III.—RECITATIVE
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 Dūspeptos 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 Dūspeptos 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 à 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 Chimæra, 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° 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 Dæmon 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. Dūspeptos was king only in name,—roi fainéant. 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 Dūspeptos 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. Béranger'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 œsophagus 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.