The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney (illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff). (1/2)

[midnight_birth]

Title: The Circus of Dr. Lao.
Author: Charles G. Finney (illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff).
Genre: Literature, fiction, fantasy.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1935.
Summary: Abalone, Arizona, is a sleepy southwestern town whose chief concerns are boredom and surviving the Great Depression-that is, until the circus of Dr. Lao arrives and immensely and irrevocably changes the lives of everyone drawn to its tents. Expecting a sideshow spectacle, the citizens of Abalone instead confront and learn profound lessons from the mythical made real-a chimera, a Medusa, a talking sphinx, a sea serpent, witches, the Hound of the Hedges, a werewolf, a mermaid, an ancient god, and the elusive, ever-changing Dr. Lao himself. The circus unfolds, spinning magical, dark strands that ensnare the town's populace: the sea serpent's tale shatters love's illusions; the fortune-teller's shocking pronouncements toll the tedium and secret dread of every person's life; sensual undercurrents pour forth for men and women alike; and the dead walk again. (Only PART 1 in this post, refer to PART 2 for the rest of the quotes).

My rating: 8/10
My review:


♥

♥ Furthermore, the midway of the circus was replete with sideshows wherein were curious beings of the netherworld on display, macabre trophies of ancient conquests, resurrected supermen of antiquity. No glass-blowers, cigarette fiends, or frogboys, but real honest-to-goodness freaks that had been born of hysterical brains rather than diseased wombs.

♥ The next person to notice something unusual in the page display was Miss Agnes Birdsong, high-school English teacher. Two words in it bothered her: pornographic and hermaphroditic. She knew what pornography meant, having looked it up after reading a review of Mr. Cabell's Jurgen. But hermaphroditic had her at a loss. She thought she suspected she knew what it meant; she detected the shadows of the god and the goddess, but their adjectival marriage left her bewildered. She pondered a little, then reached for her dictionary. A guardian of the language could do no less. The definitions left her wiser but not sadder. She returned to the ad to wonder further what a fugitive vision seen through a peephole would be like. She pondered upon the conjuring up in a stuffy circus tent of an erotic dream of a long-dead day. She wished momentarily she were a man. She thought, and quickly slew the thought, of dressing up like a man and attending that peepshow. "I'll go and see the parade," compromised Miss Agnes Birdsong.

♥ Mrs. Cassan always went to fortunetellers. When none was available she cast the cards or séanced with ouija. She had had her future foretold so many times that in order to fulfill all the forecasts she would have to live ninety-seven more years and encounter and charm a war-strength regiment of tall, dark men.

♥ So he lounged under the palm trees in the park near the railroad station, waiting for a freight train to go in either one direction or another, and cursorily read the ad in the cast-aside Tribune. And, lo, upon the world-weary traveler there fell a pall of nostalgia, and waveringly a ghost cry from the bones of his dead youth smote his ears: he had not seen a circus for ten years; to be like a little boy again; to tremble at the sight of strange animals; to recapture the simple thrill of wonderment: that would be pleasure; that would be good. Larry the infantryman, Larry the booze-fighter, Larry the whorechaser, Larry the loudmouthed, read the ad and longed for his boyhood. And presently he got to his feet and wondered what time it was and started for the circus grounds.

♥ "It's the guy with the horns on his head," said Paul. "Suppose he were real?"

"All right. I'm supposing as hard as I can. Now what?"

"Well, good Lord, can you imagine a real honest-to-god satyr driving a gold-plated mule down the main drag of a hick town?"

"Sure. I can imagine anything."

♥

♥ "Well," said the chief in disgust, "there's two people I don't never argue with: one's a woman and the other's a damn fool. And you aint no woman!"

♥ At quarter to eleven Miss Agnes Birdsong, high-school English teacher, was down on Main Street waiting for the parade and feeling a little foolish. She felt even more foolish when she saw what a silly little parade it turned out to be. But she looked pretty standing in the shade in her flimsy summer dress; she looked pretty, and she knew it, and she kept on standing there and watching.

♥ Then the last wagon came along drawn by the golden ass, driven by the clovenfooted satyr. A little gold ring was in the satyr's nose; beside him on the seat was his syrinx. To Miss Agnes he smelled like a goat. His torso was lean as a marathon runner's; his hoofs were stained grass-green. A grape leaf was caught in his hair. He leered at Miss Agnes; he shielded his eyes with his hands and leered at her. He turned in his seat and stared back at her, staring and staring as though out of his accumulation of years he could remember nothing to compare with her.

"I am a calm, intelligent girl," Miss Agnes reassured herself. "I am calm, intelligent girl, and I have not seen Pan on Main Street. Nevertheless, I will go to the circus and make sure."

..Then out of the corner of her right eye she saw the old Chinaman scuttling along with a pot of tea in his hand and a pipe of opium in his mouth. She halted him.

"Doctor Lao?"

"Yes, lady."

"Where is the tent with Pan?"

"We do not have Pan in this circus, lady. What you are thinking of, no doubt, is the satyr who drove for us in the parade this morning. He is in that tent over there."

..He lay there scratching himself on a rack of grapevines, his thin, wispy beard all messy with wine lees. His hoofs were incrusted with manure, and his hands were bony, gnarled and twisted, brown and rough and long-nailed. Between his horns was a bald spot surrounded by greying curly hair. His ears were sharp-pointed, and lean, thin muscles crawled over his arms. The goat hair hid the muscles of his legs. His ribs stuck out. His shoulders hunched about his ears.

..Miss Agnes stood there assuring herself she was a calm, intelligent girl. The satyr capered around her, tossing his pipes, tossing his head, wriggling his hips, waggling his elbows. The syrinx peep, peep, peepled. The door of the tent fell shut. Around Miss Agnes the aged goat man galloped. His petulant piping screeched in her ears like the beating of tinny bells; it brought a nervousness that shook her and made her blood pump. Her veins jumping with racing blood, she trembled as Grecian nymphs had trembled when the same satyr, twenty centuries younger, had danced and played for them. She shook and watched him. And the syrinx peep, peep, peepled.



He danced closer, his whirling elbows touching with their points her fair bare arms, his shaggy thighs brushing against her dress. Behind his horns little musk sacs swelled and opened, thick oily scented stuff oozing out-a prelude to the rut. He trod on her toe with one hoof; the pain welled up to her eyes, and tears came. He pinched her thigh as he scampered around her. The pinch hurt, but she found that pain and passion were akin. The smell of him was maddening. The tent reeked with his musk. She knew that she was sweating, that globules of swear ran down from under her arms and dampened her bodice. She knew that her legs were shiny with sweat. The satyr danced on stiff legs about her, his body chest swelling and collapsing with his blowing. He bounded on stiff legs; he threw the syrinx away in a far corner; and then he seized her. He bit her shoulders, and his nails dug into her thighs. The spittle on his lips mingled with the perspiration around her mouth, and she felt that she was yielding, dropping, swooning, that the world was spinning slower and slower, that gravity was weakening, that life was beginning.

♥ It was hot as he walked through the streets of Abalone. Etaoin reflected how much better it was to have it so hot rather than correspondingly cold-it would be way below zero. Overcoats. Mufflers. Overshoes. Eartabs. And every time he'd go in a door the lenses of his glasses would cloud over with opaque frostiness, and he would have to take them off and regard things with watery eyes while he wiped them dry again. A pox on wintertime. A curse on cold weather. An imprecation on snow. The only ice Mr. Etaoin ever wanted to see again was ice in little dices made in electric refrigerators. The only snow he ever wanted to see again was the snow in newsreels. He wiped the perspiration from his brow and crossed to the shady side of the street. On the telephone wires birds perched, their bills hanging open in the terrific heat. Heat waves like cellophane contours writhed from building roofs.

♥ THE CIRCUS OF DOCTOR LAO
"So that's the name of it," thought Mr. Etaoin.

The tents were all black and flossy and shaped not like tents but like hard-boiled eggs standing on end. They started at the sidewalk and stretched back the finite length of the field, little pennants of heat boiling off the top of each. No popstands were in sight. No balloon peddlers. No noisemakers. No hay. No smell of elephants. No roustabouts washing themselves in battered buckets. No faded women frying hot dogs in fly-blown eating stands. No tent pegs springing up under one's feet every ninth step.

A few people stood desultorily about; a few more wafted in and around the rows of tents. But the tent doors all were closed; cocoon-like they secreted their mysterious pupæ; and the sun beat down on the circus grounds of Abalone, Arizona.

Then a gong clanged and brazenly shattered the hot silence. Its metallic screams rolled out in waves of irritating sound. Heat waves scorched the skin. Dust waves seared the eyes. Sound waves blasted the ears. The gong clanged and banged and rang; and one of the tents opened and a platform was thrust out and a Chinaman hopped on the platform and the gong's noise stopped and the man started to harangue the people; and the circus of Doctor Lao was on:

"This is the circus of Doctor Lao.
We show you things that you don't know.
We tell you of places you'll never go.
We've searched the world both high and low
To capture the beasts for this marvelous show
From mountains where maddened winds did blow
To islands where zephyrs breathed sweet and slow.
Oh, we've spared no pains and we've spared no dough;
And we've dug at the secrets of long ago;
And we've risen to Heaven and plunged Below,
For we wanted to make it one hell of a show.
And the things you'll see in your brains will glow
Long past the time when the winter snow
Has frozen the summer's furbelow.
For this is the circus of Doctor Lao.
And youth may come and age may go;
But no more circuses like this show!"

..The ballyhoo ceased. The old Chinaman disappeared. From all the tents banners were flung advertising that which they concealed and would reveal for a price. The crowd lost its identity; the individual regained his, each seeking what he thought would please him most.

♥ "The satyr," he said, "is perhaps the most charming figure in the old Greek polytheistic mythology. Combining the forms of both man and goat, its make-up suggests fertility, inasmuch as both men and goats are animals outstanding in concupiscent activities. To the Greeks satyrs were, indeed, a sort of deification of lust, woodland deities, sylvan demigods. And, as a matter of fact, groves and woodlots are today favorite trysting places for lovers intent on escaping censorious eyes.

"We caught this fellow near the town of Tu-jeng in North China close to the Great Wall. We caught him in a net by a little waterfall, a net which we had set for a chimera. Incidentally, although we did not know it at that time, it is impossible to catch a chimera in a net by reason of its fiery breath, which burns up the meshes. But more of that later.

"Satyrs are not omnivorous like man, bur rather herbivorous like the goat. We feed this fellow nuts and berried and herbs. He will also eat lettuces and some cabbage. He has always refused onions and garlic seed, however. And he drinks nothing but wine.

"Notice that he has a gold ring in his nose. I cannot account for it. It was there when we first captured him, but I do not know how it got there.

"Not also that this satyr is a very old one. I doubt not that he is one of the original satyrs of ancient Hellas. Obviously, being half-gods, satyrs live a long, long time. I place this fellow's age at nearly two thousand three hundred years, although Apollonius, my colleague, is inclined to grant him even more. If he could talk, he might tell us some very curious things about his existence. How the encroachment of the hostile Christian deity drove him and his kind out of the Hellenic hills to seek refuge in unamiable lands. How some of his relatives went north into Europe to become strange gods, like Adonis becoming Balder, or Circe becoming one of the Lorelei, or the Lares Domestici becoming cuckoo clocks and mantel statuettes. Yes, he could tell much, I fancy.

"But most interesting of all would be the narration of his own journey into China, his bewilderment at the lacquer temples and prayer wheels, his disgust at the hot spiced Chinese wines, and his sadness at the foot-bound Chinese maidens who could not dance to his piping. Hey, the forlorn, lost demigod.

"Satyrs originated, I fancy, back in the old pastoral days when men stayed out in the hills with their flocks for long period of time. Among other things, to amuse themselves and soothe their flocks, the shepherds would play on pipes such as this fellow has here with him. And, doubtless too, on the hills at night by their fires the shepherds would dream of love. Men do dream of love, you know; lonely men do. Well, they would dream of love, and their dreams would be of such potency that their very flocks would be colored by them. In the moonlight's magic, perhaps, a she-goat would be transformed into a charming girl... And then in lambing time a strange, wee fellow would be seen cavorting among the woolly babies. On his brow he bears his mother's horns; his feet are hoofed like hers; but for the rest he is a man. He grows up to become scornful of the stodgy sheep and goats and shy of man. He steals his father's lute and skips away. Simple folk see him at dusk by a lakeside, and a new pastoral god is born...

"The satyr sits by some mirrored lake and plays, and even the little fishes swarm about and mimic a dance, for the music of the satyr's pipes is irresistible. He plays on his pipes, and the leaves on the trees dance, and the worms stick their heads out of their holes and writhe, and under the rocks scorpion hugs scorpion in hot, orgiastic bliss... And, by and by, a nymph comes shyly to peep trough the vines...

"But that was a long time ago, and this is an old, old satyr. I doubt if he could do anything like that now."

♥ "I think you do the cleverest tricks," said Mrs. Rogers. "Don't you, children?"

Touched to the quick, the mage said: "Oh, these aren't tricks, madam. Tricks are things that fool people. In the last analysis tricks are lies. But these are real flowers, and that was real wine, and that was a real pig. I don't do tricks. I do magic. I create; I transpose; I color; I transubstantiate; I break up; I recombine; but I never trick. Would you like to see a turtle? I can create a very superior turtle."

♥ Sitting on a couch in the cubicle was the medusa parting her nails. Her youth was surprising. Her beauty was startling. The grace of her limbs was arousing. The scantiness of her clothing was embarrassing. A lizard ran up the canvas side of her enclosure. One of the snakes on her head struck like a whiplash and seized it. The other snakes fought with the captor for the lizard. That was bewildering.

"What in the devil kind of woman is that?" demanded the big fat ignorant-looking cop.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Doctor Lao, "this is the medusa. She is a Sonoran medusa from Northern Mexico. Like her Gorgon sisters, she has the power to turn you into stone if you look her in the eye. Hence, we have this mirror arrangement to safeguard our customers. Let me beg of you, good people, to be satisfied with a reflected vision of her and not go peeking around the edge of the canvas at her. If anybody does that, I forecast lamentable results.

"First of all, however, look at her snakes. You will notice that most of them are tantillas, those little brown fellows with black rings about their necks. Towards the rear of her head, though, you can see some grey snakes with black spots on them. Those are night snakes, Hypsiglena ochrorhyncus, as they are called in Latin. And her bangs are faded snakes, Arizona elegans, no less. One of the faded snakes just now caught a lizard which some of you may have seen. Her night snakes also eat small lizards, but the tantillas eat nothing but grubs and similar small worms; the feeding of them is sometimes difficult in colder climes.

"It was a doctor from Belvedere, I believe, who first pointed out that the snakes of a medusa were invariably the commoner snakes of the locality in which she was born; that they were never poisonous; that they embraced several different species; that they fed independent of the woman they adorned. This Belvederian doctor was interested primarily in the snakes and only secondarily in the medusa, so his observations, as far as sideshow purposes are concerned, leave much to be desired. However, I have made a study of this and several other medusas and, hence, am able to tell you a little about them.

"The origination of medusas is a puzzle to science. Their place in the evolutionary scale is a mystery. Their task in the great balance of life is a secret. For they belong to that weird netherworld of unbiological beings, salient members of which are the chimera, the unicorn, the sphinx, the werewolf, and the hound of the hedges and the sea serpent. An unbiological order, I call it, because it obeys none of the natural laws of hereditary and environmental change, pays no attention to the survival of the fittest, positively sneers at any attempt on the part of man to work out a rational life cycle, is possibly immortal, unquestionably immoral, evidences anabolism but not katabolism, ruts, spawns, and breeds but does not reproduce, lays no eggs, builds no nests, seeks but does not find, wanders but does not rest. Nor does it toil or spin. The members of this order are the animals the Lord of the Hebrews did not create to grace His Eden; they are not among the products of the six days' labor. These are the sports, the offthrows, of the universe instead of the species; these are the weird children of the lust of the spheres.

"Mysticism explains them where science cannot. Listen: When that great mysterious fecundity that peopled the worlds at the command of the gods had done with its birth-giving, when the celestial midwives all had left, when life had begun in the universe, the primal womb-thing found itself still unexhausted, its loins still potent. So that awful fertility tossed on its couch in a final fierce outbreak of life-giving and gave birth to these nightmare beings, these abortions of the world. Ancient man feebly represented this first procreation with his figurine of the Ephesian Diana, who had strange animals wandering about her robe and sheath and over her shoulders, suckling at her numerous bosoms, quarreling among the locks of her hair. Nature herself probably was dreaming of that first maternity when she evolved the Surinam toad of the isthmian countries to the south of here, that fantastic toad which bears its babes through the skin of its back. Yes! Perhaps through the skin of the back of the mighty mother of life these antibiological beings came forth. I do not know.

"Now this medusa here is a young one. I should place her age at less than one hundred years. Judges of women have told me she is unusually attractive, that she possesses beauty far more lovely than that possessed by the average human girl. And I concede that in the litheness of her arms, the swelling of her breasts, the contours of her face, there is doubtless much that would appeal to the artistic in man. But she is a moody medusa. Sometimes I try to talk to her, to find out what she thinks about sitting there regarding all the world reflected in a mirror, potentially capable of depopulating a city merely by walking down the streets looking at the passers-by.

"But she will not talk to me. She only glances at me in the mirror with boredom-or is it pity or amusement?-on her face and fondles her snakes, dreaming, doubtless, of the last man she has slain.

"I recall an incident of some years ago when we were showing in the Chinese city of Shanhaikwan, which is situated at the northern extremity of the Great Wall. The medusa and some of the other exhibits in my circus were slightly ill from a long sea voyage, and the whole circus had a droopy air about it that was simply devastating to the business. Well, we put up our tents in Shanhaikwan and thought to stay there awhile until our animals had recovered. It was summer; the mountain breeze from Manchuria was refreshing. There was no war in progress thereabouts for a wonder, for that is the most war-ridden spot in the whole world; and we decided to stay there awhile and try to regain our customary equanimity.

"Sailors were in the city, sailors from foreign countries who were off their warships on shore leave; and they came to see my circus. They were a gang of drunken swine, but they paid the money, and I let them in. They saw the medusa and, being asses, thought she was just a girl I had fitted out with a cap of snakes in order to fool people. As if one had to go to all that trouble to fool people! However, as I was saying, they thought the medusa was an imposture; but they were enamored of her beauty and, for a boyish lark, they planned among themselves to kidnap her one night, take her down on the beach, rape her, and then cast her aside.

"So one black night, when the moon was behind a cloudbank, these sailors came sneaking up to the circus grounds and with their knives sliced a hole in the medusa's tent and went in after her. The night being so dark that they could not see her face, they were safe enough for the time being, at least.

"Apollonius and I were returning from a wineshop and realized what they were doing as we came staggering and arguing to our tent. I was very angry and I would have loosed the sea serpent upon the ravishers; but Apollonius said not to, that the moon would be out presently, and then matter would take care of themselves. So I quieted down, and we watched and waited.

"There were ten drunken sailors in the mob. Pale as ghost-flesh were their white uniforms in the black darkness. As I lay, they split the tent with heir knives, seized the medusa, gagged her, and carried her down to the beach. Just when they got her past the dunes, the moon came out from behind its veil. And I assume the sailors were standing in a semicircle about the medusa, for next morning, when Apollonius and I went down there, ten stone sailors were careening in the sand just as she had left them after looking at them; and the drunken leers were still on their silly, drunken faces. And sill are for aught I know, for those leers were graved in the living stone.

"I tell you, it does not pay to fool with a medusa."

♥ Doctor Lao said: "Madam, the rôle of skeptic becomes you not; there are things in the world not even the experience of a whole life spent in Abalone, Arizona, could conceive of."

♥ "Epitomizing the fragrance of grassplots, lawns, and hedgy, thickset places, this behemoth of hounds stands unique in the mysterious lexicon of life. Most of the other curiosities of this circus, I regret to say, have a taint of evil or hysteria about them, but not this magnificent hound. He is as sweet as hay new mown with clover blossoms still unshriveled lying in it. He is as sunny as the dewy mornings his parent grasses so much love. He is a grand beast, if beast he may be called. Also, though I refer to him in the masculine gender, such designation is very loose; for, as a matter of fact, this hound has sex only as a water lily might have sex. He is alone of his kind throughout the world; no mare and no sire; no dam and no brood. This hound is no more masculine than a horse radish, no more feminine than a cabbage, less carnal than a tiger lily, and as little lustful as a rose bush.

"We found him in North China along the canals where the ricefields flourish and where grasses and little stunted hedges grow. For a long, long time that land had been nothing but so much parched dust with no green thing growing upon it anywhere. Then the canals were constructed and brought water to it, and over its dry skin lovely green things commenced to grow. That which had seemed dead quickened into life. That which had seemed sterile glistened with fertility. And as a symbol and embodiment of that exuberant fecundity, the grasses and the weeds and the flowers and hedges and bushes each gave a little of themselves and created this hound, truly an unparalleled achievement in the annals of horticulture.

"We saw him first at dusk playing about the hedgerows, leaping, gamboling, biting at the hedge apples, pawing little holes in the ground and nosing fugitive seed into them. Alarmed by us he ramped about in great tearing circles, flitting through the grasses and disappearing behind hedges so swiftly the eye could hardly follow him. His beautiful greenness entranced us. We had never seen so wonderful a hound in all the world.



"So we caught him. Out of his strange eyes he looked at us-eyes that were like green unripened pods. He was perfectly gentle. His tail of ferns wagged a little, switching his sides of green, green grass. From his panting mouth chlorophyll slavered. Around his neck a thin grass snake was curled, and his leafy ears harbored green katydids and tiny black crickets.

"In the meshes of our nooses he stood there regarding us. And, oh, that first close view of his great green glorious head! He was standing in the grasses, shoulder deep among the fresh green grasses; his parent grasses, the grasses that he loved. With their slim green fingers they caressed him and sought to shield him from us. They sought with their greenness to reabsorb his greenness, to hide him, to protect him; this their son. I tell you, nothing in the world has ever thrilled me as much as did the first sight of the hound of the hedges, and I have adored and studied animals for more than a hundred years. I said: 'Here is the masterwork of all life, here in this superb living body that is neither plant nor animal but a perfect balance of both. Here is a mass of living cells so complete in itself that it even demands no outlet for reproduction, content to know that, though it did reproduce its form a thousand times, it could never through that or through the evolutionary changes of a thousand generations improve upon its own victorious completeness.'

"Most immaculate of all was his conception among the humble weeds and grasses. All things trample them, devour them, plow them under and destroy them. But they endure and are beautiful and retain their gentleness and harbor no rancor. Yet once a great passion came to them, a pure passion not ever to be clearly understood; revolt was in it, and other things foreign to grasses; and out of that strange passion of the plants the hound of the hedges was conceived and born.

"And I wondered, too, for it had always been my belief that beauty was a modification of sex. Life sings a song of sex. Sex is the scream of life. Rutting and spawning the dance of life. Breed, breed, breed. Fill and refill the wombs of the world. Tumescence and ejaculation. Flinging out spore and seed and egg and bud. Quickening and birth. Sterility and death. That was life, I thought, and that was life's means to the end that finally, after almost infinite centuries of trial and error, there might be produced the perfect living thing.

"But there was this hound, product of no trail and error process, lacking lust, unhampered by ancestral fears and instincts. And I wondered if in this hound of the hedges were not to be found the apogee of all that life could ever promise. For here were beauty and gentleness and grace; only ferocity and sex and guile were lacking.

"And I wondered: 'Is this a hint of the goal of life?'"

♥ "We found [the mermaid] in the Gulf of Pei-Chihli," said Doctor Lao. "We found her there on the brown, muddy waves. They were brown and muddy because inland it had rained and the little rivers had carried the silt out into the sea. And after finding her we came upon the sea serpent, and we captured him, too. It was a most fortunate day. But she pines sometimes, I think, for her great grey ocean. I hate to keep her penned up in this tank, but I know of nowhere else to put her. I think I shall turn her loose some day when we are showing along the seacoast. Yes, I shall take her out in the dawn when no one else is about and carry her down to the sea. Waist-deep in the water I'll go with her in my arms, and I'll put her down gently and let her swim away. And I shall stand there, an odd, foolish-looking old man, waist-deep in the water, mourning over the beauty I have just let slip away from me, mourning over the beauty I could touch and see but never completely comprehend; and, if anyone sees me there, waist-deep at dawn in the water, surely they will think me mad. But do you suppose that after she swims out a little ways she will turn and wave at me? Do you suppose she will blow a little kiss to me? Oh, God, if I could only have seen her when I was a young man! The contemplation of her beauty might have changed my whole life. Beauty can do that, can't it?

"Yes, I think I will take her down to the sea and free her. And I will stand there and watch her swim out into the tide. But I wonder if she will turn and wave at me."

♥ The blunt-nosed woman-face of the thing stared at the two inspectors as they followed the Chinaman into the tent. The leonine tail switched softly at flies. "You bring the queerest people in here, Doctor Lao," said the sphinx reproachfully.

"It's all in the interest of the trade," said the doctor.

"Good Lord! Can it talk?" asked the inspector.

"Of course," said the doctor, while the sphinx looked bored.

"What is it, a he-sphinx or a she-sphinx?" asked the other inspector.

.."You see, it's neither man nor woman; it's both."

"Aw, how can it be?" asked the first inspector.

"Haven't you gentlemen ever heard of such a thing? Really, I'm amazed. A long time ago a man named Winkelmann found it out by looking closely at little African sphinxes. They are actually both male and female at the same time. The state of being bisexual, it is called."

♥ A man of many artificial parts was Lawyer Frank Tull. His teeth had been fashioned for him and fitted to his jaws by a doctor of dental surgery. His eyes, weak and wretched, saw the world through bifocal lenses, so distorted that only through them could the distortion of Frank's own eyes perceive things aright. He had a silver plate in his skull to guard a hole from which a brain tumor had been removed. One of his legs was made of metal and fiber; it took the place of the flesh-and-blood leg his mother had given him in her womb. Around his belly was an apparatus that fitted mouth-like over his double hernia and prevented his guts from falling out. A suspensory kept his scrotum from dangling unduly. In his left arm a platinum wire took the place of the humerus. Once every alternating week he went to the clinic and was injected either with salvarsan or mercury according to the antepenultimate week's dose to prevent the Spirochæ pallida from holding too much power over his soul. Odd times he suffered prostate massages and subjected himself to deep irrigations to rectify another chronic fault in his machinery. Now and then, to keep his good one going, they flattened his rotten lung with gas. In one ear was strapped an arrangement designed to maker ordinary sounds more audible. In the shoe of his good foot an arch supporter kept that foot from splaying out. A wig covered the silver plate in his skull. His tonsils had been taken from him, and so had his appendix and his adenoids. Stones had been carved from his gall, and a cancer burnt from his nose. His piles had been removed, and water had been drained from his knee. Sometimes they fed him with enemas; and they punched a hole in his throat so that he could breathe when his noseholes clogged. He carried his head in a steel brace, for his neck was broken; currently also his toenails ingrew. As a member of the finest species life had yet produced he could not wrest a living from the plants of the field, nor could he compete with the beasts thereof. As a member of the society into which he had been born he was respected and taken care of and lived on, surviving, no doubt, because he was fit. He was a husband but not a father, a married man but not a lover. One hundred years after he died they opened up his coffin. All they found were strings and wires.

♥ The chimera lay sleeping on a pile of freshly turned clay, and it coughed in its sleep; and the fetor of its belching, wafting upwards, asphyxiated the gnats that swarmed about his head. Little dead denizens of the lower air strata, they fell like floating flakes of powder, and no requiem accompanied their falling. The sleeping chimera kicked in is sleep, following the dictates of some action-filled dream; and the great claws of his paws lacerated the clay upon which he slept. His eagle wings half spread, their pinions expanding fanwise, and, all rumpled, they drew together again, the feathers tangled and fluffy. His dragon tail stirred snakelike, and the metal barb of its tip plowed up little furrows in the clay. His whiskers were singed where his fire-breath had scorched them. Some of the scales on his tail were gangrened and sloughing off where a colony of parasites bred and pullulated. He was shedding; great loose patches of fur, like hunks of felt, hung from his hide. Ticks crawled about in and over those patches. He had a nasty minkish smell, keenly sweetish, fattily pukish, vile and penetrating.

..The sleeping chimera gave a great snort; sparks, soot, smoke, and flame frothed out of his nostrils.

"That's why we have to bed him down on clay," said Doctor Lao. "If we let him sleep on hay, he'd burn it all up. Do you know how he manages that fire-breathing trick? Well, sir, it's simple when you understand his metabolism. You see, the chimera, like Arizona's outstanding citizen, the Gila monster, has no elimination system in the sense that ordinary animals have. Instead of expelling waste matter through the bowels, he burns it up within him, and he snorts out the smoke and ashes. Yes, a chimera is its own incinerator plant. Very unusual beast. ..we got him years ago in Asia Minor. Chimeras have one frailty: they are enamored of the moon. So we took a mirror, placed it on a mountain top where it reflected the midnight moonlight, and the lunar-loving monster thought his bright silver ball was in reach at last. Well, sir, he came soaring and screaming down out of the heavens, crashed into the mirror, and us boys we jumps out, and over his shoulders we flings a golden chain. We had him!

.."The chimera," said Doctor Lao, "flies high on tireless pinions; so high, indeed, that mortal man is rarely vouchsafed a glimpse of him. Years ago, in the Asia Minor campaigns of the great Iskander, one of the Macedonian captains killed a chimera with his longbow. He took it back with him to the museum at Alexandria, and there, to preserve it for posterity, it was mounted by some forgotten Egyptian taxidermist. Years later, a monk from Tibet saw it in the museum and, on returning to his lamasery, made a statue of it in porcelain and set it out to decorate the yard. Still later, a Chinese, coming to that part of the country from the Northern Capital, saw the strange figure and took measurements of its proportions. Returning to his home, he fashioned another statue in bronze and presented it to Kublai, then great khan of all the Mongols. Then, when Kublai had the Tatar wall constructed in a square about the Northern Capital, he also ordered an astronomical tower built upon its eminence. In the tower were placed various instruments, yardstick arrangements for measuring the stars. And for the decorative motif to be worked into the design of these instruments, Kublai ordained that the figure of the chimera be used. This was done. Nowadays, one may still see chimeras in bronze writhing around celestial globes and holding in their claws celestial computing rods.

"Other Chinese kings, coming there from time to time, saw these chimeras, wondered at them, understood their significance not, and went away thinking that somehow the beasts symbolized the power of the great khan. Then the petty Chinese princes commenced using the chimera motif themselves and had it worked into the designs of their own royal decorations. About that time the misleading name of dragon was coined to designate this royal emblem, and wrongly, of course, the dragon was taken to mean ferocity. But the chimera of Kublai was a benevolent beast, a patron of the arts of contemplation and study; and it must have been surprised when later it found itself spraddled on a banner, going to war.

"Afterwards, when other lesser kings supplanted Kublai, one of them decided that his particular dragon should have five toes and that the dragons of other kings might have three toes, four toes, or even six or seven toes, but not five. A rival king disobeyed this edict, and war ensued. I forget how the war came out. You will notice that this chimera of mine, however, has four toes on his font feet and three on his rear, so the dogmatic king, if he supposed he had authenticity to back his claims, was very much mistaken. I never thought to count the toes on Kublai's chimeras in Peking, so I can't say whether the ancient sculptors were accurate."

"Will chimeras breed in captivity?" asked the lawyer.

"Oh, certainly," said the doctor. "They'll breed any time. This fellow here is always trying to get at the sphinx."

.."What? Are there no female chimeras?"

"Not a single one, and very few males either, for that matter. You are looking at a rare animal, mister."

"Well, if there are no females, then where do they come from?"

"This one came from Asia Minor, as I already said a moment ago."

"Oh, hell! I mean how are they born?"

"Your question is unanswerable. No one knows the least detail of the life cycle of the chimera."

"Could it not be that the female chimera, like the females of several insect species, is of an entirely different bodily make-up from the male and, so far, has not been identified as such by science?" asked the old-like party in the golf pants.

"Science does not even recognize the existence of the male chimera, let alone search for its mate," said Doctor Lao.

"What is science, anyway?" asked the country lass.

"Science?" said the doctor. "Why, science is nothing but classification. Science is just tagging a name to everything."

♥ "You know," he continued to his audience, "it is very necessary to watch our animals' diet down here in Arizona. I think it is because of the lack of humidity or something. Although it may very well be nothing but the dust. Anyhow, if we overfeed them, they invariably have colic or, what is worse, worms. This chimera, of course, with his peculiar interior incinerating system burns the worms up as fast as they attack him. But take our sphinx, for instance. It is a homeric task to worm a sphinx. Ordinary vermifuges won't do at all. It takes a profoundly powerful purgative in large, incessant doses. The last time I wormed the sphinx it voided some of the strangest-looking worms I ever saw in my life. Just like enormous noodles they were. And now every time I look at noodles I think of those wretched tapeworms, and every time I look at tapeworms I think of noodles. It's very distressing."

"The noodle is a favorite Chinese dish, too, is it not?" asked the old-like party in the gold pants.

"I prefer shark fins," said Doctor Lao.

♥ Apollonius warned her she was going to be disappointed.

"Now if you tell me the truth," said Mrs. Cassan. "I particularly want to know how soon oil is gong to be found on that twenty acres of mine in New Mexico."

"Never," said the seer.

"Well, then, when shall I be married again?"

"Never," said the seer.

"Very well. What sort of man will next come into my life?"

"There will be no more men in your life," said the seer.

"Well, what in the world is the use of my living then, if I'm not gong to be rich, not going to be married again, not going to know any more men?"

"I don't know," confessed the prophet. "I only read futures. I don't evaluate them."

"Well, I paid you. Read my future."

"Tomorrow will be like today, and day after tomorrow will be like day before yesterday," said Apollonius. "I see your remaining days each as quiet, tedious collections of hours. You will not travel anywhere. You will think no new thoughts. You will experience no new passions. Older you will become but not wiser. Stiffer but not more dignified. Childless you are, and childless you shall remain. Of that suppleness you once commanded in your youth, of that strange simplicity which once attracted a few men to you, neither endures, nor shall you recapture any of them any more. People will talk to you and visit with you out of sentiment or pity, not because you have anything to offer them. Have you ever seen an old cornstalk turning brown, dying, and refusing to fall over, upon which stray birds alight now and then, hardly remarking what is it they perch on? That is you. I cannot fathom your place in life's economy. A living thing should either create or destroy according to its capacity and caprice, but you, you do neither. You only live on dreaming of the nice things you would like to have happen to you but which never happen; and you wonder vaguely why the young lives about you which you occasionally chide for a fancied impropriety never listen to you and seem to flee at your approach. When you die you will be buried and forgotten, and that is all. The morticians will enclose you in a worm-proof casket, thus sealing even unto eternity the clay of your uselessness. And for all the good or evil, creation or destruction, that your living might have accomplished, you might just as well never have lived at all. I cannot see the purpose in such a life. I can see in it only vulgar, shocking waste."

"I thought you said you didn't evaluate lives," snapped Mrs. Cassan.

"I'm not evaluating; I'm only wondering. Now you dream of an oil well to be found on twenty acres of land you own in New Mexico. There is no oil there. You dream of some tall, dark, handsome man to come wooing you. There is no man coming, dark, tall, or otherwise. And yet you will dream on in spite of all I tell you; dream on through you little round of hours, sewing and rocking and gossiping and dreaming; and the world spins and spins and spins. Children are born, grow up, accomplish, sicken, and die; you sit and rock and sew and gossip and live on. And you have a voice in the government, and enough people voting the same way you vote could change the face of the world. There is something terrible in that thought. But your individual opinion on any subject in the world is absolutely worthless. No, I cannot fathom the reason for your existence."

"I didn't pay you to fathom me. Just tell me my future and let it go at that."

"I have been telling you your future! Why don't you listen? Do you want to know how many more times you will eat lettuce or boiled eggs? Shall I enumerate the instances you will tell good-morning to your neighbor across the fence? Must I tell you how many more times you will buy stockings, attend church, go to moving picture shows? Shall I make a list showing how many more gallons of water in the future you will boil making tea, how many more combinations of cards will fall to you at auction bridge, how often the telephone will ring in your remaining years? Do you want to know how many more times you will scold the paper-carrier for not leaving your copy in the spot that irks you least? Must I tell you how many more times you will become annoyed at the weather because it rains or fails to rain according to your wishes? Shall I compute the pounds of pennies you will save shopping at bargain centers? Do you want to know all that? For that is your future, doing the same small futile things you have done for the last fifty-eight years. You face a repetition of your past, a recapitulation of the digits in the adding machine of your days. Save only one bright numeral, perhaps: there was love of a sort in your past; there is none if your future."

"Well, I must say, you are the strangest fortuneteller I ever visited."

"It is my misfortune only to be ale to tell the truth."

♥ "There is a strange fascination about your brutal frankness. I could imagine a girl, or an experienced woman, rather, throwing herself at your feet."

"There was a girl, but she never threw herself at my feet. I threw myself at hers."

"What did she do?"

"She laughed."

"Did she hurt you?"

"Yes. But nothing has hurt me very much since."

.."You poor, poor man! You are not so very much older than I am, are you? I, too, have been hurt. Why couldn't we be friends or more than friends, perhaps, and together patch up the torn shreds of our lives? I think I could understand you and comfort you and care for you."

"Madam, I am nearly two thousand years old, and all that time I have been a bachelor. It is too late to start over again."

♥ Mr. Etaoin contemplated the sea serpent, and the sea serpent contemplated Mr. Etaoin. Mr. Etaoin lit a cigarette and blew grey smoke. The sea serpent exserted its tongue and flickered it; a long yellow naked nerve of a tongue, big as a man's hand, wrist, and arm, languidly sentient, gracefully forked, taster of sounds, feeler of vibrations, symbol of strange senses, silent and secret, suggestive of evil that harked back to Eden. Mr. Etaoin's eyes, circumscribed by rings of horn, looked at the snake through dusk-speckled glass ovals. The serpent's eyes, lidless and fixed, regarded the proofreader with catlike pupils, thin black ellipses standing on end in fields of copper. The proofreader's eyes were dull, muscle-bound green things. The snake's eyes were sombre, rare, and wicked jewels.

♥ THE SNAKE: Why do you stand there staring at me? You and I have nothing in common except our hatred of each other.

ETAOIN: You fascinate me. But why do you buzz your tail that way, mimicking a rattlesnake?

THE SNAKE: Why not? It is my fondest atavism.

ETAOIN: Could it be that the instinctive urge which prompts me to see a tree when a dog barks at me is the same one that prompts you to endeavor to rattle when you are alarmed?

THE SNAKE: No. Your urge is born of fear. Mine of hate. Your instinct is one of cowardice. Mine one of counterattack. You wish to flee. I to fight back. You are afraid of your own shadow. I am afraid of nothing.

ETAOIN: The god who gave you bravery gave me cunning.

THE SNAKE: I would not trade with you.

ETAOIN: Nevertheless, you are in a cage, and I am free to walk about.

THE SNAKE: Oh, you have your cage, too. You test your bars just as often as I test mine.

♥ THE SNAKE: Why do you wear those things over your eyes?

ETAOIN: In order to see.

THE SNAKE: The god that made you cunning made my eyes efficient enough to perceive objects without aid. In fact, the Lord of All Living dealt with me quite generously. Strength He gave me, and symmetry and endurance and patience. Viper and constrictor both He made me. My venom is more virulent than a cobra's. My coils are more terrible than a python's. I can slay with a single bite. I can kill with a single squeeze. And when I squeeze and bite at the same time, death come galloping, I tell you. Heh, heh, heh! But look at you! You even have to hang rags on yourself to protect your weak skin. You have to hang things in front of your eyes in order to see. Look at yourself. Heh, heh, heh! God did well by you, indeed!

♥ ETAOIN: There was a pig. A Duroc Jersey pig. It scampered about in its sty, eating slop and entertaining no spiritual conflicts. Fat it grew and fatter. Then one day its master loaded it into a wagon, took it to the depot, put it on a freight train, and sent it to a packing company. There it was slain, gralloched, and quartered after the manner of slaughterhouses. Some months later I went into a restaurant and ordered pork chops. And the chops they served me-may I die this instant if I lie-were from that very pig of which I have been talking. And the moral of this story is that the whole, sole, one and only and entire purpose of that pig's life, and the lives of its ancestors, and the lives of the things upon which pig and ancestors fed, and the climate and habitat that fostered their propagations and maturations, and the men who bred them and tended them and marketed them-the sole purpose of all that intermixed mass of threads and careers, I say-was to provide for me in that restaurant, at the moment I wanted them, a pair of savory pork chops.

THE SNAKE: There is merit in your contention. I philosophized along much the same lines when I was eating the little brown boy.

♥ THE SNAKE: Aye. Up alongside a brown rock island. She was cold and coy. She slithered up on top of the rocks and hissed at me. I slithered after her; my passion warmed her; my ardor allayed her coyness. Tell me, do men bite women on the neck when they woo them?

ETAOIN: Sometimes.

THE SNAKE: So do we. I bit her in the neck, and she hooked onto my lower jaw, and I could feel her poison circulate into me. But it didn't hurt me any; nor did mine hurt her. Then I dragged her off that rocky island, threw a loop or two about her, and so we wrestled in the bouncing, nervous waves. I remember the sky clouded and thunder muttered, as though the elements were disturbed by our antics. Tell me, do men tire of women after they have lain with them?

ETAOIN: Sometimes.

THE SNAKE: So do we. I tried and left her and returned to the west, to a place of enormous turtles ad volcanic stones. The turtles there eat only vegetables and fruits; they attain tremendous age; and though they have never been elsewhere than their little volcanic island, they are profoundly wise. I lay in the sand and talked to them. They asked me questions, and they told me many strange and beautiful things. Their feet are like the feet of elephants, and their voices slow and low. But tell me, after the period of surfeit wears off, do men again lust after women?

ETAOIN: Sometimes.

THE SNAKE: So do we. The following year I smelled her again, clear across the world again, too; and I heeded the call and went to her. And I went to her every year thereafter until...

ETAOIN: Until what?

THE SNAKE: Until Doctor Lao caught me and penned me up. Tell me, do men in cages...?

ETAOIN: Sometimes.

THE SNAKE: So do we.

♥ Mr Etaoin wandered through the circus grounds waiting for the main performance to open. He encountered the lady reporter from the Tribune coming out of another tent.

"I'll bet you envy me," she said. "I've just had an interview with Doctor Lao himself!"

"Piffle," said Etaoin. "I've just had an interview with his snake."

♥ "I can't understand how it happened," said Doctor Lao. "Usually she's so regular about her periods. She wasn't due until October. Now right here in the middle of the circus she has to metamorphose. The equinox has something to do with it, I'm sure."

..The wolf's guard coat, inturning, slipped under her wool. Across her belly her dugs marched, uniting as fat twins. Her canines blunted and recessed. Her tail shrunk.

.."Directly, you'll see her hind legs undergo drastic elongation. After that she changes very rapidly. Interesting, if you are interested in mutable morphology."

The wolf voiced sounds of agony, but not the sounds wolves customarily voice.

"You see," said Doctor Lao, "when a polliwog, for instance, metamorphoses into a frog, it is a long-drawn-out process, and any physical pain attendant to the change is counteracted by the very slowness of it all. But when a wolf changes into a woman, she does it in a very few minutes, and, hence, the pain is perceptibly intensified. Notice that as she changes she flits through the semblance of every animal figure that forms a link in the evolutionary chain between hers and the human form. I often think that the phenomenon of lycanthropy is nothing more than an inversion of the evolutionary laws, anyway."

There was a gasp as a moan and a sob, and a woman lay shuddering in the cage.

"Aw, doc!" said Larry in disgust, "why didn't you tell us she was going to be so goddam old? Jees! That old dame's like somebody's great-grandmother. Hell, I thought we was going to see a chicken. Fer crying out loud, put some clothes on her quick!"

"Sensualist," said the doctor. "I might have known your only interest in this would be carnal. You have seen a miracle, by any standard sacred or profane, but you are disappointed because it gives no fillip to your lubricity. ..Her age is about three hundred years."

♥ "Notice it!" screamed Doctor Lao. "Notice the unicorn. The giraffe is the only antlered animal that does not shed its antlers. The pronghorn antelope is the only horned animal that sheds its horns. Unique they are among the deciduous beasts. But what of the unicorn? Is it not unique? A horn is hair; an antler is bone; but that thing on the unicorn's head is metal. Think that over, will you?"

♥

♥ Mumbo Jumbo and his retinue came. The satyr syrinxed. The nymphs danced. The sea serpent coiled and glided. Fluttering its wings, the chimera filled the tent with smoke. Two shepherdesses drove their sheep. A thing that looked like a bear carried the kiss-blowing mermaid in its arms. The hound of the hedges barked and played. Apollonius cast rose petals. Her eyes blindfolded, her snakes awrithe, the medusa was led by the faun. Cheeping, the roc chick gamboled. On the golden ass an old woman rode. A two-headed turtle, unable to make up either of its minds, wandered vaguely. It was the damnedest collection Abalone, Arizona, had ever seen.

..Round and round the great triangle the animals walked, danced, pranced, fluttered, and crawled, Master of Ceremonies Lao directing them from his pedestal. They roared and screamed and coughed; rising from strings and reeds the Chinese music teetled monotonously and waveringly whined. Too close upon the fastidious unicorn, the sphinx accidentally nuzzled its rump; and the unicorn exploded with a tremendous kick, crashing is heels int the sphinx's side. The hermaphrodite shrieked. With its great paws it struck and roweled the unicorn's neck and back. The unicorn leaped like a mad stallion, whirled and centered its horn in the sphinx's lungs. Nervous, the chimera dodged about, its flapping wings fanning up dust clouds. The sea serpent reared into a giant S, launched a fifty-foot strike, caught the chimera by a forefoot, and flung seven loops about its wings and shoulders. The hound of the hedges curled in a tight ball, looking like a stray grass hummock. The Russian passionately kissed the mermaid. Lowering his horns, taking a short run for it, the satyr spiked Mumbo Jumbo in the rump when the black god's back was turned. The old woman changed back into a wolf and raced the rock chic. The little faun threw stones at Doctor Lao. The nymphs and shepherdesses and lambs hid and whimpered. From the face of the medusa the blindfold fell; eleven people turned to stone.

"Oh, misery!" screamed the doctor. "Why do they have to fight so when there is nothing tor fight about? They are as stupid as humans. Stop them, Apollonius, quickly, before someone gets hurt!"

The thaumaturge hurled spell after spell among the hysterical beasts. Spells of peace, mediation, rationality, arbitration, and calmness flashed through the feverish air and fell like soft webs about the battlers. The din lessened. Withdrawing his horn from the sphinx's lungs, the unicorn trotted away and cropped at sparse grass. The sphinx licked at its lacerated side. The sea serpent loosed the chimera, yawned his jaws back into place. Shaking itself, the hound of the hedges arose and whined. The mermaid patted the bear. Mumbo Jumbo forgave the satyr. The werewolf remetamorphosed. The faun stopped throwing rocks. Back came the nymphs and shepherdesses and lambs. Once again the medusa assumed her blindfold.

After the storm, tranquillity. Peace after the battle. Forgiveness after hate. The animals stood idle, panting, caressing their traumatized flesh.

♥ "This is one you all haven't seen before," yelled the Chinaman. "The Gadarene swine itself. Fiend-infested, it searches the earth for salvation, but finds it not. Biblical beast, it symbolize the uncleanliness of all flesh. Hence, sacramental butchery-to drive out latent devils; that is the purpose of the mummery of the priest-butchers."

Grunting and mumbling, the boar stopped to root. Out of its ear popped the head and shoulders of the devil that infested it. The little beelzebub waved his trident at Doctor Lao. "It's hotter than hell in this tent," he said.

"You ought to know," submitted the doctor.

The little ass of gold came forth. Ass and boar tripped a minuet.

"Why in the world," asked Mrs. Howard T. Cassan, "is it that everything in this circus dances all the time? I never saw anything like it."

"It's the dance of life, madam," said the old-like party in the golf pants. "You'll find plenty of precedent for it, if you look far enough."