I wonder if he'll recognise me in my Greenwich Village honkie-tonk
bobbed hair. The hairdresser said: Don't you do it, when I said I'd like
mine bobbed too. So many of the girls had theirs done a year ago and now
its just at that impossible stage where you can't do a thing with it.
Better go to Europe or California until it grows again. There's a reason
for travel: As the hair progresses the days grow fewer.
But is South Africa after all the country of the future?
Over the great spaces of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana he sped
in the Pullman car. City after city swept up to him, paused awhile at
his elbow and plunged away to the rear with the motion of a wheel whose
hub was hidden in infinity. And such indeed was exactly the case. He was
being ground between two wheels, one on either side of the car and it
was their turning that thrust him forward at such speed. The wheat was
up in the fields but a fellow passenger assured him that in Kansas, only
two days before, he had seen wheat twice as high--which explains the
cause of so many abandoned farms in Vermont, he remembered, and settled
back to another hour of idle staring. A new country he kept saying to
himself. On a siding were cars loaded with emigrants from Holland booked
through to San Francisco.
Into the elevator stepped the young man in a petty officer's uniform.
His Spanish was exquisite to hear. The first battleship since the
Spanish-American war was anchored in New York harbor. How well he bears
himself. The Spanish are the only people in Europe whom civilization has
not ruined. Savage men, big bearded chins--but shaved clean. They know
how to treat their women--better than the French for the French--after
all are _blagueurs_ to a man. The Spanish stand still. What an ass a man
will make of himself in a strange country! In armor De Soto wandering
haphazard over Alabama. The Seminoles for guides. Buried him in the
Mississippi. It is my river, he said. Roll Jordan roll. It is _my_ river
for I discovered it and into it let my body, in full armor, be put to
rest. The cat-fish ate it. So roll Jordan roll. Diada Daughter of
Discord: read it.
In Illinois, far in the west, over that trackless waste of forest and
mountain and river and lake they came at last to a valley that pleased
them and there they determined to build. So they fell to hewing trees
and building their houses, work to which they had been bred and trained
for two generations since Plymouth and Salem days. Cornwallis had been
beaten fifty years before and Pitt had rushed to see the King crying:
All is lost. A new world had been born. Here in the primeval forest the
little colony of New Englanders hoped to realize success and plenty.
In Bonnie, Illinois, the Presbyterian minister is a very good man. He is
as good a preacher as Bonnie can afford and if anybody said that Bonnie
is made up of mad-men--He would be shot. _Nuevo Mundo_, shouted the
sailors. But their cry was by now almost extinct.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account