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The Spike: or, Victoria University College Review, June 1923

In Memoriam

page 46

In Memoriam

My ancestry reaches back an extraordinary distance—how far back I dare not conjecture. Its details I am unable to give, for I have carelessly omitted to record them. Indeed, when all is said and done, who would load his memory with such an accumulation of facts, comprising as they do, amid a deal of glory not a little of regret? My chiefest regret, however, is that so many excellent people are dead. What information could they not have imparted to me, sitting at their feet with ears (so modern in length) tensely receptive; what romantic experiences, what engaging gossip, what amazing tales! Creation's heir, a world of credulousness would have been mine. In this uneventful age, surrounded by strange voices, I miss them terribly, those grand old fellows who bore up under the countless vicissitudes of evolution in order that they might produce me; and, when I consider the prestige their association might have brought me, I feel derelict. The strings I could have pulled—nay, the wire hawsers! Confusion, I say, upon that affair of Babel that broke the continuity! But anathema indescribable upon that loathly worm, the progenitor of politicians, with the rearing of whose baneful head dispossession and death came from nether regions to shatter the prospect of a vast and happy family union! The thought of that crawling meddler sets me at once in a stew; and, whatever the guise of its descendants, I for my part, being unable to forget that primeval treachery, cannot, will not love them, though they "eat the fat of state," speak with the tongues of righteous indignation, yea, even write anonymously to the newspapers.

What wonder, then, that I return again and again in tender sympathy to her whose misfortune was so dire that her children stagger beneath it to-day, to my ever-so-great grandmother Eve. Did no tie of sorrow bind me to her, still would she be the wonder of my thought, till I should scarce believe one so radiant ever to have lived. In an age that was as fair as this day is unfair, she was the fairest, alone in her faultless beauty, the belle of her period, the first lady in the land. Her form was comely beyond description; even the comic artist of to-day, whose pencil knows no reverence, dare not debase it. Her complexion was wondrous—and there was much more of it than even modern fashions reveal—her habiliment in exquisite taste, yet so amazingly simple. The queen of homebuilders, her delight was in the open air: all Nature was her domain. Indeed, she might well be called the foundress of the first Tramping Club. To her assuredly I owe my fondness for tramping. Although I cannot, I am credibly informed, claim to inherit her matchless beauty, yet I offer un affront to modesty when I say that I do not inherit her passion for fruit. Ah, golden apple age! before markets came to rob the succulent pseudocarpal of most of its vitamines and all of its romance, the dear dead day when knowledge (thrilling thought) could be had for the mere plucking. Often the plucking now, in truth, but, alas, little the knowledge!

Had the apple of knowledge never been plucked, we might have been the happier, Eve. How could you know, however, that it would be as a Stokes bomb dropped into the human race? page 47 Atalanta's race was not the surer lost. The apple of Eros worked less calamity. For labour came to worry us, and hot on the heels of labour, like a roaring lion, Capital. Had the Garden remained, Capital would never have struck oil in Mesopotamia—oil, the stinking spirit that drives the engines of avarice in their ghastly work of fashioning anew the brand of Cain, the ichor that makes man less human as he grows less godlike! And the desert would not have been left exposed to the evil eye of the moving picture director!

We do not blame thee, Eve. The Welfare League had not arrived to trumpet down with glorious note the murmurings of insidious propaganda. Thy children would have stripped the tree, in any case. Neither can fault be found with thy loyalty, as with ours; but then there was no press to disturb the empire thou didst manage with thy capable Adam, no wild windy tongues to sap at its foundations. I doubt not hadst thou lived, there had been unity to-day and one great human family, guided by the loving hand of its universal parent, instead of by

"the puny hands
Of heroes, whose infirm and baby minds
Are gratified with mischief and who spoil,
Because men suffer it, their toy the, world."

But the work of the serpent bore thee down in the end, and Adam remained to mourn his "sore, sad loss." Beside thy grave I see him sitting, a lone grizzled old man, bent with the weight of his enormous years and still more enormous sorrow, on his stricken lips the most poignant (albeit the most apocryphal) tribute ever uttered by human being, because uttered by him who alone could know the fulness of its meaning:

"Wherever she was, there was Eden!"

P.J.S.