"Bless me!" I asked, "What does he teach in his school?"
"Embalming, and all that sort of thing."
"It never occurred to me," I confessed, "that undertakers had to learn. I thought it came naturally. Ducks to water, you know. They look as if they could pick up a thing like embalming by instinct. I don't suppose you knew old Mr. Smith."
"No."
"He wore a white carnation on business afternoons."
We rounded a turn of the black walnut stair.
"There!" exclaimed the poet. "That is the office of the Shriek."
I know the Shriek. It is one of the periodicals of the newer art that does not descend to the popular taste. It will not compromise its ideals. It prints pictures of men and women with hideous, distorted bodies. It is solving sex. Once in a while the police know what it is talking about, and then they rather stupidly keep it out of the mails for a month or so.
Now I had intended for some time to subscribe to the Shriek, because I wished to see my friend's verses as they appeared. In this way I could learn what the newer art was doing, and could brush out of my head the cobwebs of convention. Keats and Shelley have been thrown into the discard. We have come a long journey from the older poets.
"I would like to subscribe," I said.