CHAPTER XII

That cat is funny. I think she'd be a good one for the circus. When she's hungry she bites your legs. Then she jumps at you as much as to say: _Carramba_, give me something.

America needs the flamboyant to save her soul--said Vachel Lindsay to the indifferent mountains.

He might have added that America tries to satisfy this need in strange and often uncatalogued ways. America, living an exemplary three-meals-a-day-and-bed-time life in a wall-papered home, goes now and then _en masse_, by Gosh, to the circus to see men, women and animals perform exquisite and impossible feats or daring. What could be more flamboyant than the trapeze-performer hurtling through the air, the tiger leaping through man-made hoops, or the elephant poising his mighty bulk on his two forelegs lifted to the top of bottles? What more flamboyant than the painted clown, timeless type of the race, laughing that he may not weep, grinning through a thousand tragic jests while little human beings perform their miraculous tricks around him?

Jazz, the Follies, the flapper in orange and green gown and war-paint of rouge--impossible frenzies of color in a world that refuses to be drab. Even the movies, devoid as they are of color in the physical sense, are gaudy in the imaginations of the people who watch them; gaudy with exaggerated romance, exaggerated comedy, exaggerated splendor or grotesqueness or passion. Human souls who are not living impassioned lives, not creating romance and splendor and grotesqueness--phases of beauty's infinite variety--such people wistfully try to find these things outside themselves; a futile, often a destructive quest.

The imagination will not down. If it is not a dance, a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest. If it is not flamboyance it becomes deformity; if it is not art, it becomes crime. Men and women cannot be content, any more than children, with the mere facts of a humdrum life--the imagination must adorn and exaggerate life, must give it splendor and grotesqueness, beauty and infinite depth. And the mere acceptance of these things from without is not enough--it is not enough to agree and assert when the imagination demands for satisfaction creative energy. Flamboyance expresses faith in that energy--it is a shout of delight, a declaration of richness. It is at least the beginning of art.

All right go ahead: A TEXAS PRIZE CONTEST--The Southern Methodist University at Dallas, Texas, recently emerged from a prize contest which had a strange _dénouement_--

Look here young man, after this you examine those girls in the cold weather.

Who is Warner Fabian? _Flaming Youth_ is the story of the super-flapper, of her affairs at country clubs and cozy home-dances with all the accompaniments of prohibition stimulants. Warner Fabian believes that the youth of this country feeds on excitement and rushes to knowledge "heeled" by way of petting parties and the elemental stimulus of jazz. The barriers of convention are down. Youth makes its own standards and innocence, according to the author, has been superseded by omniscience.

It doesn't matter that Warner Fabian is a _nom de plume_ which conceals the identity of one of the ablest scientists of this country who has dared to look facts in the face, facts physical, moral and emotional. He has written the truth about youth, the youth of today as he sees it.

FLAMING YOUTH by Warner Fabian is the writing on the wall. It is the _Quo Vadis_? of the present moment.

Those who are following in the Metropolitan Magazine the fortunes of Pat, the most sophisticated and yet at the same time one of the most deliciously lovely heroines of recent novels, and the fortunes of her two sisters, may protest that Mr. Fabian's portrayal of youth in this novel is outscotting Fitzgerald and overdancing in the Dark. We feel however that this story of three girls and their many men is one which may sufficiently frighten mothers and electrify fathers and hit the younger set hard enough between the eyes to help America's youth to, at least, a gradual return to sanity.

And so the beginning of art ends in a gradual return to sanity.

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If a man died on a stretcher he simply said: Dump it out. And ordered us back for another load.

Intended to stop at the school but his mind waylaid him. Down the hill came the ash-cart--on the wrong side of the street. He, up the hill, perforce went wrong also and with great headway. Just as he was about to pass the cart another car swung out from behind it, headed down hill at full speed. It was too late for any of the three to stop. In three seconds there would be death for someone. Angels would be waiting for mother's little boy. Without the minutest loss of time, in time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at its best he swung far to the left, up over the curb, between two trees, onto the sidewalk--by luck no one was passing--and going fifty feet came back between two trees, over the curb to the roadway and continued his empty progress, rather hot in the face, it must be confessed. He felt happy and proud.

But he had missed his street.

Well let it go. Far away in front of him a locomotive stood indifferently at the avenue end, emitting great clouds of smoke. It was autumn, clear and cold.

But you Scandinavians, said the Frenchman, it is impossible to live in this way. Why France, which is ten times as rich as your countries, could not do it. You do not know what money is for. You throw it away like a sickness. To drink champagne like this is madness, and it is every night, everywhere, in Christiania, Copenhagen, everywhere.

And there she sits staring out, not at the sea, but over Long Island Sound. Dreaming of her sons--and of the money she will make next year by renting the better of her two little shacks.

When you have paid up the twenty shares you may, if you like, retain them as paid up shares in which case you will receive the 5% interest, or, if you feel that you would like to do so, you may increase your holding to thirty shares and receive the 6%. Of course everyone is not able to do that. Do not worry about it, we will notify you in plenty of time when your book is balanced at the end of the six months.

Let's see. What is the number of your house? Four eighty? I'll see that they send it right up.

You know last Sunday was my birthday. Seventy-three years old. I had a party, a surprise party--my relatives came from all sides. But I couldn't get her downstairs. She's afraid. We had a banister put on the stairs, cost me nine dollars but she will not do it. She's so fat you know, she's afraid of falling.

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A collection agency draft notifies the banks--those great institutions of finance--that there is serious doubt regarding the way you pay your honest obligations. The bank will take note of it. From there the information quietly passes to the various Mercantile Agencies, Dun's, Bradstreet's, Martindale's. And this is ONLY ONE cog in the wheel of ARROW SERVICE. Our reports cover the whole field of credit reporting.

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At this, De Soto, sick, after all the months of travel, stopped out of breath and looked about him. Hundreds of miles he had travelled through morass after morass, where the trees were so thick that one could scarcely get between them, over mountain and river but never did he come to the other side. The best he had done was to locate a river running across his path, the greatest he had ever seen or heard of, greater than the Nile, greater than the Euphrates, no less indeed than any. Here he had confronted the New World in all its mighty significance and something had penetrated his soul so that in the hour of need he had turned to this Mighty River rather than to any other thing. Should it come to the worst he had decided what to do. Out of the tangle around him, out of the mess of his own past the river alone could give him rest. Should he die his body should be given to this last resting place. Into it Europe should pass as into a new world.

Near the shore he saw a school of small fish which seemed to look at him, rippling the water as they moved out in unison. Raising his heavy head De Soto gave the order to proceed. Four of the men lifted him on an improvised stretcher and the party, headed by the Indians, started again north along the bank.

The whole country was strange to them. But there at the edge of that mighty river he had seen those little fish who would soon be eating him, he, De Soto the mighty explorer--He smiled quietly to himself with a curious satisfaction.