THE CRIKEY.

 

THE CRIKEY;

a Dialogue,

After the Manner of Plato.

—

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

'My dear fellow, some more brandy?'

'I am much obliged to you sir.'

'And another cigar?'

'Thank you, I'll finish this one for the present.'

——

'This is convivial is it not?'

'It seems so to the mind but in fact I am extremely ill.'

'Yes, so am I. I don't know if it was the game bird or the vintage claret or the exquisite pudding, the soup to begin with (divine as it was), the salmon and champagne, the caviar, the gorgeous company of the most beautiful women I have ever seen invited to an hunting function, but I really do feel ill.'

'And melancholy.'

'Deuced melancholy.'

'Perhaps our portions were too sizeable?'

''T is true that I began to feel indigestion shortly after the complimentary bread the host provided.'

'Why do they do it?'

'I don't know, it only takes an olive to set my hypochondria a'going and put my bowels to alert. That is why I drank so plentifully, to dumb the immune response.'

'There again, what a cacophony of conversation for so small a room!'

'It is indeed remarkable how fifteen conversations mix like primary colours into a general brown.'

'And no one there loved me.'

'Nor me.'

'Wasn't Madam Milksop giving you the eye?'

'She has amblyopia. The only beings who gave me any attention were Jewlock and Dewdrop.'

'They are beautiful border collies.'

'Yes and ravenous.'

——

'I am feeling drunk, Bertie.'

'Jeffrey, the room has been scanning upwards and resetting for me, like an old television, for the last two hours. My ears are ringing and I'm conscious of a general sweat. Each puff of the cigar feels like it is tightening my skin around my skull like a plastic bag around a bowling ball, not to mention I feel an alarmingly sharp pain in the chest area.'

'Probably wind.'

'Or perhaps to-night will be the night.'

'Or perhaps it will only be a night.'

'Perhaps.'

'We shall feel dreadful come the morning.'

'Why then let us not sleep but speak.'

 

CHAPTER II.

'Good Morning.'

'A Jacksonian march feels like a Bach arpeggio.'

'Boring you mean?'

'Or like the rickety feeling of a falling wooden rollercoaster, each plank strains after another in rapid succession.'

'You obviously forgot to drink your morning cup of Hine.'

'It is the Hine which is the cause.'

'And the cure.'

'Lo, she comes with clouds descending! Mrs. Pepper looks sheepish, a case of the post-coital blues?'

'She has sciatica.'

'So had Mistress Overdone. This boiled egg's albumen runs out like water.'

'And this bacon tastes like my leather wallet.'

'It's called air frying; a new fad, doubtless they will discover it gives everyone legionnaire's disease one day. "O, but it is so much easier!" say they, "and healthier too!"'

'It makes everything taste like rubber.'

'Yea, but they put messy avocado over its products and think themselves gastronomes.'

'Hello Jeffrey!'

'Gertie! You look lovely!'

'Hullo Gertrude.'

'Who are you?'

'That's Bertie, Gertie.'

'Of course it is. Anyway, I'll see you next time Jeffrey.'

'Remember, I'm off to Australia for the next six months.'

'I do, next time is next time. T.T.F.N.'

'She didn't recognise you.'

'That is why I put on the glasses.'

'And the balaclava?'

'That is for the cold.'

 

CHAPTER III.

'He isn't relevant in this life.'

'Nor will be in any other.'

——

'I have a fixation about the origins of people's thoughts. I fancy I can deduce the concatenation of things which lead them to being conceived, and people only blink because I do.'

'You read too much of Sherlock Holmes and now look where it has got you.'

'Sherlock Holmes would have been considered delusional were he not correct, instead he was vaunted a genius. I know I am correct and I am fretted over for a lunatic. Evidently it is not the conceiving of notions but the airing of them which makes the trouble.'

'I saw you talking to yourself last night and this morning.'

'It is the only assurance I can have of a controlled conversation.'

'But it is alarming to bystanders.'

'They are alarming to me.'

'And this business of quoting things endlessly, people cannot know you are quoting but take the quote for an opinion.'

'In this I do not see that I am different to any man, for the origins of all thoughts and words precede us.'

'Yet if you spend an evening pretending to be Oliver Reed to the point where you actually drink half a bottle of brandy, that is method acting to a fault.'

'I agree, alcohol has taken more out of me than I have taken out of alcohol. Really, people should drink no more than a thimbleful for flavour and plump the rest with juice or water.'

'Now I must go, will you be all right?'

'When is any one all right? I shall be tolerably right as a slanted weathervane.'

'I'll see you next week.'

'Farewell, farewell.'

——

'Even that conversation was talking to yourself, you realise?'

'Yes, certainly, certainly.'

'Well then, play the tyrant to the very same.'

'We burn daylight.'

'I shall speak on behalf of my precise opposite. There is no God.'

'There is no man.'

'What do you mean by that statment? That the notion of man is not befitting of the object of reference, or that the object of reference has no existence?'

'I mean only to ridicule your statement. For there is more evidence of God than of man.'

'You mean to say there is nothing which is not God.'

'Certainly.'

'And the man who is friend to all is friend to none. If God is everything God is nothing.'

'That saying is a saying of emphasis not of logic. Its purpose is to define loyalty, not the nature of categories. A man who is friend to all is friend to all, but that is different to the vulgar and selfish notion of blind loyalty.'

'I must have a pickled onion.'

 

CHAPTER IV.

'Satisifed?'

'Yes but not delighted, these latest are too peppery for my taste.'

'I say again there is no God.'

'Why must you say it?'

'Because I'm too self-fulfilling to be a mechanic.'

'What is there then?'

'Demonstrable facts determined a posteriori by empiricism and the five senses.'

'I do not know what that foreign phrase means and I'll thank you not to use it again. Supply a demonstrable fact.'

'You are a buffoon.'

'An excellent example. You may demonstrate it readily by your intemperance and christen it a fact.'

'No, no, say the sun is hot.'

'That isn't very demonstrable to someone who only speaks Chinese.'

'It is. As Churchill wrote, he can go there and find out.'

'So that is the extent of truth to you, that a term of subjective experience may be applied to an object and thus verified by incinerating a Chinaman in it?'

'We are both certain the sun is hot, that is what is called a fact, dear boy.'

'What was that sound.'

'It could have been an elephant collapsing through the floorboards or, more probably, it is Mrs. Juju hauling up her week's sack of peanuts.'

'I can live on a tin of sardines for a week but I will not live without quietude. What was I thinking? Aye, that there is no such thing as a sun and its heat, that's what I think of your facts. Each is existence and nothing less you'll mind.'

'Oh I can see your thoughts already scrambling to assemble themselves in decent order, like a ragged square in a Napoleonic battle. You will mention Bishop Berkeley's hand temperature experiment.'

'And why not? Heat is like speed, only felt in differentiation.'

'Heat is like speed, the Nazis adore it.'

'So this is how you comfort yourself with the thought that you are really a very penetrating gentleman, by attributing a subjective sense to a ball of gas?'

'Temperature is an actual quality detected by a subjective sense.'

'So you say the sun is hot because it is moving a lot, do you not see that we are looking through glasses darkly?'

'Naturally, I am thou and thou art I.'

'Play up and play the game.'

'Oh very well, no, I do not. What there is I accept, what there is not I do not.'

'It must be a very happy life.'

'Yes desperately happy, morbidly happy, grotesquely mirthful. Without theism I am left to ponder the universe with greater awe and reverence than any theist could. "I yield nothing to you" in that.'

'Thank you Richard. Yet if your atheism were truly so awe-inspired and reverential it would also reverence within the compass of the universe, and with equally inspired awe, that very excellent part of it called theism, but as you patently do not mean what you say I am willing to disregard the point. Atheism is the complete rejection of reverence.'

'I am not willing to disregard it as I cannot think of another point to make, and so I mean to distract you from my uninventiveness by making an impressive show of destructive force. Yours is a superstitious second-rate mind!'

'My enemy's enemy is my friend, may I shake my hand? Thank you Holmes.'