The Asbestos Society of Sinners / detailing the diversions of Dives and others on the playground of Pluto, with some broken threads of drop-stitch history, picked up by a newspaper man in Hades and woven into a Stygian nights' entertainment

ALL was quiet along the Styx. The river banks were deserted. Cæsar had been called to court to testify against a counterfeiter who had been punching his head, and Charon took advantage of the Roman’s absence to call upon his wife Calpurnia, famed as being the only woman of whom it was said she was above suspicion. Charon’s craft, which to-day happened to be no more than an ordinary rowboat, was pulled up on the bank. In his haste to depart, the ferryman had even left his oars lying loose in the locks. I was considering the advisability of attempting to row back to Harlem when my attention was diverted by three dogs swimming in the placid waters of the Styx. Sitting astride them with all the ease of a circus clown was a boy whose forehead was branded thus: $——. It was the mark of Cain; therefore this must be the bad boy himself.

As they drew nearer, I discovered that there was only one dog instead of three; it was the many-headed Cerberus. All went well until Cain pulled the dog’s tail. Then the nearest head snapped at the lad so quickly that he disappeared down its throat. Jonah had now arrived on the scene, and enraged at this infringement on his copyright, he caught the canine by its hind legs and holding it aloft, shook it vigorously. Cain dropped out of the centre cavity in the dog’s delta with a lighted stogie between his teeth. He tossed the nicotine nugget to Jonah and bade him take the canine to the pound of Pluto.

“Charge it up to Pa,” the bad boy said airily. Jonah continued to hold out his hand.

“No credit is given in Hell,” he sneered. “You’ve got to cash in all your checks.”

Cain put his hand in the outstretched palm, but instead of the expected gold, he dropped therein the burning Stygian stogie.

Who polluteth his lips with blasphemy? Who imperilleth his parliamentary standing? Who yelleth in Sanskrit and Yiddish? Ask of the boy; he is of age and can speak for himself.

And speak for himself he did.

“Despite the doubts cast upon my parentage by Darwin, I am Adam’s son,” he said, in response to my question. “But, say, I’m an angel with wings full grown compared with what Pa was when he was a boy.”

“Do tell me about the time Adam was a boy,” I implored. In imagination I saw a spilling of red ink over the first page of the New York Universe: “Adam’s Own Story of the Rise and Fall of Man.”

“Dad and Darwin do beat creation,” Cain commented. “The delineator of the ‘Descent of Man’ says that the earth grew as naturally as a mushroom on a dung heap. Since hearing of it, Topsy has been giving herself airs under the impression that as she ‘just growed,’ she was the first woman. Adam says he doesn’t mind being called a myth by the higher critics, but when an Afro-American minister proves by logic as indisputable as a proposition in Euclid that the oldest inhabitant was a black man, and when Topsy lays claim to being his wife, he thinks it’s about time to draw the color line. Job tried to comfort Pa by telling him that it is better to be a myth than a martyr, for martyrs are burned that myths may live.”

“And Mother Eve?”

“Oh, she is an allegory, too. The legend of the lady of the pippins was generated into the genius of Genesis for the sole purpose of stimulating the cerebral cells of the clergymen whose imaginations have become stunted by much raking for Greek roots. Despite the ancient scandal when she listened to the solo of the serpent—and the result proved so disastrous woman has never been inclined to listen to any voice but her own since that distant day—Eve actually asked Adam to buy her one of those serpentine dresses the next time he went to Vanity Valley-on-the-Hudson. Pa replied that because other women were reverting to the original clinging fig-leaf garb, was no reason why she should advertise her shame to the world.

“‘To be fashionable is better than to be a Puritan mother,’ Eve retorted. A woman can find comfort in a new garter or a picture hat even when a scandal is hanging over her backbone.”

“Then the episode of Eden—”

“Eve’s appetite for apples, which gave the world dyspepsia and all the ills to which flesh is heir, has been thrown up in her face ever since the world began. Come to think of it, though, Darwin says there never was any beginning.”

“Darwin has had his day,” I observed. “His teaching is now obsolete. Some day I’m going to write a book—everybody does these days—and I have already copyrighted the title, so literary pirates may beware. It is to be called ‘The Ascent of Man.’ No more is man the old Adam, the Eden of his perfect behind him forbidding its gardens of delight. In his present imperfect is the creative hauntings of the perfect he is yet to be. As in the old days the man said, ‘The woman’—so it is the woman who has given man the new birth. Creation always did centre about a petticoat, fables and creeds to the contrary notwithstanding.”

“I asked Mother Eve about her childhood the other day, and she seemed lamentably ignorant of her younger days.”

“If Adam hadn’t gone to sleep there would have been no women in the world,” I put in. Having a reputation as a confirmed misogynist, I felt that I must live up to it whenever occasion offered.

“The queer part of it,” mused Cain, “is that he never woke up when the surgical operation was being performed and that, too, in the days when anæsthetics kept themselves hid in unpressed poppy pods. Catch a woman letting anybody take a rib from her without her knowing it!”

“If woman is so wide-awake, how was it that Eve lost her certificate of character by getting drunk on apple cider?”

“With the permission of Darwin and the rest, I will give you a revised version of the creation by the first higher critic—Cain, son of Adam and Eve:

“In the beginning chaos created Cosmos.

“And Cosmos continued to apply cosmetics to the face of the Globe and—Darwin was too busy to take notice.

“And it came to pass that without Darwin to hold the universe in check, revolution arose; from revolution came evolution and evolution evolved into molecules which came into contact with protoplasm and by natural selection the latter survived and became a plastic cell which in turn threw a fit and degenerated into the primordial germ, which is the germ of truth. This selection was so unnatural that it did not survive protogene and to swallow this up there came an ocean of eocene.

“And it came to pass that in the aeon of eocene there was enwombed in the chaotic chasm, later called Siam, a Simiad who was to show his relationship to the octopus by embracing the earth. And this Simiad grew according to his own fancy and—Darwin still slumbered.

“And the merry morn tagged the shadows of night and became ‘it’. The number of the evening hours was eleven and of the day was twelve. Eleven and twelve make twenty-three—that’s the sum that spells ‘skidoo’. And the night departed in haste.

“And in the time when it seemed good to him, Darwin awoke and made two great lights, the greater arc to rule the day and the lesser incandescent to rule the night. And Darwin was the greater and Professor Huxley was the lesser; he made Herbert Spencer also.

“And behold! the man, because he had within him all other men, spoke Henry James English in all its simplicity from his birth up. Mother Earth sang lullabies to him, but the man was sore vexed at his mater’s nonsense verses and comic opera lyrics; he swore a Saxon oath. That being the first word he had uttered, the man was called Adam. And all in the world there was none other like him.

“Now when the evening and the morning were the fifth day, Darwin began to sit up and take notice. He took a leaf from Adam’s birth record and by soaking it in alcohol over night, words became visible and he read that in the primordial epoch when in the transition period Adam was a kangaroo, a woman started to sprout from the seed of truth, but the coming man thought she had better lie a little longer, and so he stunted her truth-telling for all time by thrusting her into the tobacco pouch of his kangaroo hide, knowing that there is no stunt like tobacco.

“Eve was content to come after man for three reasons; first, she knew it was fashionable to arrive late; second, she was timid and wanted Mr. Adam to see how the land lay now that the waters had been divided; third, she was having some clothes made for her debut and even with the assistance of Prof. Huxley, Tailor Darwin had not been able to get them ready on time.

“Though eternal despairs deepened their nights about him, Adam was in a jolly mood and he said: ‘Let us make light of it’—and there was light!

“And when Eden was effulgent Darwin could see the man he had made and he saw that it was good. He was positive of that but was comparatively sure he could do better, so he hypnotized Adam by telling him he had appendicitis and that an operation was necessary for his future well-being as a man, now that he had ceased to be a monkey. Dad had never studied physiology—though he made up for it later by dissecting Eve every chance he got,—and so he did not wonder how it came about that the only portion of his anatomy for which he no longer had a use, having given up climbing trees as being too undignified a diversion, had gotten so far up as to tickle him in the ribs. He remembered that saying about man being fearfully and wonderfully made, and being assured by Dr. Darwin that the operation for the removal of ‘a rag and a bone and a hank of hair’ was as safe as an Hom pill, he quietly fell asleep.

“That is how man came to lose his tail, for contrary to report, Darwin did not give man a tail but took one away; contrary also to the authorized version, woman was made out of man’s tail and not from his rib. Kipling little knew how apt was his descriptive tag, for the tail consisted of a bone covered with a hank of hair and the dinosaur supplied the rag by tying a tin can to Adam’s tail. Thus man evolved like the tadpole, which does not have to hire George Washington to do the woodsman stunt, as Nature arranges for the chopping off of its tail at the accepted time. What Nature does for the tadpole, Dr. Darwin did for man. But he bungled the job and cut the tail off too short. That’s the reason appendicitis is prevalent to-day.

“And when Darwin looked on the woman he forgot his grammar and broke out into superlatives without the justification of the rule of three: ‘This is the most barbarous cut of all.’

“For this unkind reflection on her Marcel Wave and also for the reason that Mr. Darwin spared her costume but not her modesty, Eve condemned man to wear clothes for all time.

“And as the evening and the morning were the sixth day, Darwin called to the woman: ‘This man thou shalt call Adam, surnamed Smith.’ Likewise to the man he said: ‘Whilst thou lovest this woman, her name shall be called Evelyn and her children shall be called the daughters of Evelyn, but when thy love groweth cold like the night, she shall be thy Eve. As the first parents, so shall be all posterity.’

“And as he spoke so was it. Man’s love was as brief as the life of last year’s calendar, and ever since the year one, women have been called the daughters of Eve.

“Thus is fulfilled the prophecy of Darwin, as interpreted by the firstborn of the earth, Cain Smythe of Eden.”