Chapter 17

From now on there is to be no more fisticuffing about these parts, lads of honor: from this day henceforward, shall we discuss e'er again the plenary beatitudes of Erewhon? or the cuspidors of St. Theresa?  From this date into the foreseeable destiny of Man, can it ever again be said that we are mere stockholders, mere place-markers on the shores of His Ocean?  Or is it His Oven?  I was just remarking to Mrs. Dinwiddie down the lane the other day that if you think about the latest price increases youll see that theyre not all theyre cracked up to be O not at all because you see His Majesty himself was the One who ordered the bacon that day at Leicester Square surrounded by his admiring acolytes as they say you know that means sycophants or something like that those words they all mean the same to me and all I know is I need some lemon waters to control it cant you see it wont do otherwise because the man at the corner the other weekend not last weekend but the one when they had the fair this man said to me dont you see Mrs Mogglesworth youre a fine one you are if you only wanted to make something of yourself so I says to myself I says why dont I not that I want the men on every corner to be telling me how pretty my legs are being but otherwise WHACK.   WHACK.  WHACK.

Three times did the maddened rapscallion rap his mother on the head.  Three times did she squeal.  Then was she silent.  Across the Eliziam Fjords fled Raspulion, ever alert, ever watchful for the ever hungry bloodhounds of the law.  Across hill and dale did Rap scurry, across the scullery maids' quarters in Pembroke Hill Province, across the MidAtlantic wastes, from Chicago to Antanarivo did Shallot steal.  But Agent Blythe was on the case.  Agent Blythe would mash his face.  Agent Blythe, pudding and pythe, kissed the girls and made them crythe, leaving a few illegitimate offspring in his path, but being a gallant gentleman all the time and a fine sleuth to boot.  There was no doubt about it -- for the case left no room for doubt.  It was doubtless, no doubt, quite certainly beyond the faintest shadow of a rhododendron's tooth, that the Agent would Age his way to the Schooner's hideaway.  And so he did.  One fine morning in an April's drizzling rain, the man in the galoshes met the man in Macintoshes: it was a cave in Hungary, the Legföntószabitasz Marángök, where the rich come to frolic, cavort and dilate.  Here had our gallant criminal come to frolic, cavort, dilate, and hide.  But Princess Wilhelmine Brünnhilde Rübbertropp von Gastendienst-Wüttendorf had become in him verliebt.  That means she had the hots for the guy.  And that, boys and girls, was our fine young feathered frond's undoing: for you see, our lithe unslothly sleuthing Blythe was a personal friend of the Czarina's (not to put too fine a point on it, if you see what I am intending to mean) from way 

back.  From ante the luvia, in fact.  And tho' her legendary charms had somewhat wilted, tho' her skin was in tatters and her fragrances turned to sour milk, yet she and Blythe had a certain fondness for each other in certain fonder parts of fondling fronds.   This means, once again to be precise, that Blythe came in telegraphic contact with the Gräfin Püffendorff at exactly 06:54 hours Greenwich Time one fine drizzly day.  In the process of their long-distance conversation it came to light that there was a particular young man bathing his baden-badens at this particular bath who responded in every particular to the object of the Captain's ministrations.  Forthwith, without putting full insinuations of his true and gall-bladder-busting, heart-breaking, pancreas-imploding visions on the table, the Archgeneral in Charge of Scotland Yardage told the Comtessa de Afghanistanov-Miltvergiessenheit that he wished to encounter this rollicking dude.  It was only 13:32 of the afternoon by the autumnal clock when Preyer and Prey came to their appointed Meet.  It took place on the wilds of a dark Hungarian plain.  Goulash flowed from every pore in their pre-anointed bods as they knew that the moment of oscunambulation had appeared.  Would that it had ever been otherwise.  And then did our valiant Lieutenant Scuppernong speak to the Renegade Rasputinov: Beast!  Hast thou forgotten thine own persiflage!  Knowest thou not that thy mother lieth on the ground saying: Oo my achin haid?  Come back at this moment and apply a bandage and administer some tea of chamomilia!  And so they did.

But anyway, to make a long story short, it was Saul's bad fortune to be stuck with Paul's personal pestilences at every hour of the year.  When Paul itched, Saul scratched.  When Paul wore clothes that offended the sensibilities of the latest tailoring pundits, 'twas Saul at whom the crowded masses jeered, pointed, sniveled and variously shook their pointed patooties.  The situation brooked no gerrymandering.  This was a job for ... Proletarian!  Yes, the grave sorceror Peanutbutteron had raised the leviathan, the behemoth, the proletarian, from the depths of the netherland.  From the overpacked blistering factories of the Upper Engadine to the slaughtering pits of Westphalia, from the oppressed carbuncles of mechanized enchained East Hampton to the newborn-labor camps of Silesia, they rose.  Rising from East to set upon the West, rising like a lump of dough overbelched with yeast, they coalesced into one internationalist and solidarified Mass: a potato.  No, actually, a Proletarian.  And the sorceror Maguire took the beast and set it upon the proud of this earth; and he enjoined it to take the bones of the rich and crush them into a paste to be rubbed between the ankles of his mistress; and Witch MacQueer took every detail of the resultant carnage and he erected with it a monument to Generalia: lumpen, resistant, more ageless than the brazen spitting-pots.  Would that such a result could come among us, children, one more time, O.  One more time.  And how did this all solve and salve the rubbing-place of Saul and Paul and Patooties?  This we know not.  Yet surely in a secret unfathomed unappearant way it took its secret course of rivulets down into the souls of men.

And wouldn't you say, brave spittoons of the Orient, that this situation had gone on long enough for Christian comfort?  Indeed we would.  And would you ever deign to comment on the quidnuncking character who graced the late lamented halls of Epipyrus within the last few million years of devolving cataplution, to wit a certain Mr. Harry Entrayles, Esq., and his madwallowing habit of procuring and producing certain aforesaid mallypieces of Morok-enjambered mirrors?  Indeed we wouldn't.  

And, not to make a long tail overly simplificationalized, can't we all agree on a single word that would sum up the serendipitous and precipitous Times in which We live?  Indeed we can: the word is Massaccio-esque.

As the famed quattrocento manicurist Rupert Massaccio was putting the final quick and eggyolk-enriched touches on a particularly fine example of nail fresco work one fine midyear afternoon, the least expected event in the universe happened to alight upon his preponderant and eponymous brow.  His patroness -- the Comtessa Alessandra Veronica della Ursula-Grappeschi -- was about to hold her hands up to the rosy light that softly filtered through the escutcheoned halls.  She ached to grab an unobstructed view of Massaccio's latest fingerwork.  Fingerpainting had not yet fallen into the corrupt and heretical state to which it would be reduced by the end of the nineteenth century; children did not yet use it as a fecal substitute; no, it was still a glorious thing, full of promise, plenitude and grace.  Rupperto "Q.E.D." Massaccio had just said that the Comtessa would simply have to read The Faerie Queene.  Comtessa had just answered that, silly boy, for one thing she did not read l'inglese, and for another, the book had not yet been written.  Q.E.D. was about to answer that he had in mind the eternal book, not the perishable parchment which mere mortals called a script -- but before he could open his mouth, it happened.