How much farther the Martyr's appeal might have gone can never be known,
as the height of his great argument was cut short at this point by the
appearance of the Pontifex Maximus in person on the stage of action. The
fated victims were to be made ready for the coming sacrifice. The
oracle, it seems, had declared that Neptune would not smile, unless two
were cribbed together in one pen,--that the arrangement of these pairs
should be left with the lot of the bean,--and that as the beans went, so
must go the victims. Inexorable Fate would allow no reversal of her
decrees. Soon the beans were rattling in the hat of the Pontifex, and,
_mirabile!_ pen No. 1 fell to Duespeptos and his Satellite elect.
The immediate effects of this bean--whether white, black, Pythagorean,
Lima, kidney, or what not--were three-fold: 1. A pump-handle
hand-shaking; 2. A very thorough diagnosis of the weather, including a
rapid sketch by Duespeptos of the leading principles of caloric,
pneumatics, and hygrology; 3. An exchange of cards. That of which I was
the recipient consisted of a sheet of paste-board, rather begrimed and
wrinkled, of nearly the same dimensions as the Atlantic (Monthly, not
Ocean). The name and address occupied the middle of one side of the
document, while all the remaining space was filled in with manifold
closest scribblings in lead-pencil,--apparently notes, memoranda, and
the like. These were not at all private, so the new-found partner of my
bosom assured me. In fact, I should do well to look at them, and make
myself master of their contents. My friends also might find profit
therein. Stray hints might undoubtedly be gathered from them which would
lay open to my eyes the secret things of Nature and life. Thrusting it
into my pocket for the moment, I feasted myself in imagination with the
treasure that was mine, anticipating the happy hour that should make my
hope fruition. Then we, first elect of the bean, set ourselves to
determine the _status quo ante bellum_. And here came in once more the
fabaceous maker and marker of destiny, saying that blind justice
decreed, that, inasmuch as sound is wont to rise, he who was noonday
Sayer and midnight Snorer should couch below, while the Hearer should
circle above,--plainly a wise provision, that the good things of
Providence might not be wasted. Both Damon and Pythias agreed, that, for
once at least, the oracle was not ambiguous.
All things being at last arranged, the Rhapsodist took his leave for the
present, going, as he informed me, on an errand of mercy for his
stomach. The magazine aboard ship being of dubious character, he had
prevailed on himself to supply his concern with a limited number of
first-class cereals with his own _imprimatur_,--copyright and profits to
be in his own hands. As some consolation for his absence, I was favored
with a brief oral treatise on Fats, considered both dietetically and
ethically, with an appendix, somewhat _a la_ Liebig, on the nature, use,
and effects of tissue-making and heat-making food, nitrogen, carbon,
and the like. By way of improvement, a brilliant peroration was added,
supposed to be addressed through me to the mothers of America, urging
them to bring up the rising generation fatless. Thus only might war
cease, justice prevail, love reign, humanity rise, and a golden age come
back again to a world-wide Arcadia. Fat and Anti-Fat! Eros and Anteros,
Strophe and Antistrophe. Or, better, the old primeval tale,--Jove and
the Titans, Theseus and the Centaurs, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, Thor
and the Giants, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Good and Evil, Water and Fire, Light
and Darkness. The world has told it over from the beginning.
And do you ask what manner of man was the Fatless one? You shall see
him. His most striking feature was a fur cap,--weight some four pounds,
I should judge. I think he was born with this cap, and will die with it,
for 90 deg. Fahrenheit seemed no temptation to uncover. Boots came second in
rank, but twelfth or so in number,--weight probably on a par with the
leaded brogans of the little wind-driven poetaster of old. Between these
two extremes might be found about five feet ten of humanity, lank,
sapless, and stooping. The seedy drapery of the figure hung in lean,
reproachful wrinkles. The flabby trousers seemed to say: "Give! give!"
The hollow waistcoat murmured: "Pad, oh! pad me with hot biscuits!" The
loose coat swung and sighed for forbidden fruit: "Fill me with fat!" A
dry, coppery face found pointed expression in the nose, which hung like
a rigid sentinel over the thin-lipped mouth,--like Victor Hugo's Javert,
loyal, untiring, merciless. No traitorous comfits ever passed that
guard; no death-laden bark sailed by that sleepless quarantine. The
small ferret-eyes which looked nervously out from under bushy
brows, roaming, but never resting, were of the true Minerva
tint,--yellow-green. The encircling rings told of unsettled weather.
While elf-locks and straggling whiskers marked the man careless of
forms, the narrow, knotted brow suggested the thinker persistent in the
one idea:--
"deep on his front engraven,
Deliberation sat and _peptic_ care."
Not over beds of roses had he walked to ascend the heights. Those boots
in which he shambled along his martyr-course were filled with peas. He
had learned in suffering what he taught in sing-song. The wreath of
wormwood was his, and the statue of brass. _Io triumphe!_
His gait was a swift, uncertain shuffle, a compromise between a saunter
and a dog-trot. The arms hung straight and stiff from the narrow
shoulders, like the radii of a governor, diverging more or less
according to the rate of speed. When the scourge of his Daemon lashed him
along furiously, they stood fast at forty-five degrees. His eyes peered
suspiciously around, as he lumbered on, watchful for the avenger of fat,
who, perhaps, was even now at his heels. A slouch-hat, crowning hollow
eyes and haggard beard, filled him with joy: it marked a bran-bread man
and a brother. He smiled approvingly at a shrivelled form with hobbling
gait; but from the fat and the rubicund he turned with severest frown.
They were fleshly sinners, insults to himself, corrupters of youth,
gorged drones, law-breakers. He was ready to say, with the statesman of
old: "What use can the state turn a man's body to, when all between the
throat and the groin is taken up by the belly?" He had vowed eternal
hostility to all such, and from the folds of his toga was continually
shaking out war. He was of the race sung by the bard, who
"Quarrel with mince-pies, and disparage
Their best and dearest friend, plum-porridge,
Fat pig and goose itself oppose,
And blaspheme custard through the nose."
Every chance-comer was instantaneously gauged as dyspeptic or eupeptic,
friend or foe. On the march, Javert was on the alert, snuffing up the
air, until some savory odor crossed his path, when he would shut himself
up, like a snail within his shell. Yet he was not sleeping, for no
titbit ever passed the portals beneath. Perhaps, however, they were
themselves trusty now, having made habit a second nature. I cannot
imagine them watering at sight of any dainty.
I have heard it said that certain orders of beings are able to improvise
or to interchange organs, just as need calls. Thus a polyp, if hard put
to it, may shift what little brain and stomach happen to be in his
possession. You may say that he carries his heart in his hand. He can
take his stomach, and dump it down in brain-case or thorax, just as he
fancies,--can organize viscera and victory anywhere, at any moment; and
all works merrily. The Fatless was similar, yet different. His stomach
changed not its local habitation, was never victorious; yet, from cap to
boot, it was ubiquitous and despotic. Brain and heel alike felt
themselves to be mere squatters on another's soil, and had a vague idea
that the rightful lord might some day come to oust them, and build up a
new capital in these far-away districts. Sometimes they went so far as
to style themselves his proconsuls and lieutenants, but they were never
suffered to do more than simply to register the decrees of the central
power. Duespeptos was king only in name,--_roi faineant_. Gaster was
the power behind the throne,--the Mayor of the Palace,--the great
Grand-Vizier. Nought went merrily, for he ruled with a rod of iron.
Every day his strange freaks set the empire topsy-turvy. Every day there
was growling and ill-feeling at his whimsical tyranny,--but nothing
more. Secession was as impossible as in the day of Menenius Agrippa.
Looking at it another way, Gaster might be called the object-glass
through which Duespeptos looked out upon the world,--a glass always
bubbly, distorted, and cracked, generally filmy and smoky, never
achromatic, and decidedly the worse for wear. I think that the world
thus seen must have had a very odd look to him. His most fitting
salutation to each fellow-peptic, as he crossed the field of vision,
would have been the Chinese form of greeting: "How is your stomach? Have
you eaten your rice?" or, perhaps, the Egyptian style: "How do you
perspire?" With him, the peptic bond was the only real one; all others
were shams. All sin was peptic in origin: Eve ate an apple which
disagreed with her. The only satisfactory atonement, therefore, must be
gastric. All reforms hitherto had profited nothing, because they had
been either cerebral or cardiac. None had started squarely from Gaster,
the true centre. Moral reform was better than intellectual, since the
heart lay nearer than the head to the stomach. Phalansteries,
Pantisocracies, Unitary Homes, Asylums, Houses of Refuge,--these were
all mere makeshifts. The hope of the world lay in Hygeian Institutes.
Heroes of heart and brain must bow before the hero of the stomach.
Judged by any right test of greatness, Graham was more a man than was
Napoleon or John Howard. He that ruled his stomach was greater than he
who took a city. Beranger's Roi d'Yvetot, who ate four meals a day,--the
Esquimaux, with his daily twenty-pound quantum of train-oil, gravy, and
tallow-candles,--the alderman puffing over callipash and callipee,--the
backwoodsman hungering after fattest of pork,--such men as these were no
common sinners: they were assassins who struck at the very fountain of
life, and throttled a human stomach. Pancreatic meant pancreative.
Gastric juice was the long-sought elixir. The liver was the lever of the
higher life. Along the biliary duct led the road to glory. All the
essence of character, life, power, virtue, success, and their
opposites,--all the decrees of Fate even,--were daily concocted by
curious chemistry within that dark laboratory lying between the
oesophagus and the portal vein. There were brewed the reeking
ingredients that fertilize the fungus of Crime; there was made to bloom
the bright star-flower of Innocence; there was forged the anchor of
Hope; there were twisted the threads of the rotten cable of Despair;
there Faith built her cross; there Love vivified the heart, and Hate
dyed it; there Remorse sharpened his tooth; there Jealousy tinged his
eye with emerald; there was quarried the horse-block from which dark
Care leaped into the saddle behind the rider; there were puffed out the
smoke-wreaths of Doubt; there were blown the bubbles of Phantasy; there
sprouted the seeds of Madness; and there, down in the icy vaults, Death
froze his finger for the last, cold touch.