"Quo quisque stultior, eo magis insolescit."
Police!!! (1915) By Robert W. Chambers
"Eggs of the Silver Moon" goes a long way for its few snaps of humor. Still, Chambers seems to be shaping the mold for future melodramatic potboiler novels and sitcoms in which the weird or strange are lightly braided to screwball banter situations.
""Eggs of the Silver Moon" is told by the collection's narrator, "chief of the Anthropological Field Survey Department of the great Bronx Park Zoölogical Society…."
....That evening I was seated on the veranda beside Wilna — Miss Blythe’s name was Wilna — and what with gazing at her and fitting together some of the folding box-traps which I always carried with me — and what with trying to realise the pecuniary magnificence of our future existence together, I was exceedingly busy when Blythe came in to display, as I supposed, his most recent daub to me.
The canvas he carried presented a series of crimson speckles, out of which burst an eruption of green streaks — and it made me think of stepping on a caterpillar.
My instinct was to placate this impossible man. He was her father. I meant to honour him if I had to assault him to do it.
“Supremely satisfying!” I nodded, chary of naming the subject. “It is a stride beyond the art of the future: it is a flying leap out of the Not Yet into the Possibly Perhaps! I thank you for enlightening me, Mr. Blythe. I am your debtor.”
He fairly snarled at me:
“What are you talking about!” he demanded.
I remained modestly mute.
To Wilna he said, pointing passionately at his canvas:
"The crows have been walking all over it again! I'm going to paint in the woods after this, earthquakes or no earthquakes. Have the trees been heaved up anywhere recently?"
"Not since last week," she said, soothingly. "It usually happens after a rain."
"I think I'll risk it then—although it did rain early this morning. I'll do a moonlight down there this evening." And, turning to me: "If you know as much about science as you do about art you won't have to remain here long—I trust."
"What?" said I, very red.
He laughed a highly disagreeable laugh, and marched into the house. Presently he bawled for dinner, and Wilna went away. For her sake I had remained calm and dignified, but presently I went out and kicked up the turf two or three times; and, having foozled my wrath, I went back to dinner, realising that I might as well begin to accustom myself to my future father-in-law.
It seemed that he had a mania for prunes, and that's all he permitted anybody to have for dinner.
Disgusted, I attempted to swallow the loathly stewed fruit, watching Blythe askance as he hurriedly stuffed himself, using a tablespoon, with every symptom of relish….
From Police!!! (1915) By Robert W. Chambers
