In the gutter, quite besotted,
Lies the drunkard, sadly spotted.
People pass with unmoved faces—
Why remark such commonplaces?
Just another Volstead duckling,
Rolling in the gutter chuckling:
"Over seas of milk and water,
Angels' wings a-flappin',
Now we're purified and holy,
Things like me can't happen.
Liquor's gone and gone forever—
Even the word is lewd:
Otherwise there's somethin' makes me
Feel like I was stewed."
IV—Finale—A Short Interview with the Human Stomach
Last night as I lay on my pillow,
Last night when they'd put me to bed
I spoke to my dear little tummy
And wept at the words that I said:
"My sensitive, beautiful tummy
That once was so rosy and pure!
My dainty, fastidious tummy—
O what have you had to endure?
"You once were inclined to be fussy;
You turned at inferior rye;
You moped at a dubious vintage
And shrieked if the gin wasn't dry.
"But now you are covered with bunions
And spongy and morbid and blue;
You bite in the night like an adder—
O say, what has happened to you?"
Then my sullen and sinister tummy
Rose slowly and spoke to my brain;
"Say, boss, what's the stuff you've been drinking
That fills me with nothing but pain?
"Today you had 'cocktails' for luncheon—
They tasted like sulphured cologne.
They—were followed by poisonous highballs
That fell in my depths like a stone.
"I am dripping with bootlegger brandy,
I ooze with synthetical gin;
And the beer that you make in the kitchen—
Ah, dire are the wages of sin!
"The cursed saloon has departed,
And well we are rid of the plague;
But I'm weary of furniture polish
With the counterfeit label of Haig.
"Yea, gone is the old-fashioned brewery
And the gilded cafe is no more...."
Here my tummy jumped over the pillow
And fell in a fit on the floor,
THE CENSORSHIP OF THOUGHT
[Illustration: Robert Keable urging the Automaton called Citizen to turn on his oppressor.]
ROBERT KEABLE
I knew a man, about a year ago, who published a novel upon which the critics fell with such fury this side the water at least, that whether in the body or out of the body, such was ultimately his state of bewilderment, he could not tell, and if I am asked to discuss "Prohibitions, Inhibitions and Illegalities" it is natural that the incident should be foremost in my mind. True, it is becoming increasingly the fashion for a parson to preach a sermon without announcing text, but modern preaching, like brief bright brotherly breezy modern services, does not seem to cut much ice. Therefore we will hark back to the manner of our forefathers and take the incident for a text. It affords an admirable example of nonsenseorship.
As is always done in approved sermons (but humbly entreating your forbearance, which is less common) let us consider the context, let us review the circumstances of the case in point. Our author left the lonely heart of Africa for the theatre of war in France. He left a solitude, a freedom, a beauty, of which he had become enamoured, for that assemblage of all sorts of all nations, in a cockpit of din and fury, known as the Western Front. He expected this, that, and the other; mainly he found the other, that, and this. Being desirous of serving the God of things as they are, he pondered, he observed, and, his heart burning within him, he wrote. He had no opportunity of writing in France, so he wrote on his return, away up in the Drakensberg mountains, alone, with the clean veld wind blowing about him and the nearest town an hour's ride away, and that but three houses when he reached it. He had seen vivid things and it chanced he was able to write vividly. There were twenty chapters in his novel and he wrote them in twenty days.