Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

802 In common with most people who have been intimately connected with some as- tounding experience, everything that fol- lows it seems tame in comparison, and Billy is always hoping that either the same ex- perience will be repeated, or else that a more exciting one will take its place. I have spent a good deal of valuable time— I say valuable inasmuch as the commodity is invariably reputed to be so—in trying to argue Billy into settling down, and into giving up his expectations of imminent and perilous emotional! kicks. Just because he happened to have been on hand when the experiment occurred and was closely concerned with its thrilling out- come is no reason, as I have futilely told him again and again, for expecting any- thing remotely like it to recur in either a blue or in any other peculiarly tinted sort of a moon. Another uncomfortable condition of such a state of mind is an insatiable insistence that others be excited too. There is noth- ing that youth likes to share quite so much as astonishment. I am personally only too willing to share any amount of it; but I do not like to have to dispense it, and I could tell from the determined manner with which Billy all but unhinged the door to my flat last Sunday morning that I was about to be let in for something or other especially astonishing and that there would be no escape. “Took here, sir,” he said intently, only pausing briefly enough to inspect the pop- overs on the breakfast tray and to decide that he wanted one, “‘ you’ve got to put this affair in writing. It’s not the sort of thing that should bé kept mum. I had a long argument with myself last night, and de- cided that we should—we must—give an account of it to the world.” “JT wish you wouldn’t stand up while eating,” I told him. “I haven’t the slight- est interest in what it will do to your own stomach, but I have about mine. There is such a thing as sympathetic indigestion and I don’t want to get it. I once kn—” 66 It y—”’ “T once knew a man named Zachary Adolphus Beems, through no fault of my own, who caught a very severe attack of it ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. from his wife just after the good woman had indigestion one morning as a punish- ment for a startling habit she had had for years of bouncing up from the breakfast table at frequent intervals in order to run to the kitchen and get something.” is¢ I masts? ‘“Now my watching you stand up there while you eat that pop-over, which I sug- gest you butter, is enough to disrupt the abomasum—which you may or may not know is the fourth stomach of a ruminant —of a gazelle an—”’ ‘““T don’t believe a word you’ve been say- ing. Youre making the whole thing up out of your head just to stall me off. Well, it won’t do you any good. I’d write the account myself if I had the time, but I haven’t and you have. You ought to be glad of the opportunity instead of flying off like this the minute I open my mouth about it. It will give you something to do. No, I thank you, I do not want any butter.” This was deliberately implied slander. I have plenty of things to do—so many that I scarcely know from day to day whether or not I can get them done. I couldn’t say off-hand just what they are, but they keep popping up every instant or so and demand attention. The fact that they never get any has nothing to do with it; the things are there to be done, and if I wanted to I would do them. “Granting,” I said cautiously—one has to go cautiously when talking with Billy, as he has an extravagant aptitude for seizing an inch and making it an ell—“ that I were temporarily to become bereft of my senses and write an account of the affair as you suggest, and which I tell you plainly I won’t, have you paused at all to consider the effect upon our present-day semi-bar- baric civilization were such a discovery to be loosed upon the world?” “Yes,” said Billy, with a disturbing whole-heartedness. ‘“‘And that is exactly why you must write it.” I failed to see his point, and told him so. I even went so far, in my aD as to ask for enlightenment. “Tt is this way, sir: the thing ‘that hap- pened to Ramier and Drusilla and me is oO Ccomicboooks (©)