A Revolt of the Gods
My father was a deodorizer of dead dogs, my mother
kept the only shop for the sale of cats’-meat in my native city.
They did not live happily; the difference in social rank was a
chasm which could not be bridged by the vows of marriage. It was
indeed an ill-assorted and most unlucky alliance; and as might have
been foreseen it ended in disaster. One morning after the customary
squabbles at breakfast, my father rose from the table, quivering
and pale with wrath, and proceeding to the parsonage thrashed the
clergyman who had performed the marriage ceremony. The act was
generally condemned and public feeling ran so high against the
offender that people would permit dead dogs to lie on their
property until the fragrance was deafening rather than employ him;
and the municipal authorities suffered one bloated old mastiff to
utter itself from a public square in so clamorous an exhalation
that passing strangers supposed themselves to be in the vicinity of
a saw-mill. My father was indeed unpopular. During these dark days
the family’s sole dependence was on my mother’s emporium for
cats’-meat.
The business was profitable. In that city, which
was the oldest in the world, the cat was an object of veneration.
Its worship was the religion of the country. The multiplication and
addition of cats were a perpetual instruction in arithmetic.
Naturally, any inattention to the wants of a cat was punished with
great severity in this world and the next; so my good mother
numbered her patrons by the hundred. Still, with an unproductive
husband and seventeen children she had some difficulty in making
both ends cats’-meat; and at last the necessity of increasing the
discrepancy between the cost price and the selling price of her
carnal wares drove her to an expedient which proved eminently
disastrous: she conceived the unlucky notion of retaliating by
refusing to sell cats’-meat until the boycott was taken off her
husband.
On the day when she put this resolution into
practice the shop was thronged with excited customers, and others
extended in turbulent and restless masses up four streets, out of
sight. Inside there was nothing but cursing, crowding, shouting and
menace. Intimida tion was freely resorted to—several of my younger
brothers and sisters being threatened with cutting up for the
cats—but my mother was as firm as a rock, and the day was a black
one for Sardasa,88 the ancient and sacred city that was
the scene of these events. The lock-out was vigorously maintained,
and seven hundred and fifty thousand cats went to bed hungry!
The next morning the city was found to have been
placarded during the night with a proclamation of the Federated
Union of Old Maids. This ancient and powerful order averred through
its Supreme Executive Head that the boycotting of my father and the
retaliatory lock-out of my mother were seriously imperiling the
interests of religion. The proclamation went on to state that if
arbitration were not adopted by noon that day all the old maids of
the federation would strike—and strike they did.
The next act of this unhappy drama was an
insurrection of cats. These sacred animals, seeing themselves
doomed to starvation, held a mass-meeting and marched in procession
through the streets, swearing and spitting like fiends. This revolt
of the gods produced such consternation that many pious persons
died of fright and all business was suspended to bury them and pass
terrifying resolutions.
Matters were now about as bad as it seemed possible
for them to be. Meetings among representatives of the hostile
interests were held, but no understanding was arrived at that would
hold. Every agreement was broken as soon as made, and each element
of the discord was frantically appealing to the people. A new
horror was in store.
It will be remembered that my father was a
deodorizer of dead dogs, but was unable to practice his useful and
humble profession because no one would employ him. The dead dogs in
consequence reeked rascally. Then they struck! From every vacant
lot and public dumping ground, from every hedge and ditch and
gutter and cistern, every crystal rill and the clabbered waters of
all the canals and estuaries—from all the places, in short, which
from time immemorial have been preëmpted by dead dogs and
consecrated to the uses of them and their heirs and successors
forever—they trooped innu merous, a ghastly crew! Their procession
was a mile in length. Midway of the town it met the procession of
cats in full song. The cats instantly exalted their backs and
magnified their tails; the dead dogs uncovered their teeth as in
life, and erected such of their bristles as still adhered to the
skin.
The carnage that ensued was too awful for relation!
The light of the sun was obscured by flying fur, and the battle was
waged in the darkness, blindly and regardless. The swearing of the
cats was audible miles away, while the fragrance of the dead dogs
desolated seven provinces.
How the battle might have resulted it is impossible
to say, but when it was at its fiercest the Federated Union of Old
Maids came running down a side street and sprang into the thickest
of the fray. A moment later my mother herself bore down upon the
warring hosts, brandishing a cleaver, and laid about her with great
freedom and impartiality. My father joined the fight, the municipal
authorities engaged, and the general public, converging on the
battle-field from all points of the compass, consumed itself in the
center as it pressed in from the circumference. Last of all, the
dead held a meeting in the cemetery and resolving on a general
strike, began to destroy vaults, tombs, monuments, headstones,
willows, angels and young sheep in marble—everything they could lay
their hands on. By nightfall the living and the dead were alike
exterminated, and where the ancient and sacred city of Sardasa had
stood nothing remained but an excavation filled with dead bodies
and building materials, shreds of cat and blue patches of decayed
dog. The place is now a vast pool of stagnant water in the center
of a desert.
The stirring events of those few days constituted
my industrial education, and so well have I improved my advantages
that I am now Chief of Misrule to the Dukes of Disorder, an
organization numbering thirteen million American workingmen.