Of the Great Reduction more anon.

CHAPTER VI

More Anon

Well, I made up my mind, having tried violent exercise in the gymnasium, coupled with violent language in the steam room, and having found neither or both had been of the least avail in trimming down my proportions, but on the contrary had augmented them to the extent of nearly ten pounds, live weight, that I would let well enough alone.  If ’twere my ordained fate to be fat—­why, then so be it; I’d be fatly fatalistic and go on through life undulating and rippling.  If an all-wise Providence meant to call me to the estate of being the bulkiest writing man using the English language for a vehicle, then let Hilaire Belloc look to his laurels and Gilbert K. Chesterton to his unholsterings.  There was one consolation:  Thank heavens the championship would remain in America!

The years go marching by in ordered processional.  A great war bursts and for a space endures.  In our own land prohibition is nationally enacted and women’s suffrage comes to be, and Irving Berlin, reading the signs of the times, decides to write The Blue Laws Blues.  Fashions of thought change; other fashions, also.  A girl who was born without hips or eyebrows and who in childhood was regarded as a freak, now finds herself, at the age of eighteen, exactly in the mode, thus proving that all things come to those who wait.  Czecho-Slovakia is discovered.  The American forces spent three days taking Chateau-Thierry and three years trying to learn to pronounce it.  Ireland undertakes to settle her ancient problem on the basis of self-extermination.  Several rich retail profiteers die, the approval being hearty and general, and on arriving at heaven experience great difficulty in passing through the Needle’s Eye, or tradesmen’s entrance.  Somebody tells Henry Ford about what some high priests did in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago and in the first flush of his startled indignation he becomes violently anti-Semitic.  General Pershing returns from the battlefields of Europe universally acclaimed a model of military efficiency and wearing so many medals that alongside him John Philip Sousa, by contrast, looks absolutely nude.  His friends project him into the political arena and the result is summed in a phrase—­“Lafayette, he ain’t there!” Unavailing efforts are made by a rebellious and unreconciled few of us to find a presidential candidate willing to run on a platform of but four planks, namely:  Wines, ales, liquors and cigars.  Harding wins, Scattering second; Cox also ran:  slogan:  “He Kept Us Out of McAdoo.”  Manhattan Island, from whence the rest of the country derives its panics, its jazz tremblors and its girl shows, develops a severe sinking sensation in the pit of its financial stomach, accompanied by acute darting pains at the juncture of Broad and Wall.  This is the way Thomas Carlyle used to start off a new chapter, and I like it.  It denotes