ball-ground. The action 
 was fast and thrilling, but it was the last half 
 of the ninth inning, and so our pleasure soon 
 ended. The crowd melted away and I hastened 
 to capture the third baseman. 
 
 "So sorry the game is over," I said as soon as 
 I had him in my safe possession. 
 
 33 
 
34 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 "Yes," he answered with a boyish laugh as he 
 mopped the perspiration from his brow, "it is 
 too bad, and especially so when we realize that 
 you can never read about this game never, 
 never read about it." His eyes danced in a kind 
 of liquid fire that suggested merriment and 
 mock regret. The moist handkerchief went 
 from his face to a pocket and he struck a grand- 
 oise attitude. Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him 
 well! The shade of the man I once was; the 
 man who took his baseball by proxy, watching, 
 watching other men as they played, and then 
 reading, reading, ever reading all about it. Alas, 
 poor Yorick, I knew him well ! " 
 
 "Let s change the subject," I suggested. 
 
 "Let s do that very thing," he agreed hearti 
 ly. "What do we care for subjects? We ve 
 plenty of them." 
 
 As we walked off the field I noticed that my 
 playful friend was a little lame. He caught my 
 glance, and, true to his habit, answered the un 
 asked question. "Yes, a trifling sprain in my 
 left ankle ; got it in the game, not very bad, but 
 just enough to put me on the car for down 
 town." 
 
 We found a seat in the section of the car 
 where smoking is permitted. "I have very few 
 
VICARIOUS ACTIVITIES 35 
 
 regrets," he commenced after we were seated, 
 "but possibly the few I have are more poignant 
 than the regrets of other people. One of my 
 deprivations is the scattered and lost love for 
 tobacco smoke; I can no longer enjoy a cigar, 
 and so I will have to sing." 
 
 He glided into the musical mood as automat 
 ically as other men glide into their own pockets 
 for cigarettes and matches. He surprised me 
 with the power of his voice and the variety of 
 his selections. A cigar smoker in front of us 
 turned to me and asked, "Taking him to a sani 
 tarium?" I nodded. "Poor man!" he sympa 
 thized. 
 
 My singer heard the remark and nudged me 
 in mischievous appreciation. 
 
 "Let grand opera and the fumes of sweet 
 nicotine mingle lovingly in the ambient atmos 
 phere," he warbled. 
 
 "I ll take my atmosphere without the music," 
 said a cigar across the aisle. 
 
 "You said something, Buddy," answered the 
 singer, "and I ll take mine without the smoke. 
 He gave me another nudge. 
 
 "Are you in charge of him?" asked the 
 ruffled cigar. 
 
 "Yes," I replied; "it is a case of tangled 
 
36 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 nerves. He doesn t know any better, but he is 
 good natured and wouldn t for the world de 
 prive any man of his smoke." 
 
 "Oh, I see," said the cigar, pacified. "His 
 music isn t half bad either, is it?" 
 
 "No, it isn t," I agreed, "and more than that, 
 he is a happy creature." At this I got another 
 nudge from my singer, who was now counter 
 feiting an air of dignified pensiveness that 
 raised him to a condition almost ethereal. 
 "Didn t I tell you we had lots of subjects?" he 
 reminded me in a triumphant aside. 
 
 We left the car in the business district. "You 
 must be hungry after the exercise you have had 
 today," I said as we walked to the curb. He 
 limped in an exaggerated manner to force upon 
 me an unbecoming role of sympathy, or perhaps 
 to express some subtle shade of humor just then 
 flitting through his mind. 
 
 "Must is the word," he returned. 
 
 "Then you will have dinner with me," I said 
 decisively. 
 
 "An invitation from the king is always a com 
 mand," he replied with a grand air, "but no 
 monarch wishes to have a sick man in his en 
 tourage." With these words his exaggerated 
 lameness departed, while he conferred upon me 
 
VICARIOUS ACTIVITIES 37 
 
 an accent, a smile and a manner that only he 
 could conjure up. 
 
 I knew how his nature abhorred the main 
 stream of city life, so we went to a little res 
 taurant and found a table in a retired nook. 
 
 "Ah, bliss!" he exclaimed, "bliss and exalta 
 tion, to be as hungry as a wolf and to find good 
 food in this dear old world." Then with one 
 of his sudden changes of thought, he rushed 
 right on into another topic. "Something amus 
 ing happened a few days ago," he announced, 
 and his smile became child-like. "A distant rel 
 ative of mine died." With that preliminary 
 statement he paused and cast a sly glance at me 
 as though he wished to note the effect of his 
 words. 
 
 I tried unsuccessfully to receive the informa 
 tion as a logical statement. "Amusing," I 
 asked. 
 
 "You wonder," he answered, "and I must 
 hereby beg your pardon. Please do not misun 
 derstand. The amusing part of the incident 
 lies in the fact that the distant relative left me 
 a bequest of sixteen hundred dollars a year 
 for life. He went so far as to put into his will 
 a touch of philosophy to the effect that any true 
 spider lover is by that token an institution of 
 
38 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 the bipedal variety, and should be generously 
 endowed. In strict accordance with that theory 
 he endowed me. Behold an institution." 
 
 "Accept my hearty congratulatins," I said 
 reaching across the table to grasp his hand. 
 
 "Ah, you also find the incident amusing, don t 
 you?" he exclaimed, while the twinkle of new 
 mischief played again in his mocking eyes. "I 
 thought you were about to offer me consolation 
 in my great sorrow. You have also, indeed, 
 found it amusing ; our minds meet once more." 
 
 "Well, no, not exactly," I protested, feeling 
 somewhat discredited by my friend s whimsical 
 pose. "I congratulated you on the assured in 
 come, but I have not found the incident at all 
 amusing." 
 
 "Tut, tut, Old Man," he burst in, "you merely 
 forgot my sorrow to felicitate me on my joy, 
 a very natural mistake. Moreover I do not fish 
 for condolences, but I still stick to the amus 
 ing part of this affair with my dear, distant and 
 departed relative. It is droll that he should 
 consider me an improvident and helpless mem 
 ber of society simply because I had been jarred 
 out of a few dozen of my former conceits and 
 jarred into a few dozen new ones." 
 
 "Well, if the amusing feature carried any 
 
VICARIOUS ACTIVITIES 39 
 
 sting, we will have to forgive him, won t we?" 
 I suggested by way of reconciliation. 
 
 "Yes, yes, he is already forgiven, abundantly 
 forgiven, but what in the world am I to do with 
 an income of one hundred and twenty-five dol 
 lars a month ? Answer that riddle ?" 
 
 "It is indeed a princely sum," I replied, "but 
 there are persons in the world who, with a little 
 coaxing might be led to assist you in the dis 
 bursement of that amount of money." 
 
 "I see you do not quite understand," he went 
 on. "You naturally think that I make light of 
 this bequest, but not so. The sum is of course, 
 measured by some standards, a paltry one; it 
 would have seemed paltry to me when I was 
 normal, but today it actually places me be 
 yond the visions of Croesus. I am the king of 
 a modern Lydia, a vast psychic principality 
 all torn up by high explosives and inhabited by 
 a different race of ideas. In that sixteen hun 
 dred dollars a year is an ocean of wealth for 
 me. Here s to that generous soul, my father s 
 cousin; many glorious returns of his birthday 
 into the land of his present abode." He held his 
 glass of water aloft and I joined him in his 
 toast. 
 
 "I have an intuition that you do not even now 
 
40 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 exactly catch my meaning," he proceeded. "You 
 perhaps feel that I am flippant or lacking in sol 
 emn respect. Is it because your spirit has 
 moved away just a little from the place where it 
 stood that day on the mountain ?" 
 
 A shadow passed over his face, like the 
 shadow of a cloud over a summer landscape. 
 His super-sensitive mind discovered my infer 
 ences. 
 
 "You feel, when my words ride a wave of 
 nervous levity, that I do not mourn in a seemly 
 way for the one who was so kind to me. You 
 are right in part, for I do not mourn. Death 
 brushed me with its sable wing and yet I felt no 
 claws in its feather tips. That same wing has 
 now taken my good old relative wholly under 
 its protecting care, and surely that must be 
 good for him he a hero of Gettysburg and a 
 lover of wild nature. No, I do not mourn in 
 hopelessness, but on the contrary rejoice in 
 solemnity while the flag of my spirit flies at 
 half-mast in honor of him. He intended all in 
 kindness, but little did he realize how his money 
 would burden me. He might as well have be 
 queathed potted geraniums to the state of Cali 
 fornia." 
 
 "May it not have been that your wise rela- 
 
VICARIOUS ACTIVITIES 41 
 
 tive knew how small are the financial returns 
 from spider-loving and star-gazing?" I sug 
 gested. 
 
 "Yes," he agreed, "that must have been his 
 thought, for he could not have known that my 
 nature-foibles ever led me into a practical, 
 bread-winning occupation, but they have done 
 so and I am actually a business man ; behold me, 
 a capitain of a burro team ! Eight festive bur 
 ros have I, and over the long, rocky trail we ply 
 our trade. Five days a week we work; two 
 days we rest, and the world is mine." 
 
 His face radiated mountain light ; I was con 
 scious of a potent influence, steaming out from 
 his mind, a kind of witchery that evokes pic 
 tures of eyrie places and dusty trails. "Yes, 
 I have an occupation now," he mused, gazing 
 through and far beyond the walls of the room, 
 an occupation that is different. Some day you 
 shall meet Paloma, my leading burro. He is a 
 beauty ! Behind his broad and hirsute counten 
 ance broods the soul of meditation ; in his heart 
 an everlasting tomorrow sings and gives prom 
 ise of fruition for all his aspirations and mine." 
 
 My friend paused a moment as though he 
 wished to interpret one of Paloma s medita 
 tions, but as I watched his face across the 
 
42 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 table, in that fleeting moment, I saw the light 
 of the mountains fade and die; the potent, 
 streaming witchery of his mind returned to its 
 spring, and he himself was back again in the 
 little restaurant. "He will speak now of sane 
 and wholesome things," I thought, and so he 
 did. 
 
 "This coffee is excellent," he said. 
 
CHARITY 
 
 When I opened the envelope a spray of moun 
 tain sage fell out, telling me it was from my 
 shell-shocked companion. I found a quiet place 
 and read : 
 
 At Home, Lizard Lodge. 
 
 Dear Friend I was disappointed when you 
 failed to meet me at Sierra Madre for another 
 interview on the day appointed. You will have 
 to think up a plausible excuse. Paloma has 
 been shaking his ears in a distinguished way, 
 giving me assurance of your health and safety. 
 One of the precious things about my leading 
 burro is that he never has any evil presenti 
 ments ; therefore I know that it was no misfor 
 tune which kept you away from the trysting 
 place. 
 
 Last night I watched the Big Dipper until its 
 swing around the North Star was apparent even 
 to my untrained eyes. Hypnotized by the starry 
 multitude, I sat on a bench outside my cabin 
 door and forgot the passing of time. When at 
 last I took note, it was to realize, without look 
 ing at my watch, that the night was far spent. 
 
 43 
 
44 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 The familiar eating-sounds from the burro shed 
 had long since ceased; not a cricket could be 
 heard in the grass ; my little world was asleep. 
 But I made good use of the stars, for they told 
 me how to disburse the first installment of 
 that troublesome inheritance; the letter carry 
 ing the money away is already in the mail. 
 
 Possibly it was the creeping chill of the night 
 which revived a memory picture, or, it may 
 have been nothing more than worry over that 
 money, but whatever it was, I saw again in 
 fancy the sprawling village of Neufchateau, 
 near the battle lines in France, and a poor old 
 charcoal man I used to know, going from house 
 to house with his push-cart, in the gray of the 
 early morning. Under the cart, and harnessed 
 to it, was his faithful, little dog, pulling with all 
 his might. What an atom of life was that lit 
 tle dog! How he worked, and how his master 
 worked ! Both were too old for war, but not too 
 old for the remorseless struggle against death 
 by starvation! At last, when memory con 
 ducted me to the place where a pitying house 
 wife gave scraps of food from her own scanty 
 store to the old man and the little dog, I knew 
 I had found the place for the first month s por 
 tion of my inheritance. How simple the dis- 
 
CHARITY 45 
 
 bursement of money, after all! A few hours 
 of pleasant meditation under the stars, an un 
 spoken question addressed to Ursa Major, and 
 the deed is done. 
 
 In the days before I met my shell, the giving 
 of money to the poor and humble would have 
 filled me with self-satisfaction. My soul would 
 have luxuriated in that sense of thrift which 
 comes only from the consciousness of accumu 
 lating treasure in Heaven. But now all is so 
 different! No recording angel pats me on the 
 back; no feeling of smug respectability abides 
 with me, even for a moment. 1 am neither an 
 organized nor an unorganized charity. I am no 
 charity at all; I am merely a disbursing clerk, 
 standing midway between my dear, old, de 
 ceased relative and the person who is to receive 
 the money. How that exploding shell changed 
 me! Today I regard the normal man s atti 
 tude toward benevolence as the height of ab 
 surdity. According to his theory, there must 
 be poverty and wretchedness in the world for 
 ever; otherwise, how can his charitable and 
 ministerial impulses continue to function? He 
 believes in doing good, and he thinks that do 
 ing good is a part of being good, I don t think 
 it is, because that brand of goodness rests upon 
 
46 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 the vicious implication that some one else must 
 be bad. According to my point of view, the only 
 possible cause for self-congratulation that a 
 giver may have lies in the fact that he has tem 
 porarily solved the trifling problem of distrib 
 uting money. He has blessed himself by get 
 ting rid of the unnecessary. 
 
 Ever since my nerves took on their high ten 
 sion I have found it impossible to base any kind 
 of happiness or morality upon the assumption 
 that other people are in a condition of financial 
 wretchedness or moral obliquity. I now look 
 upon all these things as temporary, and I can 
 only predicate my own morality and my own 
 sense of social congeniality upon the solid foun 
 dation of every other person s well-being. In 
 other words, I like to assume that these mate 
 rial questions are answered and settled, and 
 that we human beings now find ourselves in a 
 world where no one is in need of physical or 
 mental food which he can not easily secure. I 
 like to imagine that I am with my equals ; that 
 I have the advantage of nobody, and that I 
 must be a social creature on fair terms. My ec 
 centricity consists for one thing, in the fact that 
 I must be satisfied with joys that gain no ac 
 centuation by being placed in contrast with 
 
CHARITY 47 
 
 other people s miseries. I live already wholly 
 within a philosophy which says that the only 
 true relationship between persons is the one 
 based on the assumption that life s best has 
 been distributed to all and that no one can pos 
 sibly give any one else a tid-bit of charity. 
 
 Of course you will wonder why I speculate on 
 a civilization that has not yet arrived. I know 
 very well it has not arrived, but when it does 
 arrive it can do nothing more than make appar 
 ent the real basis of morals and social life. That 
 basis is as true now as it will be then. The as 
 sumption that it has already arrived serves me 
 as a working hypothesis, and so I live even now 
 in a kind of millenium, but not of the orthodox 
 type. The cake at my millennium feast does 
 not have to be dipped in the blood of unfortu 
 nates to give it a rich flavor. Vicarious suffer 
 ing and sharp contrasts are eliminated as in 
 gredients of my happiness when I assume that 
 things are as they should be. Why not regard 
 life in that way ? Why wait ? 
 
 Please do not infer that I minimize the good 
 ness of charity. I only say that it has no rele 
 vancy to our morals or social congeniality. It 
 is only a gesture by means of which the giver 
 relieves a mental disquietude of his own, while 
 
48 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 alleviating the physical suffering of the re 
 ceiver. This is, of course, good within a limited 
 domain, but it touches very lightly upon the real 
 life of humanity. From this you will under 
 stand why my disbursement to the charcoal 
 man and his little dog produced no moral thrills 
 and no sense of piled-up treasure anywhere. 
 
 This morning Paloma indulged in one of his 
 major meditations ; his right ear pointed to the 
 zenith and his left one to the horizon. I have 
 learned to read from these two positions the 
 idea of suspended judgment. Paloma has a 
 weighty matter under consideration, one which 
 is difficult to settle. Of course, when he does 
 settle it, he will not be able to express his con 
 clusions. All I can know is that he has settled 
 the matter. After that his ears may droop 
 like the arms of a semaphore, or they may point 
 forward in anticipation, as is their custom when 
 some moving object on the distant horizon at 
 tracts their owner s attention. When I first 
 made the acquaintance of this introspective 
 burro I thought it was a real misfortune that he 
 could not give to the world the results of his 
 cerebrations, but now I know that he really 
 does give us the benefit of them and in the same 
 way that other thinking creatures enlighten us. 
 
CHARITY 49 
 
 Could he speak he might, just like any human 
 being, conceal his real thoughts in words and 
 thus build up a barrier between him and me. It 
 was from him I first learned how terrific and 
 awe-inspiring is the thing not spoken. From 
 him I learned to be unafraid in solitude. I found 
 that my consciousness took on different phases 
 in the presence of different people, and that it 
 was different when in the presence of my silent 
 Paloma. He and I have no choice but to judge 
 each other by the invisible, and, strangely 
 enough, I find this is exactly the way that peo 
 ple judge each other. The spoken word is al 
 most nothing between them. What you are 
 speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say/ Was 
 it not so between you and me when we first met 
 on San Gabriel? The solitude of the mountain 
 terrifies some minds because it brings them face 
 to face with themselves. Each soul, that is, 
 each normal soul, fears itself; each soul when 
 alone with another soul fears that one also, be 
 cause between the two, as between Paloma and 
 me, there is a transferance of unspoken 
 thoughts that uncover dangerous deeps. The 
 noises and amusements of the city were in 
 vented to dispel silent thoughts and to save nor 
 mal people from the horrors of involuntary self- 
 revelation. All of this I learned from Paloma. 
 
50 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 Oh, by the way, learning from Paloma recalls 
 another incident, one which I found fully as 
 amusing as the receipt of my inheritance. It 
 happened a few days ago when I was on the 
 high trail that skirts the precipice of Mt. Mark- 
 ham. I saw a man crouching on the very edge 
 of the cliff, peering into the abyss. It was an 
 easy matter to slip up to him quietly and grasp 
 him by the arm. I did this, by way of precau 
 tion, before speaking, and then I casually re 
 marked that the scenery was grand. He started 
 violently and looked at me abashed. I saw that 
 he had been in the throes of self-pity. I used 
 to be the same way when I was normal. 
 
 "You understand, don t you?" he stammered 
 with good dramatic effect, and I assured him 
 that I did. Then he explained that he had lost 
 all his property, all his money, his good name, 
 all his friends, every vestige of his nerve and 
 his youth. 
 
 "Is that all?" I asked, and I put plenty of 
 stress on the word "that." 
 
 He hesitated, as even a dying man will, when 
 a lady figures in the case, but his desperation 
 knew no limits. "No," he continued, "that is 
 not all. I have been tragically disappointed in 
 love." 
 
CHARITY 51 
 
 Little by little I got his story and fathomed 
 the full depth of his woes, or, to put it in an 
 other way, I obtained a complete catalogue of 
 things that had slipped away from him. Never 
 theless I had a conviction that he had missed 
 still other and more important experiences" by 
 the fault of never having lived them at all, and 
 so I asked him a few pointed questions. The 
 result was a shameful disclosure. Ponder and 
 be astonished! He thought a spider had six 
 legs, and that mourning doves nested in trees. 
 He believed that the cicada sang with its vocal 
 cords like a star in grand opera, and that sage 
 brush would grow in a swamp. When I told 
 him that a mule had no hope of posterity it was 
 real news to him. He had never met a mother 
 spider carrying her whole family on her back, 
 nor had he ever noticed that the limbs of trees, 
 near the ocean, stream in the direction of the 
 prevailing winds. It would not have surprised 
 him to see a thunder storm move from the east 
 to the west. He knew nothing about bugs, 
 worms, snakes, birds, trees, clouds or the way 
 to catch a trout. 
 
 "Why all these trivial questions?" he com 
 plained at last, tugging a little, but not too 
 much, against my firm hold on his arm, and 
 
52 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 shuffling his feet carefully over the edge of 
 the cliff. 
 
 "Oh, as to that," I replied, "I only thought 
 you might want to learn a little about this world 
 yet before you died." 
 
 "Man," he exclaimed, his anger visibly 
 aroused, "are you crazy?" 
 
 "Yes, certainly," I admitted readily enough, 
 "that is, I m shell-shocked out of all desire to 
 see a man die in his ignorance." 
 
 I am sure you understand how no one could 
 commit suicide gracefully under my auspices 
 after that. The stranger came to the cabin with 
 me, met Paloma, spent the night there as our 
 guest, and the next morning went out into the 
 beautiful world again with the sprouting wings 
 of a shocking theory of life. 
 
 "Nothing seems to matter up here, does it?" 
 he said with emphasis as he left my door, and 
 to this I replied that nothing really mattered 
 except the insects and birds and burros and a 
 few men scattered among the mountains, never 
 forgetting the countless stars that keep vigil 
 over all with the sun and moon, while the whole 
 universe looks on. Beyond these odds and ends, 
 I assured him, nothing should give us any 
 worry. 
 
CHARITY 53 
 
 And now, my dear friend, I must end this 
 letter. Meet me soon on the trail above the 
 five-thousand foot level, for I have matters of 
 importance to take up in your living presence. 
 Sincerely, 
 HE OF THE SPIDERS. 
 
LIZARD LODGE 
 
 It was my first night at Lizard Lodge. The 
 fire-place glowed cherry-red as the flames slowly 
 shortened to the surface of the embers. At 
 every snap of the cooling log a shower of sparks 
 went swirling up the chimney. A knotty torch 
 exploded and fell in fragments, rolling down the 
 fiery slope into the ashes. 
 
 "There goes another castle of dreams," said 
 my friend. 
 
 His face, warm and rosy in the flickering 
 light, seemed to have no material existence sep 
 arate from the images that the flames evoked. 
 When he thought of embers he was himself a 
 glowing ember. 
 
 "Ashes to ashes," he continued pensively; 
 "but that means cheer in my fire-place, not 
 death. Life comes along, like a wave, and lifts 
 inert matter out of its aged stillness in the 
 rocks, makes it a part of life itself, and then 
 some day passes on, leaving it to fall back into 
 the rocks again. How many times in the future 
 will these same ashes be lifted up by this mir 
 acle and built into the bodies of other trees ?" 
 
 55 
 
56 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 "Many times, I am sure," I agreed. 
 
 "Yes, many times," he repeated; then sud 
 denly executing one of his characteristic 
 changes, he plunged into other subjects. "That 
 flaming knot was alive with visions of dancing 
 people, women s skirts, horrified moralists, law 
 makers, speculating scientists and plausible 
 sentimentalists." 
 
 "Have you opinions regarding dancing and 
 skirts?" I asked, unable wholly to conceal my 
 surprise. 
 
 "Yes," he answered in an even tone, "opinions 
 about atoms, electrons, dancing skirts, national 
 reform societies, and everything, but first, to 
 lead up to the reasons for my precious opinions, 
 I would explain that there is a misty borderland 
 lying between the kingdom of science and the 
 kingdom of sentiment. It is a mere ribbon of 
 psychic land. Science with its disinterested, 
 impersonal, fact-seeking thought, comes up to 
 that frontier on one side, while sentiment, with 
 its religious, literary, mystic, speculative and 
 emotional thought, comes up on the other. Be 
 tween these two realms I live. It is the very 
 place where our old friend, the atom of science, 
 abdicates to the electron, which in turn falls 
 
LIZARD LODGE 57 
 
 into the arms of a mystic spirit. Interesting 
 things happen along this frontier of mine." 
 
 "It appears to me," I ventured to say, "that 
 you live wholly in the kingdom of sentiment or 
 emotion, and, I might add, religion." 
 
 "That is because you are more scientific than 
 human-centered in your proof requirements," 
 he observed. "Religious and literary people 
 think I am a materialist, especially when I dis 
 cuss dancing and morals. They charge me with 
 being un-human, if not, indeed, inhuman. When 
 I tell them that nature is neither for us nor 
 against us, they answer that God made nature 
 for us. Yet, when I see God in the stars and 
 insects ; when I see everything as a part of God, 
 my scientific critics say I am laboring under a 
 religious illusion. 
 
 "Looking into the scientific country in one 
 direction from my narrow territory, I observe 
 people thinking without fear or pride or sense 
 of sin; they are utterly impersonal. Their 
 thoughts respect no gods and play into the 
 hands of no favorites. They hate superstition 
 and suspect the word of authority. On the 
 other side of my domain I see a still larger coun 
 try, where literature and religion arise from 
 emotion; it is an irrational but a beautiful land. 
 
58 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 It is the home of literary masterpieces whose 
 figures are heroic sinners, devils, witches, or 
 acles, prophets, sibyls and that whole hierarchy 
 of entities that science is putting to death. If 
 I leave my strip of empire and go far in this 
 direction I soon lose my way. If I turn in the 
 other direction I meet scientists hot on the trail 
 of some new figment or theory. Just now it is 
 their electron, that material thing which melts 
 into spirit. They must keep up with it as fox 
 hunters keep up with their game. Even now 
 these valiant hunters are waging battle for it 
 with metaphysicians and mystics who declare 
 that all is spirit. The cowering electron, in the 
 meantime not knowing itself for a body or a 
 ghost, takes refuge in my neutral zone." 
 
 "Do you never feel like taking sides in these 
 disputes?" I asked. 
 
 "No," he replied ; "it would be more profitable 
 to talk them over with Paloma. When I was 
 normal I knew nothing about this psychic strip, 
 where so many things meet and go away again 
 unloved and unnamed. I once thought there 
 could be no right side. Now I see that there 
 may be two rights at the same time. Any point 
 on a sphere may be a pole. It is all in the point 
 of view. Not all the fox hunters come from the 
 
LIZARD LODGE 59 
 
 scientific side ; many come from the sentimental 
 and overtake their game in my parish. Indeed, 
 it seems that all turbulence, strife, propaganda 
 and social movements, sooner or later exhaust 
 themselves in the region of neutral thougKt 
 where I hold forth. They neutralize each other 
 because no one really knows the vital facts. 
 Just now moral crusaders and reformers are 
 trying to stampede the youth of America, but 
 our young people will win a place for many of 
 their so-called immoralities, just as their par 
 ents and grand-parents won before them. In 
 the days of our ancestors, doleful prophets had 
 visions of a world dying in its sins. The world 
 is always dying. Let it die. Something is also 
 always being born, and this something that is 
 being born will take efficient care of the earth. 
 I don t care where or when the crusaders and 
 crusaded decide to sign their treaty of peace. 
 There is nothing poignant about this drama. 
 Up here among my burros and insects, with my 
 singing birds and the sweet loves of nature, all 
 is well. No one is compelled to be a reformer. 
 He is free to become a villain. His decision can 
 in no way affect my peace of mind." 
 
 "Do you not think you owe anything to so 
 ciety?" I asked. 
 
60 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 "Oh, yes, I owe the duty of keeping my soul s 
 interior in order but nothing else. I have never 
 joined the Pass-A-Law-Against-It Society. I 
 am free to admire women s dresses, which, by 
 the way, are more beautiful now than they have 
 ever been in the annals of styles. My morality 
 is not injured by the ocular demonstration that 
 women do not move about on casters, like fur 
 niture. This is a physiological fact, and what 
 of it ? Even if my morals had been lost beyond 
 recall, that in itself could not justify the re 
 formation of skirts. I am the custodian of my 
 own morals. If I am unable to guard them 
 against the honest facts of physiology I am 
 lost. Dress reformers are only shadow fighters. 
 There is no such thing as a moral or immoral 
 skirt. There is nothing disgraceful about the 
 human body. The women of today are doing 
 something constructive and worth while in thus 
 overcoming the shamef ulness that superstitious 
 religions of a by-gone age attached to the bodies 
 we wear." 
 
 "The dance is also coming in for much crit 
 icism," I remarked, "and it seems to me that it 
 has about reached the bottom, with its jazz 
 noise and queer contortions." 
 
 "Yes, as a form of expression, it is over 
 emphasized," he admitted, "but I have no quar- 
 
LIZARD LODGE 61 
 
 rel with the dance or its devotees, and no sym 
 pathy for the moralist who would abolish it. 
 The dance is not my form of symbolism, but it 
 gives pleasure to other people. No one has any 
 right to take it away from them. Dancing, like 
 dress, can be neither moral nor immoral.. Its 
 basis is sex attraction, and that is another thing 
 which has been debased by superstitious cus 
 toms. Dancers may express sensuality if their 
 minds are sensual ; they may smirch any other 
 symbol in the same way. Hypocrites may 
 dance, but not all dancers are hypocrites. The 
 universe is a mixture of things good and bad as 
 seen from man s tower of observation, but the 
 universe was not made for him; he is only one 
 of the infinitesimal incidents in it. He must 
 make choice between the opposites he finds 
 strewn on the floor of the infinite. No Pass-A- 
 Law-Club need worry about public morality; 
 
 fthe public has no positive morality; that is an 
 individual attribute, self -controlled, or not con 
 trolled at all. From my vantage-point of the 
 super-sensuous, I see capable, sensible people of 
 this day picking their way through the laby 
 rinths of good and bad finding what is good 
 for them, and also what is bad but their sal 
 vation is in their own hands, never in the hands 
 of the Pass-A-Law-Against-It Society. If there 
 
62 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 is on this earth such a thing as an abstract, 
 absolute goodness, it can only appeal to man in 
 the form of an invitation, not a command. The 
 goodness within will not seek badness without. 
 It will accept the invitation of good. It accepts 
 but never surrenders." 
 
 The log collapsed in one last, fitful flame and 
 all was dark. My friend arose and I followed 
 him out of the cabin into the cool night air. 
 The Sickle and Ursa Major burned in glory just 
 over the mountain top. Far away in the canon 
 coyotes were holding a concert. "Just think," 
 my friend exclaimed, "down in the lowlands, in 
 the cities, around the world, with planets and 
 stars above the earth and below it, with the 
 earth itself a shining planet in the heavens, 
 human beings are ignoring it all they for 
 whom some believe this universe was made 
 ignoring it all, while they devote themselves 
 solely to the measuring of skirts!" 
 
 We pondered a few minutes under the im 
 personal stars. They vouchsafed us no revela 
 tion on the ways of men. Down in the canon 
 the coyotes went on with their concert, while 
 an owl, somewhere in the trees, complained to 
 the night. 
 
THE COUNT 
 
 The light of day had faded into a dull red 
 along the western horizon when I approached 
 Lizard Lodge, after a hard tramp on the moun 
 tain trails. The old, familiar eating sounds 
 proceeded from the burro shed as I passed, 
 while savory odors of supper with the aroma of 
 coffee drifted out from the Master s cabin. How 
 dear to the heart are domestic sounds and odors ! 
 
 "Good evening, Deka Parsec," I greeted, as I 
 framed myself in the open door. My good 
 friend was standing by the stove; in one hand 
 he held a dish-cloth and in the other a fork. 
 On the fork several pieces of sizzling bacon were 
 impaled, while others smoked in the frying pan. 
 
 "Enter and welcome to the hospitalities of 
 Lizard Lodge," he shouted, making at the same 
 time a whimsical bow and a ceremonious sweep 
 of the dish-cloth. He looked like a troubadour 
 of old. 
 
 "Thank you very kindly, Deka Parsec," I said 
 as we met in a hearty handshake. 
 
 "Eliminate the French, if you please, and take 
 a chair by the table. Supper is almost ready." 
 
64 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 "That is not French," I corrected. "That s 
 your new name. The committee on names here 
 by reports. I am the committee and the hon 
 orable chairman thereof, as per your author 
 ity to me given on that day when you said that 
 high explosives made your old name forever a 
 misnomer. You are now Deka Parsec." 
 
 The Master of the Lodge solemnly filled two 
 glasses with water and handed me one. He 
 held his glass aloft and looked at me. "Here s 
 to Deka Parsec," I said impressively, "may he 
 live long and reveal all his honest convictions." 
 "The deed is done," he added, and then we 
 drank the cold water and set our glasses down 
 in unison, after the manner of men who offi 
 ciate at sacred rites. 
 
 "Now that s settled," said Deka Parsec with 
 a merry laugh, "and may I ask," he continued, 
 "how you happened to choose the name ?" 
 
 "I am almost ashamed to confess," I an 
 swered, "but the truth is I merely took the 
 name of a great mystic who once lived in Ara 
 bia, the kind-hearted Cesrap Aked, and turned 
 the name around to disguise it. I had long 
 since given up all hope of finding a name 
 that in itself could be truly representative of 
 you." 
 
THE COUNT 65 
 
 "Well, that is an odd circumstance," he con 
 tinued, "for you found a measuring or symboli 
 cal word after all. Dekaparsec is a unit of 
 measure for distances inconceivable, used by as 
 tronomers ; it represents the distance that light 
 travels in thirty-two and six-tenths years, flash 
 ing through space at the speed of one hundred 
 and eighty-six thousand miles per second. Thus 
 you have decreed that I share alone with the 
 most gigantic foot-rule in the universe the 
 power of measuring all save the infinite. You 
 have unwittingly worked according to specifica 
 tions and built better than you knew. And 
 now let us eat." 
 
 There is no sauce like hunger and no tonic 
 like mountain air. With both of them favor 
 ing me, I found the supper at Lizard Lodge a 
 feast fit for the gods. When it was over and 
 we found ourselves before the fire-place again, 
 I asked my friend for the news of the mountain 
 since my former visit. 
 
 "Did I ever speak of my old friend Count 
 Taprobana ?" he began. 
 
 "No, Deka," I answered, "you have never 
 mentioned any of your old friends." 
 
 "Well," he proceeded with a reminiscent 
 smile, "one of the interesting phases of my 
 shell-shocked world is that it brings me strange 
 
66 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 and eccentric personalities with whom I am able 
 to live on terms of congenial friendship. Count 
 Taprobana is a man who lives in a world of odor 
 like a dog. But for my speeded-up nerves I 
 could never have entered into the spirit of his 
 unique discourse on effluvium. I surprised the 
 Count one day on the Mt. Lowe Trail, as he 
 stood in rapture breathing the perfume of flow 
 ering sage and manzanita. We had met before 
 in other lands across the sea. It is our custom, 
 at each successive meeting, to take up a sun 
 dered and unfinished conversation on odors to 
 take it up just where we left it, and to carry it 
 on into the unexplored regions of effluvium. We 
 came to this mutual understanding because at 
 our first meeting we found ourselves loving the 
 same thing the soul of a rose. I displayed an 
 elementary knowledge of odor on that occasion 
 by classifying eau de senteur as a synthetic or 
 artificial perfume. The Count was pleased, and 
 by the grace of our friendship at first sight, 
 he waxed confidential and told me that he was 
 capable of appreciating delicate gradations of 
 odor far beyond the preception of all other 
 men." 
 
 "And what did the Count think of our moun 
 tains?" I asked. 
 
 Deka laughed softly. "I must explain an- 
 
THE COUNT 67 
 
 other phase of shell shock," he confided. "It is 
 the impossibility of giving you the substance 
 of a conversation like this one with Count Ta- 
 probana, but I can give you the conversation 
 itself, word for word, as a phonograph would 
 give it." 
 
 "That is better yet," I said, and Deka, gazing 
 into the embers, began his story: 
 
 "Ah, my pupil," the Count exclaimed, "We 
 meet again; let me see we were discussing 
 frankincense and myrrh. Yes, after inspecting 
 the perfume factory at Grasse, our conversa 
 tion turned to the powerful, medicinal perfumes 
 of the Orient, and we reviewed the events of 
 our last expedition for Siberian musk." 
 
 "You are right Count," I replied, "and then 
 you took me for a walk through the grounds 
 of your estate." 
 
 "Once more, in fancy, I saw the Count s cha 
 teau nestling among the flowers midway be 
 tween the descending Alps and the Mediter 
 ranean. Ages ago, so the legend runs, the god 
 dess of sweet odors breathed upon the meadows 
 of Taprobana, commanding the airs of the 
 mountains to meet the airs of the sea and there 
 to kiss into being the souls of the flowers. This 
 is the true reason, so the natives say, why the 
 
68 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 village of Grasse in Southeastern France is the 
 perfumery capital of the world." 
 
 "Yes," the Count continued, "we were dis 
 cussing oriental incense and the custom of the 
 eastern ladies to stifle and woo their lovers in 
 the occult fumes of frankincense and myrrh, or 
 to lure them by the more earthly and sensual 
 appeal of musk." 
 
 "We were following the trail at a leisurely 
 pace. The Count plucked a spray of flowering 
 sage and tested its fragrance with the uncon 
 scious and habitual manner of a true connois 
 seur." 
 
 "Oh!" he exclaimed, as we rounded a curve 
 in the path, "Inspiration Point! I could never 
 forget it. Yes, it is indeed a place of inspira 
 tion; it is glorious, but after all, it inspires 
 by color and form alone. I have only to give 
 myself up to the medium of odor and I may 
 breathe the very soul of the cosmos. It is then 
 that I touch the infinite. How may I tell man 
 kind of these sensations ? Odor is the vapor of 
 music, the language of love, and the proof of 
 a reality transcending our three-dimensional 
 universe. It floats gossamer-webbed through 
 the ethereal spaces and broods over our hearts 
 in twilight harmonies. It burns like a flame of 
 eternal ecstasy. It is a diaphanous fabric woven 
 
THE COUNT 69 
 
 from solid things, a veil of electrons fluttering 
 between mind and matter." 
 
 "The Count paused while he gazed across the 
 expanse of lowlands stretching from the base 
 of the mountains to the sea." "What a lovely 
 prospect," he exclaimed. "How exquisite all 
 these colors; how celestial these perfumes! 
 Surely, at last I sense the bouquet, the grand 
 symphony of California." 
 
 "He closed his eyes and was silent for a few 
 minutes, lost in the land of effluvium. Like a 
 hound he sniffed up the wind and sought odori 
 ferous information from the infinite. He seemed 
 to be receiving messages from worlds far be 
 yond my ken. Then, with a little sigh of re 
 gret, he came back to earth." 
 
 "Did I tell you at Grasse," he resumed, "that 
 every person is a bouquet of odor, each in ac 
 cordance with his own personality, and each by 
 virtue of that aroma in his soul ?" 
 
 "Yes," I replied, "but your remarks were in 
 terrupted by the arrival of the stage from 
 Nice. It was the day you left France for Cey 
 lon." 
 
 "So it was, so it was," said the Count, "I had 
 it in mind then to explain that we ourselves con 
 stitute exquisite tones and overtones in frag- 
 
70 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 ranee. These human bouquets are distilled and 
 combined by the alchemy of our thoughts. Ex 
 pressed in terms of music, we are chords, har 
 monies, melodies or symphonies. You, for ex 
 ample, my congenial friend, are a bouquet in 
 chord C, made up of santal, geranium, acacia, 
 orange blossom and camphor. This bouquet is 
 the index of your soul and is understood and 
 appreciated by dogs and super-dogs. In the uni 
 verse of odor I am a super-dog. 
 
 "A lady of refinement knows by intuition 
 what melody sings itself through her individual 
 domain of fragrance, and when, as a concession 
 to a world obtuse in knowledge of odor, she pur 
 chases a commercial perfume, she tries to find 
 one that agrees with her individual song. If 
 her heart radiates sweet golden-rod and mag 
 nolia she will not scent her fabrics with iris or 
 eau de cologne. Commercial perfume can not 
 overcome the subtle vapor of individuality, but 
 it can produce painful discords. A person whose 
 mind exhales attar of roses or jonquils, would 
 suffer like a victim on the rack if subjected to 
 the fumes of the oriental seraglios, where musk, 
 civet and sandal-wood reek like steam from a 
 caldron. Even frankincense and myrrh, with 
 all their religious associations, would strike dis 
 cords in a soul redolent with azalea, heliotrope 
 
THE COUNT 71 
 
 and mignonette. Ah, yes, odors symbolize hu 
 man souls. Do you remember little Georgette 
 of Nice? She had the spirit of lavender and 
 there was Marie, the pretty girl you met at 
 Lyons. She was truly the twin sister of thyme, 
 and the sweetheart of an apple blossom." 
 
 "And what of the cities, Count?" I asked 
 when he paused again. "Did you not tell me 
 once that there is a bouquet for each city in the 
 world?" 
 
 "Yes, the spirit of a city is the composite 
 spirit of all its inhabitants. I am in rapport 
 with Paris; it is my dear friend, and more. 
 It is like a tropical shore that has the power to 
 throw its odorous breath over the vast spaces 
 before it, and I am lulled by a strange intoxica 
 tion long before I see a tower or spire of the city 
 itself. What is this bouquet, this farflung web 
 of witchery ? It is a magic blend the aroma of 
 burning faggots, the sweetness of grass after a 
 shower, cinnamon and cedar, roses, bergamot 
 and iris, the subtle air from old tapestry, and 
 perhaps a suggestion of pungent odors like the 
 ones that emanate from the poison cabinet of 
 Catherine de Medici at Blois. Super-dogs even 
 detect the odor of blood in the Place de Greve, 
 but the guillotine worked for a short season 
 only, while every spring we have apple bios- 
 
72 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 soms. The sweet odors of the great city, like 
 the virtues of its people, overwhelm the bad and 
 produce the bouquet adorable." 
 
 "Just then a humming bird darted past us. 
 Count Taprobana forgot his beloved Paris and 
 was away on the chase. He did not catch the 
 bird, but he discovered a rare flower and a new 
 odor in a thicket where the chase had led him. 
 Before we parted I requested him to give me the 
 odoriferous horoscope for Los Angeles. He 
 promised to have it ready for my delectation 
 when we meet again." 
 
 Deka Parsec finished his story with a little 
 laugh, and tossed another log on the fire. "I 
 wonder where my dear Count is now," he mused 
 "inhaling the miasma of Borneo very likely, 
 or he may be dreaming over the lotus flowers of 
 Egypt." 
 
 "If Count Taprobana should ever come to 
 Lizard Lodge, send for me at once," I ordered, 
 "for I would have him classify the matchless 
 symphony produced by the aroma of coffee and 
 the odor of frying bacon as they mingle and 
 float upon the cold, hungry air of the mountain. 
 
CEREMONY 
 
 At Home, Lizard Lodge. 
 Dear Friend : 
 
 On my last trip up from Sierra Madre I 
 brought a large package of magazines and news 
 papers. Paloma, as leading burro, was given 
 the honor of carrying all this literature, and 
 he seemed fully conscious of the dignity. 
 
 I have not gone very far into the mass of 
 Sunday papers and serious magazines at this 
 writing, because it is my custom first to absorb 
 all the wisdom to be found in the humorous pub 
 lications those precious periodicals that have 
 the liberty of telling truths without incurring 
 the displeasure of sad-minded people. 
 
 "Excuse me, God, there s the phone," sa*d a 
 lady at her prayers. 
 
 This joke appeared in one of the magazines, 
 which, in its wayward spirit, says whatever 
 passes through its mind. Now, you may re 
 member that since the day when you named 
 me, I have been the proud possessor of one 
 additional attribute ; I mean the quality of meas 
 uring states of mind and weighing ideas. Deka 
 
 73 
 
74 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 Parsec must live up to his name. Accordingly 
 I tried to discover the basis of the humor, or 
 alleged humor, of this prayer joke, and I came 
 to the conclusion that it acquired force as a 
 jest, if it is a jest at all, from the universal 
 custom of approaching God in a solemn, sad 
 and cringing mood, as an abject subject ap 
 proaches a king. The typical earthly king, ac 
 cording to history, is in a state of constant 
 flutter regarding his own prerogatives and the 
 marks of kingly honor that must be accorded 
 him. It is unimaginable that one of his grov 
 eling subjects should ask him to wait while the 
 clanging of a telephone is stilled. But if a 
 slave dare not ask an earthly king to stand by 
 while a simple duty is discharged, how infinitely 
 presumptuous was the lady at her prayers who 
 put her God on the waiting list? Yes, the mag 
 azine joke-smith, schooled in the etiquette of 
 royal courts, thought this was the acme of in 
 congruity and hence very good humor; at least 
 good after a manner of thinking. 
 
 The more I thought about this jest the more 
 I came to feel that it was without the elements 
 of humor; it merely stated a fact. It reminded 
 me of another ancedote. It is said that a great 
 man, upon whose shoulders there rested the 
 burdens of a nation, was walking alone in a 
 
CEREMONY 75 
 
 quiet lane, when he met a little boy who asked 
 him to hold his toys. The great man accepted 
 the commission and stood meekly waiting while 
 the boy climbed a tree for some ripe cherries 
 that had tempted him. It would have meant 
 nothing to the boy had he known that a Prime 
 Minister was his servant; the great man per 
 formed the service in a happy and spontaneous 
 way without a thought of exacting from the 
 child any homage or signs of humility. This 
 story was not supposed to contain any humor. 
 We are told to draw from it the lesson that 
 true greatness in human beings never exacts 
 any marks of servility or artificial tokens of re 
 spect. Only insignificant kings or barbarous 
 chieftains demand such expressions from their 
 slaves. Many other stories with the same moral 
 are told, but when I apply my foot-rule to this 
 one, I find that we all admire a sense of humor 
 and the democratic spirit. We are slipping ever 
 farther and farther away from kingly worship. 
 Even our metaphors and comparison contain 
 few royal allusions. "Happy as a king," is a 
 phrase that strikes a discordant note, for kings 
 are no longer happy. Fawning and adulation on 
 the part of their subjects are things of the 
 past, and these were once the food of kings. 
 In the heart of mankind there is now a love 
 
76 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 for little children and an appreciation of their 
 naive ways. There is also a love for animals 
 whose rights we recognize and respect. Our 
 democracy is spreading out beyond the confines 
 of mere humanity and is taking in all living 
 things. 
 
 Having applied the Deka Parsec rule to these 
 sentiments which are so universal in our day, 
 I returned to the jest of the lady at her prayers. 
 Here we have a person on such intimate terms 
 with her God that she does not hesitate to ex 
 cuse herself for a moment to answer the tele 
 phone. In the light of such an intimacy all 
 humor of the joke-maker vanishes. The lady s 
 conception of God contained no monarchial trap 
 pings, no scepter, no imperial attributes, no 
 hurling of edicts from a lofty throne; indeed, 
 her conception could not have contained any 
 throne at all. It was with her as though she 
 had been chatting with her earthly father when 
 the telephone bell rang. "Excuse me, Daddy," 
 she would have said, "there s the phone." And 
 Daddy would not have been peevish about it. 
 for he occupies no royal dias, but something far 
 better, a cozy corner in his daughter s heart. 
 
 We can imagine the lady of the magazine joke 
 having a hearty laugh with her God, for a God 
 that does not sit on an old-fashioned, imperial, 
 
CEREMONY 77 
 
 barbarous throne, can unbend and laugh with 
 his children He who must know the infinitude 
 of laughter and joy. He can hold his children s 
 toys while they climb trees. He is never in 
 danger of losing the glory that is eternal when 
 His children hold in their minds and hearts a 
 conception of Him which is love transformed into 
 terms that finite beings can understand. It is 
 evident that the lady of the prayer had dis 
 covered in her God an inexhaustible supply of 
 innocent joys, laughter, comradeship and pa 
 ternal love. 
 
 Before I was shell-shocked I took it as a mat 
 ter of course that when a person approached 
 his God he must become solemn, cringing, sin- 
 conscious and unworthy. This impression was 
 accentuated in my mind by the fact that my in 
 structors always managed to have God asso 
 ciated with death, punishments, rewards, mel 
 ancholy sermons and funeral wreaths. The im 
 agery of old discourses on religion led me to 
 think that God was like an earthly king. When 
 I informed myself regarding the qualities of 
 kings I found that, for the most part in history, 
 they suffered from perpetual grouches and were 
 ever hungering for tokens of servility from 
 their hapless subjects. Everything was so sol 
 emn with them that they needed the assistance 
 
78 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 of buffoons or court jesters to put them in a 
 livable mood. 
 
 In my present shell-shocked condition I se~e 
 no wisdom in the words of any historical figures 
 that grouped themselves about the thrones, ex 
 cept the words of the hired fools. They were 
 permitted to tell the truth, and often did so. 
 From them I learned that we are not really 
 fit to live until we shed our solemnity, and not 
 ready to die until we realize that all is vanity. 
 Who has the right to say that God never ap 
 preciates a joke? If all things finite are a part 
 of the infinite, there must be an eternal reser 
 voir of humor. 
 
 What basis is there in rational thought for 
 believing that God enjoys nothing but the cring 
 ing, servile, fear-haunted and contemptible 
 qualities in His creatures ? When I was normal 
 I took it for granted that a finite creature must 
 give every outward manifestation of his insig 
 nificance when approaching the Infinite, but now 
 that I am in a world of my own, this is anything 
 but obvious to me. It seems now that God made 
 sunshine as well as shadow, and that normal 
 people all emphasize the shadow. They darken 
 their church windows to keep out the light of 
 day and they symbolize the passing of their 
 friends into the next world by wearing black 
 
CEREMONY 79 
 
 clothes. Even the Indian Medicine Man, who 
 knows no classical theory, is a solemn creature. 
 The nearer he gets to his God the less joy he 
 expresses. A hearty laugh would be fatal to 
 his fearsome hocus pocus. Religious authority 
 everywhere, among the civilized and the uncivil 
 ized, is prone to wear a long face. 
 
 Since the time when I was in the hospital 
 that no-man s land between this world and the 
 next my communications with the Infinite 
 have been shorn of awe, humility, unworthiness 
 and cowardice. I am not now conscious of hav 
 ing any self-seeking honors to bestow upon sub 
 limity. Kings, gods, angels, fairies and human 
 beings all mix on equal footing in my un-the- 
 ological democracy. 
 
 When I was normal the cowardice of ancient 
 times clung like a rag to the form of my wor 
 ship. The exploding shell tore that rag away 
 with other rags. Today I have more patriotic 
 sentiment than I ever had before. I have lost 
 the ceremonious expression of religion and pa 
 triotism but not the sentiments themselves. 
 The over-solemnity associated with things re 
 ligious is something like the military salute, a 
 meaningless form. The salute is a relic of 
 feudal times when one man was not as good as 
 another before the law. There is nothing in it 
 
80 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 that can increase a man s native patriotism or 
 charm into existence any love or respect if these 
 feelings are absent from his soul; neither does 
 it in any way strengthen military discipline or 
 further the laudable purposes of a patriotic 
 army; it is only a gratuitous symbol of a slav 
 ery that no longer exists, either in theory or 
 fact. 
 
 Perhaps the sadness and ceremony so evident 
 in religion have their apologists, but I remem 
 ber very well that, when in my former state, I 
 was instructed to pull over my head a kind 
 of melancholy hood before communicating with 
 God, I had a very strong inclination not to com 
 municate at all. When I had no complaints to 
 make I had nothing to say to God, for be it re 
 membered, while I was normal I felt that it was 
 wrong to tell Him any jokes or to make Him a 
 party in felicitations. If my youthful and 
 grateful heart overflowed with song I was any 
 thing but ceremonious and solemn in my tenden 
 cies; at such times I was happy, and as happi 
 ness was taboo in realms religious, I went else 
 where with my exuberance. But in my present 
 state the difference between me and normal peo 
 ple is that I am just as likely to tell God a fool 
 ish thing as a wise one. I am far more inclined 
 to rejoice with Him over the sweets of this 
 
CEREMONY 81 
 
 world than to mourn over its sadness. Shell- 
 shock has taken from me all my ancient cere 
 mony of woe. 
 
 Excuse me, there s Paloma calling. 
 As ever, 
 
 DEKA PARSEC. 
 
HELPING TO BUILD ROME 
 
 Deka Parsec s letter moved me to visit Lizard 
 Lodge again. I came with the hope of finding 
 him in a reminiscent mood that might lead to 
 some tale of battle horror, but battle horrors 
 did not lie near his fountain of expression that 
 night. 
 
 "Did I tell you about my trip to Rome?" he 
 began when we had taken our places by the cozy 
 fireplace. 
 
 "No, Deka," I answered, and settled myself 
 comfortably into the rustic arm chair. 
 
 "Well," he continued, "when I had recov 
 ered sufficiently from my first stage of shock 
 and could be classified with the convalescents, 
 they let me go with a sergeant on leave to Italy, 
 I remember it as the time when I helped to build 
 Rome." 
 
 "Historians have always failed to suggest, 
 in their tales of human weal and woe, the vivid 
 emotions that actual historic scenes call up in 
 my soul. I believe they fail in the same way 
 with other souls. None of the writers, whose 
 
 83 
 
84 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 books I read in my youth, even hinted at the 
 awe, tinged with an exalted joy, which Rome 
 evoked when I stood in her august presence. 
 Perhaps I should thank the prosaic authors who 
 compiled cold-blooded histories. Their negli 
 gence and lack of imagination left everything 
 for me to discover alone. They made it possi 
 ble for me to be surprised at the actuality of 
 Rome, but they also cheated me out of a fortune, 
 which I might have enjoyed, bit by bit, during 
 the years when I viewed history from afar. 
 Had the historians who ministered unto my 
 childhood, not couched their message in a stand 
 ardized jargon, and had they not deemed it un 
 professional to discover and reveal the honest 
 emotions of historical figures, I would have gar 
 nered treasures from the books they gave me, 
 but, after reading their versions, it remained 
 for me to visit Rome, and there, in the presence 
 of mighty symbols, to cast out forever the sta 
 tistical concepts that had formed my picture. 
 
 No historian had even given me a hint that 
 the ruins of the Forum would conjure up in my 
 mind a disturbing vision of myself. They had 
 merely given me names and dates, leaving out 
 human associations and the magic power of 
 actual scenes. They left out the better part of 
 history. Where had I been during all the cen- 
 
HELPING TO BUILD ROME 85 
 
 turies of sunshine and rain that transformed 
 the noble edifices of the Forum into the shape 
 less ruins of today ? Where had I been through 
 out the centuries, throughout eternity? With 
 in the walls of the Colosseum near the Forum, 
 are castles of feudal lords. Many centuries had 
 elapsed between the days of Vespasian, when 
 the Colosseum was new, and the time when the 
 insignificant castles took form in the deserted 
 arena, but today all are in ruins, the outer and 
 the inner, the old and the new. A thousand 
 years passed before the coming of the outlaw 
 knights, and still another thousand years have 
 buried their names forever." 
 
 The faraway stare of revery dreamed in 
 Deka s eyes. For him the fire-place had faded 
 away, while a distant place and another time 
 blended into one here and now. He stopped for 
 a moment, just a little surprised, it seemed, to 
 find himself again in Rome. 
 
 "During all that time," he went on, "I, who 
 stand here today and marvel, did not exist. I, 
 from far away America, feel very exotic and out 
 of place, standing on the sanded floor of the 
 Colosseum. To me the wonder of wonders and 
 miracle of miracles, is not the Colosseum itself 
 but the fact that I am here. 
 
86 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 "Historians did not prepare me for this poig 
 nant introspection, but my mood is, for me at 
 least, a vital part of history and a living part 
 of Rome. It was this feeling which prompted 
 me to wedge a tiny block of stone into a crevice 
 of the wall. I selected a place near the portal of 
 a den, where, in the long ago, wild beasts were 
 goaded along narrow alleys to the arena. In the 
 walls are still the marks of iron bars and gates. 
 It was from this point that the lions charged, 
 in the frenzy of their hunger, upon the Chris 
 tian martyrs and devoured them in the presence 
 of heartless thousands. In my own conceit I 
 pondered over the fact that a thousand years 
 hence another American may stand in the same 
 place; perhaps his eye will fall upon my little 
 block of stone, which represents my own re-ar 
 rangement of the Colosseum. Will he know and 
 understand? Perhaps not, but I can wish and 
 hope that he may. 
 
 "I have placed myself in a category by the 
 wedging of that stone. I occupy a place in his 
 tory. Vespasin and Titus built the Colosseum 
 in the year A. D. 80 ; the feudal lords despoiled 
 the walls in part and built their play castles in 
 the arena a thousand years later, and still long 
 afterwards, almost another thousand years, I 
 wedged my block of stone into a crevice of the 
 
HELPING TO BUILD ROME 87 
 
 wall and thus learned my most important les 
 son in history. There that block of stone, my 
 symbol will remain, for I concealed it well and 
 wedged it in with all my might, but where will 
 I be during all the coming years ? As I ponder 
 thus the echoes within the great ruin assure 
 me that my little wedge of stone the token 
 of my passing will speak just as truly for my 
 safety and hapiness in that mysterious future, 
 when I no longer live, as it spoke of my blissful 
 non-existence a thousand years ago. 
 
 "In the presence of stones thus endowed with 
 the power to speak I always listen attentively. 
 The talking stones in the great amphitheatre 
 ask why it is that theologians, psychologists 
 and historians never show any curiosity about 
 my pre-natal state. They speculate about the 
 future alone. Where were you a thousand 
 years ago ? shout the stones of the Colosseum. 
 Do you not know that our tiers have supported 
 the weight of a hundred thousand people, and 
 that those people, frenzied with the blood-lust, 
 gazed down from these heights to the arena 
 where gladiators slaughtered each other and 
 where wild beasts devoured human beings? 
 Where were you during all these stirring times ? 
 Were you dead or sleeping? Where, indeed, I 
 wonder, had I been so long in safe unconscious- 
 
88 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 ness? What perils I escaped? What heroic 
 battles I might have waged ! What cruel, brave 
 scenes I missed ! Yet these echoes make me be 
 lieve that when the stone which I moved to a 
 new position today, has lain there a thousand 
 years, I shall again be as safe and happy as I 
 was on the day when hundreds of victims spilled 
 their blood upon the floor of the ancient Colos 
 seum. 
 
 "Near a pillar I found a growing acanthus. 
 Its leaves are fresh and green today. About it 
 there is no air of ostentation. It seems so 
 young and diffident; yet in it is the venerable 
 parent of the Corinthian capital. Greek slaves 
 taught the Romans to carve acanthus leaves on 
 their capitals, and so it happens that the stone 
 acanthus of art crumbles with age, while at the 
 foot of its own pillar the great ancestor herself 
 is alive with the chlorophyll of eternal youth. 
 
 "The historians did not prepare me for young 
 things among the ruins. Neither did they pre 
 pare me for little children in Rome. They left 
 me, by implication, with the impression that all 
 people within the ancient walls are old, but 
 childhood sings by the decaying walls and youtK 
 shouts with joy from the palace* and hovels of 
 the new city whose very foundations are the 
 stones of forgotten temples. I seem to feel that 
 
HELPING TO BUILD ROME 89 
 
 childhood sang in the same way when Rome 
 ruled the world. I am sure that Nature, in that 
 long ago, was full of the same impersonal, cos 
 mic love-hate and cruel kindness that mark her 
 ways today. She harmonized the songs of little 
 children and their rippling laughter with the 
 roar of devouring beasts and the clash of bloody 
 swords. A thousand years in the future, when 
 I am unconscious again, children will sing 
 among the same ruins and the Corinthian acan 
 thus will be as young as ever. Only the carved 
 leaves on the capital will show the marks of 
 time. They will be a little more weathered 
 and a little nearer again to the formless stone 
 from which the forgotten sculptor raised them. 
 
 "These young things of the future enlist my 
 fancy today, but the stone I wedged into the 
 wall commands my romantic interest in an 
 exclusive and deathless way. I have modified 
 the Colosseum; I have taken my place in his 
 tory with Vespasian, Titus and the robber lords 
 of the middle ages. I share the vanity of their 
 glory and also their helplessness, because when 
 the future day comes, the day of which my 
 wedged stone in the Colosseum is dreaming, 
 neither the ancient emperors, the robber lords, 
 the Christian martyrs nor I, will have the power 
 
90 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 to move even that tiny block of granite, or to 
 win from strangers the paltry tribute of a tear. 
 
 "I love to gloat over this little cogitation, this 
 futile bid for prolonged consciousness and con 
 trol over exterior things. I have stolen a march 
 on the learned historians who never by an in 
 finitesimal word anticipated my precious inter 
 pretation of dead stones in the Flavian Amphi 
 theater. Flies buzz lazily through the archways ; 
 the rank acanthus grows by the crumbling col 
 umn; sunshine and showers alternate, and my 
 flattering stone hides in the crevice of the wall. 
 Whatever my own fate may be, my token shall 
 last for countless ages. It is just this inexor 
 able continuance of physical symbols that has 
 the power of pre-figuring to me my own fate. 
 What of my tragic inability to lift even a finger 
 and stir the little stone which I so vainly mis 
 placed as the witness of my passing day ! The 
 little stone, the giant amphitheatre and human 
 history will all again be far beyond my grasp. 
 
 "Echoes from the granite galleries upbraided 
 me an hour ago for my unconsciousness. They 
 said that I was dead in that age of steel when 
 sacrifices and glorious triumphs hallowed the 
 very ground where I stood. Yet I am alive to 
 day, and not all the emperors of mighty Rome, 
 not all the gladiators and heroes who died upon 
 
HELPING TO BUILD ROME 91 
 
 these sands can summon power enough to move 
 one tiny stone. And so, in the precincts of van 
 ished grandeur I catch a new meaning in the 
 gift of life. I have more earthly power in one 
 hand today than all the hordes of Imperial 
 Rome. Some day I also must give up that power 
 and join the silent ones; yet I have passed this 
 way. I have taken to heart one lesson in his 
 tory. My poor, little stone, wedged in the crev 
 ice of the wall shall speak for me and say : 
 
 " Tor none more than thou are the present and 
 
 the past, 
 For none more than thou is immortality/ 
 
 "Thus it comes about that the acanthus and 
 the Colosseum have taught me a lesson in his 
 tory; they have made my life more vivid and 
 my native shell-shocked sentimentality still 
 more sentimental." 
 
LOVE MURDERS 
 
 It was only a sun-faded newspaper, two years 
 old, blown by the wind into a tangle of sage 
 brush on the Sierra Madre trail, but it had a 
 strange power over Deka Parsec. Carefully he 
 straightened out the crumpled relic, disclosing 
 a headline that had once flashed its enigmatic 
 legend: "Love Murder." 
 
 "This murder is less than a memory now," 
 said Deka, more to himself than to me, as he 
 held the paper in his hand ; "all the leading char 
 acters are forgotten and the thousands of read 
 ers, thrice thrilled by the cruel details, are now 
 inspired by love-deaths up-to-date." 
 
 "Naturally you wonder at my interest," he 
 went on, after reading a few words of the open 
 ing paragraph, "but tragedies like this one are 
 daily re-enacted and blazoned forth in narra 
 tives of other human combinations. They in 
 terest and instruct me because they show how 
 I differ from the dashing Lotharios of the hour. 
 You may remember the circumstances of my 
 romance how when I became conscious again 
 after months in the army hospital, and received 
 
 93 
 
94 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 word of my sweetheart s marriage, the news 
 did not disturb me. My love and the beloved 
 had become separate entities. I was neither 
 disappointed nor angry. But in spite of my 
 mental calm, there are times when it seems that 
 I should try for health again, and, emulating 
 other men, make an effort at least to conjure 
 up a manly rage over my own love-grievance. 
 My justification equals that of the hero in this 
 ancient tragedy. Yet I fear a return to the 
 healthy state that this popular story presup 
 poses, with its vigorous self-assertion and rush 
 ing of events to the fearsome climax. I shrink 
 from it, even though I know that by thus acting 
 the part of righteous indignation I would win 
 the praise of my peers. When I loved and 
 thought like other people, I seemed to under 
 stand why the marriage of a lover s sweetheart 
 to another man should change the status of 
 love itself, but now I feel that it would be 
 the most natural thing for the true lover, 
 though disappointed, to rejoice not because he 
 wishes to affect a sort of religious self-efface 
 ment but simply because he loves. Yet normal 
 people tell me that this is not a practical kind of 
 affection. They declare that love may be lost 
 or stolen and that the true lover defends his 
 possessions." 
 
LOVE MURDERS 95 
 
 "Yes," I admitted, "even women like to know 
 that their lovers are willing to do battle in de 
 fense of love in jeopardy." 
 
 "I have long observed that phenomenon," said 
 Deka, "and I find that possession of the loved 
 one is deemed the all-important prerogative of 
 love. If the lover is thwarted in that possession 
 his love grows more intense, culminating in 
 thoughts of death for his sweetheart. If he is 
 a man of action, the lethal blow follows soon, 
 and the newspapers chronicle another loving 
 episode. Thus from the news of the day I learn 
 that this is the last, convincing expression of an 
 undying affection, and yet, in my shell-shocked 
 state I cannot appreciate the token. Once, in 
 an ungarded moment, I spoke disparagingly of 
 love-daggers and poisons; I even went so far 
 as to question the devotion of the dagger s icy 
 caress, but my auditors exclaimed in chorus: 
 Did he not kill her? This I could not deny. 
 Intimidated by the concensus of opinion against 
 me, I did not again express my doubt. I had 
 already advertised my own too obvious eccen 
 tricity." 
 
 "But, Deka," I protested, "newspaper stories 
 like this one do not reflect the true opinions of 
 the community." 
 
 "Possibly not," he conceded. "We might well 
 
96 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 agree to call this a special case, but if we do this 
 we must admit that the news every day is spe 
 cial and thus see the exception become the rule. 
 Moreover, the publishers must assume that the 
 motives given are the kind that satisfy the 
 readers, because the readers do not protest. 
 They buy the news with avidity. The absorp 
 tion of love-murder literature by an enlightened 
 public is very significant. For me this is dis 
 concerting, to say the least, and it tells me how 
 hopelessly abnormal I am in everything that re 
 lates to the activities of conduct. 
 
 "Now, in this thrilling tale of love and trag 
 edy the writer does not hint at a motive which 
 I can understand. Love, of course, is men 
 tioned, but that is the very phase of the story 
 that, for me, supplies the paradox. Always the 
 same old question arises: Why, if the lover 
 really loved, could he not rejoice in the reported 
 happiness of his beloved? The writer here 
 seems to assume that the girl s marriage to an 
 other man was the vivid incident that moved 
 the lover to play his tragic role. But what has 
 marriage to do with love ? Are we to infer that 
 marriage must, of necessity be either the cus 
 todian or the thief of love? What if the be 
 loved had taken up the study of geometry or 
 relativity instead of devoting her thoughts to a 
 
LOVE MURDERS 97 
 
 man? Would she also have earned, in that 
 event, the prize of sudden death at the hands 
 of her lover ? Obviously no sentimental or shell- 
 shocked person who asks these elementary ques 
 tions, can grasp the meaning of this mystery. 
 There must be a nameless something which I 
 have lost an unmeasured force that fur 
 nishes the inspiration for weddings, divorces, 
 moving picture drama and love-murders. This 
 nameless something may be discovered some 
 day by a wizard of science, and then we shall 
 fully understand. In the meantime, however, I 
 can only stand and wonder while my un-shell- 
 shocked neighbors go on loving people that they 
 do not even seem to like, and killing strangers 
 whose hearts their own hearts have never 
 known, all because they love them so." 
 
 "But, Deka," I interrupted, "it is not clear 
 to me why you should have any regrets about 
 your status of isolation. All the benefits are on 
 your side. The peace of mind should abide 
 with you." 
 
 "Yes," he answered, "and so it seems to me 
 when I am totally abnormal, but sometimes, 
 when the air is heavy with the smoke of forest 
 fires, or when all space is charged with a kind of 
 electricity that makes me negative, I become 
 lonesome and turn instinctively in the direction 
 
98 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 of my former self. I long for things that are 
 commonplace and free from the tendrils of 
 dreams ; I remember dull, plodding people who 
 suggest homes and material interests. At such 
 times I almost cherish the ways of men who 
 produce food, repair automobiles and fight for 
 love. While under the spell of this loneliness 
 I reproach myself for the neutrality of my own 
 love. 
 
 "If I enter again into the interests and ways 
 of my neighbors, I must do so as a worthy mem 
 ber of society, and so I set my imagination at 
 work and see myself acting after the manner of 
 the people s idolized heroes. Would I set forth 
 on the quest of my stolen love ? Then I tell my 
 self that in truth no lover ever suffered more, 
 and I feel the first stirring of a devastating 
 rage. I conjure up the motive power of a nor 
 mal man. I am about to make the start, but 
 then comes the hesitation, the moment for 
 thought that unfortunate quality which sepa 
 rates the man of dreams from the man of 
 action and I permit such weak things as half- 
 forgotten words to arrest me. These words 
 may rise from a sub-conscious ocean ; they may 
 come from the ethereal summit of Mt. San 
 Gabriel, or they may come to me from the deeps 
 of the canon, but they always come at this 
 
LOVE MURDERS 99 
 
 moment and say: Love suffereth long, and is 
 kind: seeketh not her own/ Thus a foolish 
 and shell-shocked sentiment paralyzes the 
 healthy fury of a lover scorned. 
 
 "Why should the friendly echoes of my moun 
 tains indulge in quotations from a meditative 
 seer at the very moment when I am arming for 
 action ? "Envieth not/ they go on, is not easily 
 provoked/ 
 
 "I counterfeit a manly ferocity; stimulating 
 my imagination to the uttermost, I see myself, 
 knife in hand, preparing for love s perfect ex 
 pression, the murder of my beloved. For a mo 
 ment I actually feel normal and masterful ; with 
 consummate skill I imitate the fine frenzy of a 
 jilted but self-respecting wretch on the eve of 
 revenge. But nothing comes of it. How does 
 true love behave in such a ghastly dilemma, ? I 
 ask of the mountain air. Doth not behave it 
 self unseemly comes the answer out of the 
 gathering gloom. 
 
 "All day I tarry thus while flouted love goes 
 unavenged. The stars assemble for their vigil. 
 How indifferent they seem to my prodigious 
 fate ! How pure and cold and neutral they are ! 
 Yet, as I gaze at them, there comes a softening 
 in their light and they form themselves into 
 words on the scroll of the heavens that say: 
 
100 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 Hopeth all things, endureth all things, never 
 faileth. 
 
 "My love exploit, of course, is doomed. It 
 might have culminated in a popular tragedy if 
 only it could have started. Therefore the perti 
 nent question remains. How may I ever become 
 a red-blooded man again, while the mountains 
 and stars conspire against me? How may I 
 ever learn to use the killing knife, the pistol or 
 the cave-man s club? How may I thrill the 
 world from the front page of the daily news; 
 how at last die for love? 
 
 "Manifestly, no person living in my domain 
 can qualify for such an active career. It is, 
 perhaps, enough for me to trust that a few 
 sympathetic souls may understand my condition 
 and explain to others how high-explosive ren 
 dered me incapable of love s death-dealing en 
 terprise." 
 
THE POSTMAN 
 
 One evening when the letter carrier on our 
 street was off duty he showed me this personal 
 note addressed to him by Deka Parsec of Lizard 
 Lodge : 
 
 Dear Mr. Postman : 
 
 This letter is written with the hope that I 
 may be pardoned for giving my unsolicited 
 opinion about letter carriers. As my name will 
 doubtless inform you, I am not exactly normal, 
 but even so, it may not be unreasonable for me 
 to suppose that you are at least willing to re 
 ceive a statement from one person who has been 
 shell-shocked out of his pristine normality. My 
 observation supports the conviction that well- 
 poised, sophisticated people do not hesitate to 
 give you their opinions, in season and out. May 
 I not hope, therefore, to have my humble say? 
 
 In the first place, let me state that I love 
 letter-carriers. This affection of mine calls for 
 expression, but I am only to tell my story in 
 part. Ever since I became abnormal I have be 
 lieved in praise for the living; so if at times 
 
 101 
 
102 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 this letter should seem to partake of flattery, 
 just remember that but for my abnormality it 
 would not have been written at all; as an un- 
 shell-shocked person I would have suppressed 
 the nice things I believe in order that you might 
 have the mental discipline of guessing them for 
 yourself. When normal people give letter car 
 riers, or any other carriers, the benefit of un 
 solicited opinions, the said opinions are seldom 
 complimentary. It is the way of normality. 
 Praise, when it functions according to the laws 
 of good society, manifests itself as a form of 
 post-mortem, heaven-kissing coruscation. It is 
 intimately associated with the things that 
 might have been done and the words that should 
 have been spoken. 
 
 Now, I am only a partly-feathered, broken- 
 winged cogitator, but my feelings have a wide 
 range; they run high and low. I am both an 
 aviator and a pearl-diver. I like to roam among 
 the stars and then to plunge head-long into the 
 oceanic deeps for the gems "of purest ray 
 serene." This tendency of mine will explain all 
 and bring to you the full realization that what 
 I say is only the truth. 
 
 You, as a letter-carrier, are daily watched by 
 a lynx-eyed world, and yet daily you pass un 
 seen through the desolation of city streets. In 
 
THE POSTMAN 103 
 
 the midst of tumult you are really alone. Al 
 though you bear tidings to others, you are 
 scarcely seen by the hundreds who receive these 
 messages from your hands. You are a great 
 burden carrier in the season of gifts, and at 
 such times you are buried under the mountains 
 of cheering parcels you so faithfully bear to 
 their destinations. You are the living perambu 
 lating evidence that it is more blessed to give 
 than to receive. You are the tried and trusted 
 messenger of Cupid, the official announcer of 
 the Stork, and the Angel of Death. You can 
 read the look of disappointment as it seeps 
 through the brave smile that fain would hide 
 it. 
 
 I am not forgetful of your history, Mr. Post 
 man, and the long chain of heroic mortals, all 
 down the ages connecting you with the gods 
 of old. You are the descendant of Mercury, the 
 herald of Jupiter and the Messenger of Heaven. 
 When I call you the Angel of Death, I do not 
 mean that you bring death, but only the news 
 of it. However, you should remember that in 
 the days of Mercury, it was, indeed, a part of 
 the letter-carrier s duty to conduct the souls 
 of the dead "that gibber like bats as they fare 
 down the dank ways, past the streams of 
 Oceanus, past the gates of the sun and the land 
 
104 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 of dreams, to the mead of asphodel, in the dark 
 realm of Hades where dwell the souls, the phan 
 toms of men out-worn." I only mention this 
 lest you forget your fearsome heritage. Has 
 not the idea persisted even to this day that let 
 ter-carriers are messengers between worlds? 
 You, of course, remember this little verse from 
 the heart of a child, one of many verses spring 
 ing from the same old yearning: 
 
 "Wait Mr. Postman, don t hurry so fast, 
 Wait Mr. Postman, I ve caught you at last; 
 I ve watched and waited since seven 
 To give you this letter for Mother in Heaven." 
 
 Letter-carriers were none the less letter-car 
 riers when they delivered other things than let 
 ters, such as human heads, for example. We 
 do not know the name of the postman who car 
 ried to Hannibal the dread news of his brother s 
 death, but the missive came in unmistakable 
 language when the carrier hurled the head of 
 Hasdrubal over the wall of Hannibal s fortified 
 camp. That letter-carrier had an unsafe route, 
 and his name should have been preserved for 
 the inspiration of his brave followers of today. 
 There is a great chasm of years between Hanni 
 bal and President McKinley and many letter- 
 
THE POSTMAN 105 
 
 carriers did heroic deeds unpraised and unsung 
 as the centuries passed, but none could have 
 shown greater fidelity than Carrier Rowan who 
 carried the message to Garcia in the jungles of 
 Cuba. He needed all the courage and resource 
 fulness of the Roman bearing the head of Has- 
 drubal through the enemy lines. Elbert Hub- 
 bard gives us a definition: "The hero is the 
 man who does the work who carries the mes 
 sage to Garcia." 
 
 I admire letter-carriers because they do so 
 much and escape publicity. The pages of his 
 tory are cluttered up with the stories of con 
 querors and kings, but seldom is anything re 
 corded about the faithful messengers, the de 
 voted letter-carriers who really won so many 
 wars and saved so many lives. One of the proofs 
 that civilization has advanced to a measurable 
 extent may be found in the fact that letter-car 
 riers in our day may deliver bad news to a 
 peevish king and not be slaughtered in their 
 tracks. You are in an honorable profession and 
 not far removed in time of peace from the physi 
 cal or moral heroisms of the Pony Express 
 riders, the romantic letter-carriers of our one 
 time Wild West. You should not forget that 
 you belong to that illustrious fraternity. 
 
 You are a merchant of the highest class, for 
 
106 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 your commodity is nothing less than thought 
 itself dressed in symbols. You are the purveyor 
 of talismans, amulets, philtres, written incan 
 tations and cabalistic inscriptions. This is 
 abundantly proven by your delivery of a be 
 wildering assortment of love letters, patent 
 medicine philtres and the wild incantations of 
 oil stock salesmen. Never did sorcery, magic, 
 black art or necromancy, as practiced in the 
 caves of the witches, equal the artfulness of let 
 ters setting forth the merits of wild-cat oil. 
 Yet these dangerous and magical fulminations 
 pass daily through your hands leaving you un 
 harmed and unmoved. On the envelopes which 
 contain your psychic freight, are strange and 
 weird inscriptions that only you are able to 
 read. You are a doctor of hieroglyphics, runes, 
 cuneiform characters and all the multiform 
 handwritings and typewritings known to man. 
 Your quality of clairvoyance, developed by 
 constant contact with half-hidden words, goes 
 beyond the dreams of the wizards, and it is the 
 one which I most admire. It enables you to 
 perform, in the most natural and unconscious 
 manner, the highest duty of your office the 
 duty of dispensing sympathy and enlightened 
 understanding to a distraught world. It is your 
 higher nature that tells you how to comport 
 
THE POSTMAN 107 
 
 yourself on the street and on the doorstep, when 
 anxious hearts are waiting* for letters which 
 they are afraid to receive. In those exalted 
 moments you are a kind of priest, receiving con 
 fessions and offering consolation not, indeed, 
 that you do these things in crude actions or 
 words, but rather that you exhale a stimulating, 
 hopeful atmosphere, giving all men the impres 
 sion that no matter how sad the news may be 
 today, you still have it in your power to bring 
 good news tomorrow. While the joys and sor 
 rows of others seem all alike to you, in your 
 god-like impersonality, we know that you feel 
 and sympathize according to a spiritual law, a 
 law which permits you to give of yourself and 
 yet retain enough strength to deliver all your 
 merchandise. 
 
 You are the good friend of widows, orphans, 
 pensioners and the great army of the love-lorn. 
 They all know your step, the way you carry 
 your head and the meaning thereof, the glance 
 of your eyes, in fact, the very secrets of your 
 soul, because they study you with a deathless 
 zeal. They can tell whether you will cross the 
 street and forget them today, or whether you 
 will turn in on the walk with some vital news. 
 They know you far better than you know your 
 self, and yet when you hand them the letter of 
 
108 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 letters, your poor, perspiring form fades out 
 before their eyes. You thus learn over and over 
 again what it means to oscillate between every 
 thing and nothing while maintaining the even 
 ness of your temper and the lovableness of your 
 nature. You scatter joy and sorrow and con 
 solation on the arid streets every day, and 
 "blush unseen" in the midst of the throng. 
 
 For these reasons, and for many others not 
 here written, Mr. Postman, please accept the 
 renewed assurances of my highest regard. 
 
 Your old friend, 
 
 DEKA PARSEC. 
 
WALKING 
 
 It was a chance meeting of Alpine Hikers by 
 a drinking pool in the canon. Deka Parsec sat 
 on a boulder, just beyond the intangible bound 
 ary of the group. The high-tension of his 
 nerves always put him where he could not be 
 claimed or classified. I wondered how the crowd 
 psychology would affect his super-normal mind. 
 In his eyes I caught the gleam of a kindliness 
 which I knew he must entertain toward all out 
 door devotees, and so, without asking his per 
 mission, I made bold to announce that Deka 
 Parsec would speak to us about something that 
 had been revealed to him under the heightening 
 influence of shell-shock. He gave me one fleet 
 ing look of reproach, but accepted the challenge 
 with becoming grace. 
 
 "Ladies, gentlemen and animals," he began, 
 as he tossed a pebble into the pool, "creatures 
 who love the same thing should love each other. 
 Any one who attempts a speech should first as 
 sure himself that patience and love are written 
 in the faces of his victims. You love to walk, 
 and therefore I am safe within the circle of your 
 
 109 
 
110 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 forgiveness." Walking is a process of the crea 
 tive, emotional type, and hence but little under 
 stood or appreciated by harness-broken business 
 men and other disappointed people. Riders live 
 wholly outside the domain of this evolution and 
 consequently can think of walking only in terms 
 of riding. This is like thinking of sugar in 
 terms of salt. 
 
 Riders say the walker wastes valuable time, 
 because, if he is going anywhere, and is an up- 
 to-date man, he should be excited ; he should be 
 anxious to arrive. The whole world s work, 
 they say, is waiting to be done. But time is not 
 valuable to the walker because he is the owner 
 of eternity ; he is not going anywhere and there 
 fore cannot be anxious to arrive; the world s 
 work has waited a long time, waited for wars 
 and everything else to pass, so it may wait a 
 little longer. Physical instructors, health- 
 farmers, hammer-throwers, weight-lifters, 
 wrestlers, golf -players, and athletes in general 
 all agree that walking is not real exercise, and 
 that it is not intense or endurance-testing in its 
 nature. 
 
 Persons who cannot walk declare that the 
 walking man is unsocial because he delights in 
 walking alone, and that he is unspiritual, with 
 his mind always on the dusty road. These peo- 
 
WALKING 111 
 
 pie are thinking of activity in terms of inertia. 
 Their pronouncements are without authority for 
 they speak out of a legless experience. 
 
 When the walker contemplates the rider he 
 is not conscious of any marked emotion save 
 that of pity. This is not, indeed, the pity of a 
 patronizing man, proud of his superiority, but 
 the compassion of the true walker for a fellow- 
 being whose joys must forever function accord 
 ing to the flow of gasoline. Of course the walker 
 knows that the rider gets pleasure from his 
 rides as much pleasure, no doubt, as can ever 
 come to a creature with undeveloped lower ex 
 tremities and an unrealized higher nature. In 
 cidentally, it should be stated that the walker 
 understands relative speeds and values as few 
 other men understand them, and so he sees in 
 the figure of the motorist an inert mass lan 
 guishing upon ignoble cushions of ease. He 
 sees a man moving by proxy; he beholds the 
 paradox of a stationary thing in motion, a mov 
 ing mass that moves not. The walker believes 
 that the arrested evolution in the legs and mind 
 of the motorist is responsible for what may be 
 termed the rider s obsession regarding walkers. 
 This obsession manifests itself in the rider s 
 belief that the walker is going somewhere. All 
 
112 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 riders think this, even though they themselves 
 are seldom going anywhere. 
 
 If a man in a car, going nowhere, as usual, at 
 the behest of his own pleasure, should overtake 
 a man walking by the command of a like im 
 pulse, and the walker should invite the motorist 
 to park his car at the roadside and walk with 
 him, the motorist should feel highly compli 
 mented. Such an invitation is not extended to 
 everybody. He should accept with the gratitude 
 of one called into the privacy of high thoughts. 
 Many a gentle walker breaks up a delightful trip 
 of his own to please a kind-hearted riding man. 
 The walker appreciates the courtesy, but if he 
 accepts the ride it is to please the rider and not 
 himself. Yet when he invites a rider to walk 
 with him his invitation is sarcastically declined 
 by the man on the cushion, who at once asks 
 the walker to get in and have a free ride to the 
 insane asylum. 
 
 On a recent walking trip I had opportunities 
 to study car-drivers. A walking man has noth 
 ing on his mind but a few wayward thoughts, 
 and so it is easy to count the passing cars and 
 to classify them. I found that one in every 
 sixty of the high-power cars wanted me to ride, 
 while one in every fifteen Fords extended the 
 same invitation. All the truck drivers thought 
 
WALKING 113 
 
 I needed a lift. No black man, Mexican or Jap 
 anese ever went by without asking me to ride. 
 From these observations I deduced that as peo 
 ple rise in the financial world and express them 
 selves in cars, they come more and more to 
 appreciate the pedestrian s mind, until, among 
 millionaires, we may confidently expect to find 
 persons so enlightened on the subject of walking 
 that they never ask any one to ride. 
 
 The professional athlete, quite as much as the 
 motorist, is an enigma to the walker. Men who 
 arrange field sports seldom include walking in 
 the program. Possibly this is for the reason 
 that they assume everybody can walk, while 
 only a few can run one hundred yards in ten 
 seconds. Nevertheless the truth is that scarce 
 ly any one can walk, and, among the walking 
 failures are some of the hundred-yard runners. 
 Walking, as an athletic event can easily assume 
 an intensity too great for track racers and even 
 pugilists. But, whether the walker is putting 
 forth all his strength for the long-endurance 
 test, or merely strolling, he expects from the 
 motorist and the athlete the same consideration 
 these worthy individuals demand for them 
 selves. 
 
 The motorist seems to know intuitively that 
 athletes of every class, except the walker, would 
 
114 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 decline all offers to have their exercises per 
 formed for them by machinery. It would be an 
 easy matter to help them, just as easy as pick 
 ing up a pedestrian. A bag-punching machine 
 would be a boon to prize fighters training for 
 the movies. A caterpillar tractor or a baby- 
 tank would do more execution on the football 
 field than eleven brave men and true. Yet, in 
 spite of these self-evident facts, the only muscle- 
 exercising and health-pursuing man who is ever 
 offered gasoline power for carrying on his 
 chosen work is the walker. He is offered this 
 disparaging assistance, and he is expected to 
 accept it in grateful humility. If he refuses, it 
 is at the peril of his reputation for sanity. 
 
 No person is in position to declare that walk 
 ing is not exercise unless he can walk at least 
 fifty miles in one day. No person has a right to 
 say that walking can not be made a test of 
 physical and mental endurance until he has at 
 least equalled Weston s record of ninety-nine 
 miles each day for six successive days. On the 
 other hand, if there are persons who think walk 
 ing is too laborious, they should know that any 
 one, in good health, between the age of ten 
 years and the age of eighty years, should be 
 able to walk four miles an hour for twelve 
 hours. Few indeed, there are who can do it, 
 
WALKING 115 
 
 and by that measure the walker knows how far 
 civilized humanity falls below the physical nor 
 mal. This may explain why so many pampered 
 souls regard the pedestrian as uncivilized. 
 
 The accusation that walkers are unsocial and 
 earthy is the most unfair of all. It reveals a 
 still more grievous falling below the normal on 
 the part of ordinary people, for it is just in 
 their social and spiritual evolution that walkers 
 approximate the highest of all ideals. He or 
 she who walks with a walker must be a real 
 companion, a social creature, for walking dis 
 courages make-believe; it invites confidences, 
 discovers common interests, prompts naive con 
 fessions, seeks and gives consolation, strength 
 ens the bonds of friendship, and, in fact, 
 achieves every worthy purpose of social life. 
 In dispensing with sophisticated manners and 
 affectation, walkers eliminate discordant ele 
 ments from their society and thus avoid a world 
 of trouble. 
 
 All the good places of earth are reserved for 
 the people who walk. For them exist the moun 
 tain peaks; for them the dim, cool forest, the 
 tangled underbrush, the dells, the crystal 
 streams, the floes of the Arctic and the jungles 
 of the tropics. Walkers are not going any 
 where, having already arrived; every stopping 
 
116 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 place is in itself for them a destination; for 
 them are the hushed, mysterious nooks, the 
 brooding silence, the cloisters of nature, the 
 mandragora of meditation and repose ; for them 
 also the slippery precipice, the glacier, the dizzy 
 heights and the thrills. Wherever they go, on 
 the roads, the trails and in the trackless wastes, 
 people who walk find all that is good for man 
 to find and nothing that is bad. 
 
 The real pedestrian, when he is alone on the 
 road, walks straight into celestial reveries. He 
 is lifted above petty things and awed by the 
 silence of impersonal nature. He has the choice 
 of the highway, by-way and mountain trail, ac 
 cording to his mood. Where others see only 
 dust and heat he sees the unseen. If, perchance, 
 his course leads by the city abattoir and the cab 
 bage patch, he names his path the Road to Man- 
 dalay or the beautiful Champs Elysees. He can 
 always have what he wants. He meets the 
 rising sun in meadows wet with dew and loiters 
 enchanted where birds sing praises to the uni 
 verse. At high noon he rests in the shade of 
 rock or tree, far from the turmoil of city streets 
 and the wheels that men have made. At even 
 ing time a veil is drawn across every distant 
 view, half concealing, half revealing pictures 
 painted for him alone, because he is the only 
 
WALKING 117 
 
 one who has time to pause and read their 
 meanings. 
 
 In walking there is physical development, 
 spiritual evolution, good health, exalted com 
 panionship, meditation and the exact antithesis 
 of each and every unlovely thing which our civ 
 ilization imposes upon us. The man who walks 
 has all the time there is. If he is in sorrow he 
 has time to walk away from it; time to walk 
 until physical weariness wraps him in the blan 
 ket of an infant s slumber where no sorrow is. 
 He has time to walk away from the money-mak 
 ing, money-losing treadmill where men lose 
 their health and happiness. He has time to 
 search for the walker s mood of physical invin 
 cibility and to find it where he finds his second 
 wind and second courage. He has time to walk 
 away from old age and the croaking crones who 
 would force dotage upon him. He has time to 
 think, time for a congenial friend, and wonder 
 ful to relate he has time for the birds, the 
 bugs and the stars." 
 
THE TOURIST 
 
 We were off duty that day, and on the beaten 
 trail of the tourists. "Of course, you know," 
 said Deka Parsec, "that the mountains consti 
 tute for me one large theater, on whose ample 
 stage my poor friends, the lower animals, play 
 their parts. At every favorable point of view 
 on the trail there is a reserved seat for me 
 where I make myself comfortable and watch the 
 performance. Indeed, I am authorized by the 
 animals to announce that there are also good 
 seats for all persons who care to watch with 
 me. These vantage points are open to the eyes 
 of every one, but in spite of this many of the 
 tourists who succeed in reaching Lizard Lodge, 
 complain of the long, dusty trail and the weari 
 ness that assails their tortured flesh. Perhaps 
 this weariness explains why the tourists so sel 
 dom understand me when I speak of the come 
 dies and tragedies enacted on this wide stage 
 by my versatile and beloved animal friends. I 
 have also thought that their failure fully to un 
 derstand and appreciate these humble actors 
 may be due in part to the fact that the tourists 
 
 119 
 
120 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 themselves are so often members of the playing 
 company, although they never seem to realize it. 
 Being on the stage, they can not see themselves 
 as I see them. I, in my shell-shock and nebulous 
 world, stand apart where the whole perform 
 ance can be seen. That is why bugs, birds, 
 spiders, tourists and lizards all speak for me, 
 and then pass on, never knowing that they have 
 been near the footlights of the wide-open stage 
 at all. 
 
 "It is possible that I may have shown a pref 
 erence for animals over other people when, on 
 former occasions, we met in wild places, but the 
 truth is that I merely group human beings with 
 eagles, rabbits, spiders and all the other mem 
 bers of my somewhat unscientifically classified 
 kinfolk. I love them all. Shall I describe a few 
 minor performances by way of example ? Well, 
 one day a tourist with a very sour face strutted 
 across my stage and spoke a few lines about the 
 cold, uncommunicative persons he meets on the 
 trails. He denounced them for their unsocial 
 ways. While he was speaking a chipmunk 
 made friendly advances unheeded, and a happy 
 lizard, sunning itself on a rock, regarded him 
 with a penetrating and brotherly eye. The ani 
 mals considered it a very clever skit. When, at 
 last, the sour man disappeared behind the cur- 
 
THE TOURIST 121 
 
 tain of the mountain, a catbird applauded bois 
 terously. The lizard, the chipmunk and the cat 
 bird, all friends of the man, must have taken 
 his complaint as a bit of ironical self-analysis 
 well acted and they laughed at him while they 
 loved him. 
 
 "It was on the same day, while I was resting 
 at a place overlooking Echo Canon, that a lady, 
 perspiring profusely, labored up the rocky in 
 cline. The sun was hot and the dust lingered 
 lazily in the air close to the ground. The sum 
 mit was the climber s objective. Resting for a 
 moment near me, she discoursed regretfully on 
 the subject of the surf, beating, as she said, at 
 that very minute on the beach miles away. She 
 condemned herself for the folly of attempting a 
 mountain ascent when she could just as well 
 have been swimming in the stimulating water 
 of the ocean. Her dramatic part for that day 
 was to register the familiar vow, of, Never 
 again/ 
 
 "It is remarkable how well the tourists play 
 their part in the comedy of the mountains. 
 They never rehearse and yet each day a new 
 company will play the same role with a tech 
 nique of astonishing precision and uniformity. 
 Many times I have met that practical married 
 man who left rural blessings in Iowa because 
 
122 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 his wife yearned for travel. Each time a differ 
 ent actor plays the part, but always the char 
 acter is the same. This familiar martyr walks 
 unseeing, his eyes glazed and dull, fixed on va 
 cancy. He portrays, for the edification of my 
 animals, how wretched one human being can be 
 in the presence of unagricultural grandeur. He 
 depicts the bovine spirit struggling under a 
 shock very akin to my own, and for this reason 
 I can envisage his pictures of far-away corn 
 fields and fattening cattle while his feet do a 
 foolish trance-walk from peak to pinnacle in the 
 wake of a romantic spouse. 
 
 "Close on the heels of my purblind agricul 
 turist comes the excited lady in the first flush 
 of travel. She is seeing America first/ Her 
 part in the play is a talkative one, but she does 
 not speak of the wonders upon which her eyes 
 are now resting, for she has just explored the 
 Mammoth Cave, the Grand Canon of the Colo 
 rado River, Yellowstone Park, and other stu 
 pendous marvels. She directs her descriptive 
 fire against a nice man with a weak heart too 
 weak for mountain trails and the encounters 
 thereof. The nice man endeavors, without suc 
 cess, to retaliate by describing his fishing ex 
 ploits in the mosquito-infested lakes of the Can 
 adian north woods. At the Half Way House 
 
THE TOURIST 123 
 
 these two performers combine their role with 
 that of the sophisticated man who, while at din 
 ner in the rustic dining room, grieves very audi 
 bly for the food that can be found only in good 
 old New York, which food, by the way, he ex 
 plains to the man with the weak heart, belongs 
 by divine right to all well-bred gentlemen every 
 where. This epicurean from Gotham is visibly 
 pleased and consoled by the pantomine of the 
 head waitress who shows an appreciative eval 
 uation of his gastronomic deprivations, and, by 
 the most realistic gestures simulates the draw 
 ing of corks from mythical bottles and the 
 sizzling of effervescent vintages now prohibited 
 but not quite forgotten. 
 
 "Group-acting is carried on by personally- 
 conducted tourists who take me to task for the 
 manifold short-comings of the Sierra Nevada 
 Mountains. Now and then there is a touch of 
 comedy, much enjoyed by the lizards and chip 
 munks, when a loyal and unshell-shocked human 
 defender apologizes for Mother Nature and the 
 way she made everything. 
 
 "In one corner of this teeming and squirming 
 stage two lovable old ladies are talking. Soon 
 after being shell-shocked I noticed that it is only 
 the old who have time to talk and think. It may 
 be for this same reason that old people come in 
 
124 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 greater numbers to play their roles with my 
 animals in the mountains. The old ladies are 
 not complaining about anything. Before them 
 and below are the beauties of earth, and over 
 their heads the glory of the starry heavens. 
 They are happy and apparently oblivious in the 
 very possession of treasures for which travelers 
 gladly overcome weary miles, and about which 
 poets rave and sing. Soft zephyrs fan their 
 cheeks and the genial temperature of California 
 adds to their sense of aged, justified repose. 
 They respond in the form of a cozy chat, ignor 
 ing in the meantime their immediate surround 
 ings. Theirs is a sympathetic interchange of 
 youthful reminiscences and a discussion of 
 grandchildren in Illinois. 
 
 "Now comes the good and efficient hostess of 
 the Half Way House, with her sense of duty 
 and a heart full of pity for young people in pain 
 ful need of exterior excitation. She seeks to 
 beguile men of all ages into the needless gyra 
 tions of the dance. Up-stage reposes a man busy 
 with his own thoughts, while near him a soldier 
 of the Civil War revels in heroic memories. 
 Upon the two the well-meaning hostess descends 
 with the result that the aged man is galvanized 
 into his oft-repeated battle of Gettysburg and 
 the thoughtful man is changed into a polite lis- 
 
THE TOURIST 125 
 
 tener. Not for long, however, can this idyllic 
 scene endure, for in the very middle of Pickett s 
 charge the kind auditor is whisked away and 
 the old soldier is left to his meditations once 
 more. The whisking away is done by a charm 
 ing young lady who declares that Grandpa is in 
 his anecdotage. 
 
 "I am convinced that the human actors seek 
 the mountains for purposes obscure. Their os 
 tensible acts are often broken into with surpris 
 ing results ; yet all their deeds seem to harmon 
 ize and to form a part of some great drama to 
 be finished elsewhere. Interruptions and ampu 
 tations take place in their speeches but few 
 seem to care. Every fragment has a place and 
 foolish deeds have their own justification. This 
 is illustrated by the man with the short-arc 
 mustache, who, while star-gazing with his in 
 tellectual lady-love, kisses her passionately and 
 with seeming irrelevance, not to say irrever 
 ence, when she makes a casual remark about 
 the double stars near Vega. Again we see con 
 versational amputation when the learned geol 
 ogist, in the midst of an able discussion on the 
 land-slip that ages ago cleft Mt. San Gabriel 
 loses his layman listener by the accidental ar 
 rival of a prosperous cattleman from Colorado, 
 who greets his old friend, the layman, and pro- 
 
126 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 ceeds to renew mutual memories of the last 
 stock show at Denver. 
 
 "Thus for minutes or hours each day I may 
 observe the antics of people. I may laugh at 
 them or with them ; I may compare them with 
 my constant companions, the animals. Some of 
 them have bodies in feverish action with minds 
 at rest ; others have bodies at rest and minds in 
 action. Some are disappointed because the 
 mountains are not responsive and < some are at 
 odds with their own kind. As for me, when the 
 play is over for the day, I return to my lodge, 
 where the present moment is all-sufficient and 
 where no conflicting interests ever intrude." 
 
FROM CELLAR TO GARRET 
 
 At Home, Lizard Lodge. 
 Dear Friend: 
 
 Although I expect to have you by my side in 
 front of the fireplace before many evenings 
 have passed, I will say a few words now on the 
 subject of houses. I can give you no real archi 
 tectural advice for use in planning your new 
 residence , but I can at least warn you that in 
 the building you are about to erect you will re 
 veal your innermost soul to all shell-shocked and 
 discerning observers. I would invite your atten 
 tion to the following facts : 
 
 It is possible to discover the character of a 
 person by interviewing his house. If he is too 
 poor to have the house he really wants we will 
 find him living in one which expresses his finan 
 cial limitations. If he is rich his house may re 
 veal his financial condition, although not always, 
 but it cannot fail to give us the measure of his 
 appreciation of the beautiful. His house is the 
 face or mask which he presents to the world. 
 Not all houses are vivid in their expressiveness, 
 
 127 
 
128 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 but the same may be said of masks and even liv 
 ing faces. There are houses whose windows 
 stare like the vacant eyes of insanity ; there are 
 others with sane and benign expressions ; there 
 are houses with cold, cynical glances, which, 
 like the House of Usher, give to their surround 
 ings a ghostly and melancholy air. 
 
 All houses are haunted, some with good 
 spirits and some with bad. These spirits, of 
 course, are the people who live in them. All 
 houses have their own noises "house sounds" 
 their dwellers call them, such as creaking 
 stairs, snapping nails on frosty nights, scurry 
 ing sounds in the garret, furnace rumblings in 
 the basement, and culinary music in the kitchen. 
 There are neglected houses, perched on high, 
 broken foundations, under which dogs love to 
 congregate with their boy friends. There are 
 houses infested with rats, and there are houses 
 under whose eaves swallows come every spring 
 to build their nests ; there are still other houses 
 which are avoided by beasts, boys and birds. 
 
 There are houses built in dreary rows, the 
 habitations of the very poor. Little children 
 who live in them receive their first impres 
 sions there. These impressions are hideous and 
 depressing. They enter into the mind of the 
 child and form his basis of comparison, his 
 
FROM CELLAR TO GARRET 129 
 
 ideals. These black monster houses in rows 
 offend against childhood, against art, against 
 beauty and against the spirit of good. They 
 are the hatcheries of criminals by the sheer 
 force of their unloveliness. The men who built 
 them sinned against humanity. These terrible, 
 haunted houses spring up like dirty mushrooms 
 about steel mills, coal mines and coke ovens. 
 
 On the wind-swept plains of the far western 
 states are gaunt, cheerless houses, successors of 
 the pioneer dugouts and shacks. The pioneers 
 built for utility and protection from the unmiti 
 gated heat of summer and the cold of winter 
 where there were no trees to shade the earth or 
 to break the wind. Their children now build to 
 express prosperity but their houses are lifeless 
 and destitute of everything ornate and inviting. 
 The poverty of their art gives the wayfarer 
 pangs of homesickness. His heart cries out for 
 the solace of beauty for he sees nothing but an 
 arid architecture imitating an arid landscape. 
 Not all soulless houses, however, are to be found 
 on the vast plains, for on Fifth Avenue in New 
 York City is a marble palace which combines 
 Greek and Roman ideals with the ugliness of a 
 tar-paper shanty. It starts from its foundation 
 immaculate as an Italian villa but finishes in a 
 
130 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 mansard roof of brown shingles like a glorified 
 rabbit hutch. 
 
 Mining millenaries, war profiteers and coke- 
 oven magnates are not the only people who 
 reveal their hearts in their houses and offend 
 against beauty and childhood; there are many 
 prosperous communities that build school 
 houses and forget beauty. Little children who 
 idealize the scene of their instruction are thus 
 led astray. Their minds are filled with many 
 inconsequential facts and fancies, but the finest 
 of all their sentiments love of beauty is out 
 raged. 
 
 Not only has humanity the power to express 
 itself in houses, but the houses seem to have a 
 living, conscious desire to express the people 
 they shelter. One man will take brick or wood 
 and build a prison house which will tell all the 
 world that no love dwells therein. Another 
 man will take the same materials, or nothing 
 but sod, and build a house in the spirit of Michel 
 Angelo. Flowers and vines will seek his walls, 
 and his little windows speak convincingly of an 
 abundant life within. 
 
 There is something about the way a house 
 thrusts its chimney up into the air, the way its 
 porch comes out to meet one, or recedes, that 
 expresses the spirit of the in-dwelling people. 
 
FROM CELLAR TO GARRET 131 
 
 There are houses .whose windows look out from 
 overhanging eaves like sad eyes. There are 
 houses around whose corners the wind sweeps 
 in bluster and dusty madness, and there are 
 other houses where the wind never seems to 
 take such liberties. It may rustle the ivy or 
 shake down a few leaves from a nearby tree, 
 but it does no more. There are houses that do 
 not seem to love the trees of their own domain, 
 and the trees also seem to understand, for they 
 do not allow their branches to caress where no 
 love is. Around the eaves of a joyless house the 
 wind moans and sobs at night. Lonely prairie 
 houses have the faculty of turning the cease 
 less wind into eerie voices that intone a litany 
 to the spirit of the plain. 
 
 There are farm houses in old districts where 
 the green shutters on the front windows are 
 never opened. They stare like blind men s gog 
 gles. In the front room of such a house there 
 lingers a musty air reminiscent of the last fun 
 eral or wedding. On the center table is a Bible 
 and beside it a glass dome covering gilded cat 
 tails from the meadow swamp. On the walls 
 are ancestral pictures of stern, forest-clearing 
 men and spinning, butter-making women. Long 
 years ago they died. In their pioneer lives of 
 hard labor they never awoke to a single claim 
 
132 DEKA PAESEC 
 
 of beauty. Their children are like them, and 
 so the large, two-story house that their prosper 
 ity erected, is awake only in its kitchen. The 
 front part of the house broods in cave-like dark 
 ness, and the parlor is a tomb. 
 
 In Washington, D. C., there are many fine, 
 large houses built in solid rows. Their archi 
 tectural over-lord imposed upon them a heavy 
 burden, for, unlike their poor cousins, the New 
 York tenements, these pretentions dwellings of 
 the Capital yearn for the display of home-like 
 individualities, but no opportunity here presents 
 itself. For these houses there is no proud 
 lifting of a roof above the common level, no 
 retreating into protecting shrubbery, no shrink 
 ing from the noisy street. Inexorable fate has 
 placed these ambitious houses, like civil service 
 employees, on the same foundation. Nothing 
 can help them, because they have no room to 
 grow, and nothing can throw them down be 
 cause they lean upon each other. Deprived of 
 all personality, they are too poor to harbor 
 ghosts, and cut off without eaves, there is no 
 place for the wind to moan. 
 
 Every house, whose good fortune it is not to 
 be immured, smothering in a row, has an atti 
 tude of mind as well as a face. It can give 
 the world the cold shoulder by a subtility all its 
 
FROM CELLAR TO GARRET 133 
 
 own, by the lift of a porch roof or the massive 
 immobility of its door. It can incline a little 
 toward the approaching guest, receiving him 
 with kindness, or it can stand erect, cold and 
 aloof. It may even seem to gather its skirts 
 about it and retreat into the background, or 
 come out boldly in front, frank and unafraid. 
 
 Men may build houses as they will, combin 
 ing the artistic triumphs or failures of the 
 Old World and the New, but each house will in 
 the end, express the soul of the occupant or the 
 degree of his revolt against outrageous fortune. 
 Each house will stand faithful to the attitude 
 ordained for it by its maker. It will look its 
 moods through every window and voice its 
 dweller s emotions, child-like or ghost-like, in 
 nuances of familiar house-sounds from cellar to 
 garret. 
 
 This then, is shell-shocked architectural in 
 formation. Whatever you do, be sure that your 
 designers live up to the spirit of these remarks 
 that you may not have your soul presented 
 to the world in false forms and colors. 
 
 Your sincere friend, 
 
 DEKA PARSEC. 
 
CASTE 
 
 For many moons newspapers and magazines 
 have been filled with forebodings of evil. Proph 
 ecies of world endings have been many. Numer 
 ous sects flourish and seem to draw inspiration 
 from the probability of some dire catastrophe. 
 Timorous souls quake in the presence of a new 
 order of life. Political quacks run about the 
 world preaching communism, socialism, soviet- 
 ism and anarchy. There is a great unrest, a 
 boundless discontent. The thoughtful and the 
 
 thoughtless are all hypnotized by some form of 
 
 
 jazz. 
 
 Escaping from the feverish tread-mill one 
 Saturday afternoon, I started for the only quiet 
 retreat within my reach, Lizard Lodge. I 
 joined Deka Parsec at Sierra Madre just as he 
 was leaving with his burro train for the up- 
 trail. The worries of the world were heavy 
 upon my heart, and I wished to consult my 
 friend about them, but I decided to wait until 
 we had reached our cosy seats by the fire 
 place. Immense white clouds, piled up twenty 
 thousand feet high over the mountain crests, 
 
 135 
 
136 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 claimed our adoration for the last hour of the 
 climb. The rays of the setting sun turned the 
 summits of the clouds into golden fleece and the 
 reflection tinted the mountains for many miles. 
 
 "All this splendor makes me feel and think 
 in my favorite symbols of the super-sensuous," 
 said Deka. "Just consider how the universal 
 benefit, wetness and life-sustaining virtues from 
 everywhere, concentrate and condense in a 
 great white cloud. I have often wondered why 
 clouds are spoken of as dark, forbidding, 
 gloomy, in fact, anything but what they really 
 are, inspiring and glorious. To be sure, some 
 clouds do look black and lowering, but we know 
 that in them is the life of all things that live. 
 When I think about this it always seems to me 
 that the moisture, the invisible vapor that 
 comes to the cloud, is like the invisible goodness 
 that permeates humanity, condensing and be 
 coming invisible in centers of radiation and 
 beauty. For thousands of miles the clear air is 
 feeding this brilliant cloud, but the invisible sky 
 is really the mother of it." 
 
 When Deka Parsec spoke of the universal 
 goodness that permeates humanity I realized 
 how far I had drifted from his viewpoint since 
 our last meeting. Through all his shell-shocked 
 confusion he had never lost faith in the innate 
 
CASTE 137 
 
 goodness of life. It was ever the starting place 
 for his eulogies or criticisms, and to it in the 
 end he returned consoled. When supper was 
 over and we found ourselves before the fire-place 
 again, I could not formulate my question exact 
 ly as it came to me in the city. I had wished 
 to ask Deka just how soon he thought all human 
 affairs would crash in ruin. But such a question 
 now, I felt, would imply a lack of sympathy for 
 his kindly estimate of human goodness, so par 
 tially adopting his attitude, I began : "Deka, I 
 have been worried about the apparent chaos 
 in social life, religion and politics all over the 
 world, and I would like to know what you think 
 about it." 
 
 Deka smiled. "I see you are not wholly in 
 harmony with my thoughts," he said gently. 
 
 "No, not quite in harmony, Deka," I admit 
 ted, "the world seems so confused." Then, 
 wishing to get his ideas on something specific, 
 and to clarify, if possible, my own muddled 
 thought, I asked: "What element in this ap 
 parent chaos in human affairs do you consider 
 the most nearly fatal to happiness?" 
 
 "None of them are actually fatal or even 
 nearly so," he answered quickly, "but some are 
 producing painful symptoms. Perhaps when I 
 tell you what I feel you will not think I am very 
 
138 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 optimistic after all. Some normal people call 
 me a pessimist when I state facts. Of course 
 they believe that these facts are, after all, only 
 my opinions. The statement of a fact can not 
 reflect credit or discredit upon any person who 
 states the fact; he is only a reporter. Now, 
 for example there is one element in this tumult 
 that I believe to be the worst of all, and yet 
 it is not so considered by normal people. I refer 
 to the fault of snobbery or caste. Here on this 
 mountain, beyond the reach of confusing noises, 
 I can analyze social status in an impersonal 
 way. 
 
 When we were coming up the trail this after 
 noon I said that the clear, blue sky contained 
 the water vapor which is the mother of the 
 cloud. In the same way humanity contains its 
 own innate, invisible goodness. Often this good 
 ness becomes visible as it condenses in social 
 organizations. Like the cloud, these organiza 
 tions contain and exhibit the virtue. It comes 
 to them from the formless everywhere. When 
 they conceive that they in themselves consti 
 tute the human virtue or goodness ; when they 
 even assert that they are the permanent reposi 
 tories of it, their usefulness is at an end. The 
 besetting sin of all organizations is that they 
 exclude. Exclusiveness means caste and snob- 
 
CASTE 139 
 
 bery. All churches and organizations live in 
 constant peril of sinning in the name of caste. 
 
 "Religious brotherhoods are like great, 
 heaped-up clouds, catching the light of heaven 
 and reflecting it upon the earth; they are also 
 like clouds because they make visible and con 
 dense the vapor of human goodness. If the 
 similarity went all the way I could say nothing 
 but beautiful things about man-made organiza 
 tions, for then these human groups, like the 
 clouds, would make no false pretenses, but would 
 gather to themselves all the goodness that ex 
 ists invisibly in the great void and precipitate 
 it upon the thirsting world. Unfortunately, 
 however, the visible, the splendid in form is 
 everywhere taken by man for the real. To the 
 spectacular many honors are accorded ; the very 
 existence of the invisible is ignored. For this 
 reason a certain exclusiveness and caste tend 
 to gather about organized centers. On all sides 
 I see it developing in our democratic country. 
 All organizations begin and end in exclusion. 
 If they included all humanity they would be ab 
 sorbed, and like the glorious cloud, disappear 
 into nothingness by the very act of raining their 
 blessing upon the world. But they do not love 
 humanity enough for that; indeed many of 
 them feel contempt for the seeming emptiness 
 
140 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 of the atmosphere out of which they were 
 formed and filled. 
 
 "Clubs, political parties, churches and all or 
 ganized entities have a function to perform 
 the function of administration. Whenever 
 these administrative centers assert any sover 
 eignty over the spirit or invisible vapor, then 
 death begins. So far as the spirit is concerned, 
 the dead part of every club is the organized 
 part. The Golden Rule can not be organized; 
 neither, can any organization defend it; the 
 spirit of Christianity can not be organized. All 
 attempts at it have resulted in caste, exclusive- 
 ness, social status, segregation and death of the 
 ideal. No organization has the right to call it 
 self the defender of love, for love needs no de 
 fense. No organization may truly say that it 
 contains all true patriots, all lovers of human 
 ity, or all the followers of Christ. Even the 
 twelve apostles were not organized. Christ did 
 not organize anything. Men who lend them 
 selves to organizations should know that they 
 can, by so doing, further the interests of noth 
 ing except things external ; they may thus assist 
 in matters of administration, but the spirit 
 must remain within each individual and be by 
 him alone adored. 
 
 "Yet the whole world has been organized and 
 
CASTE 141 
 
 over-organized. The faith put into the result 
 ing castes and snobberies was worthy of a far 
 better fate. In my shell-shocked state it always 
 seems that in some strange way all organiza 
 tions lead to a denial of self, a sort of stulti 
 fication. They first cause persons to exclude 
 other persons ; then they cause the excluders to 
 forget the excluded. Thus a part of humanity 
 is cut off and an immoral deed is done. 
 
 When the Great War broke out, not all the 
 organizations in the world, including the organi 
 zations called churches, had any power to stop 
 it. Men in all these Christian organizations, 
 and in all other organizations, killed each other 
 by the millions. They took chaplains with them 
 to the scene of butchery that they might receive 
 assurance in their death throes that they were 
 going to a place of brotherhood which all the 
 organized intelligence on earth had been unable 
 to establish here. This is not an indictment of 
 Christianity; it is an indictment of the organi 
 zation fetish that had mistaken its function and 
 killed the spirit. There is more of real human 
 ity in the world now than ever before, but it is 
 not organized; it knows no caste or snobbery. 
 Suffocating in temples and clubs, it has taken 
 to wild places. Perhaps Lizard Lodge is one of 
 
142 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 the places, but let us not give it a name for 
 virtue, lest the spirit take fright and fly away. 
 
 "Humanity is learning to suspect membership 
 in exclusive circles, because such membership 
 means social position, the building of reputa 
 tions and the making of money. These are the 
 pillars of caste. It becomes daily more obvious 
 that organizations can never check the growth 
 of class consciousness, for all organizations are 
 themselves class conscious, and that is the curse 
 of the world. What can all these cults do but 
 fight each other? Socialism, Bolshevism and 
 all the rest, rage and tear each other to pieces, 
 giving us over and over again the pitiful spec 
 tacle of organized futility. Do we need any fur 
 ther object lessons to establish conviction that 
 nothing but ghastly failure must ever attend 
 this naming, tagging, standardizing and segre 
 gating of an ideal? Capacity for snobbery is 
 augmented by membership in any group that 
 excludes a part of humanity. Not all persons in 
 groups are snobs, but they have placed them 
 selves in the way of temptation. They have 
 placed themselves in an atmosphere of caste, 
 the most heartless, selfish and contemptible of 
 human traits. In America the only organiza 
 tion we really need is the United States of 
 America itself under its constitution. Under 
 
CASTE 143 
 
 this we may all exercise political powers. It is 
 the one, great administrative club and it leaves 
 each man the sole custodian of his own ideals." 
 Thank you, Deka," I said, "that disposes of 
 a club I proposed to organize for the purpose 
 of opposing some other club recently created to 
 lobby a new uplift law into the statute books. 
 I ll just leave my projected club in its formless 
 and harmless state." Then we turned in for 
 the night. 
 
SUICIDE 
 
 The splendor of sunrise from Lizard Lodge 
 surpasses all words of description. I stood with 
 Deka Parsec under a majestic tree and watched 
 the miracle of the east. The first airs of the 
 morning stirred the leaves ; Deka s animals, far 
 and wide, awoke to the new activities of another 
 day. The mountain tops caught the yellow rays 
 of the sun and turned their lofty snow-fields 
 into gold. 
 
 "Just think," said Deka, "somewhere in the 
 lowlands yesterday a hopeless wretch took his 
 own life. He turned his back on all this beauty ; 
 he turned away without ever having seen the 
 marvels that abide in nature s simplicity." 
 
 The breeze freshened with the growing light ; 
 a bird darted out of the branches over our 
 heads, and, rising straight into the sky, sang a 
 song of praise and joy. Creeping things rustled 
 the twigs at our feet. The dew on Deka s spider 
 webs delineated in rainbow hues every figure of 
 their matchless engineering. On all sides every 
 thing was alive in perfection. 
 
 145 
 
146 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 "Yes," Deka continued, "the man who kills 
 himself takes a journey away from the main 
 range of hills ; he dies in an interval, and a very 
 short one. Had he gone but a little farther he 
 would have reached a bend in the trail, or, had 
 he only waited, a fellow traveler would have 
 come to show him the way. There is a tide in 
 the mind, like the tide in the sea, that seems 
 to ebb and flow. A sorrow that was intolerable 
 yesterday is easy to bear today although the 
 cause of it remains. It may become intolerable 
 again tomorrow, but never can it be fatal to the 
 person who waits for the turn in his own men 
 tal tide. The suicide mistakes the moment of 
 the turn for the end of all things. Even love 
 has its ebb and flow. The love-lorn victim who 
 dies between extreme high-tide and the lowest 
 of the low, dies foolishly. He dies because he 
 cannot believe that the waters will ever return, 
 but they always do return for the man who has 
 time to wait. It seems to me now, since I 
 reached this super-normal state, that all prac 
 tical, sensible people are potential suicides be 
 cause they are so specific in their ambitions. 
 They doom themselves to the poignant suffering 
 of definite disappointments. I live in a state of 
 uniform optimism which normal people call 
 shell-shock. They do not understand how I can 
 
SUICIDE 147 
 
 live without materialistic aims ; but the lack of 
 such aims is what keeps me alive. I am never 
 disappointed in love, or in anything else. I 
 believe that the next bend in the trail will offer 
 a new and charming view. The so-called prac 
 tical unpoetic man is, after all, the greatest 
 of all illusion builders, for when all his props 
 and stays are at last seen to be nothing but 
 broken reeds, his whole creation collapses, and 
 then it is only the fear of death that saves 
 him from suicide. 
 
 "There was a time when I dreamed of great 
 achievements. My objectives were perilously 
 definite. I admired people who went out and 
 got things. I loved the doers and pitied the 
 thinkers. But now I am disillusioned. I see 
 that all deaths by suicide take place when the 
 busy hands are idle as all hands at times must 
 be and the man himself is thrown back into 
 the horrible vacuum of his own mind. Dedi 
 cated to suicide, he perishes in that awkward 
 interval, because, being perhaps, an efficiency 
 expert, or a winner of definite and material re 
 sults, or a seeker after health where it can not 
 be found, or a suitor in the grip of passion, mis 
 named love/ he suddenly finds himself in a 
 very great hurry with nothing definite to do. 
 The affairs of his life are at their extreme low 
 
148 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 ebb, the time of the turn, the zero hour, but 
 it never occurs to him that he should do simply 
 nothing when there is simply nothing to do. 
 While all things about him hesitate and tremble 
 in the balance, he feels constrained to act. By 
 his own hand he dies, true at least, to the prin 
 ciple that there must be something doing every 
 minute. Therefore, to all persons contemplat 
 ing suicide I would say: Never kill yourself 
 today if you can possibly put off the deed until 
 tomorrow, for in the meantime you will receive 
 good news. 
 
 "Here in wild nature around Lizard Lodge, 
 illness and death are concealed and ignored. My 
 beloved animals, living so near the Infinite, are 
 full of gladness. They are gay in spite of the 
 fact that in their world the chase goes on. They 
 are undefended, and some of them meet violent 
 deaths, but cries of anguish are seldom heard; 
 life with them is everywhere in the ascendency. 
 The dominant note can always be found in the 
 music of running water and in the songs of 
 birds. In every part of this vast domain life is 
 celebrated, while death is private. Even among 
 human beings, caught in the meshes of artifici 
 ality, it is natural to conceal suffering. Only 
 the suicide, by his last act, betrays the secret 
 that his pain was more than he could bear. 
 
SUICIDE 149 
 
 What wisdom he might have gained from his 
 poor friends, the animals ! 
 
 "The suicide celebrates death, but he is not a 
 coward. I am inclined to think that the charge 
 of cowardice so often made against suicides is 
 really actuated by envy. Persons who would 
 gladly go the same road, if they had the physi 
 cal courage, make a virtue of enduring that 
 from which they fear to escape. They condemn 
 the wayfarer who, though foolish in that in 
 terval of utter discouragement, nevertheless 
 had the courage to set forth on a grewsome 
 voyage to a dark and unknown country. They 
 who condemn the lonely traveler say that he 
 was afraid to live. I do not believe this is true. 
 People who contemplate suicide merely do not 
 wish to live; they believe they have exhausted 
 the possibilities of life, when, as a matter of 
 fact, they have exhausted only the possibilities 
 of their own conception of life. They have 
 denied themselves a view from Lizard Lodge. 
 
 "You may remember the man I saved on the 
 cliff the man who was about to depart this 
 world with the belief that spiders have six legs. 
 On the way to the lodge that day I asked him a 
 few simple questions and made the interesting 
 discovery that he knew nothing about all that 
 part of the universe which lies outside of a 
 
150 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 stock-broker s office. He muttered something 
 about ruin and disaster. When I pressed him 
 for particulars he admitted that he had lost 
 nothing but money and the affections of a wom 
 an attached to the money. For these things he 
 had attempted to end his life. I then explained 
 how futile it was for him to commit suicide un 
 der any circumstances because he was already 
 dead to everything worth while. I told him that 
 the only black spot in his sunshine was his own 
 shadow as he wandered among my pretty ani 
 mals. This compliment seemed to turn his 
 thought in the direction of natural things. For 
 a time he followed the chipmunks and birds into 
 the cosmos where he quickly learned that he 
 himself was merely a symbol for zero. And for 
 zero, he said, even he could not commit suicide. 
 After that he made a mathematical discovery. 
 He divided the unity of the universe by the zero 
 of his own merits and got infinity for his re 
 sult. The world was at his feet. It was the 
 first time in his busy, financial life that he had 
 ever accomplished anything. He went back to 
 his office, but he has since informed me that 
 although he had crawled into the old commer 
 cial sarcophagus as I once dubbed his office 
 he always keeps on his desk a paper weight 
 
SUICIDE 151 
 
 cast in the form of a chipmunk-rampant lest 
 he forget. 
 
 "When a person plans suicide he turns from 
 the artificial world, which he believes to be the 
 whole of existence, and retreats into a psychic 
 cavern, deep within himself. Among other in 
 struments of torture, he takes with him two 
 terrible words unloved* and unforgiven. 
 Could he but come to Lizard Lodge and view 
 one sunrise, he would know that he is both 
 loved and forgiven loved for what he is, for 
 what he is not, and for what he is to be for 
 given for the wrongs of all his yesterdays. 
 Breathing here the perfume of early morning 
 in all its purity, he could not deem himself a 
 wretch. Even remorse, the phantom of his 
 diseased conscience, would vanish away. How 
 ever contrite his spirit might be, it could not 
 condemn him to death for crimes which Nature, 
 by her lavish display of beauty, would tell him 
 he had not the capacity to commit. Pondering 
 over the simplicity and innocence of natural 
 things, he would at once detect the overween 
 ing egotism lurking in his old belief that he 
 could escape being loved, however, great his 
 unworthiness, or be by anyone considered so 
 superlatively wicked as to merit unforgiveness. 
 
152 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 He would classify himself with my mountain 
 moths and kindred ephemera who would show 
 him how wanton is the folly of any one who 
 takes his own life or the life of any other 
 creature that, like him, even now flutters its 
 last few hours in the sun." 
 
THE GRAB BAG VISION 
 
 "What a strange stream it is that flows in 
 one direction along one of its shores and in the 
 opposite direction along the other." Thinking 
 thus, I tried to make headway in the seething 
 crowd of a city street. Taking refuge for a 
 moment in the lee of a lamp-post, I gazed at the 
 river of human faces and wondered what the 
 hidden impulses could be that drove them in the 
 direction of their mysterious harbors. As I 
 gazed and wondered, a familiar form came out 
 of the river to my shore and stood beside me. 
 It was Deka Parsec. 
 
 "Why, Deka," I exclaimed, "you in the city 
 and before noon ?" 
 
 "Yes," he admitted, with a bored expression, 
 "let us find that little restaurant on the side 
 street. I would apologize for being in the city, 
 and explain." 
 
 Back once more at our little table in the quiet 
 corner, we settled ourselves for the explanation 
 
 153 
 
154 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 and for the satisfaction of the unhurried mood 
 Deka Parsec loves so well. 
 
 "I am here in the city," he began, "because I 
 attended a Chamber of Commerce banquet last 
 night, and it was too late after the festivities 
 for me to go home." 
 
 I looked at him in surprise. 
 
 "Perhaps you expect another apology for this 
 explanation," he continued, with a whimsical 
 smile, "and I have it ready. I attended the ban 
 quet to please a friend, but I was not really 
 present after all, because a vision of an enor 
 mous grab-bag and a god took me away. Per 
 haps if I tell you about this vision you will 
 pardon me in full." 
 
 "Judgment shall be suspended until you have 
 presented your facts," I replied. 
 
 "Thank you," he said, counterfeiting an ex 
 pression of deep gratitude. "I have been in 
 veigled into banquets before, and so was not sur 
 prised at the effects of this one. Nearly all ban 
 quets commit the folly of fostering oratory. 
 This results in great human suffering. Always 
 my heart is wrung in sympathy for some poor 
 wretch on the program for a speech. Speak he 
 must, whether he happens to be fitted out with 
 
THE GRAB BAG VISION 155 
 
 an idea or not. But there are professional speak 
 ers whose flow of words never ceases. They 
 are the men who make me suffer; whenever 
 they commence to speak I drift away into alien 
 visions to escape punishment. They tell about 
 the good soil, the bountiful crops, the increas 
 ing population ; they deal in quantity and more 
 quantity. The speaker of the evening may come 
 from a city or village where a renowned scien 
 tist lives and labors ; his community may be the 
 home of a brilliant preacher who has power to 
 lead his flock into the uplands of exalted 
 thoughts; a serene and happy soul may be liv 
 ing there, loved by the children and the knowing 
 animals, but if our club or banquet speaker is 
 alive to the demands of such occasions, he will 
 ignore every subject not steeped in obvious 
 materialism. After a few light remarks, made 
 to dull the edge of diffidence, he strides into the 
 midst of money, or money s worth, and stays 
 there for the evening. An appropriate name 
 for these solemn functions would be The Ban 
 quets of the Moles/ for the speaker is always 
 a mole of the earth earthy. He goes down into 
 the soil, into concrete and visible things." 
 
 "Picture to yourself the situation as it de 
 veloped last night. See me as I follow the 
 speaker, counting bushels of potatoes, measur- 
 
156 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 ing lumber, gloating over clearning-house rec 
 ords, weighing hogs. He waxes eloquent on all 
 things easy to understand; he expounds the 
 obvious ; he appeals to the primordial, the prim 
 itive. No wonder then that I gravitate with 
 him to the bottom and then escape from him 
 altogether by a subterranean route of my own. 
 His stringing of words, his intonations and 
 simple modes of thought have their effect. Re 
 leased from the labor of analysis, I slip away 
 into the long ago, into primeval earth with its 
 atmosphere hot and heavy in tropical heat from 
 pole to pole. I find myself in some vast swamp 
 of the carboniferous age. Wandering among 
 tree ferns I inhale the fetid air that rises from 
 dense and decaying vegetation ; the thread that 
 bound me to the banquet has snapped. Now a 
 god-like creature, born of the pensive and pre 
 historic air, takes possession of my senses and 
 proceeds to tell me about the one huge grab-bag 
 of the world. He seems to be stealing infer 
 ences, but not ideas, from the orator of the 
 banquet, whose voice by this time sounds very 
 small and far away, tinkling like a bell on the 
 borderland of consciousness." 
 
 " Let us get out of this carboniferous ooze/ 
 suggests the god. You must get your feet 
 upon the solid ground of the Stone Age if you 
 
THE GRAB BAG VISION 157 
 
 would know something about the grab-bag as 
 a social institution. The savages of that remote 
 day knew it well, but they did not know that its 
 dimensions were the dimensions of the world. 
 The web and woof of this miraculous bag are 
 the web and woof of the human tapestry. In 
 deed, men have thought in times past that play 
 ful or malevolent gods took the human fabric, 
 wrought their designs upon it, and then fash 
 ioned therefrom the grab-bag of life. The 
 whole physical earth was thrown into it, but 
 men were left to create for themselves all the 
 really precious things that lay concealed in the 
 deep folds of the potential. Only material ob 
 jects were in sight. The first grab-bag festival 
 on earth was attended wholly by cannibals, ar 
 rayed in the garb of nature/ 
 
 "The god pauses here, but his words work 
 upon my fancies and lead me into the presence 
 of a cannibal feast. I hear men tearing flesh 
 from human bones, and see and feel them as 
 they jostle each other and struggle for the 
 things they call good." 
 
 * They put nothing into the bag but their 
 hands/ my godly mentor is saying, and when 
 they take their hands out they grasp nothing 
 but the raw materials of the untamed earth, or 
 
158 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 perchance the uncooked bodies of their breth- 
 ern. 
 
 "The words raw materials sound so familiar, 
 and they are uttered with such earth-like simili 
 tude that they do not seem to come from the 
 god at all. They belong to the jargon of com 
 merce and they seem to have the power to dis 
 solve all god-like fancies. I feel sure that these 
 dangerous words are coming straight from the 
 banquet speaker and are threatening to break 
 down the barricade of my revery and invade the 
 sacred precincts within. 
 
 " Ah! exclaims the god, I almost let you 
 slip away. Cannibal feasts and words from 
 without have no uncertain power. But let us 
 not scorn the poor savage, for at some place in 
 the lost history of the race a human mind 
 evolved the stone axe and threw it into the 
 world s grab-bag/ 
 
 "As words, thoughts and things are all alive 
 in the realms of my banquet reveries, I actually 
 hear the great stone axe striking something 
 hard, like a mountain of granite in the world s 
 grab-bag. Then dishes incongruous and im 
 possible things rattle and break. I am dimly 
 conscious that an orator somewhere in the uni 
 verse, has punctuated a climax by striking a 
 table one resounding blow. The dishes have 
 
THE GRAB BAG VISION 159 
 
 responded. I find myself half-way back to earth 
 again, but realizing my peril in time, I turn 
 away and overtake my god once more. 
 
 " That stone axe/ he continues, was the first 
 donation of man to man. It named an epoch in 
 history. Fashioned from the material things 
 of the universal grab-bag, it became a kind of 
 creature endowed with the mind of primeval 
 man. Man made the axe and then, in turn, the 
 axe made man. It started savgery on the long 
 march toward civilization. An idea working its 
 will upon a stone made an axe, and thus un 
 taught creatures became revelations unto them 
 selves. They learned that by invention, they 
 could put more into the mystic bag than they 
 could take out. This discovery marked the 
 greatest event in the history of man. 
 
 "I hear a noisy confusion of voices, rising and 
 falling in waves of applause. A being some 
 where by a table has made an oratorical hit, 
 but whether he is a cannibal or a civilized en 
 thusiast I am too deep in shell-shocked detach 
 ment to know. Then out of the babel comes 
 a sweet voice, and I am with the god of the 
 super-sensuous again. 
 
 " Bear with me just a little longer/ he is 
 saying, I know full well that the noises here are 
 confusing and the strident calls distracting. 
 
160 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 Tarry with me but a moment longer in the 
 Stone Age and despise not the poor savages. In 
 fancy I see them preparing a heritage xor you. 
 I see generation after generation of human be 
 ings, clutching with the tiny fingers of infancy; 
 grasping with the firm hold of maturity, or 
 fumbling with the tremors of age, always 
 taking wonders out of the grab-bag of life and 
 putting other wonders in. Down through the 
 ages men have labored and added to the treas 
 ure, until now this huge bag contains countless 
 worlds, where the gods at first put in but one. 
 It contains that which is matter, and all that is 
 made of matter. It contains all that is mind and 
 all that mind has made of mind. You are at 
 once the heir and the creator of many worlds, 
 and the one gigantic grab-bag contains them 
 all/ 
 
 "Now comes a silence that embarrasses and 
 perplexes. I wonder whether my god has for 
 gotten his speech; I squirm in a misery very 
 earth-like as I see him looking down at me 
 through a purple mist. 
 
 " I was only considering/ said he, how best 
 to show that the grab-bag of humanity really 
 expanded from a thing finite when it received 
 its first bit of mind and spirit from the human 
 donor. To the whole universe you may give 
 
THE GRAB BAG VISION 161 
 
 and from it you may receive. It is for you to 
 decide whether you will contribute things of the 
 mind and heart or only things of matter. Your 
 noble civilization is based wholly upon the treas 
 ures wrought from infinite potentialities, and 
 not from mere physical contents, as the gods 
 first put them into the grab-bag. And so you 
 must add to it intelligently and spiritually, lest- 
 your civilization disintegrate and leave you at 
 last in possession of nothing but the original 
 grab-bag of the Stone Age, with its inert matter 
 untouched by the magic of mind. I admonish 
 you 
 
 "Here a loud and raucous voice disrupts my 
 whole fantasy. My gentle god is gone beyond 
 recall. I am wide awake and cross. The orator 
 of the banquet, rising to his supreme climax, 
 is saying: 
 
 " In conclusion, I invite you, one and all, to 
 come down to Plainfield, and there behold the 
 largest crop of potatoes that ever came out of 
 the ground/ " 
 
 Deka finished his tale and looked at me across 
 the little table. 
 
 "You have not sinned too much, Deka Par- 
 sec," I said, "and your apology is accepted." 
 
 "I knew you would understand," he mur 
 mured. 
 
THOUGHTS 
 
 Deka Parsec has made a true home of Lizard 
 Lodge, not a hermitage. It is the place where 
 he rests, sleeps and prepares food for his body 
 and mind. It has pleased him to simplify his 
 worldly affairs and thereby to win industrial 
 freedom. In that freedom he finds the joy of 
 life. Thus he gains time for that meditation 
 which every person needs. At Lizard Lodge, 
 far from the noise and jargon of the market 
 place, he has the cherished opportunity to ar 
 range the material of his thoughts. He visits 
 the centers of human gregariousness and for 
 the time being enters into sympathy with their 
 activities and interests, but when the time 
 comes for him to use his reasoning faculties he 
 retires to Lizard Lodge where all conditions are 
 conducive to thought. He wishes for all human 
 ity a like boon. He hopes that the time may 
 come when all people can find time for thought 
 and substitute a little of it for their present 
 round of work and sleep. But he also believes 
 that many persons condemn themselves to this 
 slavery. "It is their thought," he said one even- 
 
 163 
 
164 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 ing by the same old fireplace, "their thought 
 and not their physical environment, that is im 
 portant. Their thought, in fact, will determine 
 their surroundings, just as mine has deter 
 mined Lizard Lodge." 
 
 "But, do you think," I asked, "that the great 
 mass of normal, or as you would say, un-shell- 
 shocked humanity, is in need of thought for the 
 purpose of alleviating its suffering ?" 
 
 "Oh, yes," Deka answered very earnestly, "it 
 is just the one thing needful. We are all in 
 the same boat, whether we happen to be Tolly- 
 anna optimists, Schopenhauer pessimists, or 
 bovine dolts who never think at all. There 
 comes a time in the life of everyone when ob 
 jective things like the activities of the annual 
 vacation begin to lose their charm. The hunter 
 misses the joy of the chase; the angler forsakes 
 his stream, and even the rambler, that senti 
 mental and complacent idler, discovers a yawn 
 ing hiatus in the midst of his world of wayside 
 wonders. This phenomenon of aversion is the 
 signal for us to enter upon a new quest, whether 
 we are shell-shocked or normal. It is the time 
 when we should begin to stalk our own 
 thoughts, as once we stalked wild game. It is 
 the time when we would endeavor diligently to 
 catch baffling ideas and to plan our first ramble 
 
THOUGHTS 165 
 
 through mental countrysides, as once we 
 rambled in the world of visible things. We 
 should commence these delightful incursions, 
 these trips into the psychological, while we are 
 still young, not only for the pleasure they give 
 in themselves but because they have the power 
 to overcome the opiate of tedium and to restore 
 to outward things all their youthful charm. 
 
 "In hunting and angling for thoughts all men 
 are free and equal. There are no limitations 
 of time or place. We are not compelled to at 
 tend a university. We may travel far afield in 
 the realm of mind without even taking a vaca 
 tion. As soon as we begin this new series of 
 self -entertainment we are little children again, 
 experimenting in a world of wonders. We have 
 so many questions to ask and there are so few 
 sportsmen here who have penetrated the 
 thickets before us. What is the absolute sea- 
 level of our convictions about everything? 
 What do we actually think about religion when 
 we are not bribed or afraid ; what about politics 
 under the same circumstances? Lying in am 
 bush for the beings that live in our own minds, 
 we may capture one of them and satisfy our 
 selves on the subject of its parentage. We may 
 learn whether it is our own or an adopted idea. 
 While in these revery incursions what do we 
 
166 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 really desire? What sentiment, what emotion, 
 what thought, above all others would put the 
 greatest meaning into our lives? What would 
 this meaning be for us alone, without regard 
 to our neighbors normal or religious codes or 
 the cherished customs of our own country. Do 
 these thoughts of ours look like the thoughts of 
 good citizens or outlaws? Are they meek or 
 proud? We may discover the very soul of our 
 wishes and the nature of our own hearts in 
 these moments of unaffected honesty. What 
 would we do ; where would we go ; whom would 
 we love and where would we dwell, if all money 
 limitations could be overcome and all our plausi 
 ble excuses were swept away, leaving us face 
 to face with our very selves ? 
 
 "When beauty begins to fade ; when strength 
 begins to go; when youth bids us its tragic 
 adieu; when dear friends leave for other lands 
 or other worlds, and the specter of loneliness 
 looms very near, what then of our thoughts? 
 Are they worth anything? Are they worth ob 
 serving ? When we have gone this far we may 
 well suspect that the stalking and snaring of 
 our own thoughts is really more than a pleasant 
 form of entertainment. As we marshal these 
 beings of the inner life the ones that are God 
 like and the ones that are child-like and pass 
 
THOUGHTS 167 
 
 them in review before us, we see all that tears 
 and laughter are made of. We wonder why 
 they abide with us so long; why they love and 
 hate us with such constancy and with such per 
 sonal selection. 
 
 "These creatures of our mental incursions 
 may thus afford us interests and compensations 
 unknown to the old world of tangible things. 
 A self-revealing thought is far more precious 
 than all the trophies of the chase and the golden 
 prizes of commerce. After we have laid a few 
 of these careful ambuscades for our own 
 thoughts we may begin with assurance to play 
 the fortune-teller. We may draw our own horo 
 scopes, for as we think so we are, and so shall 
 we receive. Even the Magi could tell us no 
 more." 
 
 "You may be right, Deka" I said, "but I am 
 sure that not all the oratory that shell-shocked 
 nerves could inspire would ever convince any 
 one that he possessed a thought worth more to 
 him than the golden prizes of commerce." 
 
 "Yes," Deka conceded readily enough, "but 
 by that very token man is a slave. He who has 
 been endowed by nature with a financially- 
 focused mind, has a few disappointing adven 
 tures awaiting him if he tarries until his young 
 body grows too old for sports and his mind too 
 
168 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 centered on gold, before making the first trip 
 into realms purely intellectual. I can predict 
 for him a disillusionment fraught with bitter 
 ness, if at that late day he should seek to 
 escape from the dullness and sadness of the 
 outer world by retreating into the jungle of his 
 own mind. Yet we know that excursions into 
 the objective world will be denied him then, be 
 cause of his physical disabilities, and so in 
 fancy, we see him setting out on his first hunt 
 for psychic lions. He must penetrate thickets 
 and tangled underbrush in all directions. He 
 is astonished at the weird flora and fauna in 
 what he had always believed to be his own ultra- 
 practical mind. All the creatures around him 
 are dwarfs and runts, except the one enormous, 
 overfed thought of his career, and it is busy 
 trampling the others underfoot. Weak and 
 emaciated thoughts on all sides engage his at 
 tention. They are not without beauty even in 
 their sad neglect. He is moved to pity. He 
 asks himself why he turned them away in years 
 past these thoughts of art, of nature, of love, 
 even though they had been destitute of money 
 value and money power. To be sure he tells his 
 conscience now, they did intrude like prattling 
 children, while he was busy with practical 
 things. He had called them all useless then, 
 
THOUGHTS 169 
 
 anaemic, unworthy, weak and contemptible. But 
 now, that he has time to consider sentimental 
 thoughts, and alas! cannot escape them, he is 
 distressed. For the first time he examines 
 them with close attention; they look so little 
 and mean these discarded thoughts ol his 
 so puny and so sick, as they languish there in 
 the rank jungle of his mind. Then he catches 
 a glimpse of the charm that once was theirs in 
 full flower, and might still be theirs had he now 
 only the power to give them health again and 
 so he is moved to remorse. 
 
 "In their present state he does not find these 
 thoughts entertaining; he does not find them 
 congenial. They anger him even while they 
 arouse his pity. But suddenly he realizes that 
 they have been ordained by his own neglect to 
 be the only companions of his old age, now that 
 he has been driven back upon himself by his 
 physical exhaustion and he is moved to fear. 
 In his terror he sees them as they really are, 
 his own poor, despised, starving thoughts, the 
 waifs of his mind, his stunted, wizened thoughts 
 of beauty and love. In company with these 
 wretches he must end his days on earth, and 
 with them for his ragtag retinue, set out at last 
 on a voyage, in obedience to that knell which 
 summons him to Heaven or to Hell/ " 
 
THE IDEAL THE ONLY REAL 
 
 "I have just finished reading sixty or more 
 magazines," said Deka Parsec, when I met him 
 quite by chance at the city library. "Yes, he 
 continued, assuming that my silence indicated a 
 desire for more information, "I have been check 
 ing up the prophets and idealists. You see, the 
 thought came to me one night up at the lodge 
 that between the year A. D. 1886 and the year 
 1897, a certain fifty thousand children were 
 born in the United States and doomed by a 
 German ideal to die in battle on foreign soil. 
 I selected the year 1897 for my magazine in 
 vestigations because by that year the doomed 
 fifty thousand were all here ; the ideal, the au 
 thor of their doom, was goose-walking in Ger 
 many, and our own counter-ideals were develop 
 ing. It seemed to me that if any prophets or 
 idealists lived in America that was the year of 
 their boundless opportunities. I wished to know 
 whether they had made themselves known. 
 What did they say when the list of doomed 
 children was complete and time had ordered 
 them to fall into the ranks already marching in 
 
 171 
 
172 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 the direction of inevitable and inexorable 
 slaughter? 
 
 "I did not read all the books published in that 
 year, and so might have missed a prophet or 
 two, but it seemed reasonable to me that if the 
 magazines are good for anything they must 
 grant a little space to the seers. I found no 
 space so used. No one even hinted at the ter 
 rible things ahead. I found a few idealists and 
 a false prophet here and there nothing more. 
 
 "Turning to one of our leading magazines, I 
 find that the French army is deteriorating 
 through lack of discipline/ And this only 
 eighteen years before Verdun with it s immortal 
 heroism ! 
 
 "The German military establishment is men 
 tioned. Reference is made to the fact that the 
 army burdens the German people, but nothing 
 is said about its menace to the world. 
 
 "Mark Twain wrote an article entitled Stir 
 ring Times in Austria/ He may have had a 
 presentiment about the things in store for Aus 
 tria, for in concluding he uses these words: 
 Yes, the Lex Falkenhayn was a great invention 
 and did what was claimed for it got the gov 
 ernment out of the frying-pan. Mark Twain 
 leaves us to our own conjectures about the fire. 
 
THE IDEAL THE ONLY REAL 173 
 
 "At another place in 1897 I read : It is not 
 with Russia that Germany will ever quarrel. 
 These two have had a long practice in settling 
 their differences at the expense of neighbors; 
 and it may prove next to impossible to oppose 
 a combination which in all probability holds in 
 reserve offers capable of satisfying the griev 
 ances of France/ In spite of this prophecy, the 
 Germans and Russians, only seventeen years 
 later, killed each other quite merrily, by the 
 millions, while France accumulated a devastat 
 ing array of new grievances. 
 
 "Another wise man in the realm of the public 
 prints discusses the mutual jealousies of Eu 
 rope, and then concludes with this pious 
 thought : In our time it looks very much as if 
 it is the envy of the many which will have to be 
 righteously restrained by the wisdom of those 
 in exalted positions/ What became of the wis 
 dom of those in exalted positions when the 
 world trembled on the brink of the Great War? 
 
 "Another glowing story is Awakened Rus 
 sia/ It contains pictures of many notable peo 
 ple, nearly all of whom have since been mur 
 dered by the Bolsheviki. The learned essayist 
 sums up as follows: This then, is the story 
 that M, Witte designed the new Nijni-Novgorod 
 Fair to tell. It is the story of the present con- 
 
174 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 dition and recent progress of Russia, and it is 
 not a tale of which the minister or his country 
 men need to be ashamed/ Here I paused and 
 cogitated over the things the prophet did not 
 reveal. 
 
 "Still another wise man of 1897 gives out this 
 bit of light : It is evident that the most excit 
 ing interests in the Old World in the twentieth 
 century are to be the partition of Africa among 
 the commercial nations of Europe and the des 
 tiny of China/ This prophet leaves out the 
 Great War when making a list of the most 
 exciting interests for our century. 
 
 "Here are a few of the typical subjects that 
 occupied the pens of the seers and the minds 
 of the people in 1897, while Germany continued 
 to goose- walk and Europe prepared for our fifty 
 thousand graves: Has the Senate Degen 
 erated? American Excavations in Greece, 
 Scientific Kite Flying, Dangers and Benefits 
 of the Bicycle, and Stopping Runaway Horses 
 in New York City. 
 
 "In one of our own magazines I found this 
 portrait of Emperor William II: The picture 
 that William II presents is that of a Prince 
 quite by himself; but it is an engaging and at 
 tractive picture none the less. Of one thing we 
 may be quite sure : viz., that should the time of 
 
THE IDEAL THE ONLY REAL 175 
 
 danger ever arrive for the German Empire dur 
 ing his reign, that empire will have at its head 
 a man in the best sense of the word a man 
 who knows what he wants; resolute and Ger 
 man to the core ; fit to cope with troublous times 
 and to steer the ship of state with a sure hand. 
 And the German nation will obey him with full 
 confidence and trust/ This is indeed, a portrait, 
 framed and gilded in prophecy, but the prophecy 
 is true only in one item Emperor William II 
 is indeed a Prince quite by himself today. 
 
 "The magazine prophets of 1897 made a 
 tragic failure. Not even by accident did they 
 approach the truth. It has been said by men of 
 mystic minds that the ideal is the only real/ 
 Certain it is that the ideal which goose-walked 
 in 1897 and murdered our fifty thousand boys 
 a few years later, was poignantly real, and that 
 all the so-called instructive, timely and tangible 
 things discussed in the magazines were really 
 nothing but phantoms. 
 
 "An essay published in 1897 and entitled 
 Making of a Nation/ has a peculiar interest 
 to me because of the marvelous things that 
 happened to the author a few years later. He 
 writes : There are few things more disconcert 
 ing to the thought, or in any effort to forecast 
 the future of our affairs, than the fact that we 
 
176 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 must continue to take our executive policy from 
 presidents given us by nominating conventions 
 and our legislation from conference committees 
 of the House and Senate. Evidently it is a pure 
 ly Providential form of government. These 
 words were written by Woodrow Wilson, then 
 a private citizen. Even he, destined as he was, 
 to sit in the councils of the mighty, made no 
 statement in the nature of prophecy. On the 
 contrary he showed how difficult it is to forecast 
 the future. 
 
 "Surely, Deka," I said here, "you did not 
 really expect to discover prophets by such a 
 reading course." 
 
 "No, not exactly," he returned, "but I did 
 hope to discover evidences of wise men who 
 could see and understand reality. It is perfect 
 ly plain now that the American and European 
 ideals were the only realities then, but by a 
 strange twist of. fate, they were not mentioned 
 by the illuminated minds of 1897. Did idealists 
 of that day comprehend the deadly possibilities 
 that lurked in a conflict between the American 
 and the Prussian ideals? If they did, I have 
 found no explanation of their discussions that 
 touched nothing but the obvious and inconse 
 quential. 
 
 "If Woodrow Wilson exhibited no gift of 
 
THE IDEAL THE ONLY REAL 177 
 
 prophecy in relation to the specific and stupen 
 dous forces which it was his glory so soon to con 
 trol, it can be said for him in truth and justice 
 that he always spoke for the reality of ideals. 
 He sent young men out into the world from 
 Princeton University with these words: Our 
 true wisdom is in our ideals. Practical judg 
 ments shift from age to age, but principles 
 abide; and more stable than principles are the 
 motives which simplify and ennoble life. Years 
 afterward he pleaded for the heart of the 
 world that it should not be broken, and men 
 blinded by what they called practical judgments, 
 laughed at his idealism. The ideal underlying 
 that plea is the reality of today, whether un- 
 shell-shocked people know it or not. It is the 
 one masterful ideal whose acceptance or rejec 
 tion will determine the weal or woe of the com 
 ing twenty years. Any person who doubts the 
 reality of such an ideal, merely because it is 
 absent from the pages of this year s magazines, 
 should study the public prints of A. D. 1897, 
 note the ideals not mentioned therein, and then 
 count the crosses in France." 
 
FIVE TOWNS IN ONE 
 
 Again I found myself sitting with Deka Par- 
 sec before the witching fireplace at Lizard 
 Lodge. The frost of early autumn, creeping 
 down from the snow-caps called for an extra 
 log in the blaze. Night ruled out there above 
 the trees and crags. All this added to my sense 
 of well-being and coziness ; shadows danced on 
 the walls; the aromatic smoke called up half- 
 forgotten experiences of childhood ; fiery castles 
 built themselves in the flames and crumbled into 
 storied ruins. I stretched out my feet to the 
 grateful warmth and sighed in ursine content 
 ment. 
 
 That ribbon of white is the Rhine," I mur 
 mured reminiscently, "and there is Strasburg, 
 and Mainz and Koblenz." 
 
 "Traveling again, are you?" Deka inquired 
 with a low, good-natured chuckle. "The ne 
 cromancy of the mountains has you in thrall, 
 sure enough. You are in the exact state of 
 mind to believe anything I tell you." 
 
 "Don t I always believe you, Deka?" I asked 
 
 179 
 
180 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 in a tone that feigned a slight resentment at his 
 inference. 
 
 "Yes," he went on, "but I shall ask you now 
 to believe that only yesterday I visited five 
 towns, all standing on the site of one. What do 
 you make of that?" 
 
 "Oh, that is not asking so much." I answer 
 ed. "Pedro, our Mexican friend, would merely 
 shrug his shoulders and say: Who knows? " 
 
 "Well, then, be it known," Deka began, with 
 mock solemnity that quickly shaded off into that 
 color of thought which betokens honesty, "I 
 visited a city by the sea and carried out an 
 experiment which is very simple for any person 
 whose nerves vibrate to the high-frequency of 
 my shell-shocked voltage. For some time it has 
 been my secret desire to do a little more travel 
 ing in strange lands, but Paloma and his fellows 
 have become so sensitive to kindness that I can 
 not think of giving them into the care of cruel 
 drivers. So instead of going away I tried a 
 travel experiment. I have long been conscious 
 of the fact that no two persons ever see the 
 same scene in the same way, and that I have 
 only to see through the eyes and minds of others 
 when I wish the refreshing changes of travel. 
 For me this method of traveling or observing is 
 
FIVE TOWNS IN ONE 181 
 
 only a kind of a mental step-down or step-up. 
 Accordingly as soon as I had reached the city 
 by the sea I decided to view it through the con 
 sciousness of the first person I should meet. 
 This individual happened to be a substantial 
 resident of the town on his way to work. In 
 stantly my own view faded out and I saw in 
 sharp outlines, things that before had hidden 
 away in the blur of my picture s background; 
 washboards and soapsuds came out in bold re 
 lief; clothes assembled on lines for it was Mon 
 day morning grocery trucks raced about, and 
 people hurried to their places of business. Back 
 yards gave up their secrets in detail. I saw 
 scraps of cabbage, turnip tops, watermelon- 
 rinds, broken-down baby carriages, discarded 
 automobile parts, forsaken dolls, left out over 
 night, their garments wet with dew, odds and 
 ends dragged in by playful pups, and milk sau 
 cers left near doors for cats. As I passed along 
 the street I noticed every bit of paper and all 
 the manifold forms of litter left by the Sunday 
 crowd. I got the full force of the squeak in a 
 passing automobile and also the heart-rending 
 clatter of a flat wheel on an interurban car. 
 Some cruel citizen was burning bones and hair, 
 while another one filled the atmosphere with 
 the pungent antidote of eucalyptus smoke. 
 
182 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 "Surely I had never seen this town before ; I 
 had never even suspected its existence. But 
 there it was and growing in sordid expres 
 siveness. No doubt I would have followed my 
 adopted mentality farther, to the very verge of 
 some transplanted Ghetto, toward which his 
 mind was leading, had I not just then met a 
 man of very different type. Into his soul I 
 leaped at once for the weal or the woe of it. My 
 first look through his eyes presented an en 
 chanted view of the Palos Verdas hills. The 
 fog draped them like ostrich plumes, while the 
 sunlight, breaking through here and there, 
 painted the crests in colors of infinite variety, 
 crowning them with an ethereal beauty. Could 
 the world in any of its parts present a more 
 charming view? After enjoying the hills for a 
 long time, I turned with my romantic mentor 
 and looked in the opposite direction at the great 
 column of black smoke rising from the power 
 plant. How magnificent it was! I had never 
 known that beauty could reside in smoke. A 
 light sea breeze lifted the billows of black from 
 the chimneys and painted the sky for miles to 
 the eastward. It seemed that my borrowed 
 mind would write an ode to smoke, but other 
 wonders claimed its adoration. The ocean, gray 
 under the wind, smiled in such a different way ; 
 
FIVE TOWNS IN ONE 183 
 
 I had never caught that smile before. I thought 
 of its warmth, its good fish, its boundless sur 
 face, and its invitation to travel among far away 
 uncharted isles. Back to land I came again 
 with my adopted soul. I turned and viewed the 
 amphitheatre of hills, the impressive high 
 school building on Camino Real, that road of 
 many an ancient tale. Verily my borrowed eyes 
 deceived me! This street is not the Rue des 
 Italiens, neither is it Pennsylvania Avenue, but 
 whence the glamor of it; whence this strange 
 man s way of seeing it ? Eagerly I followed him 
 down to Pacific Avenue. I saw great structures 
 that glowed with human consciousness as they 
 ushered travelers into the city, through it and 
 out again with a hearty wish for their early 
 return. I almost lost myself in the streets of 
 reality following the footsteps of one who saw 
 another city. Peering through the trees at an 
 old deserted estate, I saw something white, like 
 a marble temple shining in the green ; it was a 
 library, stately in its lines, ample in dimensions, 
 sedate, retiring and yet inviting. The owner of 
 my borrowed eyes turned and went down to the 
 beach. I followed him northward along the 
 Strand, now a veritable Victoria Embankment, 
 some one s dream come true. And I caught out 
 lines of ships riding in a safe harbor, yachts, 
 
184 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 coastwise visitors and deep sea voyagers adven 
 turing from the lands of the spices. I breathed 
 the odors of the Orient and felt the moving in 
 spiration of a city that looks out upon the world. 
 Turning with my mentor to view the encircling 
 hills again, I saw a city more splendid than 
 Naples. For a long time I stood in rapture, for 
 getful, while in some way he of the vision de 
 parted. Another little journey had ended, and 
 I was sorry. 
 
 "No seasoned traveler tarries long to regret 
 the loss of scenes however pleasing, for he must 
 push onward into other places that are also 
 strange and new. Moreover, I remembered that 
 my last adopted eyes belonged to middle age, 
 and they must have been the eyes of a poor, idle 
 dreamer out of harmony with facts and prac 
 tical ways of life. Now I wished to see the city 
 through the soul of youth overflowing, exub 
 erant youth and so when a young man drove 
 up to the curb in a fine expensive roadster, I 
 ruthlessly applied my psychic arts and dissolved 
 the erstwhile temple, vistas, beclouded hills, 
 oriental spices and phantom ships, and then I 
 looked about me in wonder at the metamor 
 phosis. What a slow, dull town this Monday 
 morning! How utterly lacking in cheering dis 
 play ! No jazz ; no girls ; no secret paths leading 
 
FIVE TOWNS IN ONE 185 
 
 to forbidden beverages; no crowd; nothing to 
 stir the soul ! My youthful eyes survey the de 
 serted El Paseo. How tiresome the encircling 
 hills when I permit my gaze to wander across 
 the car tracks for a moment ! Perhaps there is 
 a hinterland in this town with its high schools 
 and highbrows, but I am young, full of red 
 blood and on the quest of joy. What a dull 
 town! How impossible! There is absolutely 
 nothing to do. And so the tragic pessimism of 
 youth descended upon me and carried me along 
 with a rush and back to the very step of the 
 roadster where at last I broke the psychic spell 
 and gave up my borrowed eyes again. The 
 youth whose overflowing joy I fain would have 
 known, sped out of town, scourged on by a re 
 morseless disappointment, and doubtless he 
 shall ever speed until he finds a city that is 
 beautiful and gay and full of excitement. 
 
 "It was still morning and I had seen three 
 towns scattered over the world. Time remained 
 for more. A little child played on the street. 
 I wondered how the town seemed to him. In 
 shell-shock to wish is to know, and so behold 
 me rolling in the dust, the undisputed owner of 
 glittering gold and precious stones. A rivulet 
 from a leaky hydrant is the noble Mississippi 
 winding its way through a vast countryside. 
 
186 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 The town is now the whole world, and the end 
 of it is the place where houses meet across the 
 street, far away. The trees extend to the very 
 heavens and play with the sun. Larger people 
 and horses are creatures that have been on the 
 streets throughout all the eternal past and they 
 will be here forever. All the buildings have a 
 ravishing beauty; their windows smile; their 
 doors speak kind words to little people who play 
 in the dirt. How beautiful the varicolored paper 
 that litters the walks; how fascinating the 
 empty lunch boxes with their pretty pictures! 
 What interesting things are the bright, red 
 cigar bands, scattered about, and even the half- 
 burned cigars themselves with their strange 
 strong odor that makes you cough ! What high, 
 impressive, dizzy poles, with their wires that 
 only God can reach ! What a beautiful town full 
 of fairies and wonders ! 
 
 "Looking up then at a passing patriarch, I 
 made one more psychic transformation. The 
 glittering gold vanished from the dust; the 
 buildings only a short distance away melted into 
 each other. People came out of a visual fog, 
 although the sun was shining, and went back 
 into the fog again. I saw their minds more 
 than their bodies. As I passed along in this 
 queer, circumscribed town with its short, misty 
 
FIVE TOWNS IN ONE 187 
 
 perspectives, I was conscious of a love that 
 seemed quite illogical ; it included all things liv 
 ing and not living. Details were all gone; no 
 sharp outlines remained anywhere. The houses, 
 the trees, the flowers and the people were suf 
 fused with an unearthly radiance that only the 
 patriarch and I could detect. 
 
 "The earth, and every common sight did seem 
 Apparelled in celestial light." 
 
 "At the brow of the hill we parted and my 
 five little journeys for the day were ended." 
 
 "And which of these five towns do you think 
 was the real one, Deka?" I asked. 
 
 "The real one?" he repeated, "Why, they 
 were all real." 
 
THE POETIC ATTITUDE 
 
 We were in the bottom of a canon, Deka Par- 
 sec and I, while the spirit of the place and 
 Deka s moods guided our conversation. 
 
 "Suppose we sit down on this boulder," I sug 
 gested, "unless you are in a hurry." 
 
 "My hurry was like a sore tooth, so I had it 
 extracted," he replied. "Do you know," he con 
 tinued, when we had made ourselves comfor 
 table on the rock, "I have been thinking about 
 our first meeting, and I can not escape the con 
 viction that the attitude of the beholder really 
 makes his world. Now for example, here I am 
 in the very same world with other people, but 
 it is a different world to me, thanks to high ex 
 plosive. It is so different from the world that 
 every other man seems to see. I know all the 
 time, of course, that it is I and not the world 
 that has changed." 
 
 "Yes," I agreed, "each person must live with 
 in the bounds of his own reality, but you under 
 stand more than ordinary mortals for you have 
 lived in two worlds." 
 
 189 
 
190 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 "No, it is not quite like having lived in two 
 worlds," he explained; "it is more that the 
 former world of my mind is now the memory of 
 a dream. My present attitude is the real one. 
 The terrific force of an exploding shell blasted 
 away the universe of my attitude as it existed 
 then and brought into being another interpre 
 tation, and I think, a better one. Yet it makes 
 me wonder, for, if my present state is a better 
 one, may there not still be an unattained best? 
 The fact that a change in my brain had the 
 power to transform a world proves for me that 
 the one actual and absolute world exists only in 
 the conception of God. It shows that my blast 
 ed and distorted view of life can, after all, be 
 as near the actual fact as the view of any other 
 person. Take for example, the poetic attitude. 
 There was a time in my life when poetry seemed 
 abnormal and unreal. Now, when I realize that 
 the universe can only be an attitude at best for 
 any mind less than the mind of God, I feel that 
 the poet s picture is the best of all, for he has 
 the picture of beauty, and it is always beauty 
 that gives the pleasure. You see, my motive is 
 entirely selfish." 
 
 "May not every moral code be selfish in the 
 last analysis?" I asked wishing to justify him 
 
THE POETIC ATTITUDE 191 
 
 and encourage further confidence on the subject 
 of shell shock. 
 
 "Altogether selfish, of course," he answered 
 quickly, and I could see that he was pleased. 
 "Morality is a human code. It is good for a 
 human being to be moral and bad for him to be 
 immoral. Bad people are foolish; they suffer 
 consequences, not punishment. There are many 
 ways of being bad. Beauty has a moral code. 
 We may be immoral in our attitude to beauty. 
 Being immoral I mean that we break the rules 
 of beauty or ignore their existence. The penalty 
 is that we are deprived of the high pleasure 
 that beauty gives. When I was in the univer 
 sity we studied strength of material ; we learned 
 how lumber should be sawed; how to construct 
 beams and girders. I studied the possibilities 
 of trees from standing timber in the forest to 
 the finished truss of a bridge. Had some one 
 brought me here in that period of my life, and 
 placed me on this boulder, I might have looked 
 at that gnarled sycamore and remarked that it 
 was quite useless, but, today, under the spell of 
 nerves that other men call jangled, I see the 
 tree as the poet sees it. 
 
 "Think of a civil engineer looking at a tree 
 in that way! In my normal days I considered 
 the poets mad. Now it seems to me that all 
 
192 DEKA PARSEC 
 
 persons who do not love poetry are immoral to 
 the claims of beauty. They might sit right here 
 in this dell and receive no message from that 
 azure wonder we call the sky, but for us it sings. 
 
 "The mountain peaks that shine afar, 
 The silent stars, the pathless sea, 
 Are living signs of all we are, 
 And types of all we hope to be." 
 
 "In the days before my nerves were tightened 
 to blend with some unattainable overtone, I 
 thought of grass as something common, some 
 thing to walk upon and to make up into useful 
 hay; but now it creeps into my heart; it is a 
 living entity, and for it, as for all her children, 
 Nature has found a voice to say : 
 
 Here I come creeping, creeping everywhere, 
 
 By the dusty roadside, 
 
 On the sunny hillside, 
 
 Close by the noisy brook, 
 
 In every shady nook, 
 I come creeping, creeping everywhere. 
 
 "That is the voice of the grass for me. Think 
 of that everwhelming army, the army of the 
 grass; nothing can stay it, nothing can stem 
 the awful tide of its creeping, creeping every 
 where. Over the battlefields of France, under 
 
THE POETIC ATTITUDE 193 
 
 wire entanglements, among the countless 
 crosses where sleep the heroic dead, the con 
 quering army of the grass comes with its im 
 perious, creeping everywhere/ " 
 
 "Hearts may break and the traffic of the 
 world may roar, but the great and all-conquer 
 ing soul of Nature is creeping, silently creeping 
 everywhere. Why hurry, we mortals, and get 
 excited, when the grass wins every battle ?" 
 
 The mountain wind freshened a little until an 
 eddying gust flung a shower of blossoms from a 
 bush. They seemed not to fall upon the ground, 
 but upon the soul of my friend. The high stress 
 of his emotion was imparted to me. I could feel 
 his spirit standing at attention, giving the 
 salute ; we were present at a sacred rite. 
 
 "You felt the flowers fall, didn t you," he 
 murmured. "Our spirits peeped at each other 
 through the veils, just for one fleeting moment: 
 
 We are spirits clad in veils; 
 
 Man by man was never seen; 
 All our deep communing fails 
 
 To remove the shadowy screen. 
 
 Heart to heart was never known; 
 
 Mind with mind did never meet; 
 We are columns left alone 
 
 Of a temple once complete. 
 
194 DEKA PAESEC 
 
 What is social company 
 
 But a babbling summer stream ? 
 What our wise philosophy 
 
 But the glancing of a dream? 
 
 "But, Deka," I suggested, "doesn t poetry im 
 pose upon us to some extent, and even take 
 away our common sense, at times? Is it not 
 like music in this respect? Haunting melodies 
 and poems with a strange lilt have often in 
 veigled me into acts and thoughts not in con 
 sonance with my tried and trusted moods." 
 
 "Oh, yes," he admitted, "poetry and music do 
 impose upon the unshell-shocked mind which 
 does not wish to change its practical orienta 
 tion. Poetry rushes the citadel of the soul and 
 often overthrows the rational defender. With 
 me, however, there is no conflict, because I live 
 in that no-man s land, that borderland where 
 mood and reason interchange their roles. I can 
 safely give way to poetic sentiments, for by so 
 doing I am merely maintaining the average 
 level of my own mentality. Only the other 
 evening when I was alone at Lizard Lodge, and 
 the wind moaned in the chimney in a ghostly 
 way, it pleased me to listen and to make believe 
 that it was a "midnight dreary." Ah, the lux 
 ury of the lugubrious! Chills crept along my 
 spine, and: 
 
THE POETIC ATTITUDE 195 
 
 Then, methought the air grew denser, perfumed from 
 
 an unseen censer 
 Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the 
 
 tufted floor. 
 "Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee by these 
 
 angels he hath sent thee, 
 
 Respite respite and nepenthe from thy memories of 
 Lenore ! 
 
 Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost 
 Lenore!" 
 
 Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." 
 
 "For a long time the wind in the chimney 
 kept up the refrain and moaned "Nevermore." 
 Perhaps you will say there can be no reality in 
 such a state of mind, but here I can not agree 
 with you. The world of poesy is in every way 
 as real as any other world. Indeed, I believe 
 that in some part of the infinite universe every 
 thing that we can possibly imagine actually 
 exists in an objective sense, because the finite 
 mind can not imagine beyond the infinite. The 
 limited can never overcome the unlimited. The 
 poet may reason cogently or he may only dream, 
 but if we follow him in the spirit of his song 
 we will find the real. We, sitting here in the 
 presence of the sycamores, may reconstruct our 
 world according to the poetic attitude of the 
 
196 DEKA PAKSEC 
 
 moment our very heart s desire and thereby 
 find and cherish reality in a song which, only 
 for poets, truly sings : 
 
 "The year s at the spring, 
 And day s at the morn; 
 Morning s at seven; 
 The hill s dew-pearled; 
 The lark s on the wing; 
 The snail s on the thorn; 
 God s in His heaven 
 All s right with the world." 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY