Where the tribesmen mock at the Bengalee
and shiver their spears
in
vain,
And officers steep their souls chin-deep
in brandy and dry
champagne;
Where the Rudyard river runs, flecked
with foam, far forth to the
Kipling
seas,
And the maker of man takes walks abroad
with Pagan deities.
Where AZRAEL talks to the Graces Three,
and the Muses Nine stand by,
And ask Greek riddles of BUDDHA, who never
makes reply.
(Gentlemen all and ladies too as smart
as a brand-new pin),
And nobody wonders how on earth so mixed
a lot got in—
Here in the track of a thunderbolt from
the nethernmost smithy
hurled,
With the groan of an ancient passion rent
from the wreck of a
shattered
world,
In the white-hot pincers of BAAL borne
through cycles of agony,
Lit by the Pit’s red wrath there
came the Soul of a Sundered Flea.
And all that company started back; first
AZRAEL grimly smiled,
The smile that an East-End Coster smiles,
by a stout policeman
riled;
And BUDDHA made no remark at all, but
nodded his heavy head,
Like a boy who has eaten too much dessert,
and wants to be put to
bed.
And the Muses Nine, as they stood in line,
they shuddered and
turned
to go.
“A joke’s a joke, but I can’t
bear fleas,” said CLIO to ERATO.
And the Graces, the good Conservative
Three, shrank back to a spot
remote,
And observed that they knew that this
would come from letting the
Masses
vote.
Then AZRAEL spake—“On
the Stygian lake I floated a half-sinned sin
On the crest of a cross-grained stickleback,
that is caught with a
crooked
pin;
For a year and a day I watched it whirl,
but never that sin could be
One-half so base as your gruesome face,
O Soul of a Sundered Flea!
“What ill have ye done? Speak
up, speak up!—for this is no place,
I
trow,
For the puling people on virtue fed.
So speak, or prepare to go.”
But the Flea flew free from the pincers’
grip, and uttered a
single
phrase—
“I have lived on blood, as a gentleman
should, and that is my
claim
to praise.”
Then a shout of joy from the throng went
forth; they built him a
crystal
throne,
And there in his pride, with none beside,
he rules and he reigns
alone.
And this is the tale which I here set
down, as the story was told
to
me—
In excellent Rudyard-Kipling verse—the
tale of the Sundered Flea.
* * * * *
ANTICIPATORY NEWS (from Our Own Court Tripping Newsman).—Sir ALGERNON BORTHWICK, Bart, M.P., will be raised to the Peerage with the title of Lord MORNINGPOST, of Penniwise, Seefarshire, N.B.
* * * * *