THE PAMPERERS

BY MINA LOY

Invisible Obvious
Picked People
Houseless Loony

Porcelain breath — Sèvres bow — Gilded crimson — Curved
flutings — Brocade — Tailored muscles — Whipped cream — Blue
spirals — Salved lips — Salon — Debussy — Azaleas — Ancestors
— Armorial complacencies — Ooze

Picked people melted by a distinguished method among the
upholstery.

TAG ENDS OF OVERHEARD CONVERSATION

The social fabric is a curtain . . . and that warm garnet
fold-shadow there, for souls hide and seek. . . .

Decency shudders in the bare moment, taut between vestibule
and auto. . . .

at this season are all undressed.

The earth a poignant undertaker. . . .

I wish I had a wig darling.

Observe the legs, the agony of the crucified . . .
the tendons . . . delicate as Dresden china 15th century
. . . ah yes! the troubles of the steam heating plant . . .
man from Milan knows his business. . . .

Oh Prince how charming of you . . . and what is your
opinion of the sex question?

How simple . . . still I can't quite agree with you . . .
we shall never give up wearing silk stockings.

Somebody: Ossy you know has discovered a genius . . .

Ossy: . . . coming from the club . . . wonderful chap, see his predatory eye . . .

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THE PAMPERERS

picking up cigar ends . . . the grand passion . . . pockets full . . .

Somebody: Picasso uses all sorts of odds and ends.

Ossy: No critic dare anticipate the masterpiece this man may stack . . .

Somebody: Mud larks and geniuses!

Ossy: There's a revival in *THE THING* being a patron . . . I've got a Medici Villa somewhere . . . put the fellow in the stables here . . . heart's content . . . counting fags Wait and see; fond of my dinner doesn't prevent me having an enormous respect for these creative sky-rocket-in-the-sewer chaps; *wait and see*

I've got flair . . . taken two of you to have got onto those cigar ends . . . *like that* . . . my God!

I'd forgotten Diana . . . Diana collects geniuses!

Somebody: She's got perfect toes . . . pedicured on a diamond footstool . . .

Somebody Else: Bach played for her bath . . .

Somebody: Isadora Allen to dance her awake

S. E.: Bought a museum to wear at a ball

Somebody: Has to have the Daily Mail transposed into the Arabic for the autumn, British Journalese has a bite in it . . . superfluously supplement the morning frost . . .

S. E.: Steam from hot cocoa is so suggestive of breathing in the open

Somebody: But she has so many butterflies in her nightcap . . .

S. E.: Avoiding the vulgarity of looking expensive she waters the aloe in sack-cloth. Does nothing to her complexion, but a penny worth of ice Has her own bran-mash prepared for her at the Ritz . . . reads Mahabharata through cotillons . . .

Somebody: So bored . . . has the most perfect yawn in

MINA LOY

67

Europe . . . virgin eyelashes, and abortive
morals . . . why Di dear, we were just talk-
ing about you . . .

*(Diana turns off the light, sits on the pekinese
which sinking still deeper into cushions notices
nothing; and meditates in a fussy silence on the
dial of a luminous watch.)*

*(Two intimate friends sidle into the conserva-
tory)*

1st Friend: Can I trust you?
2nd Friend: Did I trust you?
1st F.: Then I will tell you where I really was last week
. . . at home with a black eye.
2nd F.: And where . . . ?
1st F.: Oh, he was at home with a black eye too.
2nd F.: How ripping!
1st F.: Delicious, we wore Longhi masks and had
Watsiswinski play Handel on the spinet
2nd F.: Life can be very beautiful with a lover
1st F.: The Wedgewood and the Venetian lustres are in
splinters and the ceiling had to be repainted
2nd F.: It is your passion for danger, serves you your
incontestable hold on our social circle, whose
criterion the intactness of porcelain, the watch-
word . . . 'No china is ever broken here;
here where the virginity of white carpets, sancti-
fies the passage of the correct'
1st F.: Profundity of superficies
2nd F.: While to Stavinski's meteors the animal whines
a million moons behind evening dress
1st F.: Split passion to the forty gold pieces of a mani-
cure set . . . and there it still is
2nd F.: Strew souls in fractions on dressing tables
1st F.: Oh keep it up . . . disintegratedly above
those others . . . what do you suppose they
do . . . with insufficient money to do it
with?

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THE PAMPERERS

2nd F.: Nature looks after them . . .
1st F.: When you consider what *our* régime has been done to Nature
2nd F.: Diversion for our old age, in patching them up
1st F.: Well, I suppose we're rotten . . . thank God, we're rotting soft
2nd F.: Double pile . . . or an intellect walking about on it . . .
1st F.: Don't make me think . . . might drive me to anything . . .
2nd F.: Come Di's lit up again . . . Ossy's cocktails
*Remember* . . . no china broken here . . .

*Somebody:* Diana dear, you might tell us where you were
. . . while we were so patiently watching
you?

(*Diana's chameleon rattles her emeralds.*)

*Diana:* Systematizing Futurist plastic velocity by the displacement of the minute-hand . . . Ho capito.

*Somebody Else:* Isn't she wonderful?

*A man* (*whose monocle has been hypnotized to idea associations by the luminous dial*) : I don't know anything about Marinetti; I don't want to know anything about Marinetti but I respect him . . . he has a clean collar I am willing to accept the creed of any man who wears a clean collar

*Somebody:* Why the devil shouldn't Marinetti wear a clean collar?

I don't know why Marinetti shouldn't wear a clean collar, all I say is . . . Marinetti wears a clean collar!

*Ossy:* Di . . . if you half guessed what I've

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THE PAMPERERS

I am the elusion that cooed to your adolescent
isolation, crystallized in the experience of your
manhood . . . (Oh do stop blinking at me,
or I can't go on) . . . I am that reciprocal
quality you searched for among the moonlit
mysteries of Battersea Bridge.

I come to you with gifts those other women had
not to give

I am measured by the silence of inspiration,
tuned to a laudatory discrimination . . .
made of the instigatory caress . . . I know
the moment to press the grape to thy lip . . .
put ice on your head; for I am the woman who
understands . . . so *do* tell me what you
are going to make with those cigar-ends?

Loony:

I am going to make *Life* out of cigar-ends
*Life*

I must have Life . . . more life . . .

I am Life . . . . my hair is full of life
. . . my clothes are alive; but I am not satisfied.

I will have more life . . . I will *make*
more life . . . Life out of cigar ends

When God made Life . . . he rested and
saw that it was . . . good . . . the
devil interfered, making it dangerous. But Life
is more than this or that. Life is *amusing!* And
you (*to Diana*)—you make me laugh!

Diana:

I am the merriment to float your leisure . . .
And what do you do when you are not picking
them up?

Loony:

Sit in the pub arguing with my companion

Diana:

You mentioned two . . .

Loony:

One and the same . . . 'God gives' and
'the Devil to pay!'

*(The room fills rapidly with the Loony's curiosity, the 'taken for granted' advances to audience gravenly noticeable.)*

MINA LOY

71

Such are the secret dens of the terrorized. Look
here, you woman-as-you-may-say, strikes me I've
wasted a lot of theoretic sympathy on the sub-
merged . . . you don't look half sorry for
yourselves. Why I've knocked a fellow down,
out there in the Grand 'cause' he says 'they don't
feel' says he . . . 'they can't have the same
feelings as we have.' And yet, and yet . . .
what would happen if one scraped some of the
nap off you?

Somebody Else:

So you're stopping at the Grand?

Loony:

There is no stopping at the Grand . . . the
Grand is all of 'Out There' . . . I am the
grand man let loose in it. Out there where no
knick knacks nudge you into minding your p's
and q's . . . 'my miraculous ambulance in
spatial mystery'; out there where there is every-
thing to find . . . the grand man is able to
pick up anything he is able to see.

Diana: (Sighs)

Oh! . . . take me with you, I am the woman
who can see.

Loony:

You know not what you ask

Your aspirations are herculean

No human beings can be so polished, so seques-
tered, so hermetically sealed . . . but that
they may still be able to aspire. I am the
apostle of Fraternity. I find my brother in the
most secluded coward . . . But out there
. . . they are not all as I am . . . their
sympathies have narrowed to their code. Were
I to take you among them . . . you would
suffer . . . even my protection would not
suffice you.

You would be slighted . . . you would be
criticised . . . considered soft.

You with your different way of sitting down, an
unfamiliar manner of gulping food. Your most
fervid conversation would lose itself as an im-
pertinent silence among the debonaire rumble of

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THE PAMPERERS

our caste. You would be witless and a bore; koh-
i-noors for the cultured ear . . . the rude
realism of our Imagists would call up none of
the emotions of the initiated in you . . .

Somebody:
I say Ossy . . . we might be able to keep
peace with 'em there.

Loony:
Not at all, with you the art of ribaldry relies en-
tirely on technique . . . dilettante . . .
again the cowardice of the submerged . . .
Ours has the healthy spring of creative expres-
sion rooted in action . . . we coin nothing
but the image and superscription of personal ex-
perience . . .

My poor child (*catching Diana's wrist as he descends from his throne* . . . *shuffling the velvet*). Dare you look . . . look . . . (*he looks for something he is surprised not to be able to find*) I was going to try to make you see the 'Grand.' w

Ossy:
Oh Di, he wants a widow . . . James!
draw the curtains.

*(The curtains are drawn
The gilded shutters thrown back)*

Loony (*to the grand outdoors*): What an idea to muffle It up like that
Oh thou from whom all colds are caught . . .
they're afraid of you catching cold!

(*to Diana*): Now my pretty house fly! Think of that mud
. . . that bloody awful mud . . . in
all the beauty of its bloody awfulness!
A quality that escapes you?

You have never felt it plasterly squelching be-
tween your toes, salving their parchment creak
. . . cake coveringly for warm footed nights,
or sensuous slop cheek-spattering as a wench's
spittle . . . from about the Rolls-Royce
passing of the pitiably immune.