The Way of the Gods

Excerpt

TADAIMA

I thought I saw the bronze god Asamra (he who may speak but once in a thousand years, and whose friendship I keep by making time stand still for him in the stopping of the clock and its turning back) shake his head in doubt as I put the manuscript into its wrappings and addressed it to the publisher.

"Well?" I inquired, testily.

"Suppose They do not like it?" sighed the god.

"Why should They not?" demanded I, loftily.

"It has, among other unusualities, (I hope you like the gentleness of the word!) those dashes which—You ought to have learned by this time that They don't like to read over dashes."

"Why not?" asked I, again. "I like them. And, they are my own!"

"Well, you know a dash necessitates lucubration. It stands for something which you trust your reader to supply. That is unfair. If you are writing a book and receiving an honorarium for it, do not expect him to do it. It is a bit like eating. One does not go to a restaurant, and pay for his food, then cook it himself."

"I have seen it done," cried I, "by particular people!"

"Ahem!" murmured the polite god: more polite on this day than I had recently observed him—which meant some sort of propaganda.

"It is not an ahem!" I went on in the unregenerate heat which the friction of the god often engendered in me. "Have you never seen it done?"

"I have," admitted the effigy, "seen a waiter sorely vexed to bring the materials for a salad—"

"Aha!" cried I, triumphantly.

"Gomen nasai," begged the deity, "I had not finished. I have seen a waiter, I say, sorely vexed to bring the materials for a salad which the maker has—spoiled!"

"Then," demanded I, with icy coldness, "you think that if I permit Them to supply a few thoughts to carry Them over the dashes They will—"

"Think something you did not think; perhaps something worse," the effigy finished, calamitously.

"Or better?" I suggested, bitterly.

"Or better," agreed the god. "There is a small number of people (but, extremely small) who like to supply in full what you suggest in dashes. It tickles Them tremendously to think that you couldn't have done it so well; that you trust Them to do it better. Often They are certain that They have helped you over a place you could not help yourself over—hence the dash."

"Sometimes," I mused, diffidently, "that is true."

"Ha, ha!" laughed the image, and our mood became more human.

"But, do you mean to say," I asked, "that if I leave John and Jane in the upper hall, and take them up again in the lower hall, I must acquaint Them with the fact that John and Jane have been obliged to traverse the stairway to get away from the one and to reach the other? Am I permitted no ellipsis in so patent a matter as that?"

"They will expect the stairway," sighed the god.

"And a page for each step, I suppose! How can They differ from me? What other thought can They have than that John and Jane descended the stairway to reach the lower hall?"

"There may be a back stairway, or a fire escape," chuckled the deity.

"Then, I suppose, I must spend some pages in telling Them not only that John and Jane descended the stair, but that they did not descend by the back stair or the fire escape!"

"It would be better," said the idol....