Just as I gurgled the gumbo nocturne down my thirsty throat, a
shrill burst of brazen clangour (this is not tautological) in the
orchestra roused me from my dream, and I gazed on the stage. The
steam had cleared away, and now showed a rocky and wooded scene, the
trees sky-blue, the rocks a Nile-green. The band was playing
something that sounded like a strabismic version of the prelude to
Tristan. But strange odour-harmonies disturbed my enjoyment of the
music, for so subtly allied were the senses in this new temple of
art that a separate smell, taste, touch, vision, or sound jarred the
ensemble. This uncanny interfusion of the arts took my breath away,
but, full of gumbo soup as I was--and you have no idea how soup
discommodes the astral stomach--I was anchored to my seat, and
bravely determined not to leave till I had some clew to the riddle
of the new evangel of the seven--or seventeen--arts. The stage
remained bare, though the rocks, trees, and shrubbery changed their
hues about every twenty seconds. At last, as a blazing colour hit my
tired eyeballs, and when the odour had shifted to decayed fish,
dried grapefruit, and new-mown hay, I could stand it no longer, and,
turning to my neighbour, I tapped him on the shoulder, and politely
asked: "Monsieur, will you please tell me the title of this play,
piece, drama, morceau, stueck, sonata, odour, picture, symphony,
cooking-comedy, or whatever they call it?" The young man to whom I
had appealed looked fearfully about him--I had foolishly forgotten
that I was invisible in my astral shape--then clutched at his
windpipe, beat his silly skull, and screamed aloud: "Mon Dieu! still
another kind of aural pleasure," and was carried out in a superbly
vertiginous fit. Fright had made him mad. The spectators were too
absorbed, or drugged, to pay attention to the incident. Followed a
slow, putrid silence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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