…”I shouldn’t be surprised if one day I met my mother, I hope I shall; but I should if I met my father.”
He presses fiercely forward, his neat white teeth with their graceful absence of set or spread ambushed beneath the bristles of the squalid cavalier moustache, as the father-son motif crops up, with savage appeals from its stage-tomtoms.
“I consider the father a side-show a mere bagatelle – they are like the reason, overrated and not essential at all, that is the fathers – the male at all if it comes to that.”
He laughs, clearing up the atmosphere. Exit Fathers like a cohort of witches, turning tail at sight of the bristling righteous phalanx of incestuous masculine matrons, with hittite profiles, hanging out like hatchets just clear of the chest, Eton-cropped, short stout necks firmly anchored in asthmatic lungs, with single eyeglasses, and ten diamond corking-pins representing the decaceraphorous beast of the deliverance. They guard the child-herds. Revolutionary cockades bouquet’d with spatulate fig-leaves, symbolic of absolute divorce anti-family son-love and purple passion, dissimulate their abdominal nudity. Pullman barks fiercely: he is the gelded herd-dog. He barks at the heels of the Fathers, bearded despotic but now despatched.
“You don’t find it slightly intoxicating?”
Enter unobserved at the other extremity of the stage a small select chorus of stealthy matronly papas. They applaud as one man, community-singing the national anthem of the New Babel jazzed. They take up their position in the nursery modestly as regards The Average, with caressing eyes like head-lights of Santa Claus doing his rounds. Sweetly handwashing they stand aside, retiring Big Businessmen. Featuring as their spokesman, a super-shopwalker offers meat-pale sunkist fleshings of celanese silk stuffed with chocolates, crossword-puzzles, tombola-tickets for crystal-sets, and free-passes for war-films, to the million-headed herd of tiny tots of all ages but one size.
“I think it’s perfectly splendid discipline. I’m never quite certain myself, if it’s a pukka White Man’s policy. There’s the other fellow to be considered even if he’s a mere pawn or peon.”
Filed under: Writing by Ben.H
