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Show The Cannibals AiCxandlyHarvcy B THE cannibals had already lighted the Are of faggots in which they meant to roast Misa Sabina Upjohn. That brilliant and beautiful young champion of the rights of woman, tied hand and foot, was lying on the ground beneath one of the mighty trees of the Congo forest. No one who has followed, even casually, the rise and progress of that tremendous agitation in the United States which has familiarized all Americans Am-ericans with the cry of "Votes for women" can be unaware of the importance of Miss Sabina Upjohn. Many a New York audience has been ravished in Cooper Union by the irresistible slope of this young lady's waist-line, as, with heaving bust, she preened a lily-white neck to ejaculate in the Vas-sar Vas-sar accent that our written constitution embodies embod-ies nothing more sacred than a despotism of man. Night after night on street corners, in packed assembly rooms and at elaborate course dinners, has Miss Sabina Upjohn vowed in a very elegant hat that the hour now strikes for her sex to emancipate itself from a tyranny as outworn as it is meaningless. Many a puncture has been suffered by the tires of her father's fifteen thousand dollar automobile auto-mobile transporting some champion of the cause so precious to herself in the direction of the nearest near-est station-house. The elderly millionaire, whose favorite child she is, has been heard to sigh at a fate that hailed him everywhere as the father of Miss Sabina Upjohn. He had, in effect, other claims upon the attention of the public his immense fortune, for I instance, and the strange delay of the federal courts in sending him to the penitentiary for vio-, lation of the statute in restraint of trade. How- Iever, the American portion of mankind had approved ap-proved Mr. Upjohn only in the capacity of Sa-bina's Sa-bina's father. She had achieved prodigious fame for the whole Upjohn family. Even her eleven-year-old sister distributed leaflets warning against the perils of apathy. Sabina, nevertheless, monop- olized the general eye. Those scrimmages between New York police- Imen and young ladles belonging to our best families, fam-ilies, which er jgularly bring home the circumstance circum-stance that i. whole sex is disfranchised in the Empire State of this Union, impelled Sabina Upjohn Up-john to the fore in mass-meetings of protest. Her swimming dark eyes flashed beneath the most fetching toques in shot silk whenever, on such occasions, she predicted a rise in wages as the first consequence of a mode in favor at the time of the Napoleonic wars lined with black velvet. In a large white hat, covered with rateen and the brim slightly rolled off the face in front, Miss Upjohn thrilled Carnegie Hall packed to the roof with the whole history of wages viewed concurrently with that of successive extensions of the franchise. The climax of her career was not attained, perhaps, until Bhe headed that procession of her sex, three thousand strong, which, one summer afternoon, Imparted to Fifth avenue the aspect of a parading demonstration of Monsieur Marcel's artistic device. New York, it is true, grows more and more independent of Paris with respect to the coiffure, that of Miss Sabina Upjohn being, upon this great day, relatively small, in keeping with the closely-' fitting costumes of the paraders. Yet many of the young women journalists, who reported this parade so sympathetically in the evening editions i i noticed a distinct downward tendency of the hair towards the neck as banner after banner sailed gloriously from Sixty-fifth street to the Battery emblazoned with denunciations of androcentric culture. In the ornamentation of her coiffure, Miss Upjohn Up-john affected large black combs inserted obliquely at the side of the chignon. Enemies of woman referred with a sneer to the emotional effects of her smile upon the young men in the brigade of college graduates, who bore a life-size portrait of Susan B. Anthony on a banner. Articles from Sabina Upjohn's pen, describing the work and constitution of all the leading organizations or-ganizations of women in the land, are no less familiar than the photographs in the evening papers revealing how odalisque is the voluptuousness voluptu-ousness of her beauty and how high is the crown of her empire hat surmounted by a large "pouff" of black ostrich feathers. Bound, now, hand and foot, with a party of cannibals around a lire in energetic preparation to roast and eat her, the one anguish of her ordeal to Miss Sabina Upjohn lay in the circumstance that this martyrdom could by no possibility further the elevation of women politically. There was an added poignancy in the detail that every savage in debate about that fire a few hundred feet off belonged to the sex beneath the despotism of which her own had languished for so many ages. She asked herself, as she contemplated the interminable gesticulation of these wretches, if the presence of even a black female, as nude as the reBt, might not assuage the pang of it all. To be burned alive that had been the fate of Giodano Bruno, the martyr to free thought. Ser-vetus Ser-vetus had suffered fire and faggot for denying the Trinity. But Sabina Upjohn, the most conspicuous con-spicuous as well as the most brilliant champion of the rights of woman in the whole United States, was to be roasted solely in order that she might be eaten by Congo cannibals. Fain would she have endured this martyrdom in the interest of that cause for which she had been taken over and over to the police station during the famous shirt-waist strike in New York. What an irony of fate that she, an original thinker, whose power had riveted attention even in her Vassal' days, must suffer martyrdom not for an idea, but simply to make a cannibal feast. The course of her agonized reflections was given a new turn through the arrival among the cannibals of a savage whose respectful reception at the blazing flre implied a position of authority. author-ity. His breech clout was twined with more than the usual elaboration between his limbs and around his waist, his' differentiation from his fellows fel-lows being emphasized by the possession of an immense gingham umbrella. It w.as apparent that the medley of gibberish and the wealth of gesticulation with which he was received, bore directly upon the theme of Miss Upjohn's capture by the band an hour or two previously when, in flat defiance of the warning warn-ing of her brother, the missionary, she had wandered from the bank of the great river into the fastnesses of the tropical forest. The newcomer assimilated with dignity and in silence the intelligence imparted by the other cannibals. Turning suddenly, he fixed his largo and rolling eyes for a full minute upon Miss Upjohn's Up-john's piostrate form, before squatting with the rest of the band beside the blazing fire. A cold thrill rushed from the brain of the radiant champion of her sex to the extremities of her limbs as her eyes received the flash of the H cannibal's intense gaze. H Her woman's' instinct betrayed the whole soul H of this man. He was a Mark Antony of the jungle, who would give up the empire of his H world to make her its Cleopatra. She had but H to frame the eternal appeal of her sex to render H him her champion. But the price! The defiant H virginity of her being made her shudder as she H thought of that. She pictured herself as a wo- man of the Aruwimi tribes, clothing her impec- cable contours with no more than a simple cord H from which hung in front a bit of grass cloth, ' H four inches square. H The activities of a savage whose venerable H aspect contrasted oddly with the inconsequential H grinning and gesticulation of the majority, now H arrested the eye of Miss Upjohn. He was point- H ing a long stake by repeated application of its H extremity to the blaze. H She realized that the hour of her doom had H begun to stalk across the threshold of time. Her H one resource was the susceptibility of that splen- H did savage now, with his bushy black head in B the palm of one hand, peering stolidly into the H cracking logs. H Miss Upjohn turned with such facilities as her H thongs afforded until her attitude, necessarily re- H cumbent, suggested those appetizing curves M through the medium of which Botticelli indicates M the birth of Venus. No one could realize more M adequately than the fair champion of the rights M of woman how the posture accentuated every line M of a figure over which Macdougal's Alley had H raved in vain. H The ruse was a success. With a sense of ' M guilt that sent the blood to her very brows, Miss W'H Upjohn gazed long and significantly at the noble H savage. His keen ear had detected the slight r H sound her movement had mado. He turned his M head and for a minute or two their souls com- H muned. H The riot of Miss Upjohn's emotions in this 1 crisis of her fate never once expelled from its ' i AH throne that poised and perfect reason, with the H aid of which she had worked her way to a con- H victlon that all arguments telling against wo- H man's cause are not moral. She was burningly H conscious of having to take refuge now, not in 'H the bloodless and sexless court of ethics, but in H the sorcery of her hips, her bust, her eyes. H Never until this moment had she felt the sig- H nificance of that physical force argument which H asks why majorities are allowed to rule peace- H fully. "Votes," one great enemy of her sex had H declared, "are to the sword exactly what bank H notes are to gold the one is effective only be- H cause the other is believed to bo behind it." Her ffM plight revealed at last what had been meant by iH the claim that physical force was essential for M the protection of the rights and the honor of M women. How vivid the light streaming now upon M the contention that on certain questions the men B might be In an overwhelming majority in one j direction and the women in another! IH The explanation is that all men are cannibals. H What is a human male, in the last resort, bo H his veneer of culture as thick as velvet, but a H devourer of women? The lot of every maid and H every wife is cast among these cannibals. Would H the cannibals of any democracy yield obedience jH to power reposing upon the will of those whose W only capacity is that of affording a fleshy feast? H As these considerations ran riot through the head of Sabina Upjohn, the savage who inspired them raised in his enormouB right hand the ging- iH ham umbrella he had brought to the feast and m stood upright upon his flat and naked feet. She watched his approach through downcast eyelids and she suffered even a smile to part her teeth, but she shuddered while doing so at the reflection that she needed the physical force of a man. She understood at last the agony it must have cost Louise de la Valliere to look coyly up into the sensual countenance of Louis XIV. Her position, po-sition, Miss Upjohn felt, parallelled that of the object of the sun kings carnal policy. Many a time had this radiant champion of woman's right to the ballot curled her lips in scorn at the If suggestion that a vote would bring more influence 1 to a Faustina than to a Cecelia. I By the time the savage had come to a halt not ten feet from where she lay. and began to clean his teeth with a twig about the size of a ,lead pencil, frayed at the end, Miss Upjohn perceived that the disfranchisement of woman is but a recognition rec-ognition by society of man's physical superiority. An element of horror tinged the blackness of that reflection when she caught herself longing to be snatched In this cannibal's powerful arms and borne at the top speed of his lithe legs through the forest. I She knew at once, from the profound study I she "had made of evolutionary anthropology at Vassar, that this was an atavistic instinct surviving surviv-ing from a period when her sex mated through I capture. Yet the yearning was no whit less definite on that account. How she would have clung to the black bosom of this cannibal for safety, her white arms around his neck, were he, with Sabina Upjohn in his grip, speeding beneath those tall and tangled trees! i Not once, meanwhile, did the savage abate the intensity of the stare with which he gazed into the countenance of the captive. Miss Upjohn inferred in-ferred that he might be a chief of the village, in the direction of which she had been borne after I the party of black men overtook her near the ' bank of the great river. She felt a definite con fidence in the physical superiority of the cannibal which shamed her, but which was not shaken when he drew nearer, after picking his teeth, and unbound the rope of grasses fettering her wrists. The relief was exquisite. Without quite realizing realiz-ing her purpose, Miss Upjohn thrust a hand Into the slit of a box pleat at the back of her dress and extracted a cigarette case. Thrusting one of the paper cylinders between her teeth, she lit a i match and began to puff. Miss Upjohn smoked in New York, not because she cared to very much, but by way of vindicating woman's right to participate par-ticipate in all the pursuits of men. The cannibal squatted upon his haunches and I watched her performance with a noble simplicity. It dawned upon the young lady that in New York she would offer a man a cigarette as a reminder that there can be no double standard of ethics. Mechanically she extended the silvered case. The savage was clearly nonplussed. Miss Upjohn Up-john took a cigarette in her fingers and inserted it between the monstrous lips of the black. In a flash she had struck another match and applied it to the tip of the cigarette, upon which lie drew as if instinctively. Thereafter tho pair puffed for quite a minute or two and gazed Into each other's eyes in absolute silence. Emboldened by his simple aspect, she then ventured to tug at the thongs binding her feet. The effort was wasted. The savage watched without a word tho pro-5 pro-5 ceedings of the young champion of the rights of woman until she had desisted in despair. Her only resource was to peer into his face with a look of such invitation as wreathed the counten-I counten-I ance of the unprincipled Mrs. Hamilton in smiles when first she set about the enchantment of Horatio Hor-atio Nelson. The instantaneity of the effect posi-1 posi-1 tlvely frightened Miss Upjohn. The leer of a satyr 1 was on the cannibal's face as he got upon his I feet in a trice and freed her. She lit another cigarette ana olfered him the case. 'JLhis time he understood. Discarding the old one he chose a fresh specimen and the pair smoked on. MIbs Upjohn noticed, however, that little by little the cannibal was edging closer to her side. A thrill of triumph was blended with the ecstasy of terror accompanying her perception of the liberties the cannibal seemed disposed to permit himself. Would it be possible lor her to level in the consciousness that she could vote with any such joy as now filled her soul at realizing realiz-ing that she could be to this child of the Congo ail that Faustina had ever been to the ph.losoph-ical ph.losoph-ical Marcus Aurelius? But there was no time to be lost if her feminine fem-inine wile was to win against his manly brawn. Her hand sought the pocket which, in another box pleat of her tailored dress, accommodated a diminutive dim-inutive mirror and a tiny book of face-powder papers. Miss Upjohn was immensely relieved to notice how trim her hair looked, notwithstanding her recent experiences. She removed the shine lrom the tip of lier very Greek nose With a p.ece of the powder paper, affecting to be entirely oblivious ob-livious of the presence of the bl?.ck man until she saw, as she knew she would see, his face behind her own in the little looking-glass she held. His curiosity had for the moment extinguished his infatuation. in-fatuation. He looked wonderingly at the powder papers until Miss Upjohn, suddenly inspired, had rubbed one oT them all over his nose. The process whitened whit-ened the organ wonderfully. She held the tiny mirror before his face that he might perceive the lesult of her handiwork. The impression was evidently favorable. The savage squatted once more upon his haunches with the mirror in his hand. Pie had abandoned the umbrella to M.ss Upjohn, who raised it over herself and reclined against the tree. Interposing the gingham monstrosity in her hand as much as possible between the cannibal and herself, the young woman darted her glances in the direction of the savages grouped around the fire. Their preparations seemed to have approached something like completion. One strapping young black was brandishing a spear wth significant sig-nificant gestures and the others were piling brushwood brush-wood upon the blaze. A flood of shame nearly overwhelmed Miss Upjohn as she fastened upon the youth, with the spear precisely such a meaning look as in the dusk of a Thracian night the mistress mis-tress of Alcibiades might have bestowed upon that licentious Athenian. The effect was all that she intended. The victim of the wile stepped slowly away from the fire, after speaking a word in tones of authority to the blacks crouched at his feet. At this point, however, the other cannibal, having hav-ing exhausted his interest in the tiny mirror, drew closer to Miss Upjohn. She smiled up at him like Cressida, befooling Troilus before the house of Priam, nor did the American girl neglect to hold the umbrella in a posture to conceal from one of her victims the wile she practiced upon the other. It was vital to her safety that these men battle with one another for possession of herself as she had seen two stately bucks lock antlers in the Adirondack forest while the fate of the trembling and innocent doe hung on the knees of the gods. Ah! the humiliating senBe of physical inferiority inferior-ity to man with which the brilliant and beautiful champion of the rights of woman beheld in her dilemma a key to the whole history of her sex upon this distracted globe. How vividly she saw all that was signifh in that ton-year siege of Troy which made the beautiful Helen herself a mere thing to be taken possession of like a piece "hhhhiiiiih of property. What were all the wars of all of i Hl that ceaseless struggle among males for posses- H sion of females, that cannibalism of sex which BH makes the physically forceful devourers" of the H And what is woman but a feast for man? The beautiful woman, the supreme object of desire, in- volved between the rival passions of the strong- est, must make what terms she could even as BH she, Sabina Upjohn, must intrigue and befool H these masters of her own destiny. For the first H time since her profound study of human history H had made her an advocate of the cause of wo- H man, Sabina Upjohn appreciated the difficulties H of Madame de Pompadour's position at the court H of the Bourbon king and sympathized with Queen H Elizabeth's desire to send some of her lovers to H the scaffold. As for the insinuation that a woman is a H creature of guile bah! Can there be an estab- lished code between a tribe of cannibals and the Ivfl victims of their perverted appetite? The wonder Bl is, Sabina Upjohn said to herself, that any wo- man ever tells any man any truth at all. H The navago whoso nose had been blanched by M thb . j woman's face-powder did not become M awa' the approach of a rival, thanks to her M subtle manipulation of the umbrella, until it suited Miss Upjohn's purpose to effect the dis- H closure. When at last she hurled the umbrella Hl from her the newcomer and the chief were gaz- ing into each other's eyes over one of the young M woman's shoulders. She had exchanged a sig- M nificant glance with the latest of her black lovers M in the spirit of those French ladies of the half M world, who, while dining with an American mil- M Honaire, flirt with every other man in the res- M taurant. M A blush mantled the1 cheeks of Miss Upjohn H as she realized the depths to which she had H descended, but, she asked herself, what is one l'ftfl weak woman to do in a man's world? She had H long since permitted her cigarette to extinguish H itself, and she now lit another, smoking with H such composure and as much of an air of perfect H innocence as she could assume. For two or three H minutes no one; moved or said a word, except tho M cannibals around tho roaring fire, who had begun i Kfl to emit a series of yells. H The dab of white upon the nose of the chief H had already attracted the attention of his rival. H The newcomer, having drawn nearer for purposes JM of better inspection, rubbed a finger against the ,H nostrils of his chief. The powder came off. H Miss Upjohn got upon her feet, and with the H most brazen of glances, dabbed the nose of the H latest candidate for her favors with a fragment of powder paper. Having resumed possession of the H umbrella, sho covered the newcomer's head with H it and turned her back pointedly upon the chief. M There was an instant and ear-splitting yell M from that cannibal. He rushed upon his rival and bore him to the ground. The two were soon, roll- ing hither and thither, biting, scratching and jflE kicking furiously. 'H A chorus of yells from the recesses of the for- H est announced that the preparations in that direc- iH tion had reached finality. The cannibals were JH ready to feast upon Miss Upjohn. They arrived H upon the scene of combat pell-mell, with a series H of whoops. A furious battle at once began. H It was manifest that tho tribesmen were sid' H ing, some with one combatant and some with an- , H other, until they had piled on top of both in a i human pyramid of ebony arms and legs. The t submerged elements in this tower soon wrested IK themselves free and dashed madly towards the 11 fire of faggots, still crackling and sputtering not two hundred feet away. The chief was the first to snatch a burnin? brand. He let it fly at his , rival for Mis Upjohn's favor. That youth, in his ,1 immediate rear, dodged the missile with the ! (Continued on Pnf 51.) THE CANNIBALS. (Continued from Pago 25.) swiftness of a monkey. The burning mass caught the cannibal next in order plump on the jaw and set him dancing and howling until he, too, re. thought him of the weapons of offence afforded by the fire. But the other savages had been too quick for him. Each man now had his burning brand and each was aiming it with an eye as true as steel. In a trice the woods were filled with running and howling creatures, writhing in agony. Did Helen of Troy, Miss Upjohn aBked her-olf wistfully, as she followed the progress of tl . se hideous atrocities among the members of the sex which had enslaved her own did Helen of Troy contemplate the carnage that followed the Intro-duction Intro-duction of the wooden horse with her own feeling of detachment and of Irresponsibility? Would the progress of events upon those -windy plains have been modified a jot by any bestowal of political rights upon Homeric princesses? Surely tho rape of the Sabines could not have been avoided had those hapless objects of Roman violence vio-lence received the right of suffrage before the catastrophe made them the wives of the foes of their fathers, and their brethren. Did there not lurk behind every war behind even those terrible religious wars which had for thirty years turned all Germany into a wilderness some unsuspected factor in the shape of the awful truth that there is nothing for men to fight for except -women beautiful, appetizing, shapely women? There is, then, something in that physical force argument with which the rulers of this world would startle woman away from the ballot-box. A quiver ran through the frame of Miss Upjohn. Up-john. It had suddenly occurred to her that -when opponents of votes for women referred to physical phys-ical force they had in mind the influence at work before her very eyes the influence of the carnal appetites. What, then, if every office in the state were thrown open to her sex. Would not Phryne sit 'upon the bench of tho United States Supremo Court, appointed by an Alcibiades of a President and confirmed by a Senate of roues, while St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins toiled in the cellars of badly ventilated laundries? Aye, Messalina would be chosen Governor of Pennsylvania Pennsyl-vania by tremendous majorities, while St. Agnes retained with difficulty the post of a street cleaner in Chicago. Man, carnal man, seduced by the Semiramis in politics, would cast his licentious vote to overwhelm Cassandra at the polls. The males would give their suffrages to exquisite busts, to long, slim backs, to shapely hips and to the smile of Monna Lisa, while the fat and the gray-haired among females, though ripe with tho statesmanship of a Burke, went down In the ignominy of their chaste ugliness. There would be good women, yes, but they would be driven to the wiles of Cleopatra, precisely as she, Sabina Upjohn, had saved herself from a worse than death by arts worse than Nell Gwynne's. For had not Sabina Upjohn, Incarnation of defiant virginity, vir-ginity, -welcomed the leer of a black satyr in exchange ex-change for a glance from herself more fleshly In its meaning than those furtive signals directed by daughters of joy in the Tenderloin at every well-dressed middle-aged man who passed? Ah! how swift is the reversion to savagery in sex antagonism! Long before these reflections had diverted her mind from the battle among the cannibals, her eye chanced tr light upon the river, glistening In the sun a half .. mile away. She still held the umbrella, um-brella, abandoned to her in the fury of the struggle for possession of herself. A brisk walk brought her soon to the banks of the Congo, upon the bosom of which her brother George, the illustrious illus-trious missionary, must be afloat In 'istracted quest of his gifted sister. |
