The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE BIG STICK One was intensely bored as he had to restrict himself to his own society. And the more he restricted himself the more bored he became, and the more bored he became the more boorish did he grow, and the ruder did he become to his fellow passengers, who evidently had not sufficient “ rationalism” to believe that Erasmus Darwin was born in 1788, or that the water upon which they floated was composed of HO,. He wondered, “If it were they who were fools, or I myself,’—we, being mystics, don’t; we know! Their conversation was “trivial chatter,” so evidently it had nothing to do with ontogenic-phylogeny. The chaplain was “ insufferable” twice over, and so were his prayers. “The heavy mask of revelry was still on the faces of the men whom curiosity drew to the open rail: men in gay pyjamas and flaunting shirts, men with ends of cigarettes in their lax mouths, men whose language, up to a few hours before, had been too archaic for the dictionary. With open mouths they jostled each other to get a good view of the plunge of the white sewn outline of a man.” Now, Joseph, draw it mild; don’t put the sugar in your tea with a trowel! we have seen many burials at sea, more than we should care to count, but we have never seen the corpse surrounded by “ fag-ends” and a gay pyjamaed mob, Perhaps one of the passengers was on his way to the bath-room, in a Swan and Edgar “sleeping suit,’ when you went to have your own little peep—or have you borrowed a leaf from your former Jesuit brothers and write all this for the greater glory of God RPA? We are travellers as well as mystics, we have been a score of journeys as long as yours and longer, right round the world twice—think of that, Jo! and all the cockle shells you could have collected! We know that the conversation “on board” is trivial, “very naughty,” as a little Cape Dutch girl once said to us, “but rather nice,” and that the ozone of the air and the brine of the waves make the ladies most charming on the boat deck. We are mystics and are never bored; we are mystics and are just as happy on board a Castle liner as behind Fleet Street in Johnson’s Court. If we back a winner we ask our friends to come and have a “night out” with us; and if the wrong colours go by, well, we don’t pawn our breeches to buy a revolver. If it were possible for boredom to descend upon us we should not say “sucks” to it, like Philpotts, but should retire into Dhyana or Samadhi. You would call this “Self-induced-hypophylo- morphodemoniacal-auto-suggestion.” Well, well, never mind! we will pass the words, we don’t care a “tinker’s curse” about them; it is the message we look for and not the special patents act under which the wire which conveyed it to us is registered. And if I say “hocuspocus” and down come a good dinner and a pretty girl, eat the one and don’t be rude to the other—or she will run away, Joseph, she really will: and please, Josy, don’t turn to me and say: You “insufferable” fool, you are not Romano’s; what business have you to produce 333