Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

I asked and asked, I never found a strong man to protect me, but at last the fragile wife of a painter took up the idea with enthusiasm — we would go together — only a very genuine succession of vile headaches threatened to postpone our adventure indefinitely — and I went out to it alone.

But I did take a very stout walking stick to beat them off a little — in case — —

It was after all not such a long way, I wondered how it was the “dangerous” people never wandered—

A peaceful place.

The sunrays seemed to be zipping through the humming bees over the vibrant flowers of light— Everything smelt sweetly of everything else.

The riot of summer before it has succumbed to its own heat — the very dust was like a carpet in heaven—

It was impossible to feel afraid on such a day.

And after all they seemed to have their keepers, for at the outpost of the colony there stood a beautiful house covered with honeysuckle.

From the door onto the garden where a venerable old gentleman sat over the soup-tureen with his napkin tied over his magnificent white beard, a melodious tinkling of china issued like the call home from Wonderland that ended Alice’s dream.

The wife who also issued out of the honeysuckle was just as well starched as Mrs. Granger, but she had not the same damning aspect, her human nature like her skin was one “you love to touch.”

I almost shouted with joy at the way they called good day to me—

I prowled around to see if there were any strange children—

There were none at all—

So I walked along toward a roof on a distant hill, passing on the way a dilapidated house at which I knocked.

There was nobody at home.

Nobody starting out of the hedges — –

The house on the hill was built of stone and banged against the sun — its meadows sloped away from it into the shade, where an ancient ploughshare lay under an apple tree and a few white fowls pottered among the gleaming dandelions and daisies—

* * * * *

Everything around the place is just something to play with—

You see the school house is too far off— Thanks be to the Lord.

And we aren’t for putting any kind of notions into her head—

God’s the best schoolmaster for her kind — said Grandfather Green stretching his toes further out in the sunlight — while his old wife nodded to him.

Do you see anything of the people in the village—

Eh what—? Them newcomers— Nope — never set eyes on ’em — our little bit o’ tradin’, we do with the town over t’other side.

* * * * *

On my way home, I found the door of the dilapidated house wide open, and Bad Mary of Maine shading her glazing eyes with her hand invited me in—

She cleared me a space among the indescribable gimcracks of her poverty.

The place was not clean, those branch-like arms had begun to wither — sometimes she would stumble up a lame wooden staircase — to take stock of her bedridden husband — whose face seemed to have stuck fallen forever onto the flyblown linen of the pillow—

everyhow

Contes Tommy-Rots

A couple of estimable parents who had believed in the establishment of a Moral Order became so disheartened with the proceeds, that they brought up the fag-end of their family atrociously.

With the result that while all the elder children are now working in factories, the last daughter married a prodigious profiteer, and the last son grew up with a certain little lift to the left corner of his mouth when he smiled ———

This son Jove Ivon Corvon I found one day seated under a hedge meditating upon his adolescence.

“Mina Loy,” he cried on perceiving me, “You know something of life ——Tell me how to live.”

“I know only this,” I replied, “That he who cannot live on his smile, lives not at all.”

It was not long before Jove Ivon Corvon had heaved himself into the highest society, and his fame spread to the four corners of the cosmopolitan world. And every night when he came home, his spacious halls would look like a harem or a ——So many women of fashion awaited him.

Jove Ivon was of a playful nature and loved to tease these wakeful aspirants to his favours.

Some nights when the place teemed with aristocracy and stars, he would enter with an anaemic flower girl, or a flimsy waitress, and guiding her with hovering devotion through the ignored exasperated crowd, would disappear with her through a heavy door in the mysterious distance.

Upon which there would follow a great scuffling of footmen and blowing of whistles for taxis. For as the psychologists tell us War would be impossible were not each soldier convinced that the soldier beside him, and not himself must fall; so had each eager lady dismissed her chauffeur confident that she uniquely would no longer require him.

It was a sight to see Jove Ivon Corvon fondling a stray kitten he had brought home with him in the bosom of his idyllic overcoat, while he watched the effect on those ladies attending upon his moods.

Magical slips of women, who in their brief and careless gowns, appeared to possess no human forms at all.

But on investigation revealed a firmness of ivory-coned bosom, and fluent curve of rosy thigh as would persuade us to believe that all modists are hypnotists.

Jove Ivon Corvon fondled his thin kitten with so genuine an ardour, stroking its muddy fur with such affectionate legerdemain, that the sensibilities of his uninvited seraglio succumbed to the torture, and several swooned.

But Jove Ivon persisted in stroking his kitten to the cosmic rhythm, while a galaxy of wistful eyes swayed with his wandering fingers.

“Tell me, Jove Ivon Corvon” said la petite Duchesse de Da Da, “Why is it that you can be so kind to a kitten, when you are so cruel to women?”

Jove Ivon lowered his eyelids in a subliminal uprush of pudicity, and answered with a blush and a whisper

“Because the kitten does not desire me.”

On hearing this reply of Jove Ivon Corvon —the ladies arose in silence and deserted those halls. Some of them arrived home safely, a few, entirely disheartened, eloped with Apaches, one or two withdrew to the convent of the Sacré Coeur.

And at the next performance of the Opera exquisite creations in kitten fur were strongly in evidence.

This geste négligent of Jove Ivon Corvon’s was not entirely a pose, for he was in a fair way to become blasé.

All the women he knew were too beautiful, and his passion had become glacial.

He was notoriously the worst lover in the world, which in view of women’s disposition towards self-sacrifice and reform work was not the least of his advertisements.

But this state of soul could not last.

The very next morning Jove Ivon arose early and donning a dressing gown of hummingbird’s wings embroidered with emerald Catherine wheels, he wandered among the marble pillars of the lobby, we can only surmise, urged by the presentiment that a few corpses might be lying in the shadows.

When his eyes beheld, not dead, but alive, and of unfamiliar animation, a woman such as he had never seen.

Of a new shape, refreshing to his eyes, the full curves of her bust meandered into the folds of a skirt revealing only her feet (so much larger than the insignificant little things he was so weary of—). And her loose slippers flapped rhythmically to and fro as she walked.

In her hands she held a great sceptre or wand decorated at its lower extremity with a mass of soft wisps matted together like a mermaid’s hair and of the colour of twilight.

This she was waving about in mystical arabesques upon the tessellated pavement, driving before her a shallow flood of beautiful water.