But the foolish giant called Gargantua the Horror, billed as the strongest and ugliest man on earth, must have been easy to kill. He worked all day. When Lalouette’s hair was combed and her singing ceased, he went away modestly to sleep in the bushes. One night, after he had retired, Tick and Tack followed him. Gargantua always carried the spear. Lalouette listened drowsily for the comforting rumble of Gargantua’s snoring a few yards away; she loved him, in a sisterly way.
. . . Ha-khaaa . . . kha-ha . . . khaaaa-huk . . . khaaaa . . .
As she listened, smiling, the snoring stopped with a gasp. Then Tick and Tack came back carrying the spear, and in the firelight Laloutte could see that the blade of the spear was no longer clean. The redness of it was not a reflected redness.
Thus she knew what the little men had done to Gargantua. She would have wept if she could; but there was no hand to wipe away her tears, and she was a proud woman. So she forced herself to pretend to be asleep.
Later she wrote: I knew that this was the end. I was sorry. In this place I have felt strangely calm and free, happier than I have ever been since my dear mother used to hold me in her arms and tell me all the stories I told here; stories of gods and heroes and pygmies and giants, and of men with wings . . .
But that night, looking through the lashes of her half-closed eyes, she saw Tick untying the blade of the spear. He worked for an hour before he got it loose, and then he had a sort of dirk, more than a foot long, which he concealed in a trouser-leg. Tack, she thought, had been watching him also; for as soon as Tick closed his eyes and began to breathe evenly, he took out the knife which he had never allowed them to take away from him, and stabbed his partner through the heart.
He carried the body out of the range of her vision, and left it where he let it fall—Lalouette never knew where.
Next morning Tack said to her, “At last we are alone. You are my Queen.”
“The fire?” she said, calmly.
“Ah yes. The fire. I will put wood on the fire, and then perhaps we may be alone after all this time.”
Tack went away and Lalouette waited. He did not return. The disposition of his bones, and the scars on them, indicate that he was killed by a boar. There was no more driftwood nearby. Tack went into the trees to pick up whatever he might find. As I visualize it, he stooped to gather sticks, and looked up into the furious and bloody eyes of a great angry boar gathering itself for a charge. This must be so; there is no other way of accounting for the scattering of his shattered bones. Hence, the last thing Tack saw must have been the bristly head of a pig, a pair of curled tusks, and two little red eyes. . . .
The last words in what may be described as Lalouette’s Journal are as follows:
A wind is blowing. The fire is dying. God grant that my end may be soon.
This is the history of the Queen of Pig Island, and of the bones Captain Oxford found.
PROPHET WITHOUT HONOR
Time is a liar and a tease. Time is a confidence trickster. Time sells you that which is not, and which never has been. The Devil makes capital by selling Retrospect in three dimensions to fools like Faust who, at the cost of their immortal souls, want to capture their “youth.” How often have we heard the voice of ulcerated misery, wise with the wisdom of a quarter of a century of interoffice knife-play, groaning in one of those discreetly dim bars off Madison Avenue: If only I could have my time over again! . . . Or in Michael’s Pub off Fifth Avenue, or the Absinthe House on the West Side, about 12:45 any afternoon, watched it feeling the tatty fur on its tongue with its loose-fitting false teeth, and talking out of the corner of its mouth furthest away from you (for fear of offending you with bad breath) of what might have been perhaps, would be whether, and should have been if . . .
Si la jeunesse savait! Si la vieillesse pouvait!—so yearns the catchword, meaning: “If youth had the experience of old age; and old age the vigor of youth!” These French epigrams go down smoothly, but stick in the discriminating craw; could anything be more repulsive than a teen-ager, in all his frenetic vigor, with the outlook, the libido, and the untickled appetites of a decadent old playboy? . . . The most incorrigible Time-Over-Againers are generally to be found in the self-huckstering professions—I mean advertising men, real estate speculators, moving picture men, journalists, and the like—people who are incredibly wise long after the event. These young-old-timers must necessarily be one jump behind competition; they are living on borrowed time.
Some of the very worst offenders in this respect are the elderly, brilliant desk-men, features men, and editorial writers in newspaper row. They earn good money and are much looked up to; newspaper cubs are honored by their attention and, figuratively speaking, hang on their leaden or purple lips. More often than not they are generous with their money, and with their advice; and if there is one kind of person they like better than the worldly wise one whom they knew “when,” it is the eager youngster with ideals to denigrate. Their cynicism is sad, kindly, even paternal . . . but it is, nonetheless, the voice of weariness and disillusionment. Toward the end of the evening, when they are expected at home, where their friends are not welcome, they generally say, with a lingering, nostalgic, affectionate handshake, “Ah, my boy, if I were your age!” And when they leave you have a feeling of something lost, or rather mislaid; in some pyramidal shadow in one of the corners of the pub they have left something of themselves behind, something ragged with disuse. . . .
When I was in Fleet Street—which is, in London, what newspaper row once was in New York—the night editor of The Daily Special was such a man. His name was Bohemund Raymond, and his incapacity for hard liquor had made him notorious from Blackfriars to Temple Bar. (I say “incapacity,” on the assumption that a capacious man can drink a lot without getting drunk.) I believe that his appearance of drunkenness was exaggerated by a peculiar habit of speech: he spoke with a Devon drawl, and had, moreover, that inability to pronounce two successive consonants which is supposed to be characteristic of the Arabs. Take, say, the word strong: Bohemund Raymond would pronounce it something like “issitirong.” Once, in the Punch Tavern, some old soldier, half-demented with malaria, who had been trying to sell an article about elephants’ tusks during the silly season, had the nerve to say, in Bohemund Raymond’s hearing, “No, I mean to say, blast it! Was in Palestine with Allenby, blast it! I talk Wog. That man talks with a chi-chi, like a confounded Wog. No, really, I mean to say, after all, what?” Whereupon Bohemund Raymond looked at the man steadily for a long time, and said, in his peculiarly resonant voice, “By ‘Wog’ I take it this derelict means ‘Arab.’ Why, of course! By God, my fathers took Antioch when this fellow’s people were herding swine! Damn it,” shouted Bohemund Raymond, pointing to one of the arteries in his throat, “in this vein flows the blood of Bohemund, of Richard Lion-Heart, of Godfrey de Bouillon! My ancestress was a Saracen princess. Damn your eyes, my own mother was named after her—Asia Raymond, short for Ayesha! . . . ‘Wog!’ ”
The old soldier, fatuous with bottled beer, said, “No, but really, I mean to say, after all—what I mean, all those fathers, eh, and only one mother, what?” Then Bohemund Raymond said: “I’ll ‘Wog’ you,”—and so he did, with a pewter pot. And he saw to it that the article about elephants’ tusks was rejected the following day; threatened, indeed, to resign if it was accepted. . . . It was not that Bohemund Raymond was mean, or vindictive; in general, he was very generous and, in a quarrel, magnanimous. Only he could not bear to be touched in his ticklish spot: his ancestry.