The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Read Online Free Page B

inside. ‘This is mine.’
    Retreating, they found that Strephon was sitting alone in the glade, urgently scooping the pulp out of the blue pineapple.
    ‘Why are you throwing the pulp away? That’s the part that’s good to eat.’
    ‘I’ve better things to do than eat,’ Strephon said. ‘I’ve had an inspiration.’
    ‘Are you making the pineapple into a blue hat?’
    ‘I shall waste no more time on such frivolities.’ Still working away at the pineapple, Strephon glanced sideways. Amaryllis was standing beside him. He pointed suddenly to a trickle of blood between her legs.
    ‘It must be the excitement that brought it on’, she said. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’
    Strephon’s answer was to cast briefly round, snatch up the huge leaf he had once worn as a hat and thrust it at her. ‘Cover yourself,’ he said, resuming his work. ‘And stand further away from me, in case you put a jinx on what I’m doing.’
    ‘Don’t feel hurt, dear,’ Chloe said, putting her arm about Amaryllis’s shoulders.
    But ‘Strephon’s right,’ Amaryllis said, moving away. ‘I’m disgusting.’
    ‘I’ve finished,’ Strephon cried, leaping up. ‘Now watch.’ With his left hand he pulled the top off the modified blue pineapple , and with his right he hurled the rest of it into the still roofless pagoda.
    The pineapple plopped on the floor inside. Inside, Corydon exclaimed. The pagoda exploded.
    When their hearing returned after the noise, the group realised that Strephon was shouting and exulting. He was running round excitedly but bent over, covering or perhaps hugging his naked pleasure organs with his hands. Presently the group began to make sense of his incoherency. ‘We must all wear clothes,’ he was saying. ‘The age of childish play is over. I shall design everyone a uniform.’ Then, with a special squeeze at himself: ‘These are my private parts. This garden is my private estate. Any rubies recovered from the ruins of the pagoda are my private possessions. That woman’ (he pointed at Amaryllis, who had made herself a leaf skirt) ‘is my wife. You are all my people.’
    Only Corinna dared approach him.
    ‘Whore,’ he said to her. ‘Cover yourself.’
    But she continued to approach. To the group’s surprise, Strephon stood still, spread his hands to shield his private parts and looked embarrassed.
    ‘You’ve destroyed Corydon,’ Corinna said.
    ‘Corydon was a murderer,’ Strephon said sulkily. ‘He was fair game. Which reminds me: I shall kill the animals next.’
    ‘You want to destroy everything that’s beautiful. You destroyed the most beautiful of all my buildings.’
    ‘The beauty of your buildings is nothing’, Strephon said, ‘in comparison with the beauty of flame, which is its own light, leaping out of smoke, which is its own dark. And the beauty of women is nothing in comparison with the beauty of men, now that we have discovered that men, too, can bleed.’
    The group believed him.
    Much later, Strephon told Corinna to build him a hunting-lodge . When she refused, Strephon ordered the group to cut off her fruit supply. Luckily, a few old and bold friends disobeyed.
    Corinna called on Amaryllis, whom it was not difficult tofind alone because Strephon nowadays confined her to the house and preferably the kitchen, in which unglamorous setting she would be least attractive to other men. Amaryllis told Corinna the whereabouts of the blue pineapple tree. But she must have previously disclosed it to Strephon. When Corinna arrived there, hoping for a good meal, she found that the entire crop was under requisition for the ordnance factories. Indeed, a blue pineapple in its natural state has not been seen on earth since.
    Corinna built herself a garret on top of one of the slums that now filled the garden. There she drew up plans for buildings, but everyone she shewed them to said her work was extravagant and uncommercial. She hoped taste would soon change.
    The slums became teeming. Strephon